Aesthetic Dilemmas: Encounters with Art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Literary Modernism 9780228017950

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A e s t h e t ic Di lemmas

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Aesthetic Dilemmas Encounters with Art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Literary Modernism

Mar l o A l e x a n dr a B u r k s

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1665-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1795-0 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-2280-1796-7 (eP U B) Legal deposit second quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Aesthetic dilemmas: encounters with art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ­literary modernism / Marlo Alexandra Burks. Names: Burks, Marlo A., 1986- author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2023013260X | Canadiana (ebook) 20230132685 | ISBN 9780228016656 (cloth) | IS BN 9780228017950 (paper) | ISBN 9780228017967 (eP DF ) Subjects: LCSH : Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929—Criticism and interpretation. | LCSH : Art in literature. Classification: LCC P T 2617.O47 Z 527 2023 | DD C 831/.912—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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... greener than grass I am and dead – or almost I seem to me. But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

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Contents

Figures ix

A Note on Languages and Titles  xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Aestheticism  3

  1 Aestheticism in “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” (“The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two”) and the 1902 “Ansprache” (“Address”) 13   2 Art and Society in “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (“The Letters of the Man Who Returned”)  43   3 Art and History in “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”) 72   4 Aesthetic Transfiguration in Die Frau ohne Schatten 112   5 Violence and Art in Andreas 151 Notes 171 Bibliography 255 Index 279

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Figures

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Illustrated cover of the 1905 Wiener Verlag edition of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen. Photo by Marlo Alexandra Burks.  20 Dining room with tapestries in the Palais Lanckoroński in Vienna. Archiv Bezirksmuseum Landstraße, accessed through Wikimedia Commons.  36 Still Life with Blue Enamel Coffeepot, Earthenware and Fruit, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Accessed through WikiArt. 56 Wheatfield with Crows, by Vincent van Gogh, Auvers, June 1890. Van Gogh Museum, f _779 j h _2117, accessed through Wikimedia Commons.  66 Column at Delphi. Image from Hanns Holdt’s book Griechenland. Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth A.G., 1923).  91 Phrasikleia Kore, Ariston of Paros, 550–40 b c, exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Photo by Zdeněk Kratochvíl, accessed through Wikimedia Commons. 103 Sloth (Desidia), from the series The Seven Deadly Sins, Pieter van der Heyden’s engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 26.72.34.  122

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A Note on Language and Titles

In the case of German and French, translations are mine unless ­otherwise stated. When quoting from a published English translation, I refer additionally to an edition in the original language for comparison. Longer passages appear in the original language in the endnotes. There are numerous isolated translations of Hofmannsthal’s shorter works, some of which are out of print or difficult to access. Although I have tried to mention all the English translations of which I am aware, I have undoubtedly missed a few. Titles are given initially in both English and the original language in one of two ways: 1 For works that have been published in translation, I capitalize the English title headline-style: “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”); Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). 2 For works not published in translation (to my knowledge), I capitalize the English title sentence-style: “Verse, auf eine Banknote geschrieben” (Verses written onto a banknote). When discussing an English translation extensively, I use the English title primarily. An exception is Die Frau ohne Schatten, which is already well known in the English-speaking world by its German title.

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Acknowledgments

Gratitude is better expressed through action than in words, but this is a book, so a few of the latter are in order. Hans-Günther Schwarz at Dalhousie University encouraged my early interest in Hofmannsthal’s work. Working with him and Norman Diffey on Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Writings on Art/Schriften zur Kunst was one of the most intellectually gratifying experiences I’ve had over the last ten years, and it helped pave the way for the introduction to this book. Without my Heidelberg community, this book would not exist. Franz Wassermann and Lina Girdziute provided two essential things during its composition: music and hospitality. Andreea Miri-Wolf and Eva Lasch added coffee, wine, and conversations about art to the mix. Silvia Richter introduced me to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. My Berlin “family” – Michael Benson, Maureen Gallagher, Biz and Max Nijdam, Noelle Rettig, and Christy Wahl – helped in unexpected and subtle ways while I was writing the final chapter. I am also grateful to Karin Goihl – a renaissance woman if I ever met one – who made my postdoctoral stay in Berlin much less complicated than it could have been. John Zilcosky, my dissertation advisor, deserves special mention. He warned me once over lunch at the Joseph-Roth Diele not to let perfection be the enemy of the good. I know I have not fully internalized that lesson, but the fact that this book exists is proof I am trying. Similarly, Christine Lehleiter cautioned me early on against taking on too big a topic and developing too enthusiastic a style. She knew before I did that my eyes were bigger than my stomach.

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xiv Acknowledgments

Willi Goetschel, whose philosophical acumen was (and is) a constant inspiration, helped me keep my eyes open to unexpected affinities. Who else in Toronto would have talked with me about Georg Simmel and Fritz Mauthner and Sprachphilosophie? I am also grateful to Sepp Gumbrecht, whose insight and enthusiasm convinced me to take my rambling dissertation and give it new life and a sense of purpose. I’m not sure I got rid of all the rambling, though. This book would not have been possible without support from the Jackman Humanities Institute, the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, and the Hofmannsthal Gesellschaft. Thanks especially to Katja Kaluga and Konrad Heumann, who answered some very niggling questions. Those little interactions mean more than we know. In the same vein, I want to thank Richard Ratzlaff and McGillQueen’s University Press for acquiring the book. “Acquiring” – that single word entails so much. I (and by extension these 300 or so pages) have benefited from Richard’s talent, kindness, and impeccable email etiquette. Every single note he wrote brought a smile to my face and renewed conviction I should publish my research. Thank you also to my copy-editor, Kathryn Simpson, who caught a number of infelicitous and awkward formulations. I’m happy we were able to get those out of the book before print! The anonymous readers of the manuscript provided thoughtful, constructive, and in some cases downright ­brilliant feedback. I wish I could thank them in person. I would also like to express my appreciation to the University of Wisconsin Press for granting me permission to reproduce sections of my 2017 article for Monatshefte, “From Song to the Smiles of Stone: Aesthetic and Ethical Encounters in Hofmannsthal’s Augenblicke in Griechenland.” My family deserve a tome of thanks, but they already know that. Thank you to Andrew for bringing so much beauty into my life; to Nathaniel for all the humour, patience, and growth; to Phyllis for her unshakeable support; and to Enkidu for reminding me about the important things in life: walks, affection, and peanut butter.

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A e s t h e t ic Di lemmas

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intr oduct ion Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Aestheticism

When a dramatis personae includes too many star actors, it can be difficult to know where, or with whom, to begin a story. Such is the case with Vienna around 1900. The imperial city’s many luminaries shared an historical moment on the stage of the Great Theatre of the World: Painters like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka offered new ways of seeing, while theorists like Sigmund Freud, Ernst Mach, and Fritz Mauthner showed how we might interpret those visions. In music, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and only a little later the Second Viennese School conjured drastically different and novel auditory experiences, while in the literary sphere, a proliferation of writers appeared on the scene and in the cafés: Peter Altenberg, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Salten, Karl Kraus (who later criticized his contemporaries in his satire Die demolirte Literatur [Demolished Literature]), Hermann Bahr, and Arthur Schnitzler were a few of the prominent writers in town and part of the leading literary circle known as Young Vienna or Jung-Wien. One of the youngest and most multifaceted of those writers was Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929).1 Deeply versed in the literary debates of his time, especially the anti-naturalist styles of symbolism and impressionism, Hofmannsthal was well-placed to consider the various roles played by art and aesthetics in society. His body of work – forty volumes in the critical edition, completed in 2022 – ­represents a sustained engagement with aesthetic debates over the first three decades of the twentieth century. Taking cues from his contemporaries in physics, psychology, sociology, and the arts (including music), he explored the connections between perceived reality, artistic representation, poetic language, and cultural developments. The

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combination of breadth, nuance, and variety in Hofmannsthal’s writings gives readers an uncommonly kaleidoscopic view of the shifting values of his era while posing core questions about the human condition. More to the point: This book considers how and why suffering, ecstasy, and the encounter with otherness became defining aspects of Hofmannsthal’s modernist aesthetics. A few words about words are necessary. I use the term “aesthetics” in the sense given in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, namely: the “reflection on art and beauty.”2 To a greater extent than other authors of his generation, Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics involved cultivating an ekphrastic literary style: portraying art works from other media, including paintings, carpets, statues, music, and even dance. According to this approach, any encounter with a work of art involves reflecting upon it in terms not intrinsic to the work of art itself. The reflection on art and beauty, therefore, requires both ­distance and translation. Hofmannsthal is certainly not the only writer to have employed ekphrasis at the turn of the century. Many of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems, such as “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”), employed the technique to great effect. But Hofmannsthal’s use of ekphrasis was systematic, extensive, and ever evolving in response to the ideas and societal shifts of his time: scholars and s­ tudents of early twentieth-century Viennese and European culture have an unusually consistent object of study. But Hofmannsthal’s writing is relevant to a broader audience as well. Anyone invested in understanding how art and beauty affects our lives will find in his essays, libretti, stories, and dramatic works numerous points of interest. Yet Hofmannsthal is much less familiar to English-speaking audiences than some of his literary contemporaries, such as Rilke and Franz Kafka. While opera enthusiasts may recognize Hofmannsthal as Richard Strauss’s artistic collaborator and the author of some of the most sophisticated opera libretti in the repertoire, his reputation as a culturally conservative writer with an enigmatic and precious style has certainly helped to obscure his work from an Englishspeaking readership. The challenges of translation have not helped either. Egon Schwarz, an American literary scholar born in Austria, put it well when he contrasted Rilke’s (relatively translatable) poetry – especially the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies), whose “oracular atmosphere” appealed to poets and scholars – with Hofmannsthal’s more harmonious tones and culturally inflected subtilty.3

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Introduction 5

Hofmannsthal was widely appreciated in his lifetime, both at home and, to some extent, abroad,4 even at an early age. At sixteen, he began publishing poems (under various pseudonyms) notable for their ­sobriety and tinged with the world-weariness of a man reflecting upon a life already lived. Right from the beginning, Hofmannsthal’s writings displayed a preoccupation with ephemerality, the urge to escape an eremitic existence, and the importance of lived experience. An early Petrarchan sonnet from 1890, “Sunt animae rerum,”5 captures precisely that celebration of involvement in life. The poem’s octave reads like an extended meditation on Joseph von Eichendorff’s famous 1835 quatrain, “Wünschelrute” (“Wishing-Wand”), which tells of an omnipresent song that can be heard if one hits upon the magic word. Such is the power and purview of poetry. But instead of proclaiming a song in all things, Hofmannsthal’s sonnet speaks of the beating hearts within inanimate objects (“Herzen, die in toten Dingen schlagen”). Moreover, there is no magic word to be discovered – rather, one must pose the proper question, in the right way (“recht zu fragen”). Only then might the “silent mouth” reveal something (“aus stummen Munde”). Even in 1890, dialogue is at the heart of the ­aesthetic encounter for Hofmannsthal. It is the solicitation, not the proclamation, that fascinates him. True to form, the first line of the sestet marks the volta. With the word “Drum” (“Therefore”), the poem calls upon its readers to escape the confines of a solipsistic existence in favour of a life that welcomes joy as well as pain. This is made explicit in lines 9–14: Therefore flee thy self, cold and stiff, And change it for the cosmic soul unbound, And let the heaving forces of this life, Sough through thy soul with joy and woe profound, And if perchance a melody does sound, Then hold its echo fast: Thus shouldst thou strive!6 Hofmannsthal’s poetic sensibility for intertextuality, perfection of form, and maturity of subject matter impressed readers and writers alike. Hermann Bahr, spokesman for the Young Vienna literary circle, was surprised when he met (the very young indeed) Hofmannsthal. Bahr had expected to greet a mature gentleman who had lived abroad in Paris for some years – that, at least, would have explained why Bahr had never heard the name “Loris” (one of Hofmannsthal’s pseudonyms).

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The fact that the young poet took great inspiration from French Symbolism no doubt played a role in Bahr’s expectations.7 Hofmannsthal’s immediate success and his early association with the elitist and eminently talented Stefan George (1868–1933) contributed to the impression that the young writer was an acolyte of this slightly older German poet and snobbish aesthete whose ivory-tower existence resulted in a solipsistic, if sophisticated, kind of art.8 Most readers of Hofmannsthal’s later essays would agree that political and social themes are more explicitly prominent than they were in his earlier essays and lyric poetry, but Hofmannsthal’s writing, from the very beginning, rejected solipsism and pointed to broader ethical and social questions. Even that youthful poem “Sunt animae rerum” expresses an impulse to engage with the world. The rhetorically powerful assertion that Hofmannsthal (and other writers of the time who were associated with Aestheticism) “fled” reality into the world of art is an exaggeration that, unfortunately, does little to further discussion of their work.9 Hofmannsthal himself endorses quite the opposite view in his essayistic writings, an early example of which is his 1896 review, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio” (“D’Annunzio’s New Novel”): “All those curious books of d’Annunzio’s had something disconcerting about them, indeed, there was something dreadful and horrific, if you like, because they were written by a man who did not know life. He who wrote them knew all the signs of life: he knew them wonderfully, and yet now I believe he was up until this time no great poet, no poet at all. But he was, from the first line, an extraordinary artiste.”10 Life – that is, lived experience – is not equated with poetry, but it is what makes poetry possible. Aware of this fact, Hofmannsthal repeatedly attempts to identify and create within the aesthetic experience an ethical moment that is world-oriented, even object-oriented (as opposed to purely subject-oriented).11 That is not to say that all or even most of Hofmannsthal’s work is tendentious. Hofmannsthal usually explores ethical, social, and cultural themes indirectly; they arise from the story, and often result in more than one outcome. Der Turm (The Tower), for instance, has multiple alternative endings – the first two, utopian; the third, dystopian – while the novel fragment Andreas (discussed in chapter 5 of this book) splinters into so many possible trajectories that it is impossible to say which version the author might have favoured. Hofmannsthal explores various possibilities of reception and transformation in the audience as well. Ideally, the work of art evokes a

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Introduction 7

response in the viewer or reader, and that response is deeply connected with responsibility. Similarly, the audience or reader may undergo a transformation brought on by that sense of responsibility. The recognition and acceptance of responsibility is what constitutes the ethical moment, which appears in art like a shock, without instructions. That shock is at the heart of art’s troubling nature. My inquiry is guided by those writings of Hofmannsthal’s that feature what we commonly acknowledge to be works of art. Hofmannsthal did believe other objects could awaken aesthetic moments – the canonical 1902 fictional letter Ein Brief (The Letter to Lord Chandos) is the most prominent example – but I am interested in the status of those things that we consider artworks because they are already charged with ambiguity (e.g., they provoke us or they leave us unaffected), and because there is so much debate around the usefulness and the dangers of art – its “barbarity,” even, to invoke Adorno’s dictum about postAuschwitz lyric poetry and, by extension, all art that is not “engagiert,” or “committed,” as the English translations have it.12 In Hofmannsthal’s writings, the aesthetic carries its ethical other along with it. I understand “ethical” here to refer to that aspect of the human experience that responds to a sense of duty and recognizes social bonds and responsibilities. The aesthetic encounter opposes the perceiver’s expectations and desires whenever art displays a life of its own while calling to mind a shared experience of suffering. The aesthetic encounter demands a response to this suffering, but it can neither enforce that demand nor prescribe its fulfillment. This is not an everyday experience of the world and the things in it. A glass, considered simply as a glass and not as an aesthetic object, generally poses no threat – we tend not to escape into the world of the glass, and it does not usually attract us or distract us with its beauty or sublimity; we use it unthinkingly; we have no duty to it. From the aesthetic lens however, things have challenged us with their ambiguous status since Plato’s warnings of art’s power to manipulate and distract us from reality, and Aristotle’s counterclaim that art serves a cathartic function. Søren Kierkegaard even posits a connection between the demonic and art, especially music.13 For the fin-de-siècle world of disenchantment, on the other hand, art served as a secular alter deus and provided a house for homeless piety, ritual, and passion. In this sense, Aestheticism threatens to devolve into a religion that reintroduces all the problems that the worship of gods presents us, including the risk of sacrificing our participation in the “real” world

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of suffering in order to dwell in a world of fantasy – whether it be art or the afterlife. For this reason Aestheticism is often criticized. The social and ethical complications of art are also apparent in the risk of misappropriation. Art can be a tool of manipulation. Although Hofmannsthal wrote propaganda during the First World War, he later acknowledged that this was not truly artistic work.14 Art can r­ eference political themes, but it loses something when it adopts a moralizing tone. 15 In his essay “Grillparzers Politisches Vermächtnis” (“Grillparzer’s Political Legacy”) from 1915, Hofmannsthal underscores the artist’s duty: “Politics is the study of human beings, the art of socializing on a higher level. There is an irrational element here … whoever knows how to conjure up hidden powers, commands ­obedience. Thus, the great politician is revealed. For the poet, it is enough to sense these powers and, with an infallible instinct, gesture towards them.”16 Art may hold us hostage with its powers of distraction and manipulation, but art can also be held hostage. When art is violently destroyed (through its misappropriation for propaganda, or through iconoclasm, violence, or terrorism – e.g., the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan or the Nazi book burnings), it is often done so in effort to demoralize and repress a people and their culture. The “life” and existence of art, in these cases, is tied to the life and existence of a people. —*— Hofmannsthal’s work portrays the deeper conflicts of his culture and the importance of art to that culture. In one of the early post-SecondWorld-War treatments of Hofmannsthal’s work, the literary critic and scholar Richard Alewyn wrote poignantly that in Hofmannsthal’s poetic development the natural life cycle was oddly reversed, beginning with perfection and ending in darkness and chaos. According to Alewyn, so long as we find ourselves on a path towards darkness and chaos, Hofmannsthal is our contemporary.17 The standard narrative of Hofmannsthal’s trajectory as an artist relates that, after his early success as a consummate poet in the ­symbolist manner, he turned away from verse poetry around 1902 in order to devote himself instead to the more “socially engaged” art forms – primarily those of theatre and opera.18 While Hofmannsthal did for the most part cease publishing new poems (he did not cease writing them), the reasons given by scholars present a caricature of an

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Introduction 9

artist who rejected the solitary world of the “lyrical-I” of poetry for the popular world of the people. If we take the statement at face value, we risk artificially dividing Hofmannsthal’s works into two distinct phases – the lyrical and the social  – marked by a language crisis. In their influential book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin claim that Hofmannsthal experienced “a crisis that compelled him to reject all that had gone before.” They take the 1902 fictional work, Letter to Lord Chandos, as autobiographical evidence.19 If, in 1902, Hofmannsthal did in fact reject “all that had gone before,” then why did he publish a collection of his lyric poetry, Gesammelte Gedichte, in 1907? Yet this myth has been powerful. Despite overwhelming textual evidence that there was no such “rejection,” Teona Djibouti’s 2014 dissertation, Aufnehmen und Verwandeln, repeats the narrative. Thomas A. Kovach takes a less drastic view in his account: “Having recognized and criticized the alienation from life characterizing the Aestheticism that constituted the milieu of his earlier life and work, he was concerned henceforth to find what he called a ‘Weg zum Sozialen’ in his writing.”20 But even a summary like Kovach’s does not take into account the fact that Hofmannsthal’s early work (like the 1890 sonnet “Sunt animae rerum”) very frequently and clearly articulates a desire to resist any alienation from life. The narrative of crisis and rejection offers an attractively simple framework, but it is false. Moreover, it obscures the much more compelling shades of ambivalence and ambiguity in Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the a­ esthetic, at all stages in his literary career. It bears repeating: Hofmannsthal was, even in his early lyrical poetry, always concerned with questions of the broader and deeper connections between people and the world, including the things in it, and the responsibilities that both constitute and grow out of those connections. His medium of choice was primarily literary, and even his essays and speeches – the most “engaged” or “committed” of his writings – abound in extravagant metaphors and lyricism. His love for the arabesque turn of a phrase might seem precious to an audience schooled in the style of Strunk and White, but those literary choices enact a deeper, unsettled relationship between aesthetics and ethics that can awaken in readers a critical impulse. This is the “call”21 – or the demand – that we find repeatedly in his work. A more famous instance of the call is Rilke’s 1908 sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” mentioned above, in which the ekphrastic impulse to induce an ethical

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response is made explicit in the two concluding lines: “For there is no place / which does not see you. You must change your life.”22 When it comes to literary representations of the aesthetic experience, political and ethical counsels are absent: art is, in other words, still in some sense “autonomous,” as Aestheticism would have it. For Hofmannsthal, aesthetics and ethics are in constant tension with one another, but they are bound together by that tension. If art can be the catalyst for an epiphanic lived experience along the lines of that ­suggested in Rilke’s poem – an “Erlebnis” as it is called in German – then it would seem to have some deep, non-imitative connection to life (“Leben”). The notion of Erlebnis juxtaposes two domains: the domain of ethics, which considers action in lived life; and the domain of ­aesthetics, which considers art and active perception. Hofmannsthal’s 1896 lecture “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”) imagines this dynamic in the metaphor of two pails in a well: “There is no direct path that leads from poetry to life, or from life to poetry. The word as carrier of life’s content, and the dreamlike brother-word, which can be found in a poem, diverge and drift by each other, foreign, like the two pails of a well. There is no extrinsic law which bans from art all the rationalizing, all the struggle and railing against life, every immediate relation to life and every direct imitation of life; rather, it is this simple impossibility: such heavy things can live in poetry about as easily as a cow can live in the treetops.”23 During his entire literary career, from about 1890 till his death in 1929, Hofmannsthal for the most part adhered to the rule of l’art pour l’art – the idea that art is valuable apart from any didactic or moral purpose. Even the aesthetic cultivation of the self was not destructive per se, but it did require more than mere self-stylization. Art, in turn, required more of an engagement of the self with the world than a divine-like ironic distance or a flight of fancy could afford. Like the pails in the well, art and life run parallel courses. The image of parallel worlds held in tension marks a departure from an early iteration of Aestheticism which sees art as something s­uspended above life. Consider Baudelaire’s poem “Élévation” in Les Fleurs du mal, here in lines 15–21 of James McGowan’s translation: Happy the strong-winged man, who makes the great Leap upward to the bright and peaceful fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, take to their wings Each morning, freely speeding through the air,

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Introduction 11

 – Who soars above this life, interpreter Of flowers’ speech, the voice of silent things!24 The title evokes an image of the poet performing, in his poetic-priestly act, the raising (known as “elevation”) of the consecrated and transformed host – in this case, the words of the poem. But in the poem, it is also the poet who flies up above the mundane world to an elevation that affords perspective and understanding. Stefan George’s translation and transmission of Baudelaire helped introduce a petrified world of glorified art to German-language literature. In the post-Baudelaire context, as with George, who stylized himself as a priestly and prophetic poet, the troubling undercurrent below the crystallized surface began to rumble. The question at the end of the garden poem in George’s Algabal (from 1892) throws doubt onto the entire project of the poeta alter deus and the religion of art. George, the poet-priest par excellence, has gone so far as to inscribe this doubt into lines 16–20 of his own poem: How did I conceive you in this holy bower – So I asked myself as I walked in thought and forgot, in daring weaves distraught – dark great black flower?25 Just a year before Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, George gives poetic expression to the idea of the return of the repressed within the realm of art. For Hofmannsthal, whose work often lays stress on the pain of remembering,26 the crystallized world is set up against the world of growth and rot, and the speaker in his 1891 symbolist poem “Mein Garten” (“My Garden”) finds himself remembering longingly – and perhaps attempting to resist this longing – the world of organic, breathing life fated to decay. The speaker can assert: “Lovely is my garden with the golden trees,”27 but the repeated use of ellipses (four times in a poem of fourteen lines) points to what cannot be said. This symbolist penchant for suggestion rather than proclamation induces a mood of reminiscence: the poet desires to be in that other, living garden, “where I was before” (“wo ich früher war”). Rather than longing for an imagined Golden Age (as the Romantics might have done), Hofmannsthal’s speaker yearns for that which lives and breathes and dies.28

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—*— Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics engage with long-standing, persistent assumptions about art, what it does, and how we respond. His work can be assessed neither as a mere reproduction of his culture, nor as a deconstructive critique. In this respect, my approach is inspired by, and offers a qualification to, Carl Schorske’s Pulitzer Prize–winning study, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. The renowned historian gives a sensitive reading of Hofmannsthal’s views on art; ultimately, though, Schorske represents works of art as sites of avoidance: they are objects of refuge from an otherwise inhospitable reality that distract through their power to attract.29 My research has not so much resulted in a contrary reading as it has in a more nuanced one. Where Schorske sees avoidance, I find the possibility of engagement. For Hofmannsthal, the aesthetic encounter – a phrase Schorske would find oxymoronic – is a challenge to be taken up and responded to. Schorske is not wrong: Art can be a refuge; it can also pose a threat; and it can be a site of avoidance. But each encounter with a work of art presents various possible outcomes. Avoidance is not a foregone conclusion, and it is certainly not the one Hofmannsthal sought, because at the core of all those encounters is an aesthetic imperative: beauty and works of art place demands upon their audiences and viewers by issuing a call. The response will vary according to personal history, the history of the work, and the context of the encounter. While there is undeniably a culturally conservative strain in Hofmannsthal’s thought, it is there as part of a dialogue. Art confronts the human subject with the challenge of relating to the world. Simply to adopt old moralities would be insufficient. The past appears in Hofmannsthal’s work not as something towards which the present should reach back in facile emulation, but rather as an inspiration, a point of reference, or even a contrast.30 Past ideologies and works of art should not be forgotten, but it is naïve to think that they are stable or definitive. To borrow a sentiment from T.S. Eliot: “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”31 Hofmannsthal takes that notion of responsibility a step further in order to reassess the dilemma of the aesthetic encounter. In doing so, he finds something that calls to countless unreachable others of past, present, and future.

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1 Aestheticism in “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” (“The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two”) and the 1902 “Ansprache” (“Address”)

The movement known as Aestheticism has two major expressions: the cultivation of beauty in one’s surroundings – to the exclusion of anything ugly – with the aim of leading a ‘beautiful life’; and the direction of one’s aesthetic gaze at all the objects and people in one’s world. Hofmannsthal presents these two expressions of Aestheticism by exploring what they try to exclude; at the same time, he maintains a dual focus on the impossibility of ignoring the ugliness of life, and the power that beauty can exact on the subject (the viewer, reader, listener, etc.), effectively reversing the power dynamic assumed in the aesthetic gaze. Hofmannsthal’s bifocal fascination with the cultivation of beauty and the reversal of the gaze1 is already apparent in the 1895 tale, “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht,” translated into English as “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.”2 The plot can be summed up quickly: A wealthy merchant’s son lives almost entirely alone, ­surrounded by the beautiful furniture, tapestries, and other works of art he has inherited. The only people he sees with any frequency are his four servants. In the first half of the tale, nothing moves the plot forward, yet the atmospheric scenes suggest an internal struggle, which finds expression in the second half of the story: upon learning that his favourite servant is being accused (in very vague terms) of having committed a crime while in the service of a previous master, the Persian

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Emissary, the merchant’s son decides to travel to the city, with placatory intent. The reader follows the merchant’s son out of his house, through the dirty city streets, to his untimely and undignified death.3 In the secondary literature, the merchant’s son is most frequently portrayed as an aesthete who abandons his ivory-tower existence, prompted by some inner sense of guilt (regarding his Aestheticism, or perhaps his sexuality), and enters into the “real world,” where he is then punished by reality. The narrative is treated like a fable, and there is much that speaks in favour of this approach.4 On the other hand, the second half of the story (where the “real world” is depicted) introduces ambiguities that most fables cannot sustain. The “reality” of the second half of the story proves, in fact, stranger and more dreamlike than the fantasy-world of the first half. Important for understanding this curious inversion of reality and fantasy is the widespread turn-of-the-century interest in perception. According to impressionistic psychology – a growing field of inquiry at the time – the viewer-subject gathers impressions and then constructs from these impressions a reality.5 But there is also a growing interest in the object understood as a phenomenon, and in the subject’s perspective vis-à-vis the world of things outside the self and beyond the subject’s comprehension.6 Hofmannsthal’s tale invokes both impressionistic psychology and phenomenology. It has even been suggested that Hofmannsthal’s early writings exerted an influence on Edmund Husserl’s development of the phenomenological reduction.7 In a letter to Hofmannsthal, Husserl identifies a parallel between what he calls the “pure” aesthetic attitude of Hofmannsthal’s early dramas and the phenomenological method (a suspension of habitual existential attitudes) necessary for the ­critique of knowledge. What is common to both is an interest in how to face the external world: but aesthetics, as one aspect of this confrontation with the world, need not, indeed could not, be bracketed off from life and experience. Husserl, however, did not ever fully develop the aesthetic side of his phenomenology,8 and Hofmannsthal (who did not, as far as scholars can tell, respond to Husserl’s letter) developed the phenomenological side as it were only incidentally, in his literary production. In his notes from 1916 onward – published under the title Ad me ipsum by the Germanist Walter Brecht – Hofmannsthal identified the ambiguity of his own aesthetic attitude towards the phenomenal world, pointing specifically to “The Tale”: “Era of friendship with

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Poldy (‘merchant’s son’ ‘Garden of Knowledge’): The main problem of this very strange time lies herein: that Poldy completely (I less so, and in a rather indirect manner, insofar as I led a kind of double-life) overlooked the real: he sought to sense the essence of things – he took no account of the other face of things, he wanted intentionally not to notice it, to see it as nothing.”9 For Leopold (“Poldy”) von Andrian, a particular kind of ideality is made manifest in art (“the essence of things”); but there is another face of things: “the real.” The exclusion of either poses risks. In “The Tale,” the beautiful life – when understood as a flight from what is unpleasant  – comes under attack.10 The Hofmannsthal scholar Richard Alewyn wrote famously of the story that life will not be mocked; if defied, it becomes angry and vengeful.11 Put another way: the repressed can and often does return. This is equally true of the aesthetic: the human interest in art and beauty cannot be dismissed any more than real life can be. Hofmannsthal will argue in his writings that follow “The Tale” that we cannot simply ignore that aspect of the aesthetic that draws us out of our habitual mode of existence. For Friedrich Nietzsche, this might be called the Dionysian; for Freud, our unconscious drives; for Hofmannsthal, it is beauty.

E n c h a n t m e n t and Beauty: P a r t O n e o f “ The Tale” “A merchant’s son, a young man and very handsome who had neither father nor mother, grew weary of society and social intercourse soon after his twenty-fifth year.”12 So begins the story. “Schön” is one of the first adjectives used: here it means “handsome,” but its semantic flexibility is significant: it can also mean “beautiful,” “nice,” “lovely,” “pleasant,” “fine,” and even “considerable” when used in conjunction with another adjective. The word does not just describe the merchant’s son; it also sets the tone for the story. In the opening paragraph, it appears every few sentences like a leitmotiv: “sehr schön” (“very handsome”), “die Schönheit keiner einzigen Frau” (“nor … the beauty of any woman”), “seiner schönen Hände” (“his fine hands”), “die Schönheit der Teppiche” (“the beauty of the carpets”), “tiefsinnigen Schönheit” (“profound beauty”), “seine Tage bewegten sich schöner” (“his every day became fairer”).13 The word’s occurrences in the opening sections are so numerous that the reader becomes, like the merchant’s son, tired of the predictability. Indeed, each of the

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merchant’s son’s attributes has a formulaic significance: he is young, handsome, and weary – one might say today: bored. Ennui typifies the kind of decadence that Hofmannsthal’s story critiques.14 Yet readers are given rather little information and should not condemn the merchant’s son prematurely. He does not seem to harbour any misanthropic tendencies or desires; he is simply disengaged from it all. But why? One could read his weariness as what Adorno in his essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society” calls the “lyric spirit’s idiosyncratic opposition to the superior power of material things,” which is “a form of reaction to the reification of the world, to the dominion of human beings by commodities.”15 The character’s identity as a merchant’s son, after all, would suggest that the kinds of dealings he has with people and things are primarily of a commercial nature.16 Moreover, as the son of a merchant, his identity is already framed in opposition to the previous (absent) generation; he has inherited his mercantile relation to the world.17 Consider the abovequoted note from Ad me ipsum, in which Hofmannsthal nods to the broader social and cultural stakes with his reference to the “main problem of this very strange time.” The relation between subject and object has been altered in all areas of life – in physics, art, philosophy, psychology, economics, and even in the day-to-day interactions with other people. Philosophers, artists, and dilettantes alike must attempt to negotiate this new relation. In protest, Adorno’s “lyrical spirit” – the decadent aesthete – surrounds himself with beautiful objects and works of art. He sets up an artificial world in opposition to the hostile “real” world outside; he faces no challenges and can enjoy his surroundings unencumbered.18 In such a setting, the merchant’s son discovers meaning, life, and symbols: “Indeed, the beauty of the carpets and fabrics and silks, the carved and paneled walls, the metal sconces and basins, the glass and earthenware vessels had acquired a never imagined significance. He gradually came to see how all the shapes and colors in the world lived in his artifacts. In the intricacies of the ornaments he discerned an enchanted image of the intricate wonders of the world … He was long intoxicated by this great, profound beauty, all his, and his every day became fairer and less empty among these artifacts, which had ceased to be dead and lowly and were now a great legacy, the divine work of all nations.”19 Perfection and unity seem real – even tangible – in this divine image of generations spanning space and time. The merchant’s son can

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access that image through his possessions. But “possess” is a word to make us pause. On the one hand, these works of art have been passed on from previous generations, and as inherited possessions they call to mind Hofmannsthal’s tongue-in-cheek definition of “­modern” in the essay “Gabriele d’Annunzio”: “Modern are: old furniture and new nervosities.”20 On the other hand, possessions must be looked after and preserved. There is great responsibility in tending to such a great inheritance. But lofty thoughts like this are unsustainable, and Hofmannsthal’s irony cuts across the page: “Yet he likewise felt the vanity of all these things as much as their beauty, nor did the thought of death leave him for long: it would visit him amidst laughing, boisterous crowds, often in the night, often at table.”21 Even if one were to see in art a gesture towards continuity (the work exists long after its maker and awakens a sense of the infinite), art nevertheless does not allay the anxiety of life’s transience, giving credence to the saw: ars longa vita brevis. Beauty like this enlivens the surroundings of the merchant’s son, but the objects are also a memento mori, confronting him with the inevitability of death. The merchant’s son has not been able to reckon with his mortality,22 and art does not offer asylum to those in flight. Phenomenologically, the merchant’s son experiences art as full of life and, by extension, the promise of death. But instead of looking death in the face, so to speak, the merchant’s son attempts to mask any vanitas or meaninglessness (which he equates with ugliness), in essence ignoring the symptoms of an incipient existential dread; he tries to beautify death in the hope of rendering it harmless: “‘Your feet will take you to where you are to die,’ he would say, and saw himself, elegant, like a king lost on a hunt in an unfamiliar wood under exotic trees, meet a strange and wondrous fate. ‘Death will come when the house is done,’ he would say, and saw Death plod across a bridge resting on the backs of wingèd lions and leading to a palace, a house newly finished and filled with life’s spoils.”23 Like the speaker of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the merchant’s son is half in love with easeful Death. A death aesthetically adequate to a beautiful life, full of “profound beauty,” would not be so unwelcome a guest. Unsurprisingly, this mechanism of distancing typifies his approach to people as well. The merchant’s son’s four servants, whom he holds dear and without whom he cannot imagine living, pose a threat by the strength of their presence. The language of the narrative at this point oscillates between depictions of life and death, the distinction

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becoming increasingly blurred, just as the servants’ familiar gestures begin to change; their presence is oppressive precisely because they are alive, marching either towards death or into a kind of deadened life. Both fates are beyond the merchant’s son’s control, and yet they begin to mirror his own otiose existence. This kind of life has become a euphemism for meaninglessness – not death per se, but vain persistence. The merchant’s son is therefore disturbed when he senses his servants’ gazes resting upon him: “the older one’s listless and mournful, with a vague, disquieting challenge, the younger one’s with impatient or insolent vigilance he found even more disquieting.”24 Some scholars read the demand of the elder girl’s gaze as an expression of erotic attraction, which the merchant’s son is unable to recognize as such, let alone return.25 Whether or not the gaze is explicitly erotic (or ­derisive, as in the case of the younger girl), fear and vulnerability set the tone of the passage. The young man, accustomed to acting the observer, with increasing frequency feels himself the object of observation, like a hunted animal. Caught in and fully aware of his inadequacy, “he felt they were looking at his entire life, the depths of his being, his mysterious human inadequacy,” and his anxiety worsens as the servant girls’ gazes “forced him to think about himself in a fruitless and highly exhausting manner.”26 His inadequacy, which he is forced to acknowledge, is tied to the existential necessity of selfawareness in the face of others. It will soon become apparent that beauty is complicit in this imposed humility. The sensation of being watched has been read as a symptom of schizophrenia or a related psychotic illness.27 But Hofmannsthal is also working in an established literary tradition of observation, exemplified by Baudelaire. Compare this image from the opening lines of “Correspondences,” one of the sonnets in Fleurs du Mal: Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; Man walks within these groves of symbols, each of which regards him as a kindred thing.28 In “The Tale,” Hofmannsthal invokes and explores different aspects of Baudelaire’s motif of familiar gazes but creates an entirely d ­ ifferent atmosphere in the process. In Baudelaire’s image, the forest of symbols observes the man passing through. Their glances are familiar.

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At the heart of the poem is a sense of unity (line 6 ends with the word “unité”) and the identification of a space wherein “Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond” (“Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent”) in line 8. Where Baudelaire emphasizes correspondence, unity, and familiarity, Hofmannsthal evokes the uncanny. Two distinct aesthetic theories are at work here: Baudelaire’s, and that of John Keats. In his copy of Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), Hofmannsthal marked the quotation of Keats’ letter to Richard Woodhouse and wrote beside it: “Der Kaufmannssohn” (“The merchant’s son”).29 In that letter, Keats sketches his idea of the chameleon poet: one who loses his sense of self and disappears into his surroundings. The merchant’s son, having also lost his sense of self, is an observer caught between familiarity and non-identity. Such a state of ambiguity is made more palpable when a work of art is present. In a particularly elaborate scene – which featured on the cover of the Wiener Verlag 1905 printing of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen – Hofmannsthal juxtaposes the beauty of art to that of the human being through the description of phenomenological and existential oppositional pairs – death/life, immortality/ mortality, hard/soft, metal/flesh – only to have these distinctions ­collapse.30 In the same manner, the distinction between narrator and narration falls apart. In this scene, the merchant’s son observes the reflection of the elder of the two girls in a mirror. She is carrying two sculptures of bronze Indian deities. Thus doubly framed, the girl appears to approach the merchant’s son: She was carrying a gaunt, heavy, dark-bronze Indian deity under each arm, the figures’ ornamented feet resting in the ­hollows of her hands. The dark goddesses reached from her hips to her temples and leaned their dead weight against her soft, ­living shoulders, while their dark heads with evil snake mouths, three wild eyes in the foreheads, and eerie jewelry in the cold, hard hair moved next to her breathing cheeks, grazing her fair temples in time with her slow gait. However, it was not so much the goddesses’ weight and solemnity that seemed a burden to her as the beauty of her own head with its heavy jewelry of dark, vivid gold, two great arching coils on either side of her clear brow, like an Amazon queen.31

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Figure 1.1  Illustrated cover of the 1905 Wiener Verlag edition of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen.

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Hofmannsthal’s deployment of free indirect speech allows his narrator to adopt the evaluative habits of the merchant’s son, thereby blurring the boundary between narrator, narration, and narrative – right at the moment of the aesthetic encounter: that is, the encounter with the girl and the bronze deities, taken together as a single aesthetic vision.32 Hofmannsthal will again use this literary signal to great effect in the prose version of Die Frau ohne Schatten (the more mature sister of “The Tale”). In the present scene, the poetic device of free indirect speech lulls the reader into a similar aesthetic attitude, creating in effect an analogical (literary) aesthetic encounter for the reader, multiplying the reflections. The language is appropriately heavy, like the bronze deities, especially in the slowly rolling rhythms and the prevalence of darker, long vowels in the first sentence of the German. Alliteration, like the sinuous initial syllables (“sch,” “s”), traces in sound the twisting metal, and the grandeur and heaviness are echoed in the sonorous word pair “großen gewölbten” (“great arching”). The repeated velar stop consonants of “Königin im Kriege” (a warrior queen – here rendered “Amazon queen”) terminate the image with a sense of aural finality. Hofmannsthal’s ekphrastic approach draws readers into the world of the merchant’s son, and into the aesthetic moment, where “living” hair at once serves as a contrast to the hard, non-living icon, and yet adopts the aesthetic characteristics of that icon – it is metallic, ornamental, and heavy, like the language of the passage. The comparison of the girl to a queen in war is a vision likely suggested to the merchant’s son (and the narrator-character) by his own reading.33 The effects of art and beauty draw him in (along with the narrator and the reader); but with his aesthetic gaze, the merchant’s son is able to distance himself from the vision again: “He was taken by her great beauty, though he knew as well that to hold her in his arms would mean nothing to him; he knew that in the end his servant’s beauty filled him with longing rather than desire.”34 As if following the Kantian notion of taste, the merchant’s son seems to hold an uninterested appreciation for his servant’s beauty: he can look without desire. Still, the sense of being arrested (“ergriffen”) before the aesthetic vision, in all its Medusa-like ambiguity, taints the cool objectivity. Cognition occurs alongside the vision (“aber gleichzeitig wußte er”), but the expression of that cognition  – the recognition – must come after. In other words, the aesthetic encounter is broken down into two distinct moments: it is the momentary

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experience of sense perception and cognition, followed by the recognition of that experience. The merchant’s son shows signs that he wishes to narrate his own experience precisely at the moment that the narrator slips into the merchant’s son’s perspective. That coincidence of perspective is formulated and actualized in the paradox of free indirect speech. The German term erlebte Rede expresses the paradox more directly: it is, literally, lived and experienced speech. What Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls the “ästhetisches Erlebnis” (“aesthetic experience”)35 is present here within the nexus of erlebte Rede. Then, in a second move, the experience is made into an object of study. The risk of losing oneself or one’s ego is tempered when it is translated into an epistemological matter (“He knew”; “Er wußte”). But that does not quell the threat completely. Consider the adornment of the girl’s hair.36 In this image Hofmannsthal conveys the unsettling potential of beauty, and in doing so he anticipates Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 definition of the uncanny as a psychic uncertainty resulting from the phenomenological ambiguity of objects – that is, when lifeless things seem to be animate, or when living beings seem inanimate.37 The servant girl’s beauty is so mingled with that of the bronze deities that it becomes difficult to disentangle the two. Such mingling thwarts conceptual categories, much like the experience of the sublime. In his discussion of Hofmannsthal’s “Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” Burkhard Meyer-Sickendieck mentions, but does not develop, two important aspects of the story: the contemplation of the lives of others (“Kontemplation des fremden Lebens”) and the feeling of estrangement (“Befremdlichkeit”).38 These are key ingredients for a tale that engages with contemporary psychological and philosophical questions. While the importance of “Befremdlichkeit” becomes more apparent in the second half of the tale, we can already see how “Kontemplation” functions here: it is part of that distancing, “pure” aesthetic attitude, as Edmund Husserl put it in his letter to Hofmannsthal. When contemplating something or someone, there is always a negotiation of distance. The merchant’s son wishes to safeguard his subject-position by regarding others from afar, and when that distance is compromised (as when the servant girl draws nearer), the safety of the subject position and the possibility of contemplation are threatened. In the scene under discussion, the traditional subjectobject hierarchy is upended, such that the subject no longer feels master in his own house.

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How does this happen, and why? The enframement of the young woman between the icons and within the mirror’s edges is imperfect: any still image properly framed should not move, after all. The living, human element threatens to upset the Kantian aesthetic experience of beauty, and it challenges the viewer’s perception of those assumed boundaries; equally, the icons highlight the mortality, but also the unreachable otherness of the woman, and of art. Unlike, say, the Persian carpet, which reminds the merchant’s son of his mortality, the cosmic unity of the world, and the generations of fruitful creativity, the reflection of the servant girl awakens in him something more than a melancholic sense of distance and inevitable decay. She, together with the deities at her side, issues a challenge to him because she can look back at him and remind him of his powerlessness to possess and preserve this beauty. Even the word choice (“Sehnsucht” instead of “Verlangen,” translated here as “longing rather than desire”) suggests the perpetual nature of a want impossible to ­satisfy – or even an addiction predicated on a distance that cannot be traversed. The etymological associations with illness (“Sucht” in German) tinge the word. By contrast, “Verlangen,” with its homophonic verb, conjures up a different relation to desire: one of duration, necessity, and involvement. The merchant’s son’s response is to disengage himself from a threatening situation. His desire for possession is wedded to his desire for “Ruhe,” for peace and stasis, but not the kind of stasis that involves the finality of commitment. He wants the calm forgetfulness that is sealed off from the chaos and turmoil of life that lurk behind the image. And so he walks along a riverbank populated by gardeners and flower sellers, searching (yet recognizing the futility of his quest) for some bloom or spice that “might put him in tranquil possession of that sweet charm which lay in his servant’s disturbing, unnerving beauty.”39 The merchant’s son’s encounter with the servant girl cannot accommodate simple binaries, so he seeks other distractions. And yet it is telling that he searches for a solution in one of the most ephemeral of senses: scent. Even the location (the riverbank) calls to mind to the Heraclitan/Parmenidean bind in which all are caught. The desire for the security of possession and peace leads him to some of the most familiar symbols of transience: flowers and their scent. The transitional moment comes when the merchant’s son searches for a substitute – in vain. To speak in terms of tragedy: there is a

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moment of reversal, but without the satisfaction of recognition. Wandering among the various plants, the merchant’s son recalls the verses of a poem which present an inverted image of his own activity: “In the stems of swaying carnations, in the fragrance of ripe grain thou didst arouse my longing, but when I found thee, thou wert not she whom I sought but the sisters of your soul.”40 The sophistication of this passage lies in the repeatedly frustrated attempts to set up one-to-one correspondences through parallel equivalents; instead, the verses articulate a double-chiastic structure of correspondence. In this way, Hofmannsthal draws attention to the constructed character of the tale, its fabric woven of words.41 Having been inspired by the living and aesthetically reified vision of the servant girl, the merchant’s son seeks her corresponding, non-threatening, equivalent in the pleasantness of some scent or other.42 He does not find it. The verses in his head speak to the same condition (the inspiration and subsequent failure of one-to-one correspondence), which nevertheless seemed to arise from the opposite set of circumstances: having been inspired in and amid the scent of flowers and ripe corn, the unspecified “Du” (“you” or “thou”) awakens his desire. Yet upon locating this “Du,” the merchant’s son discovers it is only a shadowy double, the sister(s) of “your soul.” In disentangling this structure, a few important points concerning beauty and its relation to the real become apparent. We know that the merchant’s son wants to avoid the threats he perceives by immersing himself in sensory pleasure and its anaesthetizing effects. This is one direction. But the reverse is equally plausible: he moves away from a hard and heavy beauty towards the very image of transience and weightlessness, represented by the scent of flowers. Accompanying this movement is a desire for the real as opposed to the substitute; or perhaps instead, a desire for the substitute as opposed to the real. The ambivalence of the subject’s desire is matched by the ambiguity of the object’s ontological status: which is the real, original beauty, and which the substitute? This question is announced in the irrepressible lines of the poem, the speaker of which, beginning from the opposite pole, seeks the “Du” ­of another subject – which he had intuited in the fleeting, sweet scent of carnations and ripe corn. Upon finding this sought-after human “Du,” however, he realizes it is but a pale image of what he had sensed before. Thus “the main problem during this very strange time” returns: should one privilege the realm of the aesthetic or that of the living?

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The lines of poetry mark the point of transition to the second part of “The Tale” and uncover a moment of aporia. Original and copy, art and life, the aesthetic, the erotic, and the ethical, the solitary and the social: all are tied together in this literary chiasm, located at the figurative threshold between reality and dream,43 and at the structural break between parts one and two.

D is e n c h a n t m e n t a n d the Uncanny: P a r t T w o o f “The Tale” After receiving a strange and threatening letter from the messenger of the Persian prince concerning an unnamed crime supposedly committed by his favourite servant, the merchant’s son elects to venture out of his summer residence and into to the city. Day gives way to evening as he wanders, and soon he must find a place to spend the night. Like a lost tourist, somewhat dazed, he soon finds himself in a poorer part of the city, where he sees little along his path that could be called “schön”: even the flowers are “häßlich” (ugly) and “verstaubt” (dusty). This is a world fallen into disrepair. It has been neither preserved nor cultivated. Yet there is something oddly familiar about the place. The merchant’s son, in a kind of déjà-vu, recalls foggy memories from a forgotten past and recognizes strange moments of deceptive correspondence. The narrative of the second section repeatedly and explicitly invokes descriptions from the first. Heike Grundmann has observed that Hofmannsthal understands beauty not merely as a pleasure for the senses, but as the manifestation of a correspondence between interior and exterior, such that the art-object becomes a symbol.44 Read through this lens, the first part of the tale, with its focus on beauty and interiority, might be the symbol of the second, the “exterior” world. Grundmann is drawing on two notions of the “symbol”: the image presented in Baudelaire’s “Correspondences,” and the birth of the symbol recounted by the fictional interlocutor Gabriel in Hofmannsthal’s literary dialogue from 1904, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte” (“The Conversation about Poems”). In that work, Gabriel locates the origin of poetry in the identity between priest and sacrificial animal and emphasizes that symbols do indeed mean (he uses the verb “bedeuten” intransitively), but we should not say what they mean. In other words, we must hold meaning in abeyance; “bedeuten” (“to mean,” but also derived from “deuten,” “to point”) is understood here as an immediate, intransitive gesture.45

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In the context of “The Tale,” the origin and “meaning” of the symbol are not fully worked out, but they are hinted at. As will become evident, Hofmannsthal’s 1895 story highlights the tension between a desire to endow correspondences with a particular meaning and the impossibility of doing so (as suggested by the lines of poetry from the end of the first part of the tale). “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” is an articulate example of a “beautiful” construction of correspondences. The irony is that the correspondences are uncanny and, in the fictional dreamlike context, they portend death. With such a proliferation of correspondences, “The Tale” easily lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretations of mirroring,46 and it goes one step further by linking the correspondences to an unspoken ethical dilemma: How does the merchant’s son relate to the world? How does his interior, cloistered self interact with and correspond to the “exterior” reality of the city? The first truly unsettling encounter of the second half of the story takes place, with biting irony, in a garden – a literal hortus conclusus. After wandering into a jeweller’s shop to purchase a gift for one of his servants, the merchant’s son notices an adjacent vegetable garden, and upon entering it, he opens himself up not to the beauty of the flora or the countless exotic scents he expects to find, but to a series of uncanny visions that trigger indistinct but powerful memories. As a literary motif, the garden is especially polysemous, and Hofmannsthal used it frequently.47 In the introduction to this book, I referred to Hofmannsthal’s poem “Mein Garten,” which likewise presented two gardens: one of stasis, and one of life and decay. Hofmannsthal’s friend Leopold von Andrian had also already started writing his novella Der Garten der Erkenntnis (The Garden of Knowledge), and we have seen how Stefan George’s lyrical-I introduces a black flower to his garden of sanctity.48 Gardens offer the possibility of re-establishing an (aesthetic) order of living. But, as Alexej Žerebin notes, entering the garden is not simply about escaping an ugly or hostile world. It is also about the desire for a certain kind of Erkenntnis, to be achieved through aestheticizing all aspects of life. This helps to explain the merchant’s son’s desire to enter – and linger in – the garden. What guides him are his fascination, his insatiable gaze, and his overwhelming desire to take in the unknown world and comprehend totality through aesthetic correspondences.49 Hofmannsthal writes: “The merchant’s son went in … to find so rich a collection of rare and curious narcissi and anemones and such strange

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and totally unfamiliar foliage that he stood there for a long while transfixed.”50 The garden’s contents reinforce the desire for possession and comprehension. The narcissus points clearly to narcissism (and by extension to a particular kind of Aestheticism), and the ephemerality of the anemone (the wind-flower, according to its Greek etymology) symbolizes transience and death. Vanity in both its senses is pictured here. Narcissism in this light can be seen as a futile and misguided attempt to maintain the integrity of the self in the face of one’s own transience. In the myth, Narcissus’s life was predicated on a rejection of the Delphic command to “know thyself.” When he did in fact come to know himself, he perished.51 As the sun slowly sinks, the merchant’s son becomes aware of the passing of time, yet he still wishes to look into the second glasshouse, if only briefly, through the windows – perhaps another gesture towards Narcissus. Peering through the glass, he is startled to see the face of a four-year old child glaring at him. Although he overcomes his initial surprise, he is shocked a second time: “For the child, who, motionless, was glaring at him maliciously, bore an inconceivable resemblance to the fifteen-year-old girl he had in his house. Everything was the same: the light eyebrows, the fine, quivering nostrils, the thin lips, even the way she slightly raised one shoulder. Everything was the same, except that in the child it came together in a way that terrified him. He did not know what made him feel that nameless fear; all he knew was that he could not bear to turn around knowing that the face would be staring at him through the glass.”52 In his quest for correspondences, the merchant’s son finds distortion and parody. Ursula Renner, in her afterword to the Reclam edition of Hofmannsthal’s Erzählungen, notes that the relationship between a thing, its sign, and its meaning has fallen victim to idle analogies (“Nachwort” 426–7). The correspondence of this four-year-old child to the fifteen-year-old servant girl is one that remains indeterminate. He sees the servant girl in the child and is ­confronted with the contradiction of the ostensibly stable self in the ­passage of time, and with the identity of two separate beings. The whole passage is characterized by repetition in diction, initiated by shock. The word “erschrak” (“he gave a start”) and the phrase “Alles war gleich” (“Everything was the same”) appear twice, each in parallel syntax, and the proximity of the phrases “Er wußte nicht” (“He knew not”) and “Er wußte nur” (“He knew only”) reenforces the parallels. In an eponymous essay on the English theorist Walter Pater, Hofmannsthal writes: “We are, almost all of us, in one way or another

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in love with a past seen through and stylized by the medium of the arts. It is, so to speak, our way of being in love with an ideal, or at least an idealized, life.”53 For the merchant’s son, the idealized world mediated by art and beauty has been replaced by absurdity: he leaves the garden in a state of abstraction “and with a numb feeling of something akin to hatred for the senselessness of his torture.”54 Having managed to escape the prison-like garden, he longs for his idealized past in the form of his bed, becoming more childlike than the child he encountered. Such idealization is coupled with the very last use of the word “schön” in a reference to the past – both his own, and a literary, imagined past: “With childlike longing he recalled the beauty of his own wide bed; he thought too of the beds that the great king of the past had made for himself and his companions when celebrating their weddings to the daughters of subservient kings: a bed of gold for himself and of silver for the others, carried by griffins and wingèd bulls.”55 Beauty is linked to an imaginary, literary past. And there is another correspondence. The bed he imagines belongs in the finished house of the proverb: “‘Death will come when the house is done,’ he would say, and saw Death plod across a bridge resting on the backs of wingèd lions and leading to a palace, a house newly finished and filled with life’s spoils.”56 The parallel between the bed, carried by gryphons and winged bulls, and the palace bridge,57 carried by winged lions, reinforces the connection to death. In his quest for a bed, this travesty of a medieval knight finds himself at soldiers’ barracks. The soldiers speak to him incomprehensibly, the smells are repellent, and the horses look angry, ugly, and wretched, like the soldiers. Beauty is put to rest, and the word does not appear again. In a gesture of generosity, the merchant’s son reaches into his pocket to pull out a few coins, thereby reintroducing mercantile means of dealing with others. (He is still the son of a merchant.) Equally, the generosity can be interpreted as an attempt to allay his own feelings of discomfort brought on by a strange memory: The face of one of the horses reminds him of a poor man he once saw in his father’s shop. The man was being hounded because he was discovered to be in possession of a gold piece, and he would not say how he had obtained it. Such monetary exchanges are a failure of one-to-one correspondence, and seem to succeed only in provoking antagonism. Indeed, the merchant’s son had already tried to give a few silver coins to the child in the garden in an attempt to mollify her animosity; she let them fall, worthless, into the void.58

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This time, however, as he reaches into his pocket to pull out one of his remaining gold coins, an unclear thought seizes him. He hesitates and pulls out his hand, perhaps sensing in this moment that his gift will be of no value to a poor man, in whose possession it would only rouse suspicion. Inadvertently, in this one gesture, he tosses out the piece of jewellery intended for the old woman, one of his servants. He bends down to retrieve it and is violently kicked in the groin by a horse. In effect castrated, the wealthy merchant’s son is then brought to his final resting place: a low, iron bed. Here he dies alone, renouncing his entire life and all that was a joy to him. His story ends with the ugliness of hatred: “He hated his premature death so much that he hated his life for having brought him to it.”59 The merchant’s son dies with an expression on his face resembling that of the horses: pained and unpleasant. He has become his own grotesque parody. If the merchant’s son in some way “deserves” this fate, then it must be because his life – according to his own adage – has led him to this death, as Hofmannsthal indicated to Beer-Hofmann on 15 May 1895: “The fall of the cards … is something that one forces from the inside out.”60 But what aspect of his life has led him to this death? Part of the difficulty with interpreting this story is the absence of a contrastive figure. We see no portrait of unmitigated joy anywhere – in neither the luxury of the merchant’s son’s surroundings, nor, of course, in the miserable city. The merchant’s son is the centre of the story, to the almost total exclusion of the other figures. And yet, as with the fantastic logic of the carpet, all things here are connected. Luxury is woven with poverty, pleasure with pain, joy with suffering. The merchant’s son’s only hope for meaningful human interaction, it seems, was in his favourite servant, whose continued presence could not be safeguarded. Hegel’s lordship–bondage dialectic is full at work here: the master needs the servant just as the servant needed his master. The two men are in fact mutually dependent. One can imagine the fate of the servant will be equally unpleasant. —*— According to Gregor Streim, one of the most important distinctions to make when considering the power of art is that between the artist and the dilettante, the latter embodying a strange hybrid of the scientist and artist. The dilettante seeks to grasp the aesthetic in conceptual

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terms, to render it an object of study, and in doing so, to neutralize it. The artist, by contrast – and the aesthete may go either way – engages with the work of art, contributing to its expansion rather than trying to subsume it under a conceptual totality.61 Hofmannsthal himself expresses this productive kind of reception in his 1905 ceremonial address, “Shakespeares Könige und grosse Herren” (“Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen”). He describes reading Shakespeare as “a pleasure and a passion, a conscious talent, an imagination, an innate art perhaps, like playing the flute or dancing, a shattering but silent inner orgy.”62 That is, to be struck by a work of art in this way is also to become a kind of artist, to respond to this gift. Yet nowhere do we see the merchant’s son responding in this spirit  – even his altruism hints at egotism. He contemplates, he admires, he possesses (or believes to possess), but he does not respond to beauty’s challenge. In this respect he is like the dilettante that Streim describes, imagining himself to be merely an observer, letting the impressions of life wash over him.63 He has the prerequisite appreciation for beauty, yet he lacks the artistic-productive capacity for the perception and reception necessary to give this fantasy life (hence the castration). This would require him not only to acknowledge but also to live with death. Fourteen years later, Rilke’s narrator in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) says that when we are born, a death is born as well, and we carry our deaths with us throughout life. This fin-de-siècle theme is present in “The Tale of Night Six-Hundred and Seventy-Two” as well, and tightly woven into it is the experience of the beautiful and its challenge to the coherence and stability of the subject. As in Malte Laurids Brigge, there are hints in “The Tale” that art, as an intensified experience of the interconnectedness of life on the one hand, and a challenge to notions of the stable, isolated self on the other, becomes increasingly important in a world organized around economic exchange, acquisitiveness, and the passivity induced in the pleasure had from watching, unresponsive, as the world passes by. The only response the merchant’s son knows is exchange value, compensation, and substitution: in aesthetic terms, one-to-one correspondence. As much as the merchant’s son wants to escape the society he has grown weary of, he is still a product of that society; his inability to respond to art with a creative spirit reflects as much upon his culture and society’s relation to creativity as it does upon his own.64 To

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paraphrase Mathias Mayer, whose characterization of the merchant’s son’s death strongly echoes Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge as well: Inasmuch as he does not die a death he recognizes as his own, he has not found his life’s path.65

B e a u t y R e defi ned: T h e “ A ddr e s s ” of 1902 Neither artistic beauty, nor human beauty, nor the love of beauty is the cause of the merchant’s son’s downfall. In “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” beauty has the capacity to make one aware, sometimes painfully so, of the precariousness of life. As in the encounter with the girl and the bronze deities, beauty can be a memento mori. Buried in “The Tale” is a nuanced understanding of beauty, not yet fully articulated, but which prefigures certain of Hofmannsthal’s later ideas. In a letter to Leopold von Andrian, dated 4 May 1896, Hofmannsthal describes an experience that bears a remarkable resemblance to certain scenes in “The Tale.”66 From Tlumacz: “Everything around me is uglier than you can imagine. Everything is ugly, miserable, and filthy, the people, the horses, the dogs, the children too.”67 He also experiences this ugliness as an ambiguous, anonymous threat: “Yesterday evening I was so startled by an old beggar, who in the twilight crept on all fours into my room and kissed my feet, that I felt exhausted and bitter afterwards, as after some grave and pointless danger … I don’t understand how all these things can have such power over me.”68 The distinction between the writer Hofmannsthal and the fictional merchant’s son lies in Hofmannsthal’s ability to see value in suffering: “Actually, these are states of anxiety. But they are also very good … They expand the inner sense; they bring up things which were as if buried. I think the beautiful life impoverishes one. If one could live out life simply as one wanted, one would lose all vitality.”69 The destabilizing threat to an orderly life of comfort, which itself leads to a kind of melancholy l­assitude, has the power to shake the young Hofmannsthal out of his lethargy: “When I wake up at night here, I am present to myself more strongly than I have been for a long time. I return to myself, like one who has constantly been putting on an act; it is an act that in some mysterious manner imitates this being, but it is still an act.”70 The sensation of returning to oneself is made possible precisely in the condition of anxiety; those

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fears allow Hofmannsthal to see the “other” life in a new light, to see the theatre of it all. In Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässse Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), there is a particular passage Hofmannsthal marked in his pocket edition: “but anything truly productive is offensive.”71 Hofmannsthal had read the Untimely Meditations for the first time three years before his experience in Tlumacz, and though we do not know when he underlined the passage, it is not hard to imagine that the word “anstößig” (“offensive”) resonated with him early on. The statement is ambiguous: it could mean that all truly productive things are offensive, shocking, or even repulsive. In any case, Hofmannsthal’s experience seems to have validated the statement in all its valences; or, perhaps Nietzsche’s words provided a paradigm for Hofmannsthal’s reflection on his experience. However one interprets “anstößig,” the idea provides an angle from which to understand aesthetic creativity, and it will become an important component for Hofmannsthal’s reassessment of the beautiful in art. In light of his own revulsion, Hofmannsthal-as-reader reflects on his appreciation for beauty just a day later (“Am 5ten weitergeschrieben”). While perusing Otway’s Venice Preserv’d in all the discomforts of a dirty stable (calling to mind the merchant’s son’s place of death), something inexplicable awakens in him. Flummoxed, he grapples for an explanation: “I have felt the beauty of the entrance and departure of every person, the beauty of two or three people standing with each other, and the beauty of their dialogues. I believe this is something incredibly rare and, in order for it to occur, all these specific conditions had to be present, the solitude that went on for days, the bad nights, and the vision of so many suffering people, even their smell and their voices.”72 Hofmannsthal has rediscovered his appreciation for beauty in mere gestures and situations, as if kindled by the jolting occurrence from the day before. As a result, his understanding of beauty now includes an attention to suffering. Such attention involves something like empathy, and Hofmannsthal writes that he, at least on some level, identifies with Otway: “For an hour, I loved as the poet did.”73 This identification is achieved through a recognition of human imperfection, and here his conviction intensifies: “It is a wondrously beautiful thing to sense the weakness of the artist in a work of art, the places where he, from his inadequacy and desire for beauty, becomes strange and forceful.”74 Hofmannsthal, unlike the merchant’s son, values the shortcomings of being human

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and the subsequent striving towards beauty. In fact, feeling those shortcomings is itself something wondrously beautiful. If beauty can incorporate suffering, what does that say about aesthetics? Hofmannsthal seems tentatively to suggest a new vision of what is “aesthetic.” The new vision integrates human frailty as a challenge and spur, rather than something to avoid or paint over. Under this new attitude, the merchant’s son’s own human inadequacy – his “menschliche Unzulänglichkeit” – would be part of what makes beauty possible. Hofmannsthal’s views on aesthetics were driven in large part by a desire not to be lost in a world-denying fantasy, but rather to acknowledge the role of suffering and imperfection in the creation of beauty. It is no surprise that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe exerted such a great influence on Hofmannsthal’s understanding and portrayal of art. With her 1947 study Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Goethe, Grete Schaeder compared how Goethe and Hofmannsthal turned towards the outer world as a way of thwarting the potentially self-destructive (and Narcissistic) interiority of the artistic personality. And again, like Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal is keenly aware of the need to escape the cycle of interiority by giving external form to what is felt. A text such as the 1896 essay on D’Annunzio’s fiction shows this well. The prevalence of the words “Leben,” “Tun” or “Tuen,” and “wollen”75 – life, deed, and will – drive the essay forward: “Only the deed gives birth to power and beauty. For that reason, we lay snakes into the cradle of the babe Herakles and let him strangle them, smiling, with his little hands – only thus can such power and beauty see the light of day. For that reason, Odysseus must be tossed about by the deceitful salt tide, so that his tremendous return home can take place, himself clothed in beggars’ rags, known by no one but his dog. Many paths he had to tread, and never with ease, in order that we might weep for him.”76 In the examples given in the quote above – one taken from myth and one from epic – Hofmannsthal suggests that “the deed” is a criterion that overreaches the boundaries of genre and even begins to blur the line between life and art. As Hofmannsthal makes explicit in his lecture “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”) the experiences of life are necessary not only for the depiction of a character, but also for the reception of a work of art: “only by walking the paths of life – with its wearisome depths and its wearisome peaks – can one acquire an understanding of the spiritual art.”77 Yet art is not meant

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to imitate life. In this lecture, Hofmannsthal uses Stefan George’s anti-­Naturalist vision of absolute poetry to combat the proliferation of literature that takes its sustenance from “real life” to the detriment of the art itself. Hofmannsthal discriminates between poetry and life by ­maintaining that there is no direct path from one to the other. Like the Romantics before him,78 he asserts that the language of everyday life is distinct from the language of poetry. His argument is that one should not attempt to make art mirror life as precisely as possible, for in doing so, one neglects the cultivation of the creative element – in effect, laming art, rendering it lifeless. Hofmannsthal rejects the Naturalist aesthetic that follows Arno Holz’s formula: Art = Nature – x, with ‘x’ approaching zero.79 And his irony is incisive: “You are surprised. You are disappointed to discover I am banishing life from poetry.”80 On the contrary, it is the facile imitation of life (or “Nature”) as present in the work of “Dilettanten” that drives the life of poetry out of poetry: “I know what life has to do with art. I love life, moreover I love nothing but life.”81 Without experiencing the polarities of life, art has nothing to say to us, no substance, no reason to exist. Still, art does not, indeed should not, try to replicate life. In the following passage, Hofmannsthal describes the lifeless figures of D’Annunzio’s novel Le vergini delle rocce: “One can be here and yet not in life: whatever it is that turns a person around, that makes it possible for that person to experience guilt and innocence, to have power and beauty – that is a complete mystery. For before that moment, this person possessed power for neither good nor evil, and had no beauty at all; he was too vain for that; for beauty comes into being only where there is power and humility.”82 Hofmannsthal’s terms seem to get lost in one another, but if we tread slowly, we can follow their paths. In saying that “beauty [Schönheit] comes into being only where there is power [Kraft] and humility [Bescheidenheit],” Hofmannsthal seems to be relying on circular reasoning: humility and power – in the sense of energy, vitality, and strength – are necessary for the emergence of beauty, and indeed also for the emergence of power itself. The terms are so tangled that we see neither beginning nor end, neither cause nor effect. The paradox of origin (power and humility being the “origin” of power and beauty) is like the construction of the Persian carpet in “The Tale” and the lines of verse the merchant’s son recalls when walking along the riverbank. Origins remain elusive.

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Hofmannsthal had already hinted at the connection between humility and beauty in his letter to Leopold von Andrian, noting that the experience of beauty was tied, on the one hand, to the experience of the wretchedness of life and, on the other, to the experience of the author’s human inadequacy – that is, those characteristics which the  merchant’s son attempted to neutralize. In the essay on D’Annunzio’s novel, these features are grouped under the term “humility” (“Bescheidenheit”). Hofmannsthal develops and refines this relationship between power and humility in his understanding of beauty just a few years later.

B e a u t y R evi ved In 1902 Hofmannsthal was asked to provide some opening remarks at the house of the count Karol Lanckoroński before an audience gathered for a viewing of Lanckoroński’s overwhelmingly eclectic art  collection. Hofmannsthal’s intention with this “Ansprache” (“Address”) was to set the mood and put the audience into a responsive frame of mind conducive to viewing the collection. He compares his words to musical accompaniment: “For it has often seemed to me that music has such a power to bring beautiful images to life.”83 Hofmannsthal speaks reflectively about his own half-poetic, halfprogrammatic “Address” as something meant to facilitate the reception of beauty by bringing these works of art to life. Referring to the paintings,84 he writes: “They are like the shadows which surround Odysseus, all desirous to drink of his blood, silent, avidly pressed in upon one another, their dark, hollow gaze fixed upon his living form. They want to have their share of life. Indeed, they seem to glow and tremble with a restrained energy of their own when not observed.”85 In “The Tale,” the (aestheticized) servants mysteriously draw life from the merchant’s son; here in the “Address,” the beautiful images draw life from the viewers. But art gives something in return through the suggestive power of its material, shaped by human hands. This serves as an explication of that moment Hofmannsthal recorded in his letter to Andrian: the recognition of the hand at work in a piece of literature – a sign of the author’s (Otway’s) humanity – is now a part of Hofmannsthal’s conception of the aesthetic encounter. In the “Address,” Hofmannsthal focuses in on the dizzying effect of such a recognition. The following passage saw almost no changes in the ­different manuscripts, so one can assume Hofmannsthal read this

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Figure 1.2  Dining room with tapestries in the Palais Lanckoroński in Vienna. This image is part of a postcard series that was made specifically for the building and its collection.

vertiginous sentence aloud, pulling his listeners into its whorl: “And thus, for a moment, a hanging or outstretched weaving is, as it were, able to breathe out its spirit: while one gazes fixedly upon it, while speaking or in silence, it will suddenly reveal that here there is something which has been knotted together, knotted by human fingers over endless hours, and for a moment, this thousandfold knotted work will light up and let one catch a glimpse of the suddenly arrested vitality, the arbitrary-will-become-form of the joining colours and shades, like a nocturnal landscape which, under a great flash of lightning, lets one glimpse the junction of roads and meeting of hills, and lets it sink down again into darkness.”86 Else Lasker-Schüler said it succinctly, in one word (and line) in her 1910 poem “Ein Alter Tibetteppich” (“An Old Carpet of Tibet”): Maschentausendabertausendweit (thousands-upon-thousands-ofstitches-vast); and Stefan George said it more esoterically, intimating

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a cryptic revelation in his poem “Der Teppich” (The Carpet).87 But Hofmannsthal wants his listeners to follow the thread into the weave and to stop and wonder at its knots and ties. Hofmannsthal’s own written and spoken tapestry (his sentence) is waiting to reveal its life, too, much as the carpet described in George’s poem: “And no one senses the riddle of entanglement … / that one evening the work will come alive.”88 Hofmannsthal’s momentary revelation of complex connectivity seems itself to spin the sentence into rolling repetitions with variation, demonstrating the convergence of material and content, the creation of form out of arbitrary volition (“Form gewordene Willkür”). And yet, sustaining this tension for any length of time is too much. The vision sinks away again into darkness. The sentence comes to a full stop. Behind the description of the revelatory power of beautiful art is a cultural-critical impulse that becomes more apparent when compared with a passage that Hofmannsthal marked in his copy of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Referring to the inner world (“Innerlichkeit”) of the German people, Nietzsche writes: “The foreigner will still be to some extend justified in maintaining that our interior is too feeble and disorganized to produce an outward effect and endow itself with a form. The interior of Germans can be receptive to an exceptional degree: serious, powerful, profound, and perhaps even richer than that of other nations; but as a whole it remains weak because all these beautiful threads are not wound together into a powerful knot: so that the visible act is not the act and self-revelation of the totality of this interior but only a feeble or crude attempt on the part of one or other of these threads to pose as being the whole.”89 Hofmannsthal identifies in the collected works of art (tapestries and carpets being some of the most vivid examples) precisely that connectedness, that strong knot (“kräftiger Knoten”) that Nietzsche believes is missing in the German people. Beautiful works of art demand a peculiar blend of strength and humility from the viewer: “there are moments, and they are almost frightening, in which everything around us wants to assume its full, strong life.90 Moments in which we feel them all, these silent beautiful things, living by our side, and our life is more in them than in ourselves.”91 The beautiful is characterized by its conceptual and linguistic silence and its capacity to inspire awe. And while this aspect of beauty is not restricted to art objects, art as a medium of silent articulation (not naming the thing)92 is a privileged location for such moments.

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These moments are potentially accessible to anyone present: “Each of us, even if he has never set foot in this house, will wander this place like the native land of his dreams. For our existences are grown through and with the existences of these works.”93 The two existences are inseparable and interdependent.94 This is what makes the exchange – revelation for sacrifice – possible. We may recognize in this “native land of [our] dreams” strains of the Freudian unconscious, and Hofmannsthal was in fact reading the work on hysteria by Freud and Breuer at the time.95 But for Hofmannsthal, the native land of our dreams extends beyond the psychology of the individual. There are also hints of Goethe’s notion of daemonic creative faculties: “how they stand there enwrapped in the mystery of that immense age now vanished, they take hold of us daimonically: and each is a world, and all are from a world which touches us through them and makes us shudder to the core.”96 These works of art are, in a sense, our shadowselves, yet they also are a world unto themselves. It is this ambiguity of identity that gives them that strange familiarity and destabilizing potential, and it is also what will lead Hofmannsthal to develop a dialogical conception of the aesthetic experience. Here is one of the first expressions of this dynamic: “It lives for us, it lives through us. There is something in us that responds to this world-picture.”97 Hermann Broch, in his study Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (Hofmannsthal and His Time), comments on this defining aspect of the word “beautiful.” He notes first that the “rediscovery of complete world identification” is the “highest ecstasy man can attain, probably the very highest attainable life value, and precisely because this complete identification with his object has been posited as the artist’s task, indeed his moral task, his work must be its expression, its image, its symbol; the work itself becomes ecstasizing and thus wins that quality specific to works of art for which the word ‘beautiful’ was coined.”98 Broch’s comment is one of the few to identify the specificity that the word “beauty” had for Hofmannsthal. The “Address” helps to ­substantiate Broch’s interpretation, but we see also that there is an element important to Hofmannsthal’s understanding of beauty that Broch did not emphasize: namely, that the “moral task” is not the artist’s alone. By invoking the word “beautiful,” the viewer too – artist or not – must realize the consequences of taking the object world seriously, and appreciate its resistance to possession. The potential power of the beautiful for Hofmannsthal lies in the double-recognition of the other and oneself simultaneously, in one gesture.

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These beautiful images are a world to which we respond: the character of that response depends on our understanding of the character of the encounter. As we have already seen in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the engaged response is neither automatic nor guaranteed. At most we can say that the response is prompted by this dual characteristic of beauty: its familiarity and its threatening character. In the words of Ernst Jentsch: “This powerlessness generates a vague feeling of threat emanating from something unknown and ungraspable, something which is as enigmatic as one’s own psyche usually is.”99 For the remainder of the “Address,” Hofmannsthal develops a notion of beauty that is reflected not only in the visual (or poetic) content of the work of art, but also in the idea of art-as-gift – an idea that will become important for chapter 3. In the second half of the “Address,” Hofmannsthal reverses the sacrifice metaphor used in the first half: “And now the never-ending world of paintings: there they hang, and what is long since past continually pours out from them as something present.”100 Beautiful art takes and gives. And this is what the viewer does, too, when sensing the breath of eternity arising in these objects of human creation: “Yes, thousands, individuals and nations, have wrought form, and what they could exalt to form lives on forever: artwork, symbol, myth, religion.”101 This is not a question of whether a work of art will survive a fire or a flood, or whether one religion will continue to exist after being succeeded by another. All are ephemeral. Yet they do have something time-defying about them: they can outlive their creators, for one. But more than this, they point to the past and the future: in other words, to that which is beyond the here-and-now of the individual. At this point, Hofmannsthal’s poetic language intensifies, just as he approaches the crux of his address: art’s imperative.102 “For if we are barred from knowing the spirit of the times through contemplation, then it is given to us instead to feel it when it demandingly descends upon us, seducing and tantalizing, oppressing and enchanting us with the breath of Otherness.” 103 Hofmannsthal knows quite well we can never, epistemologically speaking, fully comprehend the past.104 We can sense it, however, through art. This happens in the demand that descends upon us, as if we had no choice in the matter. For Hofmannsthal, this is no ordinary demand. It is rather like a divine command, transcending the limitations of time and self: “And thus an infinite demand confronts us, one most dangerous to our inner

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equilibrium: the demand that we reconcile ourselves with the ­thousandfold phantoms of the past, which want to be nurtured [or nourished] by us.”105 We cannot remain apathetic, for this concerns all of us. The phantoms are a part of our own existence, and to ignore their demand is to reject participation in this world. With the invocation of a single word – beautiful – we declare our participation and responsibility: “For such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’ There is no word loftier, no word more dangerous. It is the word which binds most deeply.”106 The word is lofty, even proud (“stolz”) because we have an intimate connection to the objects we call beautiful. In some way, we identify with them. This opens up a world of reciprocal offering and receiving and presupposes our adequacy to the task: “By uttering this word, we say that something within is stirred by what art has formed as only like can be stirred by like.”107 Moreover, we become as much an object of that word as we are the subject that speaks it, insofar as our identity is upset and cast into the world of the work of art: “And insofar as our lips are compelled by a deep magic to speak it again and again, we assume such a tremendous kingdom of art, as if a thousand souls in us were stirred by the act of aesthetic enjoyment.”108 Again, there is a reversal of terms: we have a share in the kingdom of art, just as much as the work of art has a share in life. In the case of art, the situation – potentially at least – moves beyond narcissism and hubris by opening space for dialogue and a new experience of the world. The dénouement: “But let us calm ourselves: the demand imposed on us by the world of beauty, this daimonic process of enticing out of us entire worlds of feeling, this demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected power of the mysterious line of ancestors within us, the towering stacks of layers of our supra-individual memory, piled one upon the other.”109 The artworks displayed in Lanckoroński’s villa were mostly Trecento and Quattrocento paintings, statues, and artworks from the Far East. These works of far-flung origin surrounded the viewers, respirating into the air temporal, geographical, and cultural difference. But ­according to Hofmannsthal, our human capacity to call artworks “schön” allows for entire worlds to be drawn out of us. It is as if the viewers contribute to this beauty, are drawn into participation, or, as another version of the text has it, into what Hofmannsthal calls “Communion.” The world of the beautiful sets us in relation with the

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other by pulling us out of our mundane, subject-centred existences. In yet another version of the text, the question of the subject receives slightly different treatment: “Here it appears we are in danger of losing ourselves: a great error! For here it is that we first are awakened and able to possess ourselves; for indeed we create the immortal content of these images, insofar as we feel after them and empathize, alive.”110 Perhaps Hofmannsthal left this out of the final version because it jarred with the tone of the subsequent conclusion. His discussion of beauty, at this precise point, is less about losing oneself and finding oneself again than it is about the direct implications of the word itself; Hofmannsthal seems to want to awaken a sense of enthusiasm, rather than to offer promises as explicit and grandiose as self-discovery; perhaps he even had his doubts. Instead, he closes the address with Goethe’s comment on enthusiasm, complementing his own guiding, preparatory remarks: “For ‘without enthusiasm,’ Goethe says, ‘art allows itself to be neither grasped nor comprehended. Anyone unwilling to begin with amazement and admiration will not find access to the inner sanctum. And the head alone cannot grasp any product of art; it can only do so in the company of the heart.’”111 Readers are left at the end of the “Address” with a sense that Hofmannsthal, in an effort to convince his listeners of the greatness of their task, must rely on religious language. This is certainly not an uncommon move – the Germanist Heinz Schlaffer characterizes much of German literature as an ever-renewed engagement with religion – but it risks displacing the discussion of the experience of art into the realm of mysticism, moving away from the very “life” that Hofmannsthal enjoins us not to forget. —*— Understanding Hofmannsthal’s use of the word “beauty” is crucial to appreciating his literary works. It helps to give form to the aesthetic experience, which so tenaciously resists definition. “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” asks what to do when confronted with beauty-as-threat: to flee, to neutralize (anaesthetize), or to engage? Beauty can induce sensations of self-dissolution as well as interconnectedness, leading Hofmannsthal to identify an ethical moment in the aesthetic encounter, which he describes as a call that demands a response. The “Address” makes this last point clear. But is it enough?

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In a letter Hofmannsthal wrote in 1923 to his daughter, Christiane von Hofmannsthal, the ambiguity of beauty re-surfaces. Long after “The Tale” and long after Tlumacz, he writes on lovesickness and suffering: “Not that suffering should be excised from existence: no, it is the very stuff of our existence and even that which we call beautiful is unthinkable without suffering – indeed it is the blossom that ­burgeons forth from suffering, but it’s one thing if you get yourself tangled up in unnecessary suffering, half playing and half desiring, and another if we must suffer and have no bulwark to protect ourselves. And here I’m troubled by the responsibility that I carry for letting you live so outside of conventions, which are of course the natural defensive walls of existence.”112 It is remarkable that, in this letter to his daughter almost thirty years later, Hofmannsthal articulates the same conviction that beauty is not an escape from suffering, but rather the blossom that grows from it. Yet underlying this is a persistent worry that one might not be fully protected, that one might die full of regret, having failed in one’s responsibilities – that is, having failed to respond adequately.

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2 Art and Society in “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (“The Letters of the Man Who Returned”)

The cultural and intellectual changes in Germany and Europe at the turn of the century led to what one could consider a phenomenological crisis, the most prominent symptom of which was existential nausea. Literary works like Kafka’s “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” (“Description of a Struggle”) from 1909, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge from 1908–10, and Hofmannsthal’s “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (“The Letters of the Man Who Returned”) from 1907–08 all touch on this wide-spread sense of unease; even Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 Nausea can be read as part of this group and is a testament to the enduring nature of the “illness.” Hofmannsthal’s fictional letters ­present one of the earliest glimpses into this particular crisis. They do so – unusually, when compared with his contemporaries – within the framework of an aesthetic encounter. With its socially and ethically charged background, “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” was initially intended to be an ambitious multi-volume project tracing several generations of the protagonist’s family. For reasons unclear,1 Hofmannsthal abandoned the idea after having just five of the fictional letters published. The text forms not only the beginning of an aborted project; it also embodies one of the work’s central themes of fragmentation and cohesion. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” bears a striking resemblance to Hofmannsthal’s great unfinished novel Andreas. Both are fragments, but there is more than a structural affinity; many of the characters initially planned for “The Letter of the Man Who Returned”

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found their way into the Andreas fragments, which the author continued to revisit in the two decades between 1907 and 1927. Hofmannsthal’s failure to bring his novelistic intentions to completion might well be interpreted in light of the drastic societal, cultural, and scientific changes of the early twentieth century: The idea of the novel, as a literary genre steeped in the tradition of ethical and aesthetic education, could not adequately demonstrate the internal contradictions and fragmentation of a protagonist destined not to follow a progressive (even if meandering) path of Bildung (i.e., education and formation of moral character), but rather a circular route that returns to the “self.” It is telling that, in 1905, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey took the Bildungsroman and its cousins (like the coming-ofage story and the Künstlerroman) as objects of study: as if these genres had already become artifacts in literary history. Unlike the more “complete” novels of German literature (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, for example) or the examples of Bildungsroman in other European literatures, Andreas and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” are defined by their failure to demonstrate clear development, education, progress, and arrival. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” is not a story about the development of moral character, or at least not in the Bildungsroman sense; and despite the importance of art for the letters, it is not a story about developing artistic ability, in the sense of the Künstlerroman. There is a moral dimension, but it hovers above the action, suspended in the text’s own aesthetics – that is, its reflections on art and beauty. Furthermore, while the novelistic form accommodates subplots, detours, and aesthetic encounters, the fragmentary nature of these letters has the aesthetic advantage of performing its subject matter: the ecstatic moment of the aesthetic encounter is cut off from the rest of the character’s experiences, and cut off from the narrative elaborations in the unfinished Andreas.2 The letters were never published together in Hofmannsthal’s lifetime. The first three found an audience with the journal Morgen in the summer of 1907, while the last two were published in Kunst und Künstler in early February of 1908 under the title “Die Farben. Aus den ‘Briefen des Zurückgekehrten.’” Nonetheless, there is a line of continuity that has become evident in the more recent editions, r­ anging from the pocket-sized Reclam edition of the short stories, Erzählungen (edited by Ursula Renner-Henke), to the critical edition with notes and variora. In Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Writings on Art / Schriften

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zur Kunst I have translated the letters in full. Despite the clear connection between the letters, the text as a whole lacks a novelistic coherence and telos. It seems Hofmannsthal felt this too. Interest in such “productive failures” of Hofmannsthal has gained momentum: in 2017 the Hofmannsthal Gesellschaft hosted a conference on the author’s “produktives Scheitern.” It is evident that Hofmannsthal’s work – and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” is a particularly illustrative example – is interesting at least in part precisely because of the mysterious allure of its internal discord. This comes to a climax where ethics and aesthetics meet.3 The collection of fictional letters portrays a financially established man just returned from travelling the world on business (the nature of which is not explained). The year is 1901, and upon his arrival in Europe after eighteen years, the writer of the letters – henceforth referred to as the merchant4 – can no longer hold any meaningful concepts (“Begriffe”) about his own culture at the beginning of the new century. At the personal level, people seem internally fragmented and distracted, lacking in character, and guided by a desire for money. As if infected by this profit-seeking drive, the merchant repeatedly rejects the idea that he is a dreamer of any kind: for what could be less profitable than dreams (unless one is a successful psychoanalyst)? The merchant may be unhappy with modernity’s mercenary turn, but his own patterns of thought show how infectious that drive is. Still, there is a distinctly dream-like quality to his memories and thoughts. He will even come to designate some of his thoughts as “dreams” (“Träume”), and the last two letters (the focus of this chapter) present an aesthetic encounter which questions the value system that places a status-quo reality above the world of the imagination. Once this happens, it seems the merchant’s confidence in life and sense of stability is restored: he accomplishes his work as an exemplary capitalist and thereby embodies, as some scholars see it, the ideal of a human being of practical activity rather than passivity.5 I interpret this as a deceptive resolution, however: The end is not only about a successful business endeavour, nor is it an untainted triumph of activity and practicality. It is an unresolved struggle with the demands of a capitalism and the awareness that art, while it may provide a moment of relief from a mercenary world, contains its fair share of suffering as well. Hofmannsthal’s spin on the matter is a creative response (not a remedy) to the relation between social life and art.

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As discussed in chapter 1, Hofmannsthal was fascinated by the idea of a challenge, or demand, issued by beauty. Now the task is to see how reflections on beauty function in a literary text, and what the nature of that challenge is. Hofmannsthal does not write in a philosophically rigorous manner, but “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” (as well as other of Hofmannsthal’s works, notably the Chandos Letter) do engage with topics that interested psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers at the time; Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Edmund Husserl would all find in Hofmannsthal a literary colleague in the study of perception. In this epistolary collection, the final two letters trace the connection between the phenomenological and the aesthetic experiences of life, primarily by way of questioning the status of reality and art, and, by extension, the possibility of community and dialogue.

T h e P h e n o m e n o l o gi cal Cri s i s The final two letters depict the personal consequences of the merchant’s return home. His uneasiness in this society has already manifested as a psychological sickness, foreshadowed in the first letter by the merchant’s mal de débarquement. Such seasickness on land is triggered not by getting off the boat and setting foot upon terra firma once more after a long voyage, but rather by leaving the terra cognita of an ordered worldview and stepping into the whirling flux of a new reality. The symptoms worsen over the course of the letters, until the merchant loses his sense for the reality of things altogether: he suffers a phenomenological crisis, and his nausea takes on an existential significance. The merchant has lost his sense of orientation, and the world he finds himself in seems ghostly, tentative, and hollow in comparison to the Germany he imagined while on his travels. In the second letter, he has already written of the people: “And now I have for the last four months been looking into the faces of the real people: not that they were soulless, for it is not seldom that a ray of light of the soul breaks forth, but it flits away again, it is an eternal coming and flying away as at a dovecote.”6 In the fourth letter, the merchant describes how this fleeting reality comes to be characterized not by presence, but by absence. This ­dizzying destabilization of reality results in what the merchant calls “the crisis of an inner malaise; its earlier manifestations, admittedly, were as inconspicuous as was possible.”7 That sickness is insidious.

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It creeps into the merchant’s life and poisons his environment until the physical objects come unmoored. Through itemizing, the merchant attempts to re-establish the presence of the particular objects; he must list them, he says, “or tear this letter to shreds and leave the rest unsaid forever.”8 The presence of a symbol or sign (the word on the paper) and the second set of eyes (the recipient of the letter) both attest to the objects’ existence and significance. Listing also allows the merchant to move forward and write about his experience. Like lowering an anchor, listing alleviates some of the nausea by establishing a point of reference, even if the objects referred to seem elusive: “Sometimes it befell me in the morning, in these German hotel rooms, a jug or the wash basin – or a corner of the room with the table and the clothesstand – sometimes these things seemed to me so not-real, despite their indescribable ordinariness, so completely and utterly not real, ghostly in a way, and provisional at the same time, waiting, as it were, temporarily taking the place of the real jug, of the real wash basin filled with water.”9 Typically, the physical object is understood to be more “real” than its representation: works of art, dreams, and memories are supposed to be of lower orders of reality. But just one letter earlier, the merchant described a set of Albrecht Dürer prints he often looked at when he was a child; he initially described them as “unreal” (“unwirklich”) but then, as if seeking greater precision, appended the  adjective “surreal” (“überwirklich”).10 By contrast, in this ­letter, the real jug and the real wash basin are “so completely and utterly not real.” In this Biedermeier room of familiar objects, things are not quite as they should be. In fact, they do not seem to be at all. The diagnosis of the phenomenological crisis resembles the cultural critique that pervades the first three letters. In the cultural critique, Hofmannsthal focuses on what the merchant depicts as a lack of character in his compatriots. In the phenomenological crisis, the focus reveals a lack of presence. In articulating the cultural critique in the first three letters, the merchant gives a series of counterexamples; here, too, with the phenomenological crisis. There is even a link to the cultural critique in the merchant’s contrast between “here” and abroad: “Over there, in other lands, even in the most miserable of times, the jug or the pail with more or less fresh water in the morning was a given, and it was something living: a friend. Here, it was, one could say: a ghost.”11 Even houses12 and trees – in contrast to the beloved walnut tree of his childhood13 – induce this nausea with their ghostly, non-real aspect. And in contrast to the breath of fresh air he

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experienced while thinking of Germany from abroad,14 he now senses stagnation: “something shuddered through me, something that split my breast in two like a breath, a wafting, so indescribable, of eternal nothingness, of eternal nowhere, a breath not of death, but of not-life, indescribable.”15 The age-old trope of the internal split – like the two souls in Faust’s single breast or the medieval Parzival’s doubt, “zwîvel” – has been adapted to emphasize the actively separating, dissociating implications. Dissociation and parody are also worked into the description of the landscape16 as he now sees it: “it took on a face, its own ambiguous countenance so full of inner uncertainty, pernicious non-reality: it lay there so void – so spectrally void.”17 In the context of this ghostly reality, Jörg Schuster draws attention to Hofmannsthal’s confession to worrying that “real” people and things might be lost to him; they might instead be absorbed into his fantasy. Schuster cites a number of letters Hofmannsthal wrote to the countess Christiana Thun-Salm, the most striking of which dates to early January 1908 – that is, about a month before the last two epistles of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” were published. In the letter to Thun-Salm, Hofmannsthal writes of those things that make life “more beautiful, richer, and more endearing … and which, through the dangerous afflatus of poetic vision, could be driven out of life away into the world of fantasy.”18 Schuster reads this, and indeed most of Hofmannsthal’s epistolary writings – fictional and nonfictional – as the writer’s way of exploiting life by aestheticizing it and using it for his work. Schuster’s evidence is strong. He cites, for instance, a passage from another of Hofmannsthal’s letters, this time to Helene von Nostitz from 15 May 1907, wherein the author writes that the addressee is “necessary for my life, for the life of my fantasy or my thoughts.”19 According to Schuster, this statement makes use of a rhetorical correctio that reduces life to aesthetic production.20 This is one possible way to read the sentence, but there are others. It is not clear from Hofmannsthal’s statement that the movement from “my life” to “the life of my fantasy” is merely correctio; it can also be read (simultaneously perhaps) as amplificatio: that is, through repetition and further specification, he asserts how powerful an effect Nostitz has had on his life. In spite of his desire for community, Hofmannsthal constantly reminds us that our condition is always also one of isolation, and the monologic quality of the letters underscores this fact. Aestheticization is not so much an attempt to create distance – we already perceive the

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world at a distance – as it is a reification or acknowledgment of the human condition. Ignoring the essential difference that separates us and makes us particular may be even more severe a disease than trying to give form to our frustration with this condition. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” give that frustration form. In fact, this text develops the content of the letters to Christiana ­Thun-Salm and Helene von Nostitz. In the letter to Thun-Salm, Hofmannsthal writes that he fears the better parts of life might be “driven out of life away into fantasy”; the merchant expresses a similar fear that Europe “could steal me away from myself.”21 The so-called “reality” steals away (“wegstehlen”) the self, just as the poetic vision drives away (“­wegtreiben”) the “real” other. How these displacements occur is equally relevant: namely, with a breath. In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” it is “a breath [Hauch], a wafting, so indescribable” which threatens the subject; in the letter to Thun-Salm, it is “the dangerous afflatus [Anhauch] of poetic vision” which threatens real people and things. This is the same movement described from ­opposite perspectives. From the perspective of “real” life and the “real” letter, art is the danger. But from the perspective of the “­fictional” letter and the “fictional” life of the merchant, a fictionalized “reality” poses the threat. In light of the existential malaise and phenomenological precariousness, the merchant attempts a self-diagnosis. He wonders if his illness is psychosomatic, brought about by something that “the European air seems to lay out ready for him who has returned from far away after having been gone for a long time, perhaps too long.”22 Has the merchant abandoned something? Has he been avoiding something? Or has he, like another medieval German traveller, Iwein, simply been enjoying his adventure, without considering how much time has passed, without fulfilling his responsibility to return home punctually? Or is this a broader issue of time always being out of joint? Readers never get to learn what it was that started the merchant on his journey, or why it took eighteen years, but the reference to avoidance is intentional. While working on “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal was also writing a series of notes for what he called a “two-voiced soliloquy.”23 The speaker is a “Revenant” – a ghost or spirit returned to the world – that possesses two voices: a chiding voice that emanates from below, and an ameliorative one from above.24 The soliloquy embraces contradictory voices and highlights internal division. Like the Revenant, the merchant is a being who

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has returned (he is the “Zurückgekehrter”). He even experiences his world as splintered and ghostly; he feels separated from his body, and is simultaneously ashamed and in denial about his role in society. The source of his shame is the money he has made, or rather, the significance money has acquired. That is, in fact, the one thing that has become clear: “Today I cannot clearly express what went whirling through my whole self: but that my business and my own acquired money disgusted me … I had taken in twenty-thousand examples: how they forgot life itself in favour of that which should only be a means to living and should have no other value than as a tool.”25 As with the inversion of reality and non-reality, so too there has been an inversion of money and life. He continues: “For months, a flood of faces driven by nothing other than the money they had or the money others had. Their houses, their monuments, their streets, all that was for me in this somewhat visionary moment nothing more than the thousandfold reflected grimace of their ghostly non-­ existence.”26 This description alludes to the contemporary sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel’s diagnosis that “the more the life of society becomes dominated by monetary relationships, the more the relativistic character of existence finds its expression in conscious life, since money is nothing other than a special form of embodied relativity of economic goods that signifies their value.”27 Capital gain is lifeless growth without character. The preoccupation with money has morphed into something akin to a religion, so thoroughly do people desire the growth of capital for its own sake.28 This way of thinking has pervaded even the merchant’s own life, such that the physical objects before him exist, like money, only as provisional things, waiting in anticipation. Money, as a symbol of modern flux (evoked in the image of the flood of faces driven by greed), comes to stand in for a view of a world that resists reification, character formation, and existential coherence.

Visio Divina a s A e s t h eti c Encounter These thoughts seize the merchant just an hour before a meeting, at which he is meant to speak on behalf of his company’s interests. He contemplates his options but feels he has nowhere to go – everything reminds him of money and greed. To escape these impressions, he ducks into a quiet side street. The stillness, contrasting with both the hectic movement and the noise of the bustling streets,29 initiates the merchant into a new atmosphere. Upon noticing a placard advertising an

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exhibition of paintings and illustrations, he decides this will be a good distraction from his “absurd thoughts” (“unsinnigen Gedanken”).30 As a man in spiritual crisis might find himself drawn to a place of worship, so this merchant enters a gallery, not consciously looking for guidance. Formally, the visit to the gallery repeats the structure of flight depicted in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” but with key differences. Whereas the merchant’s son flees an uncanny beauty for pleasant fragrances, the merchant abandons the noxious air and lifeless world of things and directs himself towards art – and the nature and humanity discernible in it. He begins by attempting to catalogue what he sees: the subject matter, the number and kinds of works. Initially, the tone is suffused with the equanimity of the phenomenological gaze. The pictures seemed to me rather garish, unsettled, quite rough, quite ­peculiar, I had first to find my bearings in order even to see the first ones as pictures, as a unity – but then, then I saw, then I saw them all in this way, every single one, and all of them together, and the nature in them, and the human power of soul that formed the nature here, and tree and bush and field and hillside which were painted there, and that other thing as well, that which was behind what had been painted, the essence, the ­indescribably fateful –, I saw all this in such a way that I lost the feeling of myself in these pictures, then powerfully regained it, and then lost it again! … But how could I put into words something so incomprehensible, something so sudden, so ­powerful, so impossible to analyse!31 The initial confusion, which hitherto manifested in terms of a vague disjunction of things from reality, now has been given form (and fate); it has been reified in the artwork and set into motion by the overwhelming intensity of colour. The excited pace of the text – accelerated by repetition and intensification with each new beginning (“but then, then I saw, then I saw them all”) – reflects this bombardment with an altogether new tone for “The Letters,” recalling the language of a mystical vision – a visio divina. He identifies a substantial, unified otherness that has specificity and existence: first the internal cohesion of this world (a closed and self-sufficient, aesthetic world), then the sense of the artist behind it all (formed by nature and in turn a giver of form) then, finally, that essential (unnamed) thing.

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This vision recalls a much earlier essay by Hofmannsthal, “Die Malerei in Wien” (“Painting in Vienna”). In this 1893 text, the ­nineteen-year-old Hofmannsthal expresses an urgent call for a new sensibility: “In the presence of a painting, our public relates to everything that is inessential in a work of art, but never to the main thing, the truly painterly; it is interested in the anecdote, in tricks and ­gimmicks, everything but the one necessary thing: whether an artistic individuality has had the free power to offer a new perception of how the world is seen, gained through living eyes, in such a way that it might be conveyed to the soul of the viewer.”32 The merchant – ­perhaps because he has been spared eighteen years of philistinism – is able to and does see what he suspects is the essential in these paintings, and in them he sees too that they were made by an “artistic individuality,” one who had the “free power” to give form to his perception of the world-picture. In chapter 1, I referred to Hofmannsthal’s experience reading Otway’s Venice Preserv’d and his recognition of the faults and greatness of the human being who composed it. Likewise, in the 1902 “Address,” Hofmannsthal draws attention to the material construction of tapestries, “knotted by human fingers over endless hours.”33 His is an aesthetic appreciation insofar as it responds to the elements of the artwork that appeal to the senses; but crucially, in addition to this, he almost always invokes the person behind the work’s existence and the effort, ardour, and even suffering that went into its creation. If in modern society workers are alienated from their labour and what they produce, then the artist’s relation to the artwork presents a counterimage. Part of what constitutes this alternative is what Hofmannsthal calls “Frömmigkeit,” often translated as “piety.” In one of the variants of the dialogue “Furcht” (Fear), there is a definition of piety articulated with reference to the art of dance: “Dancing is being able to give oneself over totally and purely. Now this is. This is piety. Our mothers were such, for that reason the river stayed within its banks. For that reason the olive tree bore. For that reason the fountain gave.”34 “Piety” is: to give oneself over to something.35 It exhibits the same deictic structure as the symbol: it points beyond itself. And it seems to establish context for the flux – it does not halt it, but it ideally keeps it from inundating the world. Even the tree (here: the olive tree; in the letters: the walnut tree) bears intransitively (“the olive tree bore”), and does so out of piety. The fountain, that magical place from the

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merchant’s childhood, likewise gives out of piety (“Darum gab der Brunnen”). In a human being, piety would entail the whole person moving at once – in other words, overcoming that internal division and lack of character.36 This is why the dance is such an appropriate visualization. It is a kind of poising of the will, an intentionality or a posture of being, and an act of giving oneself, all in one gesture. After considering the inhumane and impious deeds perpetrated by Germans in China – a reference to the Siege of the International Legations ­during the Boxer Rebellion – the merchant asks himself: “Am I myself perhaps a pious man? No. But there is a piety of life,” he writes, and it is not a matter of praying in a church or temple: “and faith in the gin bottle is still a kind of faith. But here amidst the educated and propertied Germans, here I am uneasy.”37 Germany is stifling, and every act is performed without devotion, without giving – and without giving space. And all the intellectual training and money in the world cannot change that.38 And thus, for the first time in two decades, perhaps longer, the merchant himself is able to feel that sort of piety that involves giving himself over to something completely. Insofar as it requires him totally in this moment of dedication, it allows for a sense of the self as whole.39 The work of art, in l’art pour l’art fashion, is a world unto itself: it is given a frame, a stage upon which to present itself, in the particular artwork, at this particular hour, and here, in the effect of the colours.40 The merchant concedes: this is a highly personal response to a vivid portrayal of mundane objects. He cannot expect his reader to have the same experience. But this is precisely the point: in viewing the works of art, he has rediscovered the particularity and specificity that a world governed by monetary exchange negates. In a similar vein, Georg Simmel notes that money “lives in continuous self-alienation from any given point and thus forms the counterpart and direct ­negation of all being in itself.”41 The work of art, in this case, has cordoned off a space for autonomy and particularity. Yet, as Nietzsche says: “There is no regular path leading from those intui­ tions into the land of ghostly schemata, of abstractions: there are no words for them; man falls silent when he sees them or speaks in strictly forbidden metaphors and egregious combinations of concepts in order to correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition, at least by demolishing and ridiculing the old ­conception restraints.”42

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The merchant has found himself in this position. He does not remain silent, but he recognizes the futility of trying to give an objective representation of the encounter with the works of art. Listing off the scenes and subject matter portrayed in the paintings does nothing to reify a subjective experience; instead, he must make use of “egregious combinations of concepts in order to correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.” To do this, he devotes most of the remainder of this letter and the next to praising the power of colour.43 Colour, in fact, became a topic of great interest in the early years of the new century.44 1907 was a year that marked Hofmannsthal’s fascination with Van Gogh and Rilke’s fascination with Cézanne.45 The two authors’ writings on colour in painting have a remarkable number of points of contact; and both authors felt the epistolary form was an appropriate medium for presenting the experience. Moreover, both collections were written with publication in mind, and one ­wonders whether there was some undocumented contact between Rilke and Hofmannsthal during this time that led to their treatment of the topic. In any case, it seems they came to their particular formulations independently during the summer of 1907.46 I will occasionally compare their views in order to give greater articulation to the ­particularities of Hofmannsthal’s “Letters of the Man Who Returned” in light of their cultural context. The merchant’s initial description of the colours evokes something of the intensity of a medieval illuminated manuscript: “There is an unbelievable, most powerful blue that returns again and again, a green as if made from melted emeralds, a yellow ranging as far as orange.”47 And very quickly the descriptions move beyond the visible to suggest something of that longed-for piety: “But what are colours, if the innermost life of the objects does not break forth through them! And this innermost life was there, tree and stone and wall and sunken road proclaimed their innermost life, casting it towards me as it were, but it was not the ecstasy and harmony of their beautiful silent life, as long ago it sometimes flowed towards me from old pictures like a magical atmosphere; no, only the force of their existence, the raging wonder of their existence stared at with incredibility, assailed my soul.”48 Indeed, these colours do illuminate as in a manuscript: what they illuminate is a bearing so devotional that it begins to approach self-sacrifice. But this sacrifice is not self-annihilation. If anything, it dramatizes the struggle against the fall into a lacklustre deportment of non-existence.49

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The colours display, instead, an energetic and assertive movement: “Wucht” and “Wunder ihres Daseins” (“force” and “wonder of their existence”) instead of “Wollust und Harmonie” (“ecstasy and harmony”); their innermost life “assailed [his] soul” (“fiel [seine] Seele an”) instead of flowing to him, as happened with the Albrecht Dürer pictures from his childhood. This depiction of piety is anything but the quiet attitude of passivity: It is self-assertive and yet also altruistic. This could be read as a kind of psychological projection, devoid of any real interaction or communication.50 The highly personal nature of the experience – which the merchant himself has already highlighted – would support this view. Further, the subsequent description seems to apply just as much to the merchant as it does to the visual experience: “One being, every tree, every streak of yellow or virescent field, every fence, every sunken road torn into the stony hill, one being the tin jug, the clay bowl, the table, the heavy cushioned chair – they all held themselves up to me as if newly born from the terrible chaos of Not-living, from the abyss of non-existence, so that I felt – no – I knew how each of these things, these creatures, was born out of a terrible doubt concerning the world, and now covered up with its existence a horrible gorge, a yawning nothingness, for ever!”51 Can we presume that these depicted pitchers and tables and bowls – all things that the merchant had earlier experienced as not real – have truly been through this fight for existence that the merchant portrays? Is this the positive image of that mysterious thing that the merchant earlier described as lying within him, “a surge, a chaos, something unborn”?52 If one subscribes to Nietzsche’s early notion of the eternal wound of existence, “die ewige Wunde des Daseins” (which even seems to resonate in “Wunder ihres Daseins”), then yes. Art exposes the wound of existence, and is born out of it, but – this is crucial – it does not heal it. In a similar vein, Hofmannsthal wrote an essay in 1905 about Hermann Stehr’s book, Der begrabene Gott (The Buried God) in which he praises Stehr for taking readers into depths, “where we had never been before. Except perhaps insofar as we have suffered … But here, the nameless receives a name, the mute receives its language, and the formless its form. Here, the hands of creators have given the darkness a face and have built and shaped something from the nightmare. And we again recognize the gloomy depths of difficult times.”53 Anyone who has suffered knows the anguish of ­anonymity, formlessness, lifelessness. The human hands that can give the darkness a face do us all a service insofar as they give form

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Figure 2.1  Still Life with Blue Enamel Coffeepot, Earthenware and Fruit, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Features still life objects discussed in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.”

to that which in its formlessness makes us feel powerless; they render its visage visible to the eye or to the imagination. The paintings the merchant sees perform a similar function. At the end of the essay, Hofmannsthal writes two more sentences important in this context, showing a remarkable consistency of thought: “And a word more: Great, great, great. And one more: Reverence.”54 If the depths of being are to be given form, greatness must coexist with reverence and piety.

S u ffe r in g a n d Sacri fi ce Art works, as creative products of expression, give these things that have suffered55 a place to exist; in this way, suffering is as much a precondition for the success of this struggle as the willingness and devotion of the artist’s hand are.56 The images are all one being: they have all suffered57 through birth, have been born out of a “terrible doubt,” and are all made of the same thing, of paint on canvas. The merchant encounters a world in colour as an answer to his to struggle

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to locate reality in the colourless things around him. The colours and the created nature of the paintings allow him finally to set foot on a metaphorical terra firma, “like one who, after immeasurable reeling, feels solid ground beneath his feet and around him rages a storm, into whose whirling rage he wants to exult.”58 That which earlier “went whirling through my whole self”59 has been externalized and exorcized, such that he stands in the calm and silent centre, while the storm churns around him. The coloured forms contain this raging storm within themselves, and they in turn are born in it: in the storm “there were born before my eyes, born for my sake, these trees, with the roots staring in the earth, with the branches staring towards the clouds, in a storm, these fissures in the earth, these valleys between the hills revealed themselves, in even the heaviness of the boulders, the frozen storm was there.”60 More than that, the storm is also an answer from an “unknown soul of inconceivable strength.”61 The calm and (aesthetic) distance – achieved paradoxically by being in the centre of the storm – give the viewer the space requisite for desire, will, and relation, and even that piety which had been absent all along. Martin Heidegger’s words will later echo this idea of repositioning through speaking. Van Gogh’s work, Heidegger writes, “spoke. In proximity to the work we were suddenly somewhere other than we are usually accustomed to be.”62 With Hofmannsthal, however, there is an emphasis not on speaking as such, but on answering.63 Now that the merchant can see the world, he wishes to join in, close the distance, rejoice, and give himself over in answer to the soul who painted this world of revealed interconnectivity. Colours do not just mediate the experience. That experience exists, for the merchant, in the colours themselves. He writes: And now I could feel a certain something … could feel what was amongst them, with them, how their innermost life broke forth in colour and how the colours lived, each for the sake of the other, and how one, mysteriously powerful, bore all the ­others, and in all of this I could feel a heart, the soul of him who had made this, who himself with this vision gave answer to the catalepsy of the most dreadful doubt, could feel, could know, could see through, could enjoy the chasms and peaks, exterior and interior, one and all in one ten-thousandth a fragment of time as I jotted down the words, it was as though I was double, was lord over my life all at the same time, lord over my faculties,

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my understanding, felt time passing, knew, now only twenty minutes remain, now ten, now five, stood outside, hailed a coach, rode off.64 I have included almost the entire sentence in this quote because it is noteworthy for its length, rhythm, and, most importantly, its gradual descriptive movement from the centre of the storm to the open city street. The sentence aesthetically enacts through its syntax and length and through the openness of the conclusion (“rode off”), the connectivity that it describes. This connectivity is not casual; it is intended, and it is another example of Hofmannsthal’s concept of piety. Colours bear each other, reminding one of the olive tree that bears out of piety.65 Because the colours bear each other, it is possible to discern the “heart” of the person who gave these colours their place. In creating this vision, the artist “gave answer to the catalepsy of the most dreadful doubt.” He was strong enough to paint, in spite of the great doubt that threatened him. Painting was his defiant, worldforming answer to the abyss – and he gave this answer to himself. In doing so, he also gave the paintings their existence; and finally, he gave their potential audience (the merchant) a new picture of the world. This act, which originated from a sense of self-preservation, is altruistic by virtue of its effect and the attitude of piety. It is also artificial, insofar as it expresses a desire to see the world as picture – a Weltbild in the Heideggerian sense of the term – but in a new way. When Heidegger writes in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that “To be a work means: to set up a world,” he is suggesting that the work – the object – is the creator of the world; but we must also remember, he reminds us at the beginning of that text, that the work is created by and in turn helps to create the artist.66 The genetic origin gets lost in circularity.67 In a similar manner, the content of this aesthetic answer – the colours bearing each other in support – plays up the interdependence and confusion of internal and external worlds, and of subject and object: this can be conceived as a gesture of altruism just as much as it is one of egotism, highlighting an ethical moment in the dialogical (if also circular) movement of the aesthetic. The gesture of piety spins the wheel and seems to allow for that communion with the observer in his aesthetic enjoyment – perhaps the highest point for the merchant is this moment of taking pleasure in the contrasts brought together. But the word Hofmannsthal uses

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(“Genießen”) is multilayered: underneath enjoyment is an awareness that something has been sacrificed. There is always a sense of loss even in the moment of most profoundly felt presence.68 As if “doubled,” he no longer senses internal separation, dissociation, or doubt, so much as multiplication: presence is intensified.69 The internal chasm is experienced in its Keatsian negative capability rather than as something privative. He is able, as it were, to greet the other within. And with this awareness of doubleness comes also double perspective: he is here, amidst the paintings, but also acutely aware of the passage of time and the impossibility of the sustained moment. David Wellbery notes that aesthetic presence is characterized, for Hofmannsthal, by simultaneity and by a recognition of the passing of time.70 This doubleness gives the merchant the ability to direct himself wholly to the task at hand – and with that, he rides off to his meeting. The conference and its mundane financial concerns are re-­introduced almost in the same breath. There is no abrupt shift, and, from the merchant’s point of view, the financial world can be “conquered” by the heightened awareness achieved in that aesthetic moment, ­surrounded by Van Gogh’s paintings. Common to both situations is an appreciation for the interdependence of things in the world. Hofmannsthal is not the first to bring the economic and the aesthetic under the same umbrella: in the arch-Romantic novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis notably has the merchants (“Kaufleute”) teach the young Heinrich about poetry. In such a fairy-tale world, economics and aesthetics co-exist. Capital is not dead, but rather part of a larger life cycle of activity, production, and enjoyment of commodities and works. Economics is intimately linked to a healthy ecology, where the fruits of labour can be enjoyed by everyone. But what makes capital grow? Is capital, in fact, the unmoved mover, the new god?71 Must it be appeased? The merchant had earlier written: “I want to flourish within myself, and this Europe could steal me away from myself.”72 Perhaps capital, like its divine predecessors, demands a sacrifice from time to time; in order to grow, it parasitically steals from the other faculties of human experience – and especially from the imagination. The merchant has repeatedly written that he had no time to tarry with the creatures of his imagination. Yet if the imaginative faculty is necessary for the human experience, then it would seem art is a potential corrective to the “European-German feeling of presence” identified in the second letter.73 The merchant certainly alludes to that possibility

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when he says that “Conferences of this sort, where the magnitude of numbers appeal to the imagination, and the variety, the separation of the forces that come into play, require a talent for seeing the connections, the outcome is decided not by intelligence, but rather by a mysterious power for which I know no name.”74 If we did not know any better, we might think this were a matter of art, not economics. Appealing to the fantasy, to variety (as in Hogarth’s understanding of beauty as “composed variety”), to play, and to the connectivity of things – all of this sounds like a discourse on art. Can there be a poetry of economics? Perhaps yes,75 and perhaps this is the awareness that has been awakened in the merchant during the aesthetic experience: he now sees the world, including the economic world, with the sensitive eyes of poetry: “I was able to achieve more for my company than the board of directors had expected in even the best of cases, and I achieved it like someone in a dream who plucks a flower from a bare wall.”76 With the business growing, he can finally pluck the flowers – rather than the more useful fruits – of his investment, as if “in a dream.” So says the man who does not daydream! It also helps to recall that the wall – here, as in Robert Musil’s Young Törleß and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge – is a surface for projection. His life, in this moment, has become dreamlike, but also in some way cinematic.77 The dream here stands in metonymically for the aesthetic. It is that creative element – manifested convincingly in the paintings of Van Gogh – that does not attempt to reproduce a vision of reality, but rather to create a world out of a profound ­existential and phenomenological doubt. The repressed has returned: initially in its malicious form as the non-reality of the objects around him, and finally in its poeticized, aesthetic form. Georg Simmel articulates precisely the shift in perspective vis-à-vis reality that the merchant has experienced: “On the one hand, art brings us closer to reality; it places us in a more immediate relationship to its distinctive and innermost meaning; behind the cold strangeness of the external world it reveals to us the spirituality of existence through which it is related and made intelligible to us. In addition, however, all art brings about a distancing from the immediacy of things; it allows the concreteness of stimuli to recede and stretches a veil between us and them just like the fine bluish haze that envelops distant mountains.”78 The merchant has achieved a wide-angle ­perspective, seeing things at a distance, through a coloured haze.79 Yet he also sees things up close: “The faces of the gentlemen with whom

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I conducted this business came remarkably close to me.”80 In this moment, the nearness and the distance are united. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” could end here, in this moment of paradoxical union, with the merchant standing face-to-face with his colleagues and compatriots. It would end on a fantastic note of poetic economy. But the fourth letter continues with a postscript that reintroduces doubt about the harmonious coexistence of a world of business and the world of art. At the same time, the tension between the desire for community and the desire for isolation is brought into focus. The merchant identifies the artist as “Vincenz van Gogh” and notes that there “is something in me that compels me to believe he is of my generation, not much older than I am.”81 But we might ask: why does he feel compelled? Why does he not write simply: “I think”? Even in this moment of community, there is a tension: does the merchant value this moment of shared existence (and suffering), or does he, as Rilke says of Van Gogh in his Letters on Cézanne, find it in unbearable?82 Let us for a moment compare a similar fear of closing the distance, of leaping into the abyss understood as fear of intimacy, but also fear of identification or loss of self. In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the narrator remarks on the embarrassment and impotence one experiences with intimacy. John Zilcosky, in his book Uncanny Encounters, argues that, given the similarities between the youth Tadzio and the aging Aschenbach, a relationship “with this narcissistic double would signify the ‘return home’ (Heimkehr) and to ‘himself’ (in sich) that Aschenbach dreads.”83 The expressive affinities between Mann’s and Hofmannsthal’s texts raise the question: to what might the merchant return? To home? To himself? Does this inform his desire to maintain the security of distance? Perhaps the desire to keep at a distance is what prompts the merchant to entertain the following idea: “I don’t know if I will stand before these pictures a second time, though I will probably buy one of them, but not to take possession of it, but rather to give it to the art dealer for safekeeping.”84 With this consideration, the merchant has introduced a whole new set of problems. He is, first of all, acknowledging and supporting the commercialization of art. And maybe, from his new perspective, he can see the practical connection between money and art clearly: the artist, after all, has to make a living (in Van Gogh’s l­etters, money troubles are a recurring theme). The suggestion here would be that we should not try to sequester the aesthetic object and preserve its “sanctity” by refusing to treat it as a saleable commodity.

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In 1890, a youthful Hofmannsthal, much in the spirit of the sickened merchant, wrote a poem he called “Verse, auf eine Banknote geschrieben” (Verses written onto a banknote). That poem includes the following diatribe: Venal! All is venal! Honour too! … And all my verses, petty and decayed, Do grace this note of anguish ne’er allayed, To me they seemed as figures, branching out, Yet carved upon a deadly, glistening blade …85 What makes the anger expressed here particularly cutting is the realization that art is a secular commodity, and that its very existence and circulation depend upon this banknote (which doubles as a blade). To follow the thread a little further: Hofmannsthal himself collected art – and sold it, when he found himself in financial straits after the First World War and while working on one of the most demanding writing projects of his life, Der Turm (The Tower). In a letter to Carl J. Burckhardt, he states: “It isn’t money, it’s freedom.”86 The very real concerns for personal economic stability make way for what Simmel calls a “negative freedom,” which is financial independence – that is, if one wishes to make art, at least. In a sense, nearly all verses are written on banknotes. Hofmannsthal realized this early on. In one of the letters to his father, he signed off with: “Embracing you most warmly, your Son Hugo – poet and merchant.”87 In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” purchasing the painting is, from the ­perspective of the merchant, a sensible investment (even if idealistic sensibilities might be offended); but it is also an acknowledgment of necessity. Buying the painting is, moreover, a way of supporting artistic endeavours. And finally, it can be seen as a positive response to both painting (the product and the activity) and painter.88 But why give the paintings to an art dealer for safekeeping? Ursula Renner sees the paintings as having returned to the merchant his ­ability to carry out his mercantile duties and dealings – now with art understood as a commodity.89 Moreover, not all art dealers are ­created equal – presumably the merchant would find a trustworthy, knowledgeable person (perhaps like Vincent Van Gogh’s brother, Théo).90 But why does he not want to have the paintings in his presence? Simone Gottschlich-Kempf makes the case that the merchant’s

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act is one of resistance – an action of mixed sentiment, combining the desire to preserve with the desire never again to experience this moment for fear it might reveal itself as false or ineffective the second time around.91 In a similar vein, Susanne Scharnowski argues that this moment threatens the relation between self and world that the ­aesthetic experience allowed for in the first place. The purchase of a work of art would subject it to the same processes of capitalism that led to the merchant’s sickness.92 Gottschlich-Kempf’s point about resistance is key. However, given the merchant casually states he feels compelled to believe the artist is of his generation, I suspect this resistance has more to do with a desire for keeping the subjective, aesthetic world separate from the “real” world, and to thwart any ensuing experience of the works’ worldwithdrawal and world-decay, as Heidegger would say (“Weltentzug und Weltzerfall”).93 Yet in this desire lies an economic contradiction: money pulls art into the world. This in turn reveals the conflicting nature at the heart of the aesthetic experience: the closed world has a context, and that context is the ever-changing “real” world that ­surrounds it like water around an island. The paintings are born out of what is “real,” but then they are also able to create a more convincing, more assertive reality or terra firma than that out of which they are born. The contemporary dates of the artist make the experience that much more real. Whether the merchant wishes to preserve the aesthetic moment from reality, himself from community, his finances from loss, or the painting from deterioration, is left open. That Hofmannsthal has his merchant consider handing the purchase over to an art dealer for preservation is deliberate. In other words, the merchant’s transformation is not – nor can it ever be – a transformation that disregards his history and context. The merchant is still a merchant, and he still embodies and replicates the contradictions of his world. —*— “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” is structured around reflections and parodies and is itself a highly self-reflexive work of literature. But that raises a question: Is the production and reception of art condemned to the solipsistic, mirroring interiority of the artist (or the viewer)? The final published letter explores the relation between aesthetics and ethics with reference to this question.

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Each letter is a text, usually marked by a time and place. The letters can be read in isolation, but we know that they are part of a correspondence. Like beads on a chain, their overall effect is produced not in isolation, but in relation. And, like words in a sentence, the smallest unit of meaning never originates in the single word (or the single ­letter), but rather in the relation between words (or letters). When the merchant begins his “last” letter, it is with deliberate reference to the preceding one: “You will hardly be able to understand what I wrote to you, least of all how these pictures could so move me.”94 By making reference to the previous letter, this sentence heralds the focus of this letter, establishing a link between the two. Further, by emphasizing the singularity and subjectivity of the event, the merchant also attempts to set this event in relation to others, and to create out of it something that can be shared: “It will seem to you like a whimsy, an isolated incident, an oddity, and yet – if only one could place it, if only one could pull it out of oneself and bring it to light.”95 The merchant is describing three processes in one: the writing process, the communication process, and the productive-creative process, using a turn of phrase that is reminiscent of the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe’s description of Van Gogh’s artistic process: “He did not paint his p ­ ictures, he cast them forth … He did not feel himself there, he was one with the element which he represented, and painted himself in the flaming clouds.”96 The gesture is slightly modified in Hofmannsthal’s text: rather than pushing the pictures out or casting them forth, the merchant desires to tear or pull them out (“herausreißen”).97 The ­subtle relation between the pushing and pulling, between casting forth and tearing out, suggests more basic, organic movements of relation, of dialogue, of giving and taking, and of exchange. What is it that he wishes to draw out and expose? ­The answer would seem to be: the effect of colours. And Van Gogh’s paintings, with their intense use of contrastive colours as opposed to gradual changes in tone, are an apt point of departure. The use of colour in this manner expressed something modern: painters around the last part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century had discovered (or rather re-discovered) the expressive, affective quality of colour. On a psychological and sociological level, this makes perfect sense: the colours initially appear garish in contrast to what Spengler in Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) calls “studio brown” (“atelierbraun”), which he associated with the culture and

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faith of the baroque era.98 Further, the colours of modernity mirror those of the placard-speckled city, with its chaotic palette meant to distract, entertain, and advertise, the general effect of which might very well be a kind of colourlessness of modern urban society.99 The colours in Van Gogh’s paintings, however, reveal a different kind of correspondence, born out of the “the force of their existence” (“die Wucht ihres Daseins”).100 As Meier-Graefe has it: “The surge of water which frightens the shipwrecked describes a divine curve, and even the horrified face of the unlucky one, who clings to a plank, seems harmonious in this whirling rage of water. Van Gogh’s images are ordered in this manner. They give rise to a paroxysmic apprehension of nature.”101 The relation between colours strikes the merchant, too. At first, they shock: but unlike the colours of the city, which risk cancelling each other out, here they are organized into a composed variety, in which each enhances the other. Just as these letters are fragments of a larger epistolary collection, so too do the hues work together, producing a consonance of images and phrases. In one of the notes to “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal went so far as to write of “the boundless relativity of the colours: every colour exists only through its contiguity.”102 This note is an existential distillation of Van Gogh’s observations that colours appear only when their complements are also present. Otherwise, they appear “colourless”: “Fromentin and Gérôme see the earth in the south as colourless, and a whole lot of people saw it that way. My God, yes, if you take dry sand in your hand and if you look at it closely. Water, too, air, too, considered this way, are colourless. n o b l u e w i t h o u t ye l l o w and wit hout o r a nge , and if you do blue, then do yellow and orange as well, surely.”103 This aesthetic rule is adopted and given a central place in the context of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” Relationality is necessary for the perception of a thing’s existence, and a clearer vision of existence is accompanied by the aesthetic perception of harmony. In order to describe the effect of consonance, the merchant turns to a story of Rama Krishna he once heard, and which made a deep impression on him. The story of the Brahman’s experience of Enlightenment highlights the visual moment in which Rama Krishna fell to the ground and stood up, as if reborn. The visual experience is a result of the juxtaposition of two colours: “nothing more than these two colours against each other, this eternal unnameable thing, pierced his soul in this moment and loosed what was bound, and joined what

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Figure 2.2  Wheatfield with Crows, by Vincent van Gogh, Auvers, June 1890. Features the typical contrasting colours and the “paroxysmic apprehension of nature” described by Julius Meier-Graefe.

was unbound.”104 The imagery has an aesthetic analog in the material that is woven or knotted together to form a tapestry or a text: We are once again in Hofmannsthal’s image-world of art and (ethical) ties. But where does this “power” originate: in the colours, or in the merchant himself? The merchant asks: “Did I not say that at strange hours the colours of things have a power over me? But isn’t it I, rather, who takes on a power over them, the entire, full power, for some length of time, to wrest from them their wordless, abysmal secret, is not the force in me, do I not feel it in my breast as a swelling, a fullness, a foreign, sublime, enrapturing presence, with me, in me, in that place where blood comes and goes?”105 This passage has given rise to opposing interpretations: Antje Büssgen, for instance, sees the merchant’s experience of Van Gogh’s paintings as ultimately originating in the self and characterizes that experience as monological rather than dialogical or dialectical; duality of any kind is sublated in this colour-mysticism.106 Reading Hofmannsthal’s text alongside Gottfried Benn’s “Garten von Arles” (“The Garden of Arles”), Büssgen sees here a quest for authenticity, which is sought and asserted wherever dissociated parts (e.g., subject and object, word and thing) cannot be reconciled; only in the ecstatic visionary moment can their unity be (merely) imagined.107 Ursula Renner, on the other hand, reminds us that these moments are not set off by memories or daydreams, but rather by something in the external world – that is, the event cannot originate solely in the

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mind.108 The merchant’s vacillation marks this double-origin. The moment is structured, a priori, as a dynamic relation. That the moment may take place subjectively, for the merchant, is not the question at hand: what is in question is whether the subject can exist without reference to the outside. Further: what is the nature of this relation between subject and object? The merchant goes on to doubt his own power once again: “But if everything was in me, why couldn’t I close my eyes and, dumb and blind, enjoy the unnameable feeling of my self, why did I have to keep myself there … and look, look into the space before me?”109 Earlier, the merchant’s knowledge of his own existence was predicated upon the existence of the external world which also knows suffering. Here, his enjoyment of his sense of self depends on an altruistic gesture issued by the world: “this sacred simultaneous enjoyment of my self and the world, which opened up before me, as if it had opened up its breast, why was this doubleness, this entwinement, this outside and inside, this interlocked rhythmically beating You [“dies ineinanderschlagende Du”] tied to my looking?”110 Who exactly the “You” refers to is something of a mystery, and I have not found a single interpretation of it in the secondary literature.111 In one of his notes to the “Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal penned the following in a stream of consciousness: “Here there’s an overcoming of all inhibitions an almost raging You.”112 Similarly, in his notes to “The Conversation about Poems,” a reference to Novalis points the reader again in the direction of this relational “Du”: “Novalis: We should transform everything into a You, a second I; only by doing this do we lift ourselves to the great I.”113 While the drama might play in the head of the subject, that subject must at least entertain the idea that everything (“alles”) has a ­subject position. The statement is a paradox: only by recognizing that we are not the only I’s (and eyes) in the room, only by positing the I’s of others and of the world, can we be “great.” With “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal has reworked the notion he developed earlier in the “Address.” In that early lecture, he says that when we behold works of art and call something beautiful, we are subject to the great demand of the world of beauty: “this demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected power of the mysterious line of ancestors within us, the towering stacks of layers of our supra-individual memory, piled one upon the other.”114 In positing – or

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recognizing – the “You,” the merchant answers to a demand issued by beauty.115 Almost two decades later, Hofmannsthal will draft plans for a “Brief an einen Gleichaltrigen” (Letter to a contemporary) whose imagined recipient was to be modelled on the philosopher of religion Martin Buber. One of the notes reads: “A friend’s presence gives measure. Müller-Hofmann. Through him one expands the bedrock of experience. We put ourselves to the test of the whole You.”116 The “Du” of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” certainly resembles Buber’s notion of “Du,” and these notes would seem to indicate that Hofmannsthal was aware of an intellectual affinity between Buber and himself, particularly with respect to the development of dialogical thought.117 Consider the following passage from Buber’s 1932 philosophical treatise, Zwiesprache (Dialogue): “all art is, from its origin, essentially dialogical: … all music calls to an ear, which is not the ear of the musician’s, all visual art an eye, which is not the eye of the artist’s … they all in their unique language say something (not a ‘feeling,’ but rather a perceived secret) to the receiver.”118 Buber’s dialogical principle eventually finds a home in the “ethics” corner of philosophy, but the “Du” in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” even with its ethical overtones, is integral to the merchant’s experience of colours, which falls under the domain of aesthetics. And yet, to speak of such things is insufficient. “Colour. Colour. To me the word is now impoverished. I fear I haven’t explained myself to you as I wished. And I don’t want to strengthen anything in me that separates me from people.”119 These letters, monologic in nature, are nevertheless an attempt to express to someone else as much as to oneself something that is inexpressible: the word – the specific word “colour,” but also language in general – is and always will be “impoverished” in this respect. The merchant senses his very life in the revelation of what can only be described as force and foreignness: “And am I not there, in the inside of things, so very much a human being, myself more than ever before, nameless, alone, yet not benumbed in solitude, but rather as if the power flowed from me in waves, the power which makes me a chosen companion of the strong and mute forces that silently sit in a circle as if upon thrones and I among them? And is this not the place you always come to along dark paths when living, active and suffering, amongst the living?”120 This description suggests something of the “oceanic feeling” Freud famously outlined in the first chapter of Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents). Here, however, the emphasis is on

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a sense of belonging, not of dissipation. The sensation is characterized by the shelter of waves – as if the merchant were once again at sea – but also the comfort of anonymity and the recognition of difference. To be able to feel alone in the company of others, but not lonely, and to sense one’s power (“as if the power flowed from me in waves”) is to become aware of the connection of things in the flux. The waves ­resonate with each other. And yet accompanying that resonance is the suggestion that there is suffering involved, perhaps even a sense of guilt.121 The suffering is present in the colours themselves: “And why shouldn’t colours be the brothers of pain, for these, like it, draw us into the eternal?”122 In art there is sacrifice.123 Meier-Graefe wrote of Van Gogh: “It is as though a single person has felt the reproach of our whole era’s egotism and has sacrificed himself, much like one of these great martyrs whose fates have come down to us from a distant past.”124 According to such hagiographic logic, Van Gogh’s piety resounds in his colours, which carry each other. Some of those colours even display a willingness to recede into the background in order that others may shine forth more brilliantly.125 It is this gesture of giving oneself over that allows for the viewer to be pulled into “the eternal,” beyond the limitations of concepts. Perhaps the sacrificial aspect is an atonement as well, for, as Simmel says: “This transformation that reality suffers on its way to our consciousness is certainly a barrier between us and its immediate existence, but is at the same time the precondition for our perception and representation of it.”126 But the religious language of sacrifice and suffering is an aesthetic piety and can be understood metaphorically: Those with this peculiar aesthetic sensibility cannot bask innocently in the sensation of mystical union between art and reality; one must acknowledge the suffering that reality undergoes when observed, for it must, as it were, be bracketed off. In art, it is further manipulated and fashioned, but through that very manipulation a new kind of world is born. Van Gogh writes: “I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but still I don’t invent the whole of the painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made – but to be untangled – in the real world.”127 The “revelation” of art, then, is barely a revelation at all, except insofar as it reveals the precarity of an objective reality and one’s comprehension of it. The best way to counteract this suffering is not to work imitatively or with the assumption that the world is as one perceives it, but rather to engage with it by representing it symbolically, expressively, and most of all,

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creatively, by letting something in it be born – both in the sense of birth and endurance. The innovative use of colour in Van Gogh’s paintings would never heal the wound of existence, but it would at least be a testament to inevitable suffering. The image of the artist as martyr or as sacrificial victim is just that: an image, with all its potential and limitations. Art has no salvific power.128 In another note, Hofmannsthal writes with typical ambivalence: “Painters are there to reconcile us with appearances, and to give back to appearances their pathos. But perhaps what applies to poets applies also to painters: we are not the physicians, we are the pain.”129 Pain does not heal the wound; it makes us more sensitive to it. There may be no perfect, immediate communication between subject and object, but there is the deictic gesture of giving form (even if it is unfinished) in response to what one sees, hears, and receives. That gesture opens the dialogue, even as the dialogue opens the wound. The text – itself wounded and in search of reality, “wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend,” to quote Celan’s German130 – does not close it. —*— In 1907, Edmund Husserl scratched just below the surface of what one experiences as the overwhelming “tumult” or “maelstrom” of sensations: a mere maelstrom of sensations, I say, is indeed not absolute nothingness. But why must a world exist, and why must it have to exist? In fact, I do not see that it would have to. This ­concerns the world in the broadest sense, including the Ego as a person and other Egos. Thus we arrive at the possibility of a ­phenomenological maelstrom as unique and ultimate Being. It would be a maelstrom so meaningless that there would be no I and no Thou, as well as no physical world – in short, no reality in the pregnant sense.131 For Husserl, this possibility of dissolution is a possibility of experiencing “ultimate Being” in a phenomenological way. But the “I” that experiences it, the I of a “reality” that is constituted by more or less stable impressions, would not be able to reconcile that experience with a reality that has some semblance of regularity and relative stability.

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The phenomenologist goes on to say: “Obviously … regularity might gradually pass over into irregularity and … the presumed unity of things might again be dissolved – into a beautiful memory and phantasy, impossible to hold fast.”132 Husserl’s remarks depict a move towards theorizing an experience that was becoming increasingly common in the early years of the twentieth century. The typical conditions of modern urban life provided for just such a confusion of impressions and senses. From the sociological perspective, this results in what Simmel calls “characterlessness” (“Charakterlosigkeit”) on the level of the individual and of society, with money as its symbol. This confusion can further result in the destabilization of one’s mental and existential framework for understanding the world, leading to a kind of disorientation much like the merchant’s mal de débarquement. Although it cannot repair the world, art does not ignore the problems of society by causing the viewer to turn inward towards narcissism or egotism. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” suggests that the typical conditions of ­modern art give rise to the creative expression of – though not a solution to – the instability of reality, the disorientation and “maelstrom of the senses,” and the displacement of self.

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3 Art and History in “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”)

Over the course of the next decade, and even into the 1920s, Hofmannsthal continued to explore the facets of the aesthetic encounter in different cultural, psychological, and sociological ­contexts. Many of the motifs explored in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the “Address,” and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” became an integral part of his literary repertoire. In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” the merchant finds his country utterly foreign and the things around him lifeless, but through an encounter with (contemporary) art and the humanity behind it, the world and the things around him come to life again. In “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”), the ­situation is reversed: artists travel away from home, and the foreignness of Greece becomes, towards the culmination of the text, almost unbearable. “Moments in Greece” is based on Hofmannsthal’s actual travels.1 The text is divided into three sections, which highlight distinct but interrelated “moments,” expressed as encounters. As is characteristic for Hofmannsthal, the text engages in contemporary discussions of psychology, social thought, mysticism, and especially aesthetics.2 Underwriting the narrator’s encounters with places, people, and works of art is a recurring encounter with an otherness that renders communication and transformation of the subject possible by drawing the narrator into a dialogical relationship.

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Although Hofmannsthal’s actual experiences while travelling in Greece with his friend Harry Kessler and the French artist Aristide Maillot form the core of this text, Hofmannsthal deliberately arranges the events in reverse chronology, setting the aesthetic encounter at the culmination rather than at the beginning, when it probably would have occurred. “Moments in Greece” thus has a clear trajectory with dramatic intensification emerging out of otherwise discrete moments. This trajectory significantly qualifies a statement Hofmannsthal had made in his 1892 essay, “Südfranzösische Eindrücke” (Impressions of Southern France) concerning travel writing. In that short piece he writes that, as in a Chinese picture book, “the images of life [as presented in travel writing] follow each other without internal coherence and completely lack effective composition.”3 In other words, there is no necessary relation between the moments. The poetic impulse, however, is to seek out or even create coherence. I am inclined to see Hofmannsthal’s middle and later ­writings, such as those on Greece,4 as a deliberate move away from this earlier prescription of impressionistic representation; for Hofmannsthal’s middle period (roughly 1907–18), the connections may not be there by necessity, but they can be located, created, projected, and constructed. “Moments in Greece” is not about Greece as a place to be studied, observed, or reported on; it can only be experienced by the subject in a way that rejects essentialism and feigned objectivity. Hofmannsthal’s prose, likewise, departs markedly from the rhetoric of reportage that was common at the time.5 “Moments in Greece” depicts a twofold recognition: the impossibility of ever fully understanding the other, even in a transformative encounter; and the necessity of a non-ego-centric consciousness for any meaningful experience. The subject can move beyond narcissistic or solipsistic modes of being after recognizing that a necessary condition of being is coexistence. At the structural level, the text’s proliferation of internal correspondences and resonances seem to function as a metaphor for dialogue. Thus, while my main interest lies in the third section of “Moments in Greece,” it is important to understand how motifs in the first two sections relate to, inform, and are refashioned in the third. For this reason, I let the text’s tripartite division guide my reading, beginning with the encounters in “The Monastery of St Luke,” proceeding to “The Wanderer,” and ending with “The Statues.”

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E ch o e s in “ T h e M o n a s t ery of St Luke” Though originally published as a separate text, the first section sets the stage for the work as a whole, introducing motifs that are adapted and further developed in the subsequent sections: the importance of atmosphere (Stimmung); the connection between religious and aesthetic experiences; the paradoxical co-occurrence of the lofty and the lowly, or the sublime and the mundane; and the structural relationship of call and response as a religious, ethical, and aesthetic move that attempts to bridge the perceived distance between the self and the other. The German concept of Stimmung can be understood with reference to atmosphere, mood, and even musical tuning and voice (Stimme). Stimmung often colours the space of mediation between observer and object and, as several scholars have pointed out,6 even blurs the distinctions between the two: it can refer to the internal, psychological stance of the observer as well as the external environment and how it touches everything.7 It is, according to Hofmannsthal, the “totality of momentary imaginings, the relative consciousness of the world: depending on the Stimmung, we think about the lowliest and the loftiest things differently, there is simply no content of the imagination which is not influenced and painted by Stimmung, enlarged, obliterated, distorted, transfigured, desirable, apathetic, threatening, mild, dark, light, soft, smooth, etc. etc.”8 Stimmung’s connection to art is key. The content of imagination is painted (“gemalt”) according to the Stimmung. Stimmung can also result in a creative response in the imagination of the subject. It has a potentially aesthetic quality not only in its influence on the external surroundings, but also in the response to its influence. And it is no mere whim that prompted Hofmannsthal to conclude “The Monastery of St Luke” with the sentence, “Stunde, Luft und Ort machen alles.” Hour, air, and place – all of which contribute to Stimmung – are everything.9 The section’s opening sentence, on the other hand, seems to establish an objective tone; it is written in the indicative and devoid of any judgment or qualification: “We had been riding that day for nine to ten hours.”10 This objectivity, however, almost immediately gives way to a nuanced depiction of the world opening up before the travellers. In a note to “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal writes in a similar vein: “Nature had this effect on me, and here, something was painted. Here was a human language. In a flash I glimpsed the function of the artist.”11 The link between the thing

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painted (whether in paint or words) and human language suggests a communicative function of the artist. In “Moments in Greece,” the traveller/narrator experiences a similar phenomenon: the landscape (like “Nature” in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”) and the events that occur are collected in an undeviating rhythm of simple, repetitive syntax, expressing what one might see through the veil of distance: “and we looked down and across, as though from a balcony.”12 Looking out from above allows for a serene and totalizing vista, like that presented in a landscape painting. The “human language,” though, is yet to be heard. Gradually, the reader is visually guided into the monastery proper and made aware of the picturesque quality of the unchanging scene. The view closes in on a door, like a picture frame: “In the wall on the left was a small open door; in the doorway leaned a monk.”13 Upon arrival at the monastery, the prosaic style changes, though quite subtly. Hofmannsthal introduces rhetorical repetition and anaphora, charging the sentences with a more assertive tenor that seems inspired by the monk’s presence: “The long black gown, the high black headgear, the casual way he stood there, gazing towards us in this paradisal solitude – all this gave him the air of a magician.”14 In Hofmannsthal’s work, the magician is a being possessed of great creative force who lives in splendid isolation.15 The monk, too, inhabits a space isolated from the sorrows of the world. His very posture confirms this, as he leans languidly at the doorway, gazing at the visitors as they approach. For the first time in “Moments in Greece,” someone other than the first-person narrator is portrayed as commanding the faculty of sight; with the cenobite’s gaze directed at the narrator, Hofmannsthal opens the possibility for co-presence and multiple perspectives. And yet the monk’s location at the threshold also announces an ambiguity, ­mirrored in his countenance: “He was young, with a long, light red beard, its cut reminiscent of Byzantine portraits, an eagle nose, restless, almost intrusive blue eyes. He greeted us with a bow and a spreading of both arms, in which there was something forced.”16 The monk’s posture, his gesture of welcome, and the unsettled and forced quality of his expression which greet the travellers are the first indications of a powerful encounter with an uncanny otherness. For now, however, the visitors are led into the monastery grounds, where they perceive everywhere a constant rhythm “as far removed from haste as from slowness” and catch the strains of psalms being sung, “as remote from lamentation as from desire, something solemn

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which might have been sounding from eternity and continue to sound far into eternity.”17 Erwin Kobel described the music as the play of contrasts between human beings and God; its nature, he says, is both physical and religious.18 The observation is astute. It is worth noting, additionally, that the word “might” (in German “mochte”) pulls the moment into a space of uncertainty. The reality of the song’s path from and back to eternity is qualified by this “mochte” at the end of the sentence, and its metaphysical ambiguity is strengthened in the narrator’s description of another sound emanating from the voice of an unseen singer: “The echo-like quality, the utterly faithful following of this solemn, hardly any longer human sound, this will-less, almost unconscious voice, did not seem to issue from the breast of woman. It sounded as if mystery itself were singing, something insubstantial.”19 The inconclusiveness of “mochte” has given over now to appearance (“seem”) and to the counterfactual subjunctive mood (“as if mystery itself were singing”). The narrator then discovers that the voice belongs to a young boy, striking in his beauty, which transcends the division of gender, as if in answer to Goethe’s Mignon,20 or as a precursor to Thomas Mann’s Tadzio. And yet this boy does seem to embody duration, repetition, and those rituals conveyed through the ages. In him the narrator sees the  coming generation of monks performing the same ancient ­rituals manifest in song.21 Few things in the world (art perhaps being one of them) are comparable to this enduring enactment; and yet it is ­r e-enactment, each and every time. The ritual is the same and  ­different – not dasselbe (the self-same) but rather das Gleiche (a ­different instantiation of the same). For Hofmannsthal’s traveller, this is not a matter of identity, but of repeated sameness, which is established through participation. In the German text, the language itself performs this sameness in the rhythm of the syntax and even the rhyming of keywords: “Der gleiche Boden, die gleichen Lüfte, das gleiche Tun, das gleiche Ruhn” (the same ground, the same air, the same action, the same repose).22 Standing out like an errant line of poetry, the sentence re-enacts in miniature the rhythm and ritual of song. It is therefore especially striking when, in the same paragraph, Hofmannsthal switches tenses and brings that distant past into the present of the text. It is near to the reader as well. For Hofmannsthal’s narrator, there is something inexpressible that is calling from the past, through time, for a response. It does this by making its presence known in the serenely vibrating Stimmung.23

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Shortly after registering the echoes of the past in the presence of the music, the narrator overhears two men conversing, now with attuned (“abgestimmt”) ears: “The dialogue between the priest and the serving man is short. But its tone is from the time of the ­patriarchs … this insignificant incident, these few words exchanged in the night, have in them a rhythm hailing from eternity.”24 Eternity is transported on the wings of such small things: the seemingly ­insignificant incidents, the gestures, the few words exchanged. 25 We can understand what prompted Kessler to express preference for the text’s conclusion with the sentence: “That was how this dialogue sounded.”26 Yet for Hofmannsthal the dialogue is born out of a Stimmung that evokes and sustains a sense of continuity, connecting the conversation to the space; just as the scent of wax, honey, and incense is like the redolence of song,27 so too is there a very real, physical sense in which “The hour, the air, and the place are all-important.”28 —*— While “Moments in Greece” can be read as a series of juxtaposed episodes, any interpretation of the text will benefit from a reading that finds in these discrete moments intentional and meaningful repetition. Put another way: Hofmannsthal’s writing continuously – we might even say ritualistically – calls forth images and forms of expression already presented in the text, rendering them familiar while paying tribute to their uniqueness. In “The Conversation about Poems,” the fictitious interlocutor Gabriel conjectures that the eyes of poetry see everything for the first time.29 It is with such eyes that Hofmannsthal wants his readers to approach “Moments in Greece.” Each moment is a distinct event that occurs in relation to other moments. The paradox of the encounter lies in its preservation of distance and difference, as well as individuality; that is, there is no full identity. As the traveller says: “enough, it is near.”30 The religious Stimmung of the monastery is aesthetically evocative. The landscape is like a painting, and the monk, with his ambiguous gaze, is like the artist-as-magician. Even ritual – an interruption in linear temporality akin to the aesthetic moment of encounter – finds aesthetic expression in the music of a boy’s voice (Stimme). That voice calls out in answer to another voice; and, like beauty, it calls for a response.

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F a c e s a n d F a t e s in “ The Wanderer” Leaving the cyclical rhythms and echoes of the monastery, the travellers once more take to the road, where they engage in conversation. Passing through the landscape on foot, they become aware of the stark contrast between that sense of eternity in the monastery and the transience of their individual lives. Personal memories and once-familiar faces now become the focus of “one of the strangest and most beautiful conversations” the narrator can recall.31 The conversation consists not in a merely enjoyable exchange of opinions – it is treated as an aesthetic occasion. The travelling companions take turns evoking memories of significant encounters with other people, investing them (both the memories and the people) with new life; each memory then calls up other memories, each face answering the previous one. In this manner the conversation sustains itself: a sea of ever-changing faces gradually swelling up from the past. The setting and Stimmung, too, are important for the conversation. At the foot of Mount Parnassus – the famed home of the muses – and along the path where Oedipus is said to have journeyed, the clarity of the air, the lack of sleep, and the sense of connection to the past and to myth attune the travellers to their own bygone days. Much as the monks’ rituals invoke age-old practices, so this dialogue of memories draws poetic inspiration from the home of the muses and the path of Oedipus. The memories may stem from the individuals, but the setting lends those recollections an almost mythical status. With time, the travelling companions become acutely aware of their own existence: “Our friends rose before us and, by bringing themselves, brought with them the purest essence of our existence.”32 For Hofmannsthal, reciprocity is a condition for beauty, and this “most beautiful” of conversations adheres to the definition outlined in the “Address” of 1902 – as does the description of the travellers’ utterances as “serious and of almost frightening clarity.”33 Hofmannsthal repurposes a memorable image from the “Address”: “For such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’”34 Here, we have the counterpart: “Figure after figure rises up, satisfying us with its appearance, accompanies us, and vanishes again.” The word “satisfying” translates the German “sättigt,” which might equally be rendered “­satiates.”35 The metaphor of sustenance suggests that the faces of memory have a life of their own. But, like the ancient Greek spirits in Hades, they must wait

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their turn to imbibe the libations and speak: “others, evocative, have already been waiting to occupy the empty place. They illuminate a circle of lived life, then fall behind, as it were, on the road, while we walk on and on – as though it were upon our walking that the continuance of this enchantment depended.”36 Hofmannsthal’s travellers find themselves in the literary territory of some of the classic narratives: The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy. In all these stories, wanderers must speak with the dead in order to continue their journeys. Hofmannsthal’s “Moments in Greece” has a different tenor, however, which comes out most clearly in a description of the faces the narrator sees. Significance is to be found in trivial events rather than the heroic or legendary deeds: “While they were standing before us and looking at us, the smallest circumstances and things, through which our union with them had come to pass, were present.”37 The travellers imagine hearing the voices of those they once encountered and the “seemingly trifling short sentences.”38 Yet contained in these sparse words is the entire human being, and more: “and their faces are more than faces: the same quality as from the sound of their broken sentences surges up in them, comes nearer and nearer towards us, seems to be caught and confirmed in their features, in the inexpressible of their expressions, yet not quite at rest. It is a never-ending desire, possibility, readiness, something suffered and still to be suffered. Each of these faces is a destiny, is unique, the most singular that can be, and at the same time infinite, a wandering on to an immeasurably distant destination. It seems to exist only while it is looking at us, as though it were living merely for the sake of our responsive glance.”39 In this passage one can discern traces of the Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian concepts of will (“ein endloses Wollen,” translated as “a never-ending desire”), as well as a recognition of suffering (“Gelittenes, zu Leidendes,” translated as “something suffered and still to be suffered”) that evokes the writings of Georg Büchner.40 This is the fate of humanity, which should come as no surprise, for the face here is also fate. If we take the face to be, as Simmel calls it, the “locus of inner personality insofar as it is visible,”41 then we are also not far from that “dark” Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and his 119th fragment: character is fate.42 Each face shares in the same fate, yet it does so individually: each face is das Gleiche, not dasselbe. The fate in which all faces share is itself a kind of history, a part of which the two wanderers recall through the veil of time: “We are like two spirits that fondly remember having taken part in the banquets of mortal men.”43

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The likening of this encounter to that of spirits who once partook in the communion of mortals is inspired by ancient and Classical Greek. Plato’s Symposium, in particular, proves illuminating. The title of the dialogue derives from the verb συμπίνειν (sympinein), which means “to drink together.” Such communal repasts were opportunities to enjoy the company of others, to carry out customs (θέμις, themis), and to establish relationships based on hospitality, which was then given material representation in the form of a gift.44 Gadamer reminds us in Die Aktualität des Schönen (The Relevance of the Beautiful) that the σύμβολον (symbolon, symbol) was, for the ancient Greeks, ­precisely this gift of hospitality. It is a gift, furthermore, of recognition: “eine Erinnerungsscherbe”  – literally: a shard of memory. 45 As Gadamer explains, the symbolon was a kind of passport and token of hospitality of antiquity. One half of a broken plate, when reunited with its other half, might be the sign for recognition after years or generations of absence. In Plato’s dialogue, Aristophanes tells a story in praise of Eros using the symbolon as a metaphor for love, which, in this context, is imagined as elective affinity or marriage of the minds: two people existed as one but were separated, and now each half seeks the other. Gadamer suggests that the referential character of the symbolon, together with the sense of completion it suggests, is easily translated into the world of beauty.46 As in the experience of love, so too in the experience of beauty one is able to sense the open-ended conjuration of a possible ideal world. The faces the travellers see are such shards of memory, symbols that recall something lost or desired. The allusion to the “banquets of mortal men” seems an appropriate scene for the symbol of hospitality. Yet, for Hofmannsthal, a confrontation with memories is also a confrontation with suffering and loneliness. He draws our attention to one figure in particular: “him, who had suffered so unspeakably … He is poor and suffers, but who could dare to offer him help, this boy lonely beyond words?”47 The unnamed figure, whose affliction is demarcated by the limits of language, bears a resemblance to Arthur Rimbaud, who, when still a young man, rejected his vocation as a poet and chose instead a solitary wanderer’s life out of contempt for his former self. Impoverished, the young man of memory set out to secure financial stability, but in doing so, strove against “his own demon for something gigantic, which cannot be named.”48 The Rimbaud-like figure of memory disdains his situation and even seems to be in denial about his imminent death. The reader learns he, while

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incapacitated during a journey, would not let himself be borne down a hillside easily, but insisted rather “on a steep, fast descent, across country. Indescribable rebellion, defiance of death up to the whites of his eyes, the mouth distorted with suffering, yet refusing to complain.” 49 He may exhibit the same qualities of solitude and independence of will presaged by the monk at the Monastery of St Luke, but his world is no serene cloister – it is a long road of pain. As Wellbery aptly points out, the physical traits described recall the face of the merchant’s son on his deathbed.50 As if to reinforce the image of the defiant, solitary wanderer, the Stimmung too begins to feel antagonistic: “The morning sun shone almost threateningly on this solemn, foreign landscape … Strange destinies, normally invisible currents, struck some strong chord in us and revealed themselves.”51 These fates and faces, strange perhaps by nature of their reluctance to partake in the banquet of mortals, ­nevertheless approach the conversing travellers. The shared, though internal, world of memory extends its sphere of influence outward just as much as the environment affects the world of interiority. Whereas at the monastery of St Luke, “the hour, the air, and the place are all-important,”52 here Hofmannsthal draws from the subjective, internal world of reminiscence a literary anticipation of an actual encounter with another human being, one of these “strange destinies.” Subjectivity and even the implicit sense of responsibility that accompanies the (beautiful) conversation prepare the reader and the travellers for an encounter with what lies beyond their sphere of influence, and beyond their personal memories.

T h e r e is V e n g e a n ce i n Heaven f o r a n I n j u r ed Dog Set above the section heading of “The Wanderer” is an epigraph in Greek: εἰδὶ καὶ κυνῶν ἐρινύες. Hofmannsthal takes this quote from the classicist Gilbert Murray’s collection of lectures, The Rise of the Greek Epic: “There is vengeance in heaven for an injured dog.” Murray’s work was crucial to Hofmannsthal’s literary treatment of his 1908 Greek travels, as made plain by the many markings he made in his copy of The Rise of the Greek Epic [*fd h 1738]. As Hans-Jürgen Schings has pointed out, Murray’s commentary on social responsibility is echoed repeatedly in “Moments in Greece.”53 The classical scholar notes: “If you made a man your slave, that showed you did not regard

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him with aidôs … Of course a wrong done to a slave was hated by the gods and, one might hope, duly avenged. But that was the same with animals.”54 For the ancient Greeks, every dog, however lowly and abject, has his day.55 No dogs are mentioned in “The Wanderer,” yet the question of how to treat the abject other – whether human or animal – is omnipresent. The failure to treat another being with respect is represented by the tragic figure of memory who, filled with contempt for his community and for himself, suffered from a twisted kind of hubris. Like Oedipus, whose path the travellers have been walking, the man did not know, or rather, he refused to acknowledge his identity. In doing so, he also cut himself off from others and abrogated all social responsibility. The meeting with the man in memory anticipates a meeting with a “real” man along the road to Thebes: The travellers encounter by chance a German wanderer, whose life, they learn, also resembles that of Rimbaud’s. The German is a formerly strong young man of twenty-one, weakened by unceasing pain. He is helpless and barefoot. His face is described as “suffering” and his eyes are like those of a “tortured animal,” reminiscent of Murray’s injured dog.56 Yet unlike Rimbaud, he is trying to return home from his travels. This “shipwrecked” man is ill and in need of rest.57 Nevertheless, he refuses to retrace his steps and return to a place nearby where he could convalesce. Instead, he sets himself on a strictly linear path forwards: “Strangely unreal the way he had walked in silence towards his death.”58 But his initial refusal gives way to consent: he agrees to be accompanied to a town in the direction he wishes to travel, and to be tended to “with decorum and reverence.”59 The man in need who can accept help is also worthy of respect. As Gilbert Murray would have it, his aidôs is recognized: “The disinherited of the earth, the injured, the helpless, and among them the most utterly helpless of all, the dead. All these, the dead, the stranger, the beggar, the orphan, the  merely unhappy, are from the outset αἰδοῖοι, ‘charged with αἰδώς’ … It is the counterpart of what we, in our modern and scientific prose, call ‘a sense of moral responsibility’ or the like; the feeling roused more or less in most people by the existence of great misery in our wealthy societies.”60 That sense of moral responsibility is given symbolic expression in Hofmannsthal’s narrative. The travellers arrive at a spring, from which the injured German wanderer had earlier drunk; bowing down (very nearly mimicking the religious gesture of proskynesis – prostration

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whereby one kisses the ground), they take a drink from this same spring.61 Remembering the German wanderer and his suffering, the narrator suddenly senses the antagonism of the world, as if sharing in that suffering. The troubles of the German traveller become the narrator’s own as he recalls the man’s face inscribed with pain: “His face looked at me, as hitherto those other faces had looked at me; I almost lost myself to his face, and as if to save myself from his embrace, I said to myself, ‘Who is this? A strange man!’ Then alongside this face were the others, looking at me and exerting their power over me, and there were many more.”62 This one face has now joined the ranks of those faces of memory, and in doing so has unleashed the power of the o ­ thers, such that the force of the wanderer’s gaze threatens to disrupt the cohesiveness and sense of presence of the self. The desire to rescue the self reads like a deliberate response to Ernst Mach’s well-known proclamation in the Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations): “Das Ich ist unrettbar” – the I is unsalvageable. The coping mechanism used to achieve distance from such shame-conjuring faces63 is to deny their familiarity, to deny any relation or point of commonality, and to label them “fremd.” But such refusal is tantamount to ignoring social responsibility. Not surprisingly, the instinct backfires: the faces of the past reassert themselves in the form of what seems to be an early memory, yet the narrator, speaking now in the third person, does not identify it explicitly as his own. In contrast to free indirect speech (whereby the third person narrator approaches that of the first person), the narrator describes his own vision by sacrificing his first-person perspective for the third, essentially rendering in literary form the sensation of the doubled self described in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”: “It was as though I was double, was lord over my life all at the same time, lord over my faculties, my understanding, felt time passing.”64 Yet here, the experience is more traumatic than transformative, split rather than multiplied, and motivated by memories of the past rather than an encounter in the present moment: “a boy watching the faces of soldiers pass, company after company, countless numbers, tired dusty faces, always in fours, each a single individual and none whose face the boy had not absorbed into himself, forever groping mutely from one to the other, touching each one, counting to himself, ‘This one, this one, this one!’ while tears were rising in his throat.”65 The young boy – the narrator’s childhood self – is overwhelmed by each soldier’s individual suffering; and this suffering cannot be assuaged by any

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actions the boy might take. As in the Iliad’s catalogues of the dead and those about to die, the intensity and amount of suffering grows, etched as it is upon each and every face. And the boy senses that anonymous enjoinment to take responsibility for all. He would – if he could, hence the subjunctive hätte, not rendered in the English translation here – draw each of these faces into himself, all of them strangers, and all of them individuals, united in the human experience of pain and suffering. This awakens in the boy a desire to feel, to touch each one with his sympathetic counting, his acknowledging the other. Though he does not experience the suffering of the other directly, he is an active viewer of it, a witness, and his mere existence apart from what he witnesses makes him sense in his being – again, indirectly – a kind of guilt. This vision compels the narrator to turn his earlier question to himself: this time, he does not ask “Who is this?” and respond with “A strange man!” – instead, he asks: “Who am I?”66 This question arises out of the encounter with the many faces flooding his child-self’s vision; the narrator is overwhelmed completely by his own past, and yet it is also the moment where the self exists in communion with others, as symbolized by drinking and partial submersion in water. At one point in his notes to the “Address,” Hofmannsthal approached a similar dramatic peak when describing the confrontation with a work of art: “We see ourselves surrounded by beautiful forms and colours. Enjoying at first sight the manifold creations of nature and of the human hand … ‘Friend of Art’: A dangerous word, not without demonic content. Here we seem to be in danger of losing ourselves: a great mistake! Here we are first awakened to possess ourselves: for we do create the undying content of these creations in so far as we, alive, empathize with them.”67 The “Address” also points to the potentially positive, if also painful, effects of recognizing the stratified layers of supra-individual memory in one’s own psychic organization.68 In this division of the self, there is an opportunity to experience the self as other; in “Moments in Greece,” the narrator observes at a distance his younger self, the boy.69 Yet he also then must make the journey back to his present “self.” Paradoxically, this happens precisely when, caught in a state of wonder, he fears the total loss of his sense of self: “Then, in the moment of most anxious wondering, I once more came to, the boy sank into me, the water flowed by under my face, bathing one cheek, the propped-up arms supported my body, and I raised myself and it was nothing more than the rising of one who, with his lips lying upon the

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flowing water, had taken a long draught.”70 The dénouement is so quick as almost not to exist. In one sweeping sentence Hofmannsthal brings together the most intense moment and the return to the mundane, linking them with the multivalent symbolism of water. Like Narcissus, the narrator bows down to the water and initially does not recognize himself (“Who am I?”). But water also carries the opposite connotations of the symposium he shares with his former self – and with the German traveller he had encountered earlier. Finally, it is an image of life’s renewal,71 and of the flux of existence. In drinking from the spring, the narrator reveals the identity of the self precisely in its multiplicity and its participatory existence in the ever-changing flow of life. This is the moment when Narcissus listens to Echo and recognizes her voice’s similarity to and difference from his own. Even once the “boy” has sunk again into the narrator’s memory, the narrator still experiences the world as at once split and unified. He speaks of his body as both separate from and one with himself. “The propped arms”  – in German: “Die aufgestützten Arme” – hold up “the body” (“den Leib”).72 Rather than using the first-person pronoun and possessive adjectives, the narrator employs reflexive verbs to render the subject split, an object separated from itself. Finally, this most intense of moments is swept up entirely into generality, as if it were nothing more than some person – any person – standing up from taking a drink of water. In the end, the individual is just as much himself as he is everyman. In his notebooks, Hofmannsthal writes, referring to his play Gestern (Yesterday): “Memory belongs to the body alone: the body seems to reproduce the past, that is, it gives rise to something similar and new in Stimmung. My ‘I’ from yesterday is as irrelevant to me as the ‘I’ of Napoleon or Goethe.”73 In “Moments in Greece,” this is fully overturned. The traveller’s “I” from yesterday is still present and relevant to him, as are the “I’s” of others – be they soldiers, wanderers, or injured dogs. The ethical implication that the being of others is of relevance to the traveller is, furthermore, a thing of beauty.74 As early as the mid 1890s, Hofmannsthal had connected ethical and aesthetic sensibilities in a strikingly similar fashion. In a note from those years, he writes: “The kinship of beautiful things in time, and the deep sense of it: the picture books from Crane the kinship of those of different times … and so the parallel gestures of the countless hover around us, countless faces bow down to drink water with us.”75 The kinship of beautiful things transcends generations, revealing a moment of sameness in spite

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of the incorrigible march of historical time. Thus, Walter Crane’s images can share in their beauty with the medieval or – according to Pater, Hofmannsthal’s source – renaissance world’s celebration of the senses. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Hofmannsthal had located the countless faces kneeling down to drink of the same water we drink – the same unnamed inspirational source – in the invisible enchanted world-garden. The water in this locus amoenus is then transformed in “Moments in Greece” into an “actual” water source, where “real” travellers, including the weary German wanderer, drink. The “countless faces” in the imagined garden become the “countless numbers, tired dusty faces” in memory, revived and resurfacing like one’s reflection upon bending down towards the water. And it is no coincidence that both drink from the source. In the “Address,” the subject and the beautiful object exist in a relationship of mutual exchange. The narrator’s relationship to his memories of past encounters has a similar structure. In the case of the faces of the soldiers, the narrator maintains that “their faces are more than faces,” elaborating thus: “Each of these faces is a destiny, is unique, the most singular that can be, and at the same time infinite, a wandering on to an immeasurably distant destination.”76 We might very well read this distant destination as that fate shared by everyone who lives and ­suffers, yet unique always in its specific manifestation: individual death. The river is an image of life as much as it is of death, for it is also Acheron, the river of woe. This woe is integrated into the mere act of taking a drink of water: “Then, in the moment of most anxious wondering … and it was nothing more than the rising of one who, with his lips lying upon the flowing water, had taken a long draught.”77 This radical levelling of experiences – bringing together the ecstatic and the mundane – does indeed find its most final actualization in death, the most mundane and the most ecstatic moment we can imagine. As in both “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and in the letters Hofmannsthal wrote during his time in Tlumacz, ­witnessing the suffering of others – if that suffering cannot be experienced directly  – is for Hofmannsthal potential grounds for an experience of beauty. This is not just a matter of knowing beauty through its opposite, ugliness; rather, the very foundation of beauty, if there is one, is the ugliness of suffering, like the mud out of which a lotus flower grows. In “Moments in Greece,” this relationship of suffering to beauty is repeated and elaborated: the singularity of an

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event that revealed to the narrator the suffering of others becomes the underpinnings for the experience of beauty, and the text’s evocative qualities intensify the sense of beauty. In the few hours after this moment at the river, the narrator gazes at a nameless landscape, and yet the anonymity speaks: “The mountains called to one another; the clefts were more alive than a face; each little fold on the distant flank of a hill lived; all this was as near to me as the palm of my hand. It was something that I shall never see again. It was the guest gift of all the lonely wanderers who had crossed our path.”78 The vulnerability of the self and the confrontation with death (in one of its many forms) has opened up the opportunity to witness life external to the self: the earth itself proudly exhibits life in every crease of its physiognomy, and this life is close to the traveller, recalling the phrase from the first section: “enough, it is near.”79 Yet this is all nearer than near; it is almost a part of him, like the “Wurzel meiner Hand,” – the palm, or literally the “root” of his hand. This familiarity with the unnamed landscape reconciles the traveller with his own body, at least in language. Hofmannsthal has moved from the reflexive verbal structure of the propped-up arms holding “the” body to an analogy of familiarity focused on the hand of the traveller, which he refers to using the possessive adjective, “my.” The landscape calls, and in this call the narrator senses its nearness, and even his own body. And yet there is no delusion of grandeur in this; it does not give the narrator a sense of power or stability of being. It is also singular in incarnation; he will never see it like this again. And yet he calls this the “Gastgeschenk” – the “guest gift” – of all the lonely wanderers encountered, the gift of hospitality being the symbolon that suggests the infinite relationship of reciprocity and the covenant between host and guest. If the guest gift is a symbol, that is, something that has a complement elsewhere, it is also nevertheless still unique, because to see with the eyes of poetry is to see everything for the first time, and to do so requires the knowledge of suffering. “Everything alive, every landscape, reveals itself once, and in its entirety: but only to a heart deeply moved.”80 To those who have witnessed and been “deeply moved” (“erschüttert” is stronger, more like shattered or shocked) by affliction, beauty is a gift. In his copy of The Rise of the Greek Epic, Hofmannsthal made a note on the endpaper: “Der Bettler der Hilfelose beladen mit αἰδώς” (The beggar the helpless one, laden with αἰδώς). Aidôs is that which, in heaven, may be attributed even to injured dogs; on earth, it is the

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gift which the impoverished and afflicted have the right to bestow: it is a gift of beauty. Yet with the acceptance of this gift comes the awareness of taking on an unpayable debt. The luxury to enjoy the aesthetic all too often comes at the expense of others’ well-being. Whereas Hofmannsthal makes the connection to the social and economic forces explicit in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” here they are rendered as an existential problem, for beauty bears upon it the mark of suffering; it is not a place of solace, but rather a fraught reminder of both participation and the great divide between “subject” and perceived “object.” Once one is aware of the violent sacrifice at the altar of beauty, one cannot experience the same simple pleasure and enjoyment of seeing a work of art fashioned out of human misery by human hands. Any attempt to aestheticize the unpleasant and make it more palatable fails. We could read Hofmannsthal’s work as an exploitation of the unpleasant, but we would not be saying anything Hofmannsthal did not already know – nor would it make us, the “critical reader,” in any way morally superior to the writer. As readers, we are already implicated. Hofmannsthal consciously uses the unpleasant to literary effect – but he is also aware that the aesthetic is not an anaesthetic. Art is born out of a desire to make manifest indirectly what will not be articulated directly. For Hofmannsthal, the artist is always involved, interested, and implicated in the object, which comes to have a life – and demands – of its own. Some works of art are even capable of making us uncomfortably aware of the unpayable debt and that impassable divide; they issue a command to us to give up something of our own inner world in order to sustain what the artist began.

T h e P o v e r t y o f Presence Only a day after his encounter with the wanderer from Lauffen an der Salzach, his powerful vision at the spring, and the train ride during which he saw in the living landscape the “guest gift of all the lonely wanderers”81 who had crossed their path – only a day after this whirlwind of experiences, the narrator finds himself in the disappointing anti-climax of the present. Indeed, as if ashamed, he wants to forget the German traveller (and the pain of others) and all traces of the encounter: “But I was not tempted to think any more about it. ‘Passed,’ said I involuntarily, and lifted my foot over the fragments of ruin that

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lay around here by the hundreds.”82 The irony of this statement becomes apparent when we see that “passed” (gewesen in German, which is also the past participle of “to be”) refers not only to the man of yesterday, but to the narrator’s surroundings as well. The narrator’s desire to forget the encounter with the man affects his reception of the world around him, for now things take on a painful quality of transience as they threaten to slip out of the reach of the present. Even the stones on the hill seem now to be “decaying with age.”83 And so, whereas the previous day’s encounter had awakened the memories of yesteryear and the potential of life in memory and landscape, we have here the desire to forget the discomfort of that encounter, resulting in the narrator’s vision of a landscape receding into the past. The narrator wishes to seize control and halt the flow of time, ever out of joint, by placing the past securely in the past, and holding the present in the here and now; but the wish is never fulfilled. In Hofmannsthal’s hand, the temporal disconnection finds spatial expression as well. The narrator views the world around him, in this case focusing on a column: it is a thing of solidity and stability, and it is a monument to past cultural achievement. But there is something peculiar about the narrator’s view: He sees the column as though it were intimately linked to his own being and its mode of existence and behaviour dependent upon his own life-giving breath. He is transposing that feeling of shared existence, yet the selection of the object of his gaze – Pygmalion-like in its inspirational power – is beyond his control: “I felt that as I breathed, its contour rose and fell  … Unintentionally, my eye chose.”84 Much like the gaze in Sappho’s celebrated poem φαίνεταί μοι (phainetai moi), the eyes here seem to be somehow separate from the willing self; this distance creates a sense of poverty rather than possession (self-possession or otherwise).85 And yet this poverty, or lack, is ironically presented in terms of the richness of gold: “But in the evening light, clearer than dissolved gold, the consuming whiff of mortality also played around it.”86 What unites the column and the observer is neither the observer’s megalomaniacal gaze, nor his quickening artist’s eye, but the richness of their shared golden transience. Poverty and wealth are recurring themes in Hofmannsthal’s writings.87 In his early works, the poet or artist, portrayed as a reverse Midas, is the figure whose craft has the power to imbue a lifeless object with something much like life; whereas Midas turns living things into beautiful but lifeless gold.88 In “Moments in Greece,” the gold of the

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sun is rich; and while the enjoyment of beauty is often considered a privilege of the wealthy, it is never enough to purchase meaningful experiences. One must know poverty.89 Hofmannsthal critiques his own narrator, who wishes to forget the suffering of others and leave it in the past; yet the narrator cannot, if he is to see the world with the eyes of poetry, ignore the world’s own misery: for the world too slips away from him as he walks. Midas, as Mayer has pointed out, is a metamorphosis of Pygmalion: he freezes the motion of organic nature into inert gold. Yet for Hofmannsthal, art reveals itself to be always in motion, slipping out of one’s hands, exposing the uncomfortable relation between poverty and wealth as well as absence and presence. This has sociopolitical implications. Though neither sociologist nor political philosopher, Hofmannsthal puts into poetic form what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about industrialization: “From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.”90 And he even approaches William Morris’s socialist critique: “The necessity of the time, I say, is to feed the commercial war which we are all of us ­waging in some way or another; if, while we are doing this, we can manage, some of us, to adorn our lives with some little pleasure of the eyes, it is well, but it is no necessity, it is a luxury, the lack of which we must endure. Thus, in this matter also does the artificial famine of inequality, felt in so many other ways, impoverish us despite of our riches; and we sit starving amidst our gold, the Midas of the ages.”91 An impulse to uphold Midas’s alchemic art drives the ­narrator to the column: “I felt the urge to walk around it; the side turned away from me, facing the setting sun, this held the promise of real life.”92 The narrator’s desires echo those attributed to the poet Rimbaud, “who believes he is struggling for money, money, and more money, but who is really struggling with his own demon for something gigantic, which cannot be named.”93 Though the narrator is not striving for money per se, he is striving for that security that comes with permanence, which the gilded life of the wealthy often seems to offer but cannot. He seeks that golden life that fades away with the setting sun. The narrator has already noted his anticipated disappointment, and the paragraph that follows confirms it: everything he has seen in Athens, everything in Greece, all of it is of the past, all of it a

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Figure 3.1  Column at Delphi. Image from Hanns Holdt’s book of photographs, Griechenland. Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben, with an introduction by Hofmannsthal.

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tribute to decay and the poverty of presence, frustrating Midas’ art with the tireless persistence of time. Even memory, which before had held such power, seems now to be only of a second order to itself, useless for enlivening the relics of the past. Having descended a rung on the ontological ladder, the memory of memories can offer only a distorted view of things; indeed, its ontological status resembles that of art (much maligned) in Plato’s Republic: “These Greeks, I asked within myself, where are they? I tried to remember, but I remembered only memories. Names came floating near, figures; they merged into one another as though I had dissolved them into a greenish smoke wherein they appeared distorted.”94 The description of images intertwining is not new to readers of Hofmannsthal: it was an important leitmotif for “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and was also used in the “Address” (see chapter 1). In both of the earlier instances, the effect of this ­weaving is a revelation of vitality and connection; here the image is transformed so that the individual ties are loosed. The identities meld and distinction disappears, becoming formless rather than “arbitrary-will-become-form.”95 The language here subtly recalls that used to describe the sunlight three paragraphs earlier. First, the past participle used above to describe the gold, “aufgelöst” (“dissolved”), reappears here in the phrase “als löste ich sie auf” (“as though I had dissolved them”), thereby introducing by way of the subjunctive mood the possibility – but not the reality – of the subject acting upon an object. The atmospheric quality, too, is underlined in this moment, except that  the golden light is replaced with a greenish smoke; and even the ­distortion (“verzerrten”) is as much a distorted auditory echo of “der verzehrende Hauch der Vergänglichkeit” (“consuming whiff of ­mortality”), as it is a visual one. The distortion dissolves the ­earlier descriptions, while at the same time recalling them as memories.96 The attempt to render presence tangible and lasting has failed in both instances: neither column nor memories of memories can fulfil the narrator’s desire for presence as an escape from the past and its reminders of poverty. His response is yet again reminiscent of the figure of Rimbaud, above all in its disdainful tone: “Because they had passed long ago I hated them, and also because they had passed so fast.”97 This sentence is also remarkably similar to the merchant’s son’s renunciation upon his deathbed: “He hated his premature death so much that he hated his life for having brought him to it.”98

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This disdain colours his entire judgment of the cultural artifacts the ancient Greeks had left behind, and does so in an antagonistic spirit akin to Plato’s critique of art in the Republic, expanding that critique to the Greek pantheon: “All was gone, even while it still believed it existed! And over it, floating, the eternal fata morgana of their poetry; and their deities themselves, what uncertain phantoms flitting by … Gods, eternal gods? Milesian fables, a decoration painted on the wall of a wanton’s house.”99 The critique rests on an ontology that identifies the true with existence and its eternal ebb and flow: art is no longer, precisely insofar as it believed itself to be. A clumsier but equally ­possible translation of the first sentence in the block quote would be: “Already, everything was not, insofar as it believed itself to be!” The word “indem” can mean both “while” (as in the quoted translation) and “insofar as” or “by doing something.” In any case, attributing the faculty of belief to the ostensibly inanimate object suggests that these figures, names, and fragments have an ambiguous ontological status. A distorted version of René Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, these objects believe they are, therefore they are not – or are they? If they can believe, then they are not merely objects for the subject’s cognition and gaze; they are also subjects in their own right – a factor that raises the phenomenological experience to the aesthetic, as will be made clearer in the encounter with the statues. I classify these things as part of the aesthetic because the narrator himself describes the “fata morgana of their poetry” that hovers above. We need not go back as far as Plato to understand the significance of this miragelike quality for the aesthetic; Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense” speaks precisely to this aspect of non-identification, uncertainty, and slippage, while Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” celebrates it. But even if we can attribute a “subjective” quality to these aesthetically experienced objects and thoughts, their coherence is still always in the process of dissolving and reforming. Art is ­evanescent; and so are the “eternal” gods, those “uncertain phantoms flitting by” whose existences have been relegated to murals in some wanton’s house. I have mentioned Plato in this chapter more than once, primarily in the context of his sceptical stance towards art. But Plato plays more than one role and even appears explicitly in a vision, amplifying the sense of disdain and even arrogance that the reader witnesses in the narrator:

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The sun must have sunk lower, the shadows lengthened, when a glance met mine – deep and equivocal as that of a passerby. He walked on and was already half-turned away from me, also ­contemptuous of this town, his hometown. His glance revealed me to myself, and revealed him: it was Plato. Around the lips of the inventor of myths, the despiser of gods, hovered arrogance and spook-like dreams. In a magnificent, spotless garment ­carelessly brushing the ground, he walked along, the non-citizen, the regal man; he floated past, like ghosts who walk with locked feet. Contemptuously he touched time and place, he seemed to hail from the East and to disappear towards the West.100 Plato becomes a placeholder for several qualities already at play in “Moments in Greece.” First, Plato’s gaze meets the narrator: The narrator is the object of the gaze as much as he himself is a gazer. The philosopher-ghost’s gaze and the careless (“lässig”) brushing of his gown upon the ground recall the figure of the monk from the monastery and his casual (also described as “lässig”) way of standing with his gaze directed towards the travellers. Plato’s gaze is also “equivocal as that of a passerby,” recalling the wanderer from Lauffen an der Salzach. And, if inclined to an intertextual reading, the reader is thrown into an abyss of allusion and suggestion. Consider Hofmannsthal’s laudatory yet eerie poem “Einem, der vorübergeht” (To one who passes by) with its poetic reference to and distortion of the poet Stefan George, with whom the young Hofmannsthal briefly associated. The poem depicts the power of another person to reveal to oneself aspects within oneself forgotten or unknown. The line in “Moments in Greece” – “His glance revealed me to myself, and revealed him” (Sein Blick enthüllte mir mich selbst und ihn) – echoes the poem’s first two lines: “You reminded me of things / hidden within myself” (Du hast mich an Dinge gemahnet, / Die heimlich in mir sind).101 This passage in “Moments in Greece” also seems to reference Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal poem “À une passante” and George’s 1901 translation, “Einer Vorübergehenden,” in Die Blumen des Bösen. In the Baudelaire poem and in George’s translation, we see imagery similar to that of this passage on the phantom Plato; in both the poem and the description of Plato, special attention is drawn to the hem of the “magnificent, spotless garment, carelessly brushing the ground.” This is where high meets low. In Baudelaire’s poem, a majestically

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melancholy woman walks by, “Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet” (George: “Ihr finger gravitätisch / Erhob und wiegte kleidbesatz und saum” – “her fingers ponderously / lifted and balanced the dress’s trimmings and hem”).102 Plato’s disdain, by contrast, is not for the low, as might be read in the image of the lady lifting her skirt to keep it clean. Rather, his ­disdain is for the high, or the high-seeming – he is a “despiser of gods,” and a disdainer of art (again, associated with “high culture” and the delusion of wealth); and yet he also betrays the arrogance of the mythmaker, the poet. Plato embodies the essential paradox of the ­aesthetic: its power, its ineffectuality (Plato is an insubstantial phantom), its height and depth. Plato is sceptical of art’s deception and power over the passions, yet he, “the inventor of myths,” is a great artist himself. Recalling Goethe’s famous proclamation in the West-östlicher Divan, Hofmannsthal reminds us that poetic writing is a kind of arrogance for which the poet should not be chid.103 Goethe’s poem is an apology for the artistic hubris of the poet who defies rational logic. Yet as we have seen, the lowly monk in “The Monastery of St Luke” displays something suggestive of a similar kind of arrogance. For the poet, arrogance is displayed in the very act of writing and is linked to the sin of pride. That is, this is demonic work. The image of Plato floating along with his feet locked is borrowed here (and again later in Die Frau ohne Schatten) from Goethe’s Faust. In that play, the titular character sees a magically conjured image (“Zauberbild”) floating by with locked feet. He believes this image to be his beloved Gretchen, yet it turns out to be the work of demonic magic.104 Art, even as a creative product of the poet as alter deus, has something vaguely diabolical about it. Yet Hofmannsthal, in grappling with the place and purpose of art, is not satisfied to leave it all up to arrogance and illusions. The narrator himself takes on the role of the passerby (der Vorübergehende). Jerry Glenn has suggested that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is also lurking behind the words of the poem addressed to George, namely, when the fool counsels Zarathustra to abandon the city: “Have pity on your foot! Rather spit on the city gate and turn back.” And Zarathustra, grown weary of the fool’s ramblings, concludes: “where one can no longer love, there one should pass by [vorübergehen].”105 If Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was an influence on the poem, it seems to have had an even stronger role to play in Hofmannsthal’s characterization of this ghost of Plato, a figure that combines the image of passing by with

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that of disdain for the city and the times (and more broadly, temporality itself) and space: “Contemptuously he touched time and place.” His disdain has the function of revealing to the narrator his own artistic weakness: “and my guilt lay clear as the day. It is your own weakness, I called to myself, you are unable to revive all this. It is you yourself who tremble with transience, you who steep all about you in the ­terrible bath of time.”106 In a gesture of frustration, the narrator decides that, if he cannot exercise his creative powers, he will at least read. But according to Hofmannsthal active reading involves creativity and a certain suspension of the notion of self-as-agent.107 The narrator’s choice of reading matter – the Sophoclean tragedy Philoctetes – is also significant: like Oedipus (whose path the travellers have walked), Philoctetes is wounded in the foot and cannot walk without constant pain. The German wanderer, too, walked barefoot, suffering the entire way; and, like the German wanderer, Philoctetes makes one uncomfortably aware of one’s own guilt. Gilbert Murray says of him: “So when Philoctetes charges Neoptolemus to look him in the face: τòν προστρóπαιον, τòν ἱκέτην, ὦ σχέτλιε; he means: ‘Me, charged with the wrath of God; me, who kneel before thee, O hard heart.’”108 Zarathustra is urged to have pity on his own feet and not enter the city. Plato practically hovers, his feet locked, neither one touching the ground. Even the verb vorübergehen is closely associated with the feet – gehen means “to walk,” and walking in this setting brings ­constant reminders of the passing (das Vorübergehen) of time, as we saw at the beginning of this section: “‘Passed,’ said I involuntarily, and lifted my foot over the fragments of ruin that lay around here by the hundreds.”109 Frustrated with the unclear motives of the character Odysseus in the play Philoctetes and the injustice that seems to govern so much of human actions, the narrator finds himself sympathizing with Philoctetes, thereby establishing a connection to the character’s dramatic fate.110 Yet there is something of a dramatic irony in this identity; the narrator does not seem himself to be aware of it and instead focuses on the incomprehensibility and vanity of the dramatic action, underscoring the necessity of Philoctetes’ presence: “they must know that without Philoctetes himself the town cannot fall.”111 The Sophoclean drama, beautifully written and enchanting, explains neither why this man need suffer, nor why the other characters do not see his importance.112 Frustrated with the other characters’ actions and apathy, the narrator puts down the book: he cannot be the stage upon which Sophocles’ drama plays out.

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The unbridgeable chasm between the narrator and the “impossible antiquity” he has encountered at every turn – the gods, the column, the book – is characterized first by the unavoidable transience of things; it is as if only the shell of the ancient world were left behind, its substance or essence having long since taken flight into the air: “Here, where I had hoped to touch it with my hands, here it is gone, here more than anywhere else.”113 This is more than an expression of frustration; it is a careful reworking of the ancient Greek (and Roman) encounter with the shades. Achilles in The Iliad sees a dream image of Patroclus and tries to embrace him, to no avail. Odysseus, likewise, in his katabasis thrice tries to embrace his mother, Anticleia, and thrice encounters only air. Now the narrator is faced with physically tangible ruins: columns, books, rocks, temples. But he cannot grasp antiquity. Its essence, its meaning, its explanation for the absurd injustices of life and suffering are absent. All these things have slipped from him as the shades from Achilles’ and Odysseus’ searching arms. The only possible response he can entertain is to abandon it all for lost, and to walk on: “I raised my foot to leave the ghostly place of the Nonexistent.”114 Despising that which seems to have no presence, the traveller betakes himself to a place where he expects to be surrounded by real presence – a museum, with “treasures found in the rubble of the graves: they have resisted, at least for the moment, the power of time; they express only themselves and are of incomparable beauty.”115 His hope is influenced not by a worldview associated with antiquity, but rather by a modernity enamoured with the small things that, in their simplicity and presence, are beautiful and promise a place of respite from an incomprehensible world. That is, Hofmannsthal’s narrator wishes to escape to the present, to his present. And he thinks he can achieve this by surrounding himself with things of enduring presence. In his essay on Auguste Rodin, Rilke writes of “things” and “the unwritten law that lived in the sculpture of the past,” noting that the “distinguishing characteristic of things – this complete self-­ absorption – was what gave sculpture its serenity; it could neither demand nor expect anything from outside itself, and it could refer to nothing and see nothing that was not within itself.”116 The emphasis on autotelic existence – on answering to no purpose other than its own existence – is what is meant by “autonomy of art,” here attributed to things. On 8 August 1903, Rilke writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé of the “art-thing,” or Kunst-Ding: it is removed from ravenous time,

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and given over to space  – the space, in this instance, being the museum.117 Yet the art-object itself is, in one respect, like a museum: it houses the beauty that otherwise would be subject to decay, not through imitative representation, but through the evocation or suggestion of something absent.118 Hofmannsthal, like Rilke, is fully aware of the suggestive potential of art objects (heir to symbolism that he is), and infuses this potential with his own melancholic nuance. The object exists as a productive absence; the presence of the thing is a monument to that absence; the museum is a mausoleum, with an aesthetic turn of the screw. The self-sufficiency of the symbolic art-objects segues into the Symbolist air of fin-de-siècle Vienna as the narrator very nearly quotes Hofmannsthal’s own 1896 poem, “Die Beiden” (translated as “The Both of Them” by McClatchy in The Whole Difference). The narrator moves from a general remark about these Kunst-Dinge (art-things) to a particular hypothetical example: “A goblet [Becher] resembles the roundness of a breast or the shoulder of a goddess. A golden snake that once encircled an arm evokes that arm.”119 In a similar gesture, the poem of 1896 opens: “In her hand she carried the cup [Becher] to him – Her chin and mouth were like its rim.”120 The physical body is compared with and then spatially juxtaposed to and expressed through reference to the cup. They share a space of existence, calling each other and responding within the framework of the symbol. In a similar manner, the imagined golden serpent once wound round an arm evokes the arm itself, now gone. Art recalls life through evocation and suggestion. The snake recalls the arm, but it also, indirectly, recalls another ekphrastic moment: the serpentine coils of gold in the servant girl’s hair in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” In that story, discussed at length in chapter 1, the living servant is framed by and arises out of a description of golden ornamentation, evoking the powers of Midas and Medusa: “while their dark heads with evil snake mouths, three wild eyes in the foreheads, and eerie jewelry in the cold, hard hair moved next to her breathing cheeks, grazing her fair temples in time with her slow gait.”121 The pull of such things is strong, for they promise duration – a satisfaction of the desire to fix beauty in space. In Georg Büchner’s 1836 novella, Lenz, the eponymous protagonist expresses a desire to fix beauty with a Medusa-like stare122 so that it might be preserved and shared with others. Similarly, in “Moments in Greece,” the narrator’s desire for preservation suggests a deeper

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discontent and a greater loss suffered. Turning something to gold or to stone is the mythical expression of a desire to overcome the poverty one feels when encountering death or absence. But to what degree can one rely on an economy of presence? The narrator himself, recalling yet again the image of Rimbaud and his quest for money, knows that any supposed essence or true being of Greek antiquity is unattainable, and so sets his sights on the lowly, the graspable, the Kunst-Dinge, that recall the life that once surrounded them.123

A e s t h e t ic E n c o u n t e r as Augenbli ck The first half of this third section has been concerned with the poverty of presence. The second half presents a complement in the overwhelming presence of a collection of Greek statues. That presence is felt in the aesthetic moment or Augenblick, a word whose etymology refers to “the glimpse (or blink) of an eye.” The moment is a double motion: the eye opens for an instant before it closes again. In the final “moment” in Greece, the Augenblick itself becomes an object of consideration. Upon entering the museum, the narrator encounters something far grander than the charming but unassuming goblet with its wispy hints of life. He encounters, instead, something that seems to have a life of its own: the faces of a collection of korai – those freestanding statues of ancient Greece known for their “archaic smile.” The narrator’s frustrated attempts to describe the last “moment” result in a proliferation of words strung together by colons, with each successive phrase serving as an attempt to clarify and inch towards an adequate description; but with each phrase, the immeasurability of the moment continues to overwhelm the words. Hofmannsthal’s sentences form a wavelike rhythm; the iterations and reiterations of this ineffable presence do not cease until the narrator comes to describing his vision of that mysterious, time-defying smile – a smile that has played so central a role in the long history of aesthetic discussions: “At that moment something happened to me: an indescribable shock. It came not from outside but from some immeasurable distance of an inner abyss: it was like lightning: the room, as it was, rectangular with whitewashed walls and the statues that stood there, became for an instant filled with a light utterly different from that which was really there: the eyes of the statues were all at once turned towards me and

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an unspeakable smile occurred in their faces.”124 Expressible only obliquely, this “something” is a “shock,” the source of which is located, if it can be located at all, in that distance within the interior abyss, its temporal quality conveyed only as the flash of an instant. The description resembles the visionary Augenblick in the “Address”: there, a hanging tapestry has the capacity to illuminate the “arbitrarywill-become-form of the joining colours and shades.”125 Here, too, the connectivity of things has been rendered aesthetically – or perhaps we could reverse the terms and say that aesthetic manifestation is rendered through connectivity. The surroundings in which this “something” takes place – its atmosphere – is a kind of Hofmannsthalian version of the Platonic khôra, the space described in the Timaeus (52a-b),126 where things come into being and form is given (as in the smile: “an unspeakable smile occurred in their faces”). It is the space of the universe of forms and their representation. Hofmannsthal gives this space an aesthetic emphasis: this is where the work of art can reveal its form. But that revelation, as scholars have affirmed, involves a moment of dissociation.127 That raises the question: What is it about the aesthetic experience and momentary revelation that brings us back to ourselves – after the dissociation? For Hofmannsthal, one answer is: beauty’s capacity to awaken a response. Khôra can prepare us to answer. Keeping beauty’s call to responsibility in mind, we see that Hofmannsthal’s idea of space here would in at least one respect be closer to Derrida’s explanation of the khôra than to, say, Heidegger’s “clearing” (Lichtung), insofar as there is ultimately a call of responsibility within this formproducing space. This is evident, for instance, in Derrida’s analogy between Socrates and khôra: “Socrates is not khôra, but he would look a lot like it/her if it/she were someone or something … Socrates does not occupy this undiscoverable place, but it is the one from which, in the Timaeus and elsewhere, he answers to his name. For as khôra he must always ‘be called in the same way.’”128 There is a call in the khôra, as there is in the aesthetic space. Responding to one’s name and doing so in a like (or adequate) fashion are demanded of the viewer (or listener). For Derrida, this kind of response involves a degree of effacement. In Ancient Greek theatre, effacement was commonly enacted by the humble character of the εἴρων (eiron), whence the phrase “Socratic irony” and, further down the line, our own literary understanding of the term. The effacement can be expressed as privation of any real

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referent.129 In Hofmannsthal’s text, too, there seems to be no real referent (the critique of Naturalism is still hale and hearty): “the room … became for an instant filled with a light utterly different from that which was really there.”130 And yet for Hofmannsthal, the work of art – “arbitrary-will-become-form” – will take on a face in this space, uniting humility and hubris. In fact, the face issues the call for responsibility. Hofmannsthal uses this space as a stage for the work of art and its ironic face.131 Keeping in mind the notion that beauty binds us to some duty,132 we see this expression of responsibility emanating from the eyes of the statues. In this moment of shock, being subjected to the statues’ gaze is indeed one of those profound moments that “can make us tremble.”133 Derrida uses that phrase when describing the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and it might seem strange to invoke the name of a man who wrote so eloquently on the nefarious appeal of art; yet Hofmannsthal himself has already done this for us in his vision of the phantom Plato. All three thinkers  – Plato, Hofmannsthal, and Levinas – wrestled with the same issues: art threatens to overtake us and to steal us away from reality by offering a fantasy world. Art is, like writing, a pharmakon, a drug with the capacity to heal and to harm. Hofmannsthal clearly falls on the side of art, but he does so in a way that accounts for the inherent ambiguity of the aesthetic. In “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas argues that art inspires disengagement. He uses Pygmalion’s statue as an example par excellence for art: “The artwork does not succeed, is bad, when it does not have that aspiration for life which moved Pygmalion. But it is only an aspiration. The artist has given the statue a lifeless life, a derisory life that is not master of itself, a caricature of life. Its presence does not cover over itself and overflows on all sides, does not hold in its own hands the strings of the puppet it is.”134 The lifeless statue and other works of art by their very nature, according to Levinas, induce a similarly lifeless stupor in the observer: “Do not speak, do not reflect, admire in silence and peace – such are the counsels of wisdom satisfied before the beautiful.” The statues are, for Hofmannsthal too, speechless in that they, as Levinas says “have mouths but do not speak.”135 But Hofmannsthal does attribute faces to them (a distinctly ethically charged image for both Hofmannsthal and Levinas) and, more essentially, a physicality that demands response, and even responsibility. Levinas would argue against any kind of phenomenological or aesthetic mediation in the confrontation with the face: “Infinity presents

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itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyses my powers and from the depths of defenceless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution. The comprehension of this destitution and this hunger establishes the very proximity of the other … To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation. To manifest oneself as a face is to impose oneself above and beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form … In Desire are conjoined the movements unto the Height and unto the Humility of the Other.”136 There are remarkable parallels between Levinas’s description of the encounter with the face in its “ethical resistance” and Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the encounter with the statues’ faces – with their aesthetic resistance. One might argue, again along Platonic lines, that in the statues we have only images of faces (that is, a phenomenological intermediary, not self-made, mute, existing but not alive), but for Hofmannsthal’s narrator these images call attention to and validate physical existence. They possess, through their very plasticity and Medusa-like gaze, their own means to call to the observer and recall that “nudity and destitution.” The statues are a site wherein “are conjoined the movements unto the Height and unto the Humility of the Other” – and for Hofmannsthal, these movements of recognizing the other involve a return to the self. Height and humility, hubris and meekness, are united in the work of art. Shock is the traveller’s first (involuntary) response to the statues’ eyes and the “unsägliches Lächeln” (unspeakable smile) that graces their faces. The smile is associated with the beauty and mystery of the Mona Lisa as much as with the archaic smile of a statue like the Peplos Kore of Athens. It is worth lingering on this smile, which in the secondary literature on “Moments in Greece” has received surprisingly little ­attention; yet the image is key to the passage and to the narrator’s own awareness: “At the same time I knew: I am not seeing this for the first time.”137 Erwin Kobel and Zsuzsa Breier acknowledge that, with this smile, Hofmannsthal would be thinking of Leonardo da Vinci. Kobel calls this an “archaisches Lächeln” (archaic smile), which, while ­certainly not incorrect – it is the proper term from an art historical perspective – is inadequate, since it does not account for the timelessness and even the modernity of the moment; nor does Kobel ask what this smile could be suggesting. He leaves the allusion unexplored. Breier reduces the smile and the eyes to memory’s handmaidens, stating that they are important in this respect alone.138 It seems to me that Hofmannsthal’s images are more complex and meaningful than that.

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Figure 3.2  Phrasikleia Kore, Ariston of Paros, 550–540 bc. Depicts a typical archaic smile.

The eyes and the mouth are perhaps the most expressive parts of the face in Western physiognomy.139 Hofmannsthal is deliberately drawing on Walter Pater’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci (in The Renaissance), parts of which he had translated some years earlier.

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Towards the beginning of the essay, Pater identifies two of Leonardo’s early influences: “the smiling of women and the motion of great waters,” that is, the beautiful and the sublime. That the moment of shock in “The Statues” should be connected with the faces and smiles of the korai is meaningful first of all insofar as it unites the beautiful and the sublime in one aesthetic experience. Their “unspeakable smile” is practically a translation of what Pater identifies as the “­germinal principle” of Leonardo’s work, namely “the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it.” La Giaconda’s smile, one of the most well-known of such enigmatic expressions to grace canvas, embodies for Pater countless fates and histories, radiating outward from the present moment, as much an expression of today as of yesteryear, as familiar as it is strange.140 Hofmannsthal has located this smile in the korai, such that the narrator too recognizes something of the countless fates and stories in these faces – not just his own, but others’ as well. Yet Hofmannsthal resists the idea of totality as a final negation of particularity. Instead, communion is the key, as it was in “The Wanderer”: “in some other world I have stood before these, have had some kind of communion with them, and ever since then everything in me has been waiting for just this shock, and so dreadfully I had to be shaken thus within my innermost self in order to become again what I had been.”141 The insistent use of the demonstrative pronouns (“these,” “them,” “this”) highlights the importance of particularity and nearness; on the other hand, one can indeed be lost in a place and time defined only by vagueness, suggesting the indefinite rather than the definite: “At that moment something happened to me”; “It came not from outside but from some immeasurable distance of an inner abyss”; “in some other world”; “had some kind of communion.”142 This is a world of suspension between definitudes. It is what Hofmannsthal, in his notes to himself, entitled Ad me ipsum, calls “Präexistenz.”143 It is a moment of shared ritual – each repeated performance a unique occurrence (here, before the statues) yet partaking in a common practice – and a rite of passage, as Hofmannsthal clearly indicates, subject to the laws of neither space nor time: “Somewhere a ceremony was taking place, a battle, a glorious sacrificial offering: that was the meaning of this tumult in the air, of the expanding and shrinking of the room, the meaning of this unspeakable exaltation in me, of this effervescing sociability, alternating with this mysterious anxiety and despondency: for I am the priest who will

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perform the ceremony – I, too, perhaps the victim [“Opfer”] that will be offered: all this presses towards decision, it ends with the crossing of a threshold, with a landing.”144 The “landing” is a clear reference to the ship-wrecked man from the “The Wanderer,” but the link this time is marked by humility and sacrificial offering.145 Such sacrificial humility can be attributed to the poet-figure. The poet as priest (related to but distinct from the poet as alter deus) in German literature is a familiar trope. Novalis famously noted in Blüthenstaub (Pollen): “In the beginning, Poet and Priest were one.”146 But the connection between religion and the poet goes further back: the Sturm und Drang playwright and theorist Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz wrote in his Anmerkungen übers Theater (Remarks Concerning the Theatre): “For ever and always the feelings, emotions and passions of men have been grafted on to their religious concepts, a man with no religion has no sensibility whatsoever (woe to him!), a man of twisted religion has twisted sensibilities, and a poet who did not found the religion of his people is worth less than a fairground musician.”147 If art is to be a substitute for religion, however, there must be a way whereby the mystery is made manifest and ­aesthetic (plastic or otherwise). For Hofmannsthal, this is most elegantly achieved in the symbol, the idea of identity that is das Gleiche but not dasselbe. In “The Conversation about Poems,” the origin of the symbol is one of identity between the sacrificial offering and the person performing the sacrifice: the man, as priest, dies in the moment, for the moment, with the animal he sacrifices. In “Moments in Greece,” the scene is more elaborate, the paradoxical nature of the identity more prominent: “effervescing sociability” and “despondency” coexist. Furthermore, the movement arises out of participatory identification: “all this presses towards decision.” This is not a decisionist philosophy in the sense of Carl Schmitt – it is not about the existence of authority justifying the content of the decision – but rather about the necessity of response, of the deed: “it ends with the crossing of a threshold, with a landing.” This action is framed as a poetic rite. “At that moment something happened to me.” This sentence opens the long paragraph detailing the auratic experience, but it seems to end as quickly as it came on. The face – both in art and in life – is the window to this chaos, this ultimate confusion from which the ordered cosmos must again and again be separated: “And now already all this dies down into their faces turning back into stone, it expires and is gone; nothing remains but the death-sigh of despondency. Statues stand

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about me, five of them, only now am I aware of their number, strange they stand before me, heavy and stonelike, with slanting eyes.”148 These statues preserve and re-enact that moment of being in the world before the separation of light from darkness. That confusion exists like a vestige in the work of art. This can be seen in the image of petrification as a continual process, rendered grammatically as a present participle: “turning back into stone.” Crossing the threshold is a kind of death, and whatever remains after this event still is tainted with that death. The moment of identification – which seems not only to have threatened the observer’s independent existence, but even to have killed some part of him – gives way to impenetrable difference.149 The statues’ physical outline is as much a rift in space (frustrating any totalizing identification) as it is a demarcation of their physical presence; at every point along this line of demarcation there is an abyss of difference. The narrator goes on, drawing attention to the particularity of the physical statues before him and to their now seemingly static presence: note the change from present participle “versteinernden” (turning into stone) to the simple adjective “steinern” (stonelike). The ritual has been accomplished. He counts the statues – five – repeating the child’s counting of the soldiers’ faces, only here the number is finite. It is the limiting adumbration of materiality – in short, their physical presence, which will now challenge the observer’s notions of life, of subject and object, and of reality. The narrator writes that there is a life that plays around their chins: they have in their aesthetic presence an aesthetic vitality that appears to have been given them in that moment of strange identification between observer and observed. And yet now, given that life, they stand before him, utterly foreign and ­unattainable symbols of the original chaos: “Am I not standing before the strangest of the strange? Does not the eternal dread of chaos stare at me here from five virginal faces?”150 Despite the shock, the statues, in their imposing physical presence, nearly force a response from the observer. And the narrator does respond, with a kind of paean: “Yet, my God, how real they are! They have a breathtaking sensual presence.”151 The description “breathtaking” (“atemberaubend”) operates chiastically with the above “death sigh of despondency” (“totbehauchte Verzagtheit”) said to have been left behind. Whereas before, held in the throes of ambiguity, the narrator is left with a despondence, the only quality of which is that it has upon it the breath of death, here the narrator’s breath is taken away in amazement at the form and its life. This form is made

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manifest, first, as the reality of physical presence (the phenomenon), a presence appropriately likened to the temple with its architectonic clarity and its privilege as the site of sacrifice and ritual, and also as a metaphor for the body itself. The sentence that follows establishes the link between the body and the face, the seat of represented personality: “Their solemnity has nothing of masks: the face receives its meaning from the body.”152 Moving from the temple of the body to the inner sanctum of the face with its commanding presence and distinction, we trace the trajectories from both the phenomenological and the religious to the aesthetic. Walter Pater writes in his essay on the eighteenth-century German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann: “Greek art … is entangled with Greek religion.” Greek religion, he says, like all religions, is founded on a “pagan sentiment” that “measures the ­sadness with which the human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander far from what is here, and now.”153 Hofmannsthal identifies this pagan sentiment as common to religion, art, and phenomena generally; that is, what unites all three is the condition of difference, distance, and absence. Yet Hofmannsthal does not forfeit the notion of participation – rather, he elevates it: “They participate in things that are above any common conception.” This pronouncement ­heralds the move from the phenomenological to the aesthetic: “How beautiful they are!”154 Beauty, in this sense, is not the pleasant loveliness of the objects the narrator had expected to find,155 but something overpowering that emanates from the statues’ bodies: “Their bodies are more convincing to me than my own … Never before have I seen anything like these proportions and this surface. Did not the universe, for a fleeting moment, open up to me?”156 The universe’s revelation through the physical presence of the statues seems a thoroughly mystical moment. The narrator aptly compares himself to a dreamer. But dreams  – and poetry  – have a special ­connection to reality, according to an aphorism from Hofmannsthal’s collection Buch der Freunde (Book of Friends): “Insofar as one can say anything conclusive about reality, one approaches dream, or rather poetry.”157 For “Moments in Greece,” it is the realm of physical reality that houses this eternity, providing the material for its expression: “it is the secret of infinity in these garments.”158 The material is, in a Hegelian sense, adequate to the idea.159 The statues’ physical presence – their grandeur – is in this aesthetic, sensual moment nevertheless receding and unattainable.

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In light of this aesthetic encounter, and sensing its inevitable ephemerality, the narrator draws a conclusion: “He who would truly be a match for them must approach them by means other than the eye, with greater reverence yet with more daring. And still, it is the eye that would have to bid him, beholding, absorbing, but then drooping, growing dim as with one overwhelmed.”160 This statement is key to understanding Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics. It is the conundrum of Hofmannsthal’s artist-viewer. Just as critical observers have become artists, so too must artists become critical observers while preserving their identity as creators. They must approach with reverence, as one would approach an altar. Yet the eye, in all its metaphorical multivalence, is a necessary medium for that approach; an affected observer responds by sinking, bowing, breaking, and ultimately being overpowered by the vision of the divine, falling into a proskynesis: “My eye did not droop, but a figure sank down over the knees of the priestess, someone rested his forehead on the foot of a statue. I know not whether I thought this or if it happened.”161 There is a sense in which the self is separated from itself in the aesthetic encounter, as if undergoing a near-death experience. The scene recalls an earlier moment, when the traveller takes a drink from the spring. Yet unlike the earlier instance, here the grammatical subject “Ich” is still present; that is, here the self experiences itself as multiplicity. But the artist’s approach is not only reverential; it is bold and at times defiant. Pride functions as a necessary antidote that accompanies its correlative poison – that is, whatever might stifle the creative force, be it anxiety of influence, a sense of inadequacy, or deference to an object more idolized than aestheticized. Defiance and self-assertion, through creating that which is beyond the self, rise to meet the ­aesthetic object, itself a formidable thing. The Platonic pharmakon reasserts itself in the “Moments in Greece” and elsewhere – we might again refer to Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan and the confusion of “Gift” and “Theriak,” that is poison and its antidote. In one of the poems from that collection, Ebusuud Efendi praises Hafis for his poetry, but warns against the excesses of aesthetic indulgence: If you want to err on the side of caution, you must know how to differentiate between snake venom and theriac.162 In “Der Deutsche dankt” (The German gives thanks), which directly follows, one reads the counterstatement: Snake venom and theriac must seem alike to the poet; the one will not kill, the other will not heal.163 As in Goethe, so too in Hofmannsthal one witnesses the yoking together of opposites.

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Both reverence and boldness must be present even to approach such an encounter and to see the world with the eyes of a poet. The importance of power and boldness for artistic creation – especially innovation – is apparent. And if we are unsure, Hofmannsthal himself has already told us, for example, in one of his essays on D’Annunzio, “for beauty comes about there, where there is power [Kraft] and humility [Bescheidenheit].”164 Art transcends the rules of the quotidian by transgressing the boundaries of discursive reason. But how does Hofmannsthal explain the humility necessary for the generation of beauty, and the awe (Ehrfurcht) needed in approaching it? Hofmannsthal has repeatedly invoked notions of communion and participation, and it is this which allows him to conclude the “Moments in Greece” with the triumphal sentence: “If the Unattainable feeds on my innermost being and the Eternal builds out of me its eternity, what then still stands between me and the Deity?”165 Scholars have not offered a satisfying interpretation of this sentence. Zsuzsa Breier calls it “radikal” but does not elaborate. Hans-Jürgen Schings refers to the “Kühnheit der Schlußwendung” – the brazenness of the conclusion’s turn – but he does not explore this further either.166 Carlpeter Braegger, on the other hand, makes an interesting point in referring to the much later introduction Hofmannsthal wrote to Hanns Holdt’s Griechenland: “Perhaps we still take in a complete form, made of marble and rising before us, with a romantic view. Perhaps we lend it too much of our consciousness, of our soul.”167 We also find an interpretive clue in the “Address” from 1902: “The demand imposed on us by the world of beauty, this daimonic process of enticing out of us entire worlds of feeling, this demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected power of the mysterious line of ancestors within us, the towering stacks of layers of our supra-individual memory, piled one upon the other.”168 From a “Romantic” point of view, we are more than merely individuals; at the moment of such an encounter, we live beyond our selves, and we offer ourselves up as sustenance to the other. Where does this ability to offer ourselves up come from? Again, the 1902 “Address”: “For such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’”169 In “Moments in Greece,” the narrator has emphatically designated the statues “schön.” Moreover, the beauty of these statues is tied to something we might call a phenomenological suffering, or sadness. I have already discussed the role of suffering in Hofmannsthal’s “The

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Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” and here it takes several forms as well, the most explicit of which is the depiction of the German wanderer. But even in the statues – these nonhuman entities – the viewer is made privy to a peculiar kind of suffering that arises from phenomena and speaks to the passing away of great things. Having offered himself up to the ecstatic moment of the encounter with the beautiful – his own katabasis – the traveller is then “returned” (the anabasis) and given an understanding of the transience of experiencing that atemporal moment – that Augenblick – and of the interdependence of human being and artwork that gives the moment vitality. In his long study Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (Hofmannsthal and His Time), Hermann Broch describes Hofmannsthal’s “Moments in Greece” in terms of a poetic ecstasy, whereby the artistic mind finds its way back to complete identification and pre-existence. The question remains, though: is this a complete identification? Broch qualifies his statement upon further reflection: the artist, like anyone, must deal with the flux, the constant motion of the world.170 In “Moments in Greece,” there is a heightened awareness of the unknown and of the impossibility of penetrating the surface of things. As Hofmannsthal himself writes in Buch der Freunde (The Book of Friends): “Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface.”171 The statement betrays a typically fin-de-siècle appreciation for the surface, relief, and outline of things, and marks an aesthetic view that focuses on materiality. But the surface is anything but stable: “It would be unthinkable to want to cling to their surface. This surface actually is not there – it grows by a continuous coming from inexhaustible depths.”172 The surface is not; rather, it becomes. Insofar as it comes into being, it passes away as well. Of course, this can be said of all things, animate or otherwise. But in this particular moment, the narrator is able to experience communion with the world. But that connection is tinged with the melancholy of untraversable distance to and universal difference from what is foreign, unknown, and other.173 “They are here and are unattainable. So, too, am I. By this we communicate.”174 —*— As with “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” one might here be tempted to call this encounter a mystical one and leave it at that. The religious tone, the temporal suspension, and the feeling of dissociation

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would all support such an interpretation. The contraction and expansion of space, the very notion of the Reise (as pilgrimage or as metempsychosis), and the sacrifice all read like a medieval dream vision. It seems no coincidence that Hofmannsthal wrote on the final leaf of his copy of The Rise of the Greek Epic the name “Buber,” as if the philosopher Martin Buber’s 1909 Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions) were a source of inspiration. Hofmannsthal adopts much of the imagery associated with the ecstatic, mystical experience as outlined in Buber’s book, yet he creates a literary text that ultimately represents an aesthetic moment. For Buber, the mystical, ecstatic moment is characterized by unity (Einheit); for Hofmannsthal, unity is impossible, except as participation, and even this comes about with the recognition of unreachable otherness. At the same time, Hofmannsthal stresses the dialogical reciprocity in the encounter, quoted above: “They are here and are unattainable. So, too, am I. By this we communicate.” Such reciprocity represents a departure from the ecstatic confession in the sense that Buber describes. This last of the Moments does not exhibit unity, but comes about in the face of the other. If anything, “Moments in Greece” has more in common with Buber’s later work on dialogical philosophy, here anticipated in Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the work of art. Some fourteen years later Buber will write in Ich und Du (I and Thou) about art in a way that recalls “Moments in Greece”: “Tested for its objectivity, the form is not ‘there’ at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it.”175 The surface, too, is not there, but is in a process of becoming; and both the viewer and the statue have the power to affect each other through a kind of identification. In The Book of Friends, Hofmannsthal writes of the generation of “das Plastische,” which can refer to sculpture, threedimensionality, and malleability: “The plastic does not arise from seeing, but rather from identification.”176 The hierarchy of the gaze must be overturned in that momentary loss of the sense of Ego (the self, standing in opposition to the other). The ontological (not simply epistemological) realization comes about in the aesthetic encounter, suggesting that art, too, participates in that dialogue which recognizes and can only exist in conjunction with an other. This is for Hofmannsthal the ethical moment in art. But it remains to be seen whether the union of ethics and aesthetics can ever be realized in the world beyond the page, and beyond the gaze.

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4 Aesthetic Transfiguration in Die Frau ohne Schatten

The Märchen, or fairy-tale, is the least realistic of literary genres. On a philosophical level, it serves a similar experimental function to that of the essay. But unlike the essay, the aesthetic features of the text are not merely aides for the imagination, they are frequently objects of reflection. Just as beauty cannot be, as Hermann Broch says, “its own critical authority,” neither can ethics.1 Die Frau ohne Schatten, Hofmannsthal’s most convoluted Märchen is, paradoxically, also one of his most sustained meditations on ethics. Die Frau ohne Schatten has an unusual genesis.2 As early as 1909, Hofmannsthal had an idea for a fairy-tale opera, which would eventually result in a grandiose and difficult collaboration with Richard Strauss. Ten years later, the opera premiered in Vienna on 10 October 1919 under the direction of Franz Schalk. But post-war circumstances had a considerable effect on both the staging and the reception. The situation was neither economically nor socially propitious. Restricted imports from Czechoslovakia – especially coal, reduced steel, and iron – brought industry to a halt, and limitations on power usage and the reduction of food imports contributed to a generally unpleasant life in Austria. The change in the form of government did, however, introduce ­subventions for theatre and music – a product of the Social Democrats’ ambition to make “high art” available to more people.3 After the war, Strauss was asked to be co-director (together with Schalk) of the Wiener Staatsoper – hence the choice of Vienna for the opera’s premiere. He accepted a substantially reduced income, which nevertheless seemed to many rather high for such a city with such economic woes.4

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For an opera like Die Frau ohne Schatten, the financial limitations could have proven fatal. This is Strauss’s and Hofmannsthal’s most demanding work: it is their longest opera, and it requires five worldclass singers and an immense (and tireless) orchestra. Hofmannsthal’s symbol-laden libretto and cinematic stage directions likewise require many resources that opera companies for years after the war simply lacked.5 Many critics did receive the opera positively, but audiences were not as enthusiastic.6 Though staging the opera so soon after the war was far from ideal, the other option would have been to hold off indefinitely. Technical and financial difficulties aside, Hofmannsthal began to sense while writing the libretto that the material of Die Frau ohne Schatten demanded more than one approach. He decided to work on a prose version of the story while still writing the libretto. In October of 1919, he penned a letter to a fellow writer, Raoul Auernheimer, and explained: “There are six years of work in this book, all the good, pure moments I was able to salvage from these dark times, and an unspeakable effort.”7 Like the opera, the prose version bears the scars of its conception. But this prose Märchen could say more, because the stage of the imagination has fewer limitations than a physical stage. The prose tale is interesting also because of what Hofmannsthal added to the story.8 Key elements like the carpet motif, the elaborate description of the Emperor’s petrification (the human being transformed into a work of art), and the explosion of colour at the end of the story are absent from the opera, or function merely as part of the background. Furthermore, the prose version, both in its structure and its imagery, offers a response to the problems of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” Not only the broader narrative strokes – a protagonist from a world of beauty descends to a world of ugliness – but also particular motifs, such as the carpet, recall the earlier work.9 Most importantly, in both tales, the question of beauty and the confrontation with works of art explore the dialogical relationship between ethics and aesthetics, this time in a wartime and post-war context. In an essay from 1949 entitled “Hofmannsthals Wandlung” (Hofmannsthal’s Transformation), Richard Alewyn formulated what became an oft-cited interpretation of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” thus: “Life – according to Hofmannsthal – will not be mocked. If defied, it becomes angry and vengeful.”10 Alewyn reads

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Die Frau ohne Schatten as a transformation of the aestheticism conundrum presented in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,”11 but his observations want demonstration. In what, precisely, does this transformation (“Wandlung”) consist? Hofmannsthal’s transformation need not be read as a refutation of earlier work, nor as a herald of a sudden, new interest in social or ethical concerns.12 Transformation can incorporate what existed before. In the case in Die Frau ohne Schatten, the earlier literary material is clarified – one might even say “transfigured” (verklärt). In a literary studies context, “transformation” as a motif occurs most frequently in two kinds of stories: the novel genre of Bildungs­ roman, and mythical stories like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and fairy tales. The characters in Die Frau ohne Schatten are not novelistic, and although they are treated with subtlety and given a complexity of emotion, they are more like the characters of Shakespeare’s Tempest than of his Hamlet, still somehow of the aether, even if they gain shadows in the end. The ethical resolution is too magical a transformation to realize in a novel. In this wartime Märchen, unlike the Märchen from 1895, the resolution is a happy one, but it is achieved artificially (or artfully) through a logic of deus-ex-machina in the guise of sacrifice. In his essay “Die Ironie der Dinge” (“The Irony of Things”), written in 1921, Hofmannsthal reflects on a fragmentary observation attributed to Novalis: “After an unhappy war, comedies must be written.”13 According to Hofmannsthal, comedy is the genre of irony par excellence.14 Whoever has survived a crisis gains the clear spirit and insight of irony, much like one who has died and returned.15 Die Frau ohne Schatten can therefore be described as a comedic Märchen (by contrast, the “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” would be a tragic Märchen), which explores the possibility of life after death (of some kind), not just of the individuals who have survived trauma, but of future generations. If there is a message or a moral in the story it is this very obvious one: Life may persist after death insofar as we create the conditions for future generations to thrive. The story is complex, so a summary is in order. The setting is a mythical empire of the Southeastern Islands. While hunting, the Emperor of the land comes upon a shadowless gazelle and shoots it. The gazelle transforms before his eyes into a woman, the daughter of the Spirit King (“Geisterkönig”) Keikobad. The Emperor’s falcon attacks the

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gazelle-woman in the moment of her transformation, for which it is chastised before flying away. The Emperor and this newly transformed woman fall in love, but their union is troubled. In marrying a mortal, the woman loses her ability to change shape at will; furthermore, if within a year she still casts no shadow – a sign that she will bear no children – then her husband, the Emperor, will turn to stone. The Empress (now wife of the Emperor) has mysteriously forgotten (or repressed) her knowledge of the curse. Only her Nurse, who harbours a deep distrust of and aversion to humans, remembers. Time passes, and with every new month a messenger from the spirit realm comes to the palace to remind the Nurse of what will happen if the Empress fails to cast a shadow. But the Nurse keeps her knowledge silent, hoping for an eventual return to Keikobad’s realm. There are now three days remaining. This is when the narrative begins. When the Empress awakes one morning, her husband is already away again on one of his daily hunts. As she speaks with her Nurse, a falcon suddenly appears in the sky – the same falcon that had flown away – and with its appearance, the Empress recalls the curse. She then commands the Nurse to help her acquire a shadow. To do so, they must descend to the city below, where suffering souls might be willing to sell their shadows. According to the Nurse, humans are venal creatures. The two make their way through the city and find a woman, the wife of a Dyer named Barak (the Semitic root of which means “to kneel down”). The Dyer’s Wife is unhappy in her marriage and says she is prepared to exchange her shadow for a life of eternal beauty and freedom from her aging husband. This means she will never be able to bear children and must abandon Barak for a demon. With time, the Empress comes to see the suffering such an exchange will bring about: Barak will lose his wife and any hope of a family; and his wife will lose not just her ability to bear children but her humanity as well.16 With this knowledge, the Empress decides to sacrifice her own and her husband’s lives for those of the poor couple. In doing so, she restores the shadow to the Dyer’s Wife, gains her own, and saves her husband. This is a summary of the story’s plot; but woven into the plot is another story about the power of art and its relation to ethics. How these two stories inform each other is central to Hofmannsthal’s reflections on the encounter with art.

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T h e P a l a t ia l Ves ti bule Die Frau ohne Schatten begins, like the “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” with a description of the world that the Empress inhabits: a secluded blue palace on an island in an almost magical, typically German Kunstmärchen setting  – an imaginative space removed not only from the reader’s world, but also from the harsher climes of other, impoverished people in the tale itself.17 The story begins with the Empress’s Nurse as she nostalgically recalls in the early ­morning darkness how the Empress, before her marriage to the mortal Emperor, could change her shape at will and live as any and all creatures. Now enclosed in the palace, which belongs neither to the spirit realm nor to the city below, the Empress and the Nurse are as if suspended between dream and reality.18 In many ways, this world is antagonistic to the characters’ development.19 Neither here nor there, neither this nor that, there is something ontologically ambiguous about the place, which recalls that “Nicht-Leben” (not-life) described in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” as well as Dante’s vestibule to Hell. Here, Hell is the city below, where mortals toil and suffer.20 Stuck in this vestibule, the Nurse has been counting the fruitless months and monotonous days as they die away. The Emperor goes out to hunt and returns late at night to sleep at the Empress’s side. This repetition is not ritual; it is an attempt to hold on to what has passed. Or, in Nietzsche’s words: “Woe speaks: Vanish! Yet all delight desires eternity – profound eternity!”21 All three characters at this point are possessed by their desire to retain something of the past, something that can and will slip through their fingers into oblivion. For the Nurse, the goal is to repurchase what was lost; for the Emperor and the Empress, the goal is to re-enact daily their moment of falling in love. One might say they are trying to capture their moment of Kairos and smuggle it into the regularity of Chronos. In the Emperor’s case, this sort of regularity induces blindness to the flow of time, which has several repercussions. He enters the scene only briefly – the description takes up a mere eighteen lines – and his gestures are telling. In the opera, the Emperor has a memorably long aria in which he waxes lyrical about his quests – his hunt of the gazelle transformed into the Empress, and of his search for the red falcon, who disappeared after the Emperor had chastised it for causing injury to the future-Empress. He even talks to the Nurse briefly. In the prose version, however, Hofmannsthal paints with a few simple strokes three

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important aspects of the Emperor’s character: 1) rising fully clothed from his bed, he seems not to have engaged in sexual activity with the Empress, thus not conceiving with her, meaning she will still cast no shadow; 2) his activities are repetitive (as described above), and a result of habit; and 3) he is blind to beauty and its ethical command. The last point is an inference informed by Hofmannsthal’s other writings. Consider the Emperor’s encounter with the Nurse in this scene: “With a light foot, the Emperor stepped over the body of the Nurse, who pressed her face to the ground. He paid her no more attention than if she had been a rug.”22 Like the souls in Dante’s Vestibule to Hell, the Emperor (and the Empress, it might also be argued) is not malicious; his failure is one of sight – a strikingly Dantean sin.23 This is the first time the Emperor’s ethical insufficiency is presented, and it is done so by way of reference to a work of art: the carpet. Like the merchant’s son of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the Emperor owns many beautiful objects but takes no notice of them, and – worse yet – he takes no notice of the living being at his feet, whom he treats as if she were merely a rug upon the floor. This instance foreshadows the dramatic tension to come: later in the story, the Emperor will behold a beautiful carpet, at which point his moral fortitude will be put to the test. Hans-Günther Schwarz put it succinctly when he argued that the Emperor’s eyes must be opened to life as well as to the carpet. For now, however, he is set only on re-enacting the pursuit, and goes again on the hunt.24 The Empress, upon waking from unpleasant dreams, repeats to the Nurse the story of that fateful hunt that brought the two lovers together and sent the red falcon flying. She too replays this moment, even before those who witnessed it at the time: “The story of that hunt and the first hour our love was familiar enough to her [the Nurse]: it was as if a red-hot stylus had burnt the story into her soul.”25 The Nurse becomes angry, however, when the discussion shifts to the subject of the Empress’s dreams: namely, human beings. The Nurse is keen to see that the Empress remain secluded from those other mortal creatures who, unlike the wealthy and handsome Emperor, are ugly, both in face and in soul. The Empress betrays the same prejudice, despite her marriage to a mortal: “Why,” she asks, “are human faces so wild and ugly, and animal faces so honest and pleasing?” 26 Reversing the typical characteristics of human and animal, she attributes wildness and ugliness to the former, but tameness and beauty to the creatures of nature. It is worth noting that elsewhere Hofmannsthal

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has had his characters express precisely the opposite view: in “Das Gespräch und die Geschichte der Frau von W.” (The conversation and the story of Frau von W.) one reads: “Face – hieroglyph. There are no ugly people.”27 But when the red falcon suddenly appears with the Empress’s talisman, upon which the curse is etched, the Empress knows that she – like the merchant’s son in the “Tale,” and like Gianino in The Death of Titian – must descend into the hideous lower world of humankind to find a shadow. The Empress has failed to remember something of great importance – the curse. What alerts her to her error is the talisman: in Arabic, the word ‫مسلط‬ (ṭillasm) means “magical picture” and derives from the Greek τελέω (teleō), “I complete, perform a rite.” While not explicitly an encounter with a work of art (as in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” or “Moments in Greece”), this reunion with the talisman recalls the power that Walter Pater ascribes to beautiful, if seemingly trivial objects: “That sense of fate, which hangs so much of the shaping of human life on trivial objects, like Othello’s strawberry handkerchief.”28 Quite literally, the talisman – a beautiful, pale white stone upon which the symbols glow like fire – is an object upon which the fates of the Emperor and the Empress hang. And the pictorial quality of the talisman further suggests the possibility that the Emperor and Empress will have their eyes opened; this is what enables the ultimate move from repetition to rite and consummation. With this recognition, however, comes a sense of time quite different from that of the Nurse’s: “I will not know how much time is left! Perhaps it shall elapse this hour, and I might freeze, if I knew … Here and nowhere else begins the path, today and not tomorrow, in this hour and not only once the sun is higher in the sky … the seconds are burning my heart.”29 The hic et nunc imperative of desire is, in its active quality, distinct from the desire to tarry in the sweetness of the honeymoon, or before a work of art – or the hesitation before taking decisive and life-changing action. As with the hunt, this spirit of adventure seeks its fulfillment in the pursuit and capture of something outside the ­palace; but unlike the Emperor, the Empress is motivated by a different temporal sensibility: she feels each second burn away. Driven by this almost Faustian exigency, the Empress must descend into the city. The Nurse, too, bears Mephistophelean traces. Like Goethe’s Mephisto, the Nurse leads the Empress through the world on a quest. And like Christopher Marlowe’s Mephistophilis, she hates this world. In answer to Faustus’s inquiry as to how Mephistophilis

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was able to leave Hell, the devil replies with words that could equally be spoken by the Nurse: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss?30 The elision of the difference between Hell and Earth is telling. In Die Frau ohne Schatten, “Heaven” is, for the Nurse, Keikobad’s realm of timeless beauty and endless possibility; all else is Hell in comparison. But it is her experience of the lower pits of a worldly Hell that make her qualified to be the Empress’s guide in the quest for a shadow.

T h e P o e t in t h e Ci ty of Woe Having disguised themselves to be as inconspicuous as possible, the two travellers descend into the city. As in the “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the city is deliberately contrasted to the palace. Even the palette is reversed: instead of the crystal-clear blue of the palace, we have the dirty yellow water of the river which “flowed with great spots of dark colour that came from the Dyers’ Quarter beyond the bridge.”31 To borrow Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the Manchester waterways: “It is the Styx of this new Hades.”32 This multisensory hellscape is composed from the stench rising from the tanneries (where one finds the poorest of the poor); the sight and smell of hanging skins; the clangour of hammers; the stink of hooves burnt for shoe fitting. Masses of people crowd around the Empress, disorienting her in the process. Like a modern metropolis, this city overwhelms the senses and awakens an unnamed anxiety. “The dreadful aspect in the faces of the people struck her from such nearness as never before. She wanted boldly to pass by them, her feet were willing, her heart was not. Every hand that moved seemed to grasp at her, ghastly were these many mouths in such closeness. The merciless, greedy, and, as it seemed to her, anxious glances from so many faces blended into one another in her breast.”33 This passage echoes aspects of the “Address,” yet what there was a metaphor is here a physical reality for the Empress. There the works of art are “like the shadows which surround Odysseus, all desirous to drink of

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his blood, silent, avidly pressed in upon one another.”34 The works of art as well as the faces and hands of the people in the crowd are portrayed as having a desire to possess. They are threatening and greedy. In the works of art, however, this experience is transfigured: “they take hold of us daimonically: and each is a world, and all are from a world which touches us through them and makes us shudder to the core.”35 In the case of the Empress, the experience presents itself as a real physical threat. But here too, as so often with Hofmannsthal, there is a chiastic relationship between the real and the imagined. The encounter with the work of art is presented in the indicative mood – that is, the mood of reality: “they take hold of us.” By contrast, the ‘reality’ of the Empress’s experience is qualified by one word: “Every hand that moved seemed to grasp at her” (my emphasis). As in Baudelaire’s work, ugliness is here made the object of an aesthetic depiction of something like modernity, infused with a Hofmannsthalian sensibility for empathy (with notes from Keats): “[The Empress] nearly went under in the tangle [Knäuel] of people, all of a sudden she found herself before the hoof of a large hinny, whose knowing and soft animal’s gaze met her, and she recovered. The rider struck the head of the hinny, which hesitated so as not to tread upon the trembling woman. – Is it for him to decide that I must transform into an animal and expose myself to the cruel hands of human beings? This thought went through her soul and she shivered, and with that she forgot herself for a moment and found herself c­ arried by the current to the end of the bridge, she knew not how.”36 The narrator presents the Empress’s limited point of view: the “Knäuel” threatens to pull her under and suffocate her. But this tangle will later unravel and be re-tied in an aurea catena homeri – an alchemical image of a chain of transformations, made popular in the eighteenth century by Anton Josef Kirchweger.37 The focus on the hinny contributes to this consideration as well: The animal’s gaze spurs the Empress to consider her own ability to transform into any animal she wishes: that is, she is in some essential way connected to the animal. They are both part of that golden chain. There is an emotional connection as well: As in Raskolnikov’s dream of the pitiable horse,38 the animal here is struck by his rider, awakening in the Empress a sympathy that will later come to guide her actions. Her question – “Is it for him to decide?” – is akin to that posed in Crime and Punishment. Who is responsible? The more the Empress becomes a witness to that life in the shadow of the blue palace, the

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more difficult it is to disentangle her fate from the fates of others. What is more disturbing is the implicit link to her former life: here, the hinny attempts to avoid injuring the Empress, as the rider strikes him violently upon the head. This re-enacts with subtle differences the scene of the hunt, in which the Empress, changing from gazelle- to humanform, is attacked by the red falcon clawing at her head; the falcon is punished by the Emperor. The ties between the beautiful world above and the wretched world below are increasingly evident. As she and the Nurse approach the house of the Dyer (Barak) and his wife, more evidence of suffering confronts them. They observe Barak’s three brothers, once whole in body, now fragments of their former selves. One had lost his eye to an angry bailiff, one had lost his arm in an oil mill accident, and one was crippled after being trampled by a camel – a fate the Empress had just now only narrowly escaped. Their bodies are casualties of labour: The oil mill accident, in particular, points to the ever-present, dangerous working conditions for the lower class. Though these are characters in a fairy tale, contemporaneous readers might well have thought of other mutilated bodies – those of First World War veterans.39 This fictional world makes use of unsettlingly familiar images from reality. In this ugly world there is one beautiful person: The Dyer’s Wife, a woman full of pride and spite (“Hochmut” and “Bosheit”).40 She is contrasted with her husband not only in physical form – to the Empress, Barak is repulsively ugly (“abschreckend häßlich”) – but also in movement and attitude. Barak bears all the signs of his job as a dyer: his hands are stained dark blue, and he carries a great bale of scarlet red cloth he intends to use on a saddle. This he then heaves onto his back, like a camel. Against the pride and lassitude of his wife, Barak’s humility and industriousness seem almost exaggerated. The saddlecloth he carries turns him into a beast of burden. His wife, on the other hand, would fit perfectly into Bruegel’s 1557 depiction of “Desidia,” the sin of sloth. Initially sitting on the ground and staring blankly into space, she moves only once her husband has gone, ­performing her quotidian tasks with utter listlessness. But she is more than an allegorical figure of idleness and vanity. She has been placed into this position by force, not by her own will. Under the (albeit benevolent) rule of a husband old enough to be her father, she lacks the freedom and responsibilities of adulthood. Stunted in this way, she behaves with immaturity. Upon entering the married couple’s home, the Empress trips, and the Dyer’s Wife laughs out loud

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Figure 4.1  Sloth (Desidia), from the series The Seven Deadly Sins, Pieter van der Heyden’s engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1558.

like a child.41 And she is held in stasis by a dilettantish infatuation with beauty – her own, in this case – and is unable to see how her fate is entwined with others’ fates. Like the slumbering woman at the ­centre of Brueghel’s “Desidia” engraving, she is vulnerable to the demons which surround her. And there are demons. In her Mephistophelian manner, the Nurse is able to manipulate the Dyer’s Wife to relinquish her shadow – and with it the possibility of children. All seems to be going according to plan, until the Empress begins to perceive what no one else can: Seven fish, which have been thrown into a pan to fry, begin to cry out in singing tones: “Mother, mother! Let us come home / the door is locked: we cannot get in.”42 In the opera these voices are sung by children, heightening the agony and pathos in their entreaty and connecting them directly to the Dyer’s Wife’s unborn children – now, it seems, condemned to nonexistence.

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This is one of a number of intensifying moments in which the Empress’s feels overwhelmed with compassion  – the first being the encounter with the hinny. Having descended to the world of labour and toil, relegated in this moment literally to the shadows and sensing the suffering of others, the Empress allegorically embodies Hofmannsthal’s artist more than any other character in the story. Richard Alewyn summarizes Hofmannsthal’s views succinctly: “The incognito is the poet’s lifeform. Hofmannsthal leads the poet down from his ivory tower into the bustling markets and streets … Like St Alexius of legend, he lies in his beggar’s clothes, in his house, the house of time, under the stairs, there where he sees and hears all … A St Sebastian, he is bound by the law: bar no one and nothing entry into your soul.”43 Kurt J. Fickert and Peter Celms characterize the Emperor as the poet or artist figure, but given Hofmannsthal’s description in “The Poet and Our Time,” from which Alewyn draws his characterization, it is more reasonable to see the Empress in this role.44 The Empress, like the poet, must descend, disguised, from the blue palace (her ivory tower) to the markets and streets of the city. Like St Alexius, she finds herself in the house of time – a new temporal sphere, breaking from the repetition of her days – and relegated to dark corners where she sees and hears everything. No one recognizes her – not even the Nurse really knows her – and she will experience suffering, for she, now like St Sebastian, must give all things access to her soul. That suffering is brought to a crisis when the Nurse summons the demonic Efrit to place the Dyer’s Wife into a trancelike state of acquiescence and loveless desire. The Empress recognizes that this woman, at heart, does not want to enter into the alliance this way. Hofmannsthal draws his readers’ attention to the hands and the eyes, those parts of the body connected with will and power: “With both hands, the Efrit grasped the wrists of the Dyer’s Wife and forced her to look up towards him; her glances could not resist the penetration of his gaze  … the oppressive feeling of reality held everything together.”45 Like an unwilling witness to violent seizure or rape, the Empress is stunned. She cannot turn away: for not only is she a witness, she is also implicated in the crime. This gives that phrase “the oppressive feeling of reality” a new valence: everything is bound together by this nightmarishly oppressive sense of reality. But the Dyer’s Wife’s desire is intermixed with aversion – though enraptured by the Efrit, she does not fully assent to the union, and her hesitation

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affords her the opportunity to pull herself away from the demon just before Barak enters. At this moment, the Empress’s compassion unfolds and she responds, stepping in between the Dyer’s Wife and the Efrit, whose terrifying face she now boldly confronts: “Through his two unlike eyes there grinned the abysses of a region that barred trespass, a fear seized her, not for herself, but rather in the soul of the Dyer’s Wife, that the latter should lie in the arms of such a demon and let her breath blend with his … An awful feeling shot through the Empress from her spine to the soles of her feet. She hardly knew any more who she was, nor how she had come to be here.”46 In Die Frau ohne Schatten the abyss is almost always at the periphery of the story, and sometimes it is acknowledged, as in this moment. The eyes of the Efrit reveal a grinning – not a gaping – chasm which is both enticing and menacing. Like the faces of the smiling korai in “Moments in Greece,” the Efrit’s face is an abyss which would swallow any sense self. The scene is interrupted when Barak enters. Having come from the market with a variety of delicacies and children in tow, he introduces an incongruously celebratory tenor. His three brothers and the accompanying flurry of children are rambunctious and happy to feast upon such bounty. Yet despite his good intentions, Barak fails to see his wife’s suffering: alternating between feeding treats to the children and to his own wife, “He did not notice that she choked on the bits of food and grew cold and stiff under his caresses, like a corpse.”47 He treats her like a child, but also wishes for her to share in his joy and desire for children. Singing jauntily out of tune – expressing the lack of harmony in their marriage  – he then gently tosses one of the children to his wife, who responds by violently spurning the gesture, quickly standing up, and knocking down the child, who then tumbles into the open fire. Chaos ensues as the other children cry and pull their sister to safety, and the Dyer’s Wife cries out, suffering from what would seem to be a rather cliché example of “hysterics.” Hofmannsthal shows here that those fits which were attributed to “women’s issues” are an expression of deep suffering. A kind of rigor mortis sets in as she bares her teeth at her husband, like an animal. On the level of the plot, both married couples seem to be moving further away from each other as their pain becomes increasingly ­difficult to bear. Meanwhile, the aesthetic web of the story is pulling them together all the more tightly.

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T h e E m p e r o r ’ s Contrapa s so The scene shifts to the Emperor on his hunt, but in an unexpected turn of events, the hunter himself is lured into a trap. Hearing singing voices, he follows them into a cave, described as the “region of his first adventure with the beloved woman.”48 Like the medieval lovegrotto of the tragic lovers Tristan and Isolde, this cave calls forth images of sequestered romance, hidden away from society and the sense of time’s passing. The Emperor’s love for his Empress strikes at the heart of what Kierkegaard writes of in “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage”: Can so intense an experience as that first moment of love be repeated?49 What does love look like over time? Kierkegaard writes: However you turn and twist in it, you must admit that the task is to preserve love in time. … Your misfortune is to ­identify love simply and solely with these visible signs. If these are to be repeated over and over again and, let it be noted, with a morbid concern for their constantly having the reality they had by ­virtue of the accidental feature of its being their first occurrence, it is no wonder you are afraid and refer these signs and “gesticulations” to those things of which one dare not say “decies repetitia pacebunt,”50 for if it was the first time that gave them their value, then a repetition is an impossibility. But healthy love has a quite different worth; it works itself out in time, and is therefore also capable of rejuvenating itself through these outward signs … it has quite another idea of time and of the meaning of repetition.51 Numerous clues suggest that Emperor’s love for the Empress has not matured into that other “idea of time” and repetition. The singing he hears, for one, is full of despair: “To what avail is this, we shall not be born!”52 These are the voices of his unborn children, the witnesses to his failure to preserve love in time. The Emperor enters a room with a table set for two – for himself and the Empress. A child who has brought in the table settings bows to the Emperor, recalling the multiple instances of this gesture in “Moments in Greece”: “He pressed his hands together upon his breast and bowed … The boy bowed before the Emperor down to the earth and spoke no word. But he pointed with a reverential gesture towards one of the sitting places, at the upper end of the table.”53 The gesture

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of respect before one of higher rank is not only a sign of humility – although it is certainly this – for it is accompanied by a voice from behind: “It is up to him!” (“Es ist an dem!”). This is on the one hand a sign of traditional respect: Do not speak before being spoken to. But it is also an indication that the Emperor is supposed to initiate the dialogue – and indeed, their lives. In this moment, everything depends on him. But, like the medieval Parzival, he is slow to recognize his duty to ask the right question: “It took a moment for the Emperor to realize that it was up to him to speak the first word.”54 The children grow in number, and one in particular – a girl, somewhat older – deserves particular attention. Like the servant in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” she bears in her arms a work of art with religious significance, though this time it is not a pair of bronze statues but a carpet that she herself has woven. The two girls’ gaits are inversions of each other. In “The Tale,” the girl moves thus: “Though perfectly erect, she moved slowly and with ­difficulty … The dark goddesses reached from her hips to her temples and leaned their dead weight against her soft, living shoulders … However, it was not so much the goddesses’ weight and solemnity that seemed a burden to her as the beauty of her own head with its heavy jewelry of dark, vivid gold.”55 Rhythmical but heavy, her movement mimics the movement and sounds of the sentence, as discussed in detail in chapter 1. The girl in Die Frau ohne Schatten, on the other hand, glides rather than walks, and at the end of the section she starts again “as if she were moving towards him with her feet closed together,” explicitly linking her movements with those of the ghost of Plato in “Moments in Greece,” and a whole host of otherworldly beings in Hofmannsthal’s writing.56 The effect is one of elegance and grace, but it also shows ontological difference. Kneeling nearly to the floor, she presents the rolled-up carpet to the Emperor and speaks. Though unborn, she offers pictures (the carpet) and words (dialogue) to the Emperor: “pardon, she said, that I did not hear your arrival, so absorbed in my work on this carpet I was. But if by the time we eat it is to be worthy enough for you to take it – which we hope you will – and have it lie under you, then the final thread dare not be torn off; it must be looped back into the initial thread. – She brought it forth with eyes cast down; the lovely tone of her voice pressed so deeply into the Emperor that he nearly failed to catch the sense of her words.”57 This presentation and her subsequent explanation of the carpet’s manufacture – it is made by hand – link

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several important aspects of the story together. Indeed, this is the central image in the central chapter of the story. The girl’s labour on the carpet draws our attention to the demanding nature of the craft. Such careful craftsmanship is key to the work’s being “worthy”: the thread of the end must be woven together with the thread at the beginning. Compare the Gobelin tapestry described in the “Address” of 1902: “What a peculiar dream an early Gobelin is! A completely closed and bound, exceptional world! … It lives for us, it lives through us. There is something in us that responds to this world-picture.”58 The “completely closed and bound, exceptional world” is separated from the living, breathing world of growth and rot. All the elements and emblems of the Emperor’s life and personhood – the hunter, the lover, the falcon – are brought together into an orderly, symmetrical form; not a bacchanalia of tangled bodies, but an Apollonian harmony of symmetry. The circularity of uniting end and beginning is a sign of chilling perfection. As is typical of Hofmannsthal’s writing, a long and serpentine sentence winds its way through harmonious descriptions only to end abruptly, in this case breaking not the rhythm so much as the magic: “The textile was underneath his feet, flowers passed into animals, hunters and lovers unwound themselves from out of the lovely vines, all things held each other in an embrace, the one was entendrilled in the other, the whole was splendid beyond all measure, but a waft of cool air rose from it up to his hips. – How were you able to construct this with such perfection?”59 This sentence draws together seemingly disparate moods: the beauty of connectivity and the cold air emanating – unlike breath – from the perfect carpet. The visual motifs and the chill rising “up to his hips,” reflect both the content and the form of the Emperor’s life while also revealing his kinship with the merchant’s son of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” who dies after being kicked in the groin – that is, emasculated. But rather than being concerned about the spreading chill, the Emperor asks how the carpet was made, and in the child’s response we hear incantations of the Enlightenment-era author Christoph Martin Wieland’s fictitious character Theophron.60 “I separate the beautiful from the material when I weave; that which is to the senses a decoy and which rattles them to folly and corruption I leave out. When weaving, she said, I proceed as your blessed eye when looking. I see not what is, and not what is not, but rather what always is, and according to this I weave.”61

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The process of refinement through separation contrasts with the process of connection through weaving. Yet it also recalls the original separation common to many myths and religions. Ovid’s Metamorphoses opens with chaos and the separation of the elements, out of which a world is born: the first metamorphosis. The Book of Genesis tells of the separation of matter, space, and time out of the void: Tohuwabohu. The creation of the work of art – its genesis – is in miniature the creation of cosmos from chaos. Unlike “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” where things are reborn from the “chaos of Not-living” as artworks,62 the unborn children do not know chaos, nor do they know suffering; they know only an unnamed longing to move on from what Hofmannsthal calls the “Präexistenz” of this underworld. The artwork which is born out of a division of “das Schöne vom Stoff” (the beautiful from the material) is thus a product of stripping or carving away the base matter. Paradoxically, the “Stoff” (material) could equally refer to the very material out of which the carpet is made. But how can one separate the carpet from the material? In addition to this rarefied view, there is an aesthetic and ethical connection to life beyond the vestibule (whether palatial or “präexistential”). At the Emperor’s strange questions, some of the younger children must make great efforts to avoid laughing out loud, recalling the Dyer’s Wife’s uncontrollable laughter. The children of this beautiful realm of rarefied art are connected through their gestures to the adultchildren of an ugly world. Moreover, the carpet’s very creation depends not only on the weaver, but also on the Dyer.63 We have already seen in the dyers’ district the squalor and toil where the threads and cloths are made brilliant. In real works of art, below the shining surface there is the shadow of labour: colours are the brothers of pain here as in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” The Emperor’s questions all operate according to a logic of separation, division, analysis, and definition. He asks where the children live and where they are going, using binary oppositions: “Is your house nearby or far away? … Is this the beginning of a journey or the end of one?”64 But there are no simple answers. As Hofmannsthal has it in one of his notes: “wrong: seeing every work of art as something definite; always saying: he has given this up, he’s turned to this now, he sees only this; and so he means this and that / wrong the definite / wrong: all cheap antitheses like ‘art’ and ‘life,’ Aesthete and the opposite of aesthete … right: seeing production as a murky business between the individual and tortuous existence.”65 The Emperor

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must learn a new way of seeing – a “Neues Sehen”66 that includes a mature appreciation for that which is not “definite,” and for that which is beyond “all cheap antitheses.” The children, furthermore, answer in paradoxes and upset the parent-child hierarchy by highlighting the Emperor’s own naïve ignorance. They teach him humility in their gestures, bowing as they respond: “Your questions are nonsensical, O great Emperor, like those of a little child. For say to us this: when you go to table, do you do so in order to remain in your state of satiation or to free yourself from it again? And when you go on a journey, do you do so in order to stay away or to return?”67 These questions do not deter the Emperor from trying to attain his desire. Like a spoilt child he cries: “I’m used to getting what I want!” The outburst is met then with reverence, tenderness, and fear.68 The children desire to live, but cannot if the Emperor fails to mature. In a vague recognition of his parental role, the Emperor exhibits behaviours and desires similar to those of Barak: a love for his future children seizes him and, like Barak in the earlier meal scene, he wishes to feed the children with sweets, but when he tries to hold them, he catches only cold air.69 Among the Japanese Buddhist proverbs collected by Lafcadio Hearn, whose writings Hofmannsthal knew well, we find one that speaks to precisely this situation: “Ko wa Sangai no kubikse. A child is neck-shackle for the Three States of Existence.” Hearn’s footnote to this proverb offers this explanation: “That is to say, the love of parents for their child may impede their spiritual progress – not only in this world, but through all their future states of being, – just as a kubikasé, or Japanese cangue, impedes the movements of the person upon whom it is placed. Parental affection, being the strongest of earthly attachments, is particularly apt to cause those whom it enslaves to commit wrongful acts in the hope of benefitting their offspring.”70 Both Barak’s and the Emperor’s affections are a potential threat. This overabundance of affection takes the form of feeding, that is, controlling the site of the logos. What initially seems like an act of affection easily transforms into one of aggression. But these unborn children cannot be had, held, or controlled. The Emperor is in an underworld and has to do with pre-existent beings whose very corporeality is doubtful. Still, he has not overcome his desire to possess beauty. By contrast, Barak lives in a world where ugliness is part and parcel of existence. Though flawed, he is a man who affirms not only his own life, but the lives of others: for this reason, the children now bow in his

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honour. And as the Emperor asks repeatedly who Barak is, he receives this response: “Just a grain of magnanimity!”71 Envy – that sin of sight, invidia – transforms the Emperor’s affection into aggression. Anger literally seizes him: “He hated the message and the messenger and felt his heart had become stone through and through. Without a word, his hand sought the dagger in his belt in order to throw it at her, since he could not throw it at his wife; when the fingers on his right hand could not feel anything, he tried it with the left, but neither hand belonged to him any longer, the stony arms already hung, stiff, at his petrified hips, and there came no sound across his petrified lips.”72 The desire for possession easily slips into violence when any sort of resistance is encountered.73 The Emperor’s failure to possess “just a grain of ­magnanimity” translates into his failure to possess himself; his body revolts and does not heed his will – or rather, it heeds a deeper drive to petrification. The Emperor’s contrapasso is like Hearn’s kubikasé. As the children disappear and the ceiling opens up to reveal the solitary night sky, the Emperor is left silent and alone, turned to stone. Having treated the world as his object, he has himself become an object – in fact, he has become a parody of a work of art.

B e a u t y ’ s Lab o u r’s Los t Barak’s world is the inverse of the underworld and reveals with naturalistic details the grit and dirt involved in the production of real, beautiful textiles. Barak loads the dyed fabrics upon his back to take them to market; he cleans them of blood and dirt: “and so he beat out the dirt and blood from a butcher’s garment … The Dyer had laid out the garment onto clean boards and coated it anew with white. The Empress helped him. The blood-stained effluent poured out from the tipped-over tub into the gutter. The two of them worked diligently and did not look up from their labours.”74 In the process of washing, the Dyer is doing in the “real” world what the child in the underworld did in order to fashion her fantastic carpet – separating out the baser elements in order to reveal something beautiful. The dirtied run-off drains away, presumably into the yellow river the Empress and the Nurse had seen earlier upon entering the Dyers’ Quarter. That is, the waste never really goes “away.” Blood and dirt run through the city’s veins. And just as the signs of labour course through it, so the dyes adhere and stain all they come into contact with, marking the dyers, mixing with their sweat.

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Despite the physical demands of the work, Barak’s hands move with surprising delicacy to make sure that every single strand has access to air. For all the roughness of this man’s manners, he is adroit and demonstrates a level of devotion worthy of his name and an attention to his labour that contrasts sharply with the Emperor’s (initial) obliviousness. With these qualities, Barak is able to effect almost magical transformations: bloodied, dirtied clothes are made to gleam white, and yellow-green fabrics are cleaned and dyed to a brilliant blue.75 By assisting Barak, the Empress learns to appreciate his work and person. In earlier versions of the prose text, Hofmannsthal spends a great deal more time on the Empress’s reaction to this work. Even the words she uses recommend a comparison with the pageant of the underworld: “The ceremonies he performs: the paths and the combinations his blessed hands effect, the splendor of the colours and their simplicity [Bescheidenheit], all this the magical power of his nature [seines Gemütes] directs: the love he holds for his tools: the poise, composure, and the pious care with which he labours towards his goal: the deep respect [Ehrfurcht] he has for himself and for ­paving the way for something higher – … so artfully did he work. How was it you never told me how good people are?”76 The tone of this passage is perhaps too sentimental for the otherwise relatively reserved style of the prose tale. It is also too expository for a Märchen – and for an opera77 – though its explicit references to ­ceremony, magic, piety, humility, and art make a strong case for reading Barak as a consummate artist, and the Miranda-like wonder with which the Empress comes to see him speaks to the possibility of a brave new world. In an aphorism contrasting the present and the past, Nietzsche sheds light on the sociological transformations that art has already undergone in the “real” world: “Formerly, all works of art adorned the great festival road of humanity, to commemorate high and happy moments. Now one uses works of art to lure aside from the great via dolorosa of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment – a little intoxication and madness.”78 Hofmannsthal’s and Strauss’s work with the renowned theatre director Max Rheinhardt and their collective founding of the Salzburg Festival attest to Hofmannsthal’s devotion to the reinvigoration of festivals and ceremonies in this Nietzschean sense. It is not simply about pomp and circumstance and distraction. It is about

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celebrating humanity – and that means humanity’s trials, too. Both Nietzsche and Hofmannsthal see this in terms of something “higher.” In Barak’s case, labour is also ceremony and a celebration of existence. This work is described in the note by the Empress as “good” – a rejection of the Nurse’s assessment of humanity’s decrepitude. The Empress even says to the Nurse that Barak should receive his rightful due. The Nurse’s response shows how far she is from understanding what the Empress has understood: “His due? How has that elephant earned anything?”79 The Dyer’s Wife, too, sees nothing of the beauty of Barak’s work. Instead, she is enthralled by the beauty of the Efrit. Indeed, she is precisely one of “those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick,” of whom Nietzsche speaks: she even refers to herself as “krank” (sick).80 Although she knows her sickness has been reanimated by the Efrit, she still desires him for his ability to draw her away from the via dolorosa of humanity: “She was beautiful in this moment and her young blood coursed through her so that she glowed, and the old woman [i.e., the Nurse] watched her with delight. – No, no, she shouted suddenly with passionate rapture, he is handsome, pay no attention to me, you foolish woman, he is beautiful like the morning star, and his beauty, that is the barb on the nail.”81 The Efrit presents the Dyer’s Wife with an opportunity to experience a beauty she has never known. But the Efrit is merely a decoy. Though she desires to escape the prison of her marriage, she recognizes that absconding like this leaves Barak no chance to defend himself – the Nurse has slipped him a drug. But then there is also the sense that this chain is one not of bondage, but of fate. Her marriage has been arranged – by her mother.82 She thus stands in stark contrast to the Empress, who fell in love with and married the Emperor contrary to the wishes of her father, Keikobad. We cannot speak here only of a tyranny of fathers, nor of a tyranny of men. If there is supra-individual conflict, it is a generational one that involves both the father and the mother: not quite a “collective oedipal revolt,” as Carl Schorske calls it,83 nor a collective revolt à la Electra, although the text might suggest that at first glance. Schorske is right to emphasize the fact that one generation defines itself against another. But what is more interesting is the fact that Hofmannsthal’s tale is not about two conflicting generations, but about countless generations that define themselves both through and against each other. The four main characters are at the point of transitioning from being defined as

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the children of parents to being defined as the parents of children. But “parents” here is not to be taken only literally. Metaphorically, it is about the process of maturation through turning the gaze from self to other and developing one’s creative capacities. In Hofmannsthal’s ­artist, the two develop together and reinforce each other. At this moment the Empress betrays a change in appearance: she weeps, such that “her face was swimming in tears and pain, like that of a mortal woman.”84 Her compassion for both Barak and his wife stems from her recognition of her own responsibility for their fates; the pain lends her a mortal aspect and a moral compass, which, coupled with her powerful will, enable her to reanimate Barak’s body. Only half-conscious, Barak believes his children have been murdered or stolen away. He picks up a hammer and swings it, hoping to strike the culprit, all the while showing a remarkable resemblance to the Efrit in his strength and ferocity. Significantly, this raging man is calmed by the familiar, unpleasant voices of his brothers: “the trusty sounds of their voices seemed to press towards his soul.”85 At this he wakes from his rage, and, entirely overcome with shame, makes a gesture that, in this story as elsewhere in Hofmannsthal’s work, demonstrates a profound sense for humility: true to his name (“to kneel down”), Barak goes down on his knees before his wife to ask forgiveness. In contrast to the compassionate Empress, the Dyer’s Wife betrays an increasing coldness: she does not grant him her pardon. In his moment of repentance, he is sorry for having married so late, for holding the delusional hope that he would live a long life with his beautiful wife and children. It seems he is sorry for something else, too, but cannot say it; this speechlessness links him with the Emperor, who could not formulate the decisive question to the children before him.86 The emotional states do not add up. At the end of this chapter, one has the feeling that everything is out of sorts, all threads hanging loose, untied. Important gestures go unanswered or are misunderstood. And yet the play between beauty and ugliness as well as compassion and coldness is clearly guiding the narrative as well as the aesthetic arc.

T h e F a c e s o f I n n o c ence and Gui lt Beauty in its various manifestations guides the reader through the characters’ developmental states. Above all, this is inscribed upon their faces – the site of reckoning and of ethical resistance. But for Hofmannsthal, the human face is also inherently beautiful. It is the

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point of convergence of the ethical and the beautiful, a new kalokagathia87 which is not based simply on sensory pleasure, but rather results from a kind of sympathetic reverberation between two distinct but connected beings. Hofmannsthal’s presentation of beauty in the face of the other is inspired by his understanding of the effects of aesthetic beauty – specifically, of art. And so it is with a vision of beauty that the Dyer’s Wife’s resolve begins to waver. When wandering through the poorest part of town, she remarks in a manner most strange, even poetic: “A small child is filthy, and they have to give it to the pet dog to lick clean; and yet it is beautiful like the rising sun; and such did we have a mind to sacrifice. – It was a strange, almost singing tone in which she said these things.”88 This is a portrayal of utter destitution: there is not even clean water to wash away the dirt. But the dog has a particular ­significance for Hofmannsthal. In “The Poet and Our Time,” Hofmannsthal describes the poet as having been sent to the dogs.89 In a quite literal sense, this is precisely what would happen to the dirty child, linking the child (if only vaguely) to the poet. But the association becomes clearer with the word “schön” and the simile of the sunrise with its suggestion of newness, hope, and light. A dirty child is beautiful like this: striking, natural, and bright, made clean by its proximity to abjection. We might even go further and interpret the singing tone in which the Dyer’s Wife makes this remark as her having come under the influence of the unborn children, who are associated with singing. But singing might equally be a palliative measure; the Dyer’s Wife seems here to see the tragedy her actions would lead to, and she must somehow make the decision less painful. The image and act turn in on themselves: sacrifice becomes a euphemism for murder. As if crowded in by both future generations and past ones, the Dyer’s Wife finds herself having wandered to her mother’s grave. She sinks onto her knees, but as she arises, her movement is not that of a devout or divinely inspired woman: instead, she is pure dynamism, having thrown off the yoke of “an old law.”90 She springs into flight, like a fleet-footed creature. But the tinnitus of conscience is persistent. No matter how hard she runs, the Dyer’s Wife cannot escape the voice of her mother, who calls after Barak.91 Barak, meanwhile, sits in the midst of chaos – a complete inversion of the orderly, attentive world he had cultivated before. Having lost his mind, he imagines he is speaking to his “diligent children” with their “clean little hands.”92 Showing them the dyeing process, he

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reveals the fantastical sacrifices involved: “We take the colours from out of the flowers and fix them to the cloths, and so too we take colours from the worms, and from birds’ breasts, there where their feathers glow and are exposed.”93 Though there have been a number of meditations on the process of art production so far in the story,94 none has been so explicit as this. The depiction of Barak speaking to his imagined children is full of pathos, in part because he clearly wants to pass on his art to the next generation. In other words, this is the moment when the motivic thread of art production crosses the thread of reproduction. Passing on the craft of dyeing ensures the survival of beauty, while integrating the next generation into the social fabric. Barak’s motives unite aesthetic and ethical considerations; he embodies the artist as described by the philosopher Jacques Maritain: “Hence the tyrannical and absorbing power of Art, and also its astonishing power of soothing; it delivers one from the human; it establishes the artifex – artist or artisan – in a world apart, closed, limited, absolute, in which he puts the energy and intelligence of his manhood at the service of a thing which he makes. This is true of all art; the ennui of living and willing, ceases at the door of every workshop.”95 The Dyer’s Wife’s sacrifice of their children is a twofold blow to Barak. In her ennui and vanity, she will not have her beauty passed on in time and life, but wishes to retain it for herself: in other words, to possess it eternally and exclusively: “They, who are supposed to come to greet me one day, shudder before the eternal softness of these cheeks and these breasts that shall not wither.”96 But she is shown to be less decisive than she would have herself to be: just as she is about to fulfil the deed, ritualistically tossing seven fish over her shoulder, Barak takes a step towards her, and her conviction shrivels: “Her lips moved and she muttered the words, but it was as if she were unaware; she raised her hand with the fish above her shoulder and cast, but as if in a slumber; she did what was required, but she did it as if she were not doing it: her eyes were riveted to the Dyer and her lips became distorted like those of a child about to cry … She took a few indecisive steps, saw help nowhere, pressed her lips together and stood still.”97 At the moment of metaphorical petrification, Hofmannsthal uses syntactical repetition with variation that gives his prose a sense of ritualistic fulfillment. And he does so with irony. The ritual itself is already compromised, and, as we shall see later, is ultimately invalid – due in part, it might be argued, to her very hesitation. The subjunctive mood and the as-if comparisons (the “unreal”) come to have more

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weight than the indicative statements (the “real”). The ritual, which seems embedded in the language itself, is a false sacrament. Paradoxically, this act does not free her. It seems rather to entrap her by drawing Barak’s anger nearer. Those that come to her aid, ironically, are Barak’s brothers – the hideous creatures who remind us of a suffering we would rather forget. They wish only that their brother not become a murderer – murder is an act that could not be undone – and manage to move the Dyer’s Wife for a moment out of reach of her husband. They then bid her farewell, wishing upon her “a bitch’s fate.”98 Given Hofmannsthal’s penchant for canine symbolism, the curse is oddly fortuitous. It suggests that the Dyer’s Wife might suffer, but she might also be capable of finding beauty in this world of suffering. The description that then follows is from the perspective of the Nurse, who has been studying the struggling, flickering shadows and in the meantime lost sight of the Empress. She then sees that a female figure is lying at the Dyer’s feet, “her face pressed to the earth, with unspeakable humility she stretched out her arms without lifting her face till her hands reached the Dyer’s feet and grasped them. The Dyer seemed not to notice her … And now the one lying there pushed herself closer and she pressed her chin onto the Dyer’s feet. Her lips murmured a word heard by no one. Then she lay in this position as if dead.”99 The woman lying at Barak’s feet, it would seem, is the Dyer’s Wife, who has just run in the direction of her husband. Her humble prostration suggests an appeal for forgiveness, which, in the light of her wavering actions, is certainly plausible. But to the Nurse’s amazement, a “Lebendes” (contrasting with the figure outstretched “as if dead”) appears near her, stretches forth both her hands, and reveals herself to be the Dyer’s Wife. The Nurse is shocked when she realizes that the woman lying at Barak’s feet is the Empress. This confusion is calculated: it is the moment when the Empress and the Dyer’s Wife share a sense of ethical responsibility and it is a moment of profound equality. The Dyer’s Wife appropriately takes on a beauty more typical of that of the Empress: “a wonderful and innocent beauty … the tremendous fear did not disfigure her, it rather transfigured her.”100 Like the Empress-as-gazelle, the Dyer’s Wife possesses a beauty that reflects both fear and innocence, but it is also one of intense bravery, for she stretches both hands out towards her husband (like the Empress had done in her prostration), as if to ­welcome death. Indeed, she is described as having a face ready for death: “todbereite[s] Gesicht.”101

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This moment is also typical of what Karl Heinz Bohrer refers to as the suddenness (Plötzlichkeit) of the Augenblick. Barak reflects the gaze of his wife and realizes for the first time the impotence of his earlier unwanted embraces; and in this he sees the impenetrable otherness of his wife’s being, the abyss of her difference and the span of her ages: She is a young and innocent girl and a mature woman in one. At this sight – much as in the aesthetic encounter – he is rendered powerless and his fists begin to shake. He wavers, just as his wife had earlier done. And in this instant a weight is lifted and he is as if reborn: “in the greatness of his powerful body he seemed a child on the verge of tears.”102 He thus shares with his wife the beauty of innocence, but this beauty only comes as a result of having seen the abyss of the other person.103 The moment in Die Frau ohne Schatten thus draws on both the aesthetic encounter and the ethical moment when one recognizes the fully other (“das ganz Andere”) as other, à la Bohrer. In refraining, Barak acknowledges the power of the moment of encounter before the embrace. In another work of short fiction, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen” (Paths and encounters) Hofmannsthal imagines the erotic as a tension, at the heart of which is a respect for distance. There is something of the innocence of animals in this: “Methinks it is not the embrace but rather the encounter which is the truly decisive erotic gesture. In no other moment is the sensible so soul-like, the soul-like so sensible … Here is a striving towards one another still without desire, a naïve mix of trust and reserve. Here there is that element of the deer, of the bird, of animal muteness, of angelic purity, of the divine. A greeting is something without bounds.”104 The encounter is a greeting and an invitation to communication. Communication in turn is an idealized moment: the Dyer’s Wife’s un-kissed kisses are described as “sparkling” (perlend), like tears might be, and she enters into an “embrace without entwinement and a kiss in which lips neither touched nor parted.”105 Recalling the strange paradoxes of the unborn children, this encounter is one that defies logic and exists as that unsubstantial rainbow that spans the “inexorable plunge of existence.”106 At this climax, the shadow frees itself from the Dyer’s Wife and flees to the water. In the moment the shadow has been freed from its rightful owner, the Empress too is transfigured. Whereas the face of the Dyer’s Wife radiates an innocent beauty, the Empress’s face now betrays mortality: she knows and displays her own guilt.

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S o u n d , C o l o u r , and Moti on With responsibility comes freedom. Having been magically transported away from the scene, the Empress now finds herself utterly alone – the Nurse, now a kind of Virgil to the Empress’s Dante, is unable to accompany the Empress along her new journey, and disappears into the woods. As the Dyer’s Wife had earlier called to her mother, so now the Empress calls to her father, evoking one of the most chilling arias of the more familiar opera Elektra: “Allein, weh ganz allein.” Both Elektra and the Empress call to their absent fathers. In Elektra’s case, the patriarchal Agamemnon is dead, but his memory and unavenged spirit wield power over the living Elektra. The first few lines of the aria, except for the name “Agamemnon,” might equally have been sung or cried by the Empress: Alone! Woe, utterly alone. The father gone, cast away into his cold chasms below Agamemnon! Agamemnon! Where are you, father? Have you not the strength to drag your face up here to me? It is the hour! Our hour it is!107 In an almost exact quotation, the Empress “called … ardently: Father, where are you? The word echoed.”108 That echo is a variation of Elektra’s repeated call: “Agamemnon! Agamemnon!” It also establishes a stark contrast with the Nurse’s cry from a paragraph earlier: “She [the Nurse] shrilly called out the name of her child, with no response, not even an echo.”109 Furthermore, as it was for Elektra, so this is “the hour” for the Empress. The decisive hour – the moment of Kairos – is upon her. For every parallel move, there is also a divergence. Unlike Elektra, who wishes to sacrifice others to the memory of her father and the accomplishment of vengeance, the Empress will sacrifice herself and her own happiness for the sake of others, to make up for her own crime. She has realized that she is no longer an innocent child. It is also telling that, whereas Agamemnon is an absent ghost for Elektra, Keikobad is more an insubstantial presence for the Empress: “In his unapproachability she felt him, his reflected splendour shined upon her brow.”110 This indirect presence – the shining light upon her forehead – is a precursor to the colour to come, and heralds a lifeaffirming intergenerational relationship, rather than a tragic one.

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The description of inaccessibility recalls the statues in “Moments in Greece,” but Hofmannsthal does not linger here, for good reason: the focus must be on the new generation, not the old one. Hofmannsthal thus channels Oswald Spengler’s art historical interpretations: “The statue is rooted to the ground, music – and the western portrait is music, soul woven from colour tones – permeates the boundless space. The fresco is bound up with the wall, grown with it; the oil painting, as panel painting, is free from the barriers of a place. The Apollonian language of forms reveals something that has been; the Faustian – above all – reveals something in the process of becoming.”111 The statue is bound, whereas the portrait (music composed of “colour tones”) is unbound, floating. It is in a process of becoming, where the statue is static. But the connection to Spengler’s theory goes further: this kind of portraiture allows for what the ­philosopher ­considered to be one of the greatest achievements of “western art,” namely the child and family portraits. For Spengler, the child is a bridge between past and future. These aesthetic and metaphysical reflections are present in Hofmannsthal’s text as well. The Empress is awakened to the nearness of unborn children first by the sound of water. She turns around, as if turning from the past generation – that of her father – to the future generation, to see a tall boy standing before her. From his appearance, he seems to be one of the unborn sons of Barak and his wife. It is as if this unborn son is both child and family portrait in one. Like the unborn children in the underworld seen by the Emperor, this boy too is like an impossibly clarified work of art: “He wore a robe of wondrous blue, not as though one had taken a white fabric and laid it in a dying vat, where the intensity of the indigo and the woad mixed, but rather as if the blue of the bottom of the sea itself had been pulled forth and draped across his body.”112 As with “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” so here the colour is the centre of focus, but behind this are the words of the Dyer, who, in his state of madness, explained to his imagined unborn children how colour was lifted out from the plumage of birds, from flowers, and from worms.113 What is more, these colours have the capacity to change; their iridescence suggests the visual dance of colour one sees in a bird’s feathers, or in the washing of fabrics. The colour changes from the blues of the ocean floor to a nocturnal “blackblue, before the first rays of the sun illuminate the sky.”114 Even the simile is telling: in the previous section,

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the Dyer’s Wife described dirty children as “beautiful like the rising sun.”115 Here we have the moment just before sunrise, just before birth, figured in the colours. Another child appears with equally strange aesthetic features, “resembling the Dyer’s Wife, from the delicate waxlike feet to the dark hair that shone like copper,” and glides “upon the green ground as if it were glass, with feet pressed together, and no other manner of movement could have suited the delicacy of the limbs and the glistening colours.”116 Like a wax figure, the child is lovely, but not alive; the feet are still bound. This is the plastic translation of the dark blue colour just before sunrise. These children are at the threshold of existence, but do not yet walk in the sun. As more children arrive, the Empress asks whether they bring a message, but the response is mysterious: “The colour seemed to come to him from eternity, so too the answer, which slowly rose up in him and reached the edge of his lips with hesitation. – We have no commission, we have no message. That we show ourselves, Lady, is all that is vouchsafed to us.”117 If art could speak, this would be its answer. They can only show themselves. But even this is qualified, for when the Empress asks where one of the children has disappeared to, the response she receives is simply that she is: “There, and not there, Lady, as it shall please you! … and his robe was like blood which turned into gold; all the trees received from him the confirmation that they were living, as from the first ray of the rising sun.”118 Blood red turns into life-giving gold water. The confirmation of life is reminiscent of the existential guarantee afforded by the walnut tree – only here it is the tree that receives confirmation – and later the colours in the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” In their transience, the colours change once more, sinking from red into violet “like a cloud in the evening sky, as one of the boys says to the Empress, reminding her of the importance of the hour at hand: “You are not being presented to, Lady, rather you are being presented, and this is the hour.”119 As in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the one ostensibly in power – to gaze, to judge – is revealed to be the one gazed upon and judged. This hour of judgment is the moment of encounter between the Empress and her unborn children. The trial and judgment are rendered verbally and aesthetically, by the play of colours: “Dark was his robe, like the starless night sky.” The Empress’s thoughts, likewise, are dark: “I have committed a serious offence … She lowered her eyes and then looked to him again.”120 These words and the gesture of her eyes are

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so effective that he seemed to caress the words – an image of embrace without holding on that recalls the idealized embrace of Barak and his wife. And his response is to the point: “Everyone who sets one foot in front of the other must say that. For that reason, we go with locked feet.”121 The link between mobility and moral culpability recalls Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment motto: “Enlightenment is the human being’s stepping out of their self-inflicted immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s reason without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-inflicted when the cause lies not in a lack of reason, but rather a lack of resolution and courage to help oneself without guidance from another. Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own reason! This, therefore, is the motto of Enlightenment.”122 The twist is in the focus: The Empress’s guilt – her self-inflicted immaturity – affects not only herself, but others as well. This is partly aesthetic: the simple dismissal of the ugly world below is a kind of immaturity; but it is also social: the lower, poverty-stricken realms are not to be treated as mere tools for the achievement of some goal. The Empress has realized this – and it is why she can stand before this aesthetic and ethical otherness, one of the unborn sons of the people whose lives she wishes not to destroy, and “her reverence for him, who spoke with her thus, was no less than his for her.”123 I would suggest this reverence is learned – perhaps from Barak, whose reverence and piety in labour the Empress so admired. Two more children enter the scene to explain to the Empress the distinction between her actions and those of their mother (the Dyer’s Wife). The difference is a matter of time, and of seizing the decisive moment of opportunity. The actions of their mother happen in the passage of time as Chronos and are thus revokable, but for the Empress, another law is at work: “Everything lies in the moment: counsel and deed!”124 The Empress’s first step was one of transgression: she threatened the lives of others. Her second was Kantian egression: she steps out of her life of self-inflicted immaturity and recognizes her own culpability; her third step will be a Kierkegaardian leap.

N e w L ife: A M e t aph o r a n d a Metamorphosi s The parallel stories of ethics and aesthetics cross in a kind of nonEuclidean narrative geometry, forming a Gordian knot. The ethical story serves as a comment on the aesthetic story and vice-versa. In this

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section of the final chapter of the story, there is a rebirth not only of soul, but also of senses: the ethical rebirth occurs in tandem with an aesthetic rebirth, and both are brought about by a recognition of and response to human frailty and human strength. This recognition takes place, as it did in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” and even more explicitly in “Moments in Greece,” at the moment of seeing the irreducible difference of others. The curious phrase from The Letters – “dies ineinanderschlagende Du” – is imagined here as a new and clarified kind of embrace or union at-a-distance, like the embrace of Barak and his wife. As noted earlier, Hofmannsthal’s dreamer in “Die Wege und die Begegnungen” (Paths and encounters) esteems the encounter above the embrace, noting: “A greeting is something without bounds.” The dreamer then follows with an invocation of Dante’s Vita Nuova and the power of sound emanating from that which is different from the self: “Dante dates his ‘New Life’ to a greeting that was given him. Wondrous is the cry of the great bird, the strange, solitary, premundane sound at dawn, issuing from the tallest fir, listened to somewhere by a hen. This ‘somewhere’ – this unspecified and yet passionate desire, this cry of the stranger to the stranger, is what is tremendous.”125 In Die Frau ohne Schatten, there is a similar cry of one stranger to another, and it will be answered by an embrace that is informed by a respect for unreachable otherness. The “new life” is new both ethically and aesthetically, as is made clear when the Empress sees the unborn children of the couple whose lives she has stained. The fluctuating colours of the children’s garments as well as their disappearance before her eyes have left her sense of sight bewildered; it seems appropriate, even a relief, that she should then be led into a dark cave. But in the dark cave the senses are again activated to such a pitch that her whole trajectory seems to be an aesthetic one: the high room is like a temple, lit by a single torch which emits a pleasing fragrance, and it is also like a bath, but lovelier even than those of her own palace. In the presence of such atmospheric beauty, the Empress seems in danger of losing herself – on both ethical and aesthetic grounds. The atmosphere begins to ring – literally – with tension. The tension is even erotic: she feels the presence of her husband and releases one of the most recognizable sounds of desire: “Ach! came over her lips, ashamed and full of yearning at the same time, and the breath-becomesound from her own mouth made her glow from top to bottom.”126 Hofmannsthal’s paraphrasis is important: her “Ach” is a breath – a

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sign of life – that has become sound. The phrase’s structure recalls the description of art as “arbitrary-will-become-form” (Form gewordene Willkür) from the “Address.” Like the bells at elevation during a celebration of mass, this sound serves a liturgical function. Indeed, the water – the sound of which had awakened her to the presence of the unborn children – does rise. And at a certain elevation, light from a torch strikes a column, which then gives “a resounding clang, which with its sweet sound nearly split the Empress’s heart in two.”127 The reverberations of climactic tension occur at the moment the Emperor appears, caught between life and death: “he seemed heavy like a bronze grave stone built in the middle of a pond.” Bereft of weapons and leg braces, the statue has been rendered utterly vulnerable: only the light hunting armour was left, and everything else was like marble. The metal and marble invoke the myths of both Midas and Pygmalion, but there is something else at work: the statue is both dark and light, black and white, but devoid of colour. Thus robbed of protection, life, and colour, he stands there “unspeakably beautiful … yet unspeakably strange.”128 The Emperor displays a colourless, lifeless beauty. The Empress’s response is an inarticulate cry (in the opera, the singer screams), accompanied by a gesture that draws her into the familiar mythologies of metamorphosis: “she threw herself into the golden, gently undulating pool; like a swan with its wings outstretched she swooped to her lover.”129 Like many a fairy-tale swan maiden, she is married to a mortal man and has lost her metamorphic ability. But the Empress’s swan transformation is purely one of simile: she is like a swan.130 The Empress’s former metamorphic abilities have themselves been transformed into metaphoric power; but then this is the stuff of poetry. The statue’s effect on her is above all troubling, because it shows her something that eludes understanding: death. In “Moments in Greece,” the korai have a similar effect: they are both beautiful and foreign, displaying their strange unspeakable smiles. Just the like the ancient Greek statues, there is something utterly inaccessible in the petrified Emperor that shocks and terrifies the Empress. The aesthetic takes form in the ethical decision the Empress must confront: As their gazes meet, she sees in his eyes a fear that makes his visage hideous: The German term “gräßlich” is used in multiple other places in the text: to describe the flight of the injured falcon; human faces in the Empress’s dream; the words of the curse; the expression

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on the Nurse’s face when the Empress realizes she has been withholding her knowledge all this time; the many mouths of real people she encounters in the crowded streets of the city; her own face, when full of fear and disquiet; and the vanishing of the unborn children into thin air.131 All of these instances are associated with powerlessness. As if to highlight the helplessness of the situation, the golden light shifts, following the Emperor’s gaze to a wall upon which the shadow of the statue falls. The Empress, however, still casts no shadow. The statue is “gräßlich” and uncanny because it is an embodiment (or entombment) of the human: the statue can move a little, but it cannot leave its spot; its face responds, but it is not alive. The demand issued by this work of art is united with the demand of the ethical relationship. And so, the foreign shadow appears to her, offering her a bowl of golden water, more than humbly: “it was the gesture of a slave surrendering completely, to the death.” And here again the senses are explicitly brought to the fore: “She felt how she would lose her senses and drink.”132 Losing the ability to see, feel, hear, touch, and taste, but also losing her mind and consciousness, she would act fully anaesthetized. Drinking the water and appropriating the shadow of another would be a senseless act in all senses of the word, on some level not even willed (mirroring the Dyer’s Wife as she threw the seven fish over her shoulder). Without the will, this act would be divorced from ethics: or the will would be a negative one, an abnegation of the aesthetic and ethical senses. But before she drinks, one of the unborn children – resembling Barak – appears and presents an alternative possibility: The Empress’s actions do not have to be unconscious and senseless. Of particular importance here is the description around this moment of decision. Like a priestess, the Empress holds in her hands the bowl of water – a potential libation. Her conscience, however, is intimately linked to the sounds of reality: Hideous and strange, as from the breast of one sleeping deeply, the curse emanated from her own breast and struck her ear … – she listened inwardly as her own heart beat, slow and heavy. She saw with one glance, as if she were hovering outside herself, how she stood there, and at her feet the shadow of the other woman, who had fallen slave to her, and over there the statue. The terrible feeling of reality held everything together with iron chains. The cold wafted towards her and to her core and

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­ aralyzed her. She could not take a single step, neither forwards p nor backwards, she could do nothing but this: drink, and win the shadow, or pour out the bowl.133 The auditory admonition experienced by the Dyer’s Wife earlier is reproduced here, though it is the curse of the father Keikobad rather than the curse of the mother. The body’s response is to dissociate: a common enough idea in psychology and literature of the early twentieth century.134 But it is not just the psychological dissociation that is at play here; it also has characteristics of that ecstasis that occurs in mystical moments,135 and in the aesthetic encounter, especially as presented in “Moments in Greece.” The turn in Die Frau ohne Schatten occurs with the evocation of reality, which holds everything together with iron chains (the negative image of the aurea catena homeri). In the unreal world of art, there is the alchemical potential to transform these iron chains into gold. This is part of the imagined vita nuova, and it is suggested in this passage, ironically, in a complete reversal of the opera’s handling of the scene. In the opera, the music begins pianissimo, and with the slow crescendo and the gongs, it begins to swell and reaches such a height that the Empress’s singing transforms into a terrified scream. The orchestral accompaniment abruptly ceases, leaving the Empress’s voice alone: but she does not sing. She speaks the formula of renunciation, as if breaking from the fairy-tale world of opera into the spoken, discursive world of “reality.” She speaks, with a heavy pause before and after each word: I will not.136 In the prose tale, Hofmannsthal reverses the change, but again, only metaphorically: the words rise from the depths of her being and leave her mouth: “as if they were sung, far away in the distance; she just had to repeat them. She repeated them without hesitation. – I owe you, Barak! She spoke … and poured out the bowl before the feet of the veiled figure. The golden water burst into flames, the bowl in her hands vanished into thin air.”137 The golden water possesses the power of metamorphosis; the Empress, of metaphor. But metaphor, in this moment, becomes metamorphosis. The libation makes this transformation possible. Hofmannsthal shares with Walter Benjamin an appreciation for the ancient Greek ritual: libation is a way of g­ iving something back to the earth and the gods.138 The notion of the symbol as gift in “Moments in Greece” is adapted here as libation, as giving back.

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This gesture of response makes transformation possible. And so the water rises, carrying both the Empress and the heavy statue upwards as they embrace, as if weightless, till “she felt herself pulled into the bottomless deep.”139 The abyss is the place of birth and death, like Derrida’s khôra. It is here too that the symbolic sacrifice takes place: in “The Conversation about Poems,” the symbol is born when the priestlike man dies for a moment with the animal he sacrifices. Here, the Empress is the priestess and the offering at once, and this is once again accompanied by a disturbance in the senses: “Incomprehensible torment shattered her senses. She felt death creep over her heart, but at the same time she felt the statue in her arms move and come alive. In an incomprehensible state, she surrendered herself, and, shaking, was now there only in the intimation of life which the other had received from her. Into him, or into her, there pressed the sensation of a darkness clearing, of a place receiving, of a breath of new life. They took it in with senses newly born: hands, which carried them, a stone gate, which closed behind them, swaying trees, smooth firm ground, upon which the bodies lay resting, the bright sky’s expanse.”140 The Empress, in pain, feels death and comes very near to it herself, perhaps she does die in this moment, like the sacrificial animal and the man in “The Conversation about Poems.” And perhaps her life transmigrates into the stony limbs of the Emperor, imbuing him with life. The text switches for a brief time to free indirect speech, marking the dissolution of self – precisely when both Emperor and Empress feel the same thing. The narration is uncertain and even stylistically fragmentary, as if conveying fleeting thoughts: “Into her, or into him there pressed the sensation of a darkness clearing.” Like infants, whose sight is undeveloped, they are reborn and cross the threshold into existence, into the light, as the entrance to the cave closes behind them, and the Empress senses the trees, the ground, the sky. There is something cinematic in this passage. Like a film shot from the first person of view, we follow her, then their, impressions. As the Empress looks into the sky, a transfer of perspective takes places. The perspective narrows momentarily and then broadens again as the narrative lens pans out in order to encompass the Empress and the Emperor in the landscape more objectively: “In the distance, the river glistened, behind a hill the sun was rising, and its first rays struck the Emperor’s face, who lay at the feet of his wife, curled up like a child.” With this broadening perspective, the intricacy of relations becomes clearer: The once powerful Emperor is now like a child, and

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as the Empress rises, she – finally – casts a shadow over him, tracing a bridge between them. The Emperor awakens at the Empress’s cry of delight over having caught sight of her own shadow, and they wordlessly embrace: “their shadows combined into one.”141 A parallel shadow bridge forms between the Dyer and his wife, and, like the transition from stasis to motion that takes place in the Emperor, so too does the Dyer’s Wife undergo a visual transformation: from the wan colourlessness of fear to the brilliant colour of life. The Dyer pair are reunited in the same landscape, not far from the Emperor and Empress. The Dyer’s Wife carries a great basket containing a sword and a blood-dyed carpet, where colours are concentrated and then explode, covering and imbuing the Dyer’s Wife with new life. It is important here that the colours do not just adorn her; they permeate and enliven her. Colours here do the work of the artist, and the Dyer’s Wife becomes like a work of art given life – for with these colours, she also regains her shadow. We might go so far as to say that Hofmannsthal is representing here his own idea of the poetic act: within the imagined “reality” of the story, the Dyer’s Wife and the Emperor, as well as the Empress and the Dyer, have been given a new life. Renewed life correlates to renewed aesthetic sensations: those who are catatonic are animated, while pale faces are given the colour of life and the shadow of humanity. All of these transformations are, of course, enveloped by an aesthetic frame itself – the tale. Although the characters are given a kind of life, it is ultimately no Promethean act. It is humbler than that, since it is just a story, but does not lack for boldness: paradoxes, contradictions, and reversals are possible and even demanded. The shadow bridge that forms between the Dyer and his wife is a visual echo of the colourful arc which the soul makes when spanning the abyss: “Like the rainbow, unsubstantial, our soul spans across the inexorable plunge of existence.”142 The colours of the rainbow are in the Dyer’s Wife herself. The gesture of art is a bold one in its attempt to undo wrongs committed, and to unite what is disparate.143 But for Hofmannsthal there is no artistic act without humility; hence the reciprocal prostrations of the married couples: “He pressed his hands upon his breast and bowed before her. Like a stone, she fell down before him, her brow, her lips touched his feet”; “as the Dyer’s Wife had thrown herself at the feet of her husband, so too the Emperor threw himself before his wife and buried his convulsing face in her knees. She knelt down beside

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him; to her, too, weeping was new and sweet.”144 The gesture of humility is the common denominator for all of the characters, men and women, the royal pair and the dyer pair.145 The end of the prose tale, as Harry Seelig has emphasized in “Musical Substance and Literary Shadow,” does not review the fates of the characters simultaneously. Rather, each individual character is given individual attention. The dyer pair are awarded a future full of the wonder of prosperity – they have been magically lifted out of their destitution and given a perfect fairy-tale ending. A figure full of colour, the Dyer’s Wife sits upon stacked carpets in their fairy-tale boat, while Barak sings “as no one had heard him sing before,”146 essentially reversing the earlier portrayal of him singing out of tune.147 The new singing corresponds to a new ethical understanding and relation with his wife: theirs is now a harmonious marriage. For the Empress and the Emperor, the end is similarly one of reconciliation and hope. Having sunk to his knees, the Emperor gazes into the sky at his falcon returning, while the Empress hears a song from the heavens: “Soft words and quiet tones found their way inexplicably from the heights down to her.”148 This song is the only instance in the prose text given as it is in the libretto: it is kept in verse, separated from the rest of the text by its genre and its difference. Like Goethe’s Chorus Mysticus at the end of Faust II, the singing voices celebrate the paradox of life and the mystical union of host and guest: “If ever there were such a feast, would we secretly be both the hosts and the guests?”149 The talisman has the last word: the curse is now a blessing, celebrating the connection of all things to all things.

T h e M ä r c h e n : “ A s L o v ely as a Persi an Car p e t ,   a n d a s Unreal” Die Frau ohne Schatten – both the opera and the novella – is one of the most representative cases for Hofmannsthal’s fascination with the relation between what we consider to be “real” and “unreal.”150 The central motif of the carpet raises the question in the form of an image: the carpet is shown both in its real and its ideal (unreal) production; it is ascribed magical properties, and it is a symbol of perfection and cosmic interconnectedness. Aesthetics and ethics are figured here as the warp and weft of the carpet: they are never the same, but without either, the fabric of human existence would come undone. Hofmannsthal’s strange mix of the

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real and the unreal – like the realistic detail and ideal images and riddles that defy logic – is a response to this double-drive, as well as an attempt to depict the drama of life. We see it in his use of colours, for instance, which (as in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”) change in response to each other and even exhibit what Sabine Schneider identifies as the essence of the dramatic, namely the counterplay of forces. Schneider goes on to say that Hofmannsthal’s understanding of colour is a somewhat forced interpretation of Goethe’s view that colours are the silent language of nature and are part of a harmonious totality.151 It is true that Hofmannsthal tends to highlight the dramatic (and agonistic) display of forces at play in colours, but he also depicts colours as mutually reinforcing one another, allowing for a potentially harmonious depiction of the interconnectedness of things, as is made clear in the motif of the carpet, and in the (controlled) explosion of colour at the end of the story. Fickert and Celms repeat the anti-aestheticist formula: “Significantly, in the opera, the character named die Kaiserin [the Empress] acquires a shadow and the ability to bear children after she has put the insubstantial world of the cult of beauty as expressed in art behind her.”152 This assertion is based on an analogy with the figure of Claudio in Der Tor und der Tod (Death and the Fool), whom the noted British translator Michael Hamburger once called “the man without a shadow, the potential man incapable of crossing the threshold into reality.”153 While the opera and the prose tale bear a certain thematic resemblance to Death and the Fool, the Empress never expresses a rejection of art – in either the opera or the prose tale – and in fact art (song, the carpet, even the Emperor-as-statue) plays a significant role in her and the other characters’ transformation. In Die Frau ohne Schatten art too experiences a kind of baptism in the (albeit fictional) world of “reality,” to use Hamburger’s term. The broader issue at stake is that the kind of resolution between aesthetics and ethics is only ever imagined through art (especially as a comedic Märchen). Die Frau ohne Schatten is an aesthetic theodicy, where all characters and all plot points, all suffering and all paradoxes have their justification in the aesthetic whole. The carpet is a portrait of this theodicy, but its unreal status puts into question a real ethical expression of this aesthetic success. This ambivalent attitude is evident in Hofmannsthal’s own comments. In a letter from 27 May 1918 to the countess Ottonie Degenfeld, he wrote: “In these dreadful weeks I have written perhaps the most

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beautiful chapter of the Märchen: how the Emperor comes to the unborn children … Eberhard said to me a few months ago how little these dreamt up harmonies have to do with life – how they have nothing to do with it – and yet how felicitous it would be, that they should exist and that more such things should ever come to be.”154 The dreadful reality contrasts all too much with the dreamt-up harmonies, and yet these harmonies are perhaps even more necessary because of the horrors of reality – in this case, the First World War. Richard Strauss, too, makes this explicit (even in his off-putting patriotism) in a letter to Hofmannsthal from 8 October 1914: “In the midst of all this unpleasant news, which this war brings – with the exception of the magnificent deeds of our army – diligent work is the only salvation. Otherwise, one would die from frustration at the inaction of our ­diplomats, our press, the Emperor’s apologetic telegram to Wilson.”155 Such diligent work in the sphere of art has intrinsic value for Strauss, and indeed seems necessary for survival. But this is no easy task. The negotiations between the necessities of creating beauty and the ethical questions of the time (is art a luxury in war?) result in a tale that imagines – must imagine – the impossible. Art and war have something in common: they are situations in extremis. And war, too – as with the Futurists and, to a certain degree, the author and Imperial German soldier Ernst Jünger – can be experienced aesthetically. With Hofmannsthal though, one always has the sense that the aesthetic could very possibly send the subject to the brink of existence. There at the world’s edge one finds a rickety bridge, or perhaps it is that unsubstantial rainbow, crossing in a blur the unfathomable chasm between art and life, the imaginary and the real. Those are two poles of existence. The fact remains that one cannot cross the bridge, for it would not hold real weight. Instead, one experiences the paradoxical reality of the unreal in the aesthetic encounter, in its effect of strangely persistent presence as it withdraws from one’s grasp. For Hofmannsthal, art invents an imaginary language for this, and is itself the invention.

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5 Violence and Art in Andreas

Not every work of Hofmannsthal’s depicts a successful aesthetic encounter; that is, not every encounter with artworks is characterized by that feeling of timelessness, connection, the sensation of being “called,” or the pious sense of duty and responsibility that arises in recognition of what is beautiful. The works discussed in the previous four chapters all depict elevated moments (“erhöhte Augenblicke,” to use Pestalozzi’s phrase) in the aesthetic encounter; and these tend to occur when one is confronted by a work of art. The novel-fragment Andreas is different. The characteristics of the aesthetic encounter are not concentrated in the work of art. They are dispersed. In fact, while a painting does feature in the text, it is precisely not the site of the aesthetic encounter. It is, one might say, a failure. If Die Frau ohne Schatten is an aesthetic “success” in the sense that it has a clear beginning, a sense of progression, and a resolution, then Andreas is its counterpart: obsessively circular in its story, unfinished, and fragmented.

A ppr o a c h in g Andreas Documentation of Hofmannsthal’s work on Andreas1 spans twenty years, from 1907 until about two years before the author’s death.2 Scholarly opinion is markedly divided in its evaluation of this fragmentary collection: while many see it as a failed Bildungsroman or an act of self-censorship on the part of the author, others see in the novel’s fragmentation one of the high points of literary modernism.3 The former arguments carry weight insofar as Hofmannsthal never ­published any of the novel, even though he had previously published

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other unfinished works in instalments and with varying lengths of time between sections (as with “Moments in Greece” and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”). One would think Andreas simply never turned into anything cohesive enough to be published and was in this sense a failed project. But those who champion the work’s achievements find support in Hofmannsthal’s own estimation of the “fragment” as a genre and a work of art. In his 1911 essay “Wilhelm Meister in der Urform” (Wilhelm Meister it its original form) Hofmannsthal writes: “Here, the torso is truncated. What a work! … What an abundance of figures, what wonderful richness in juxtaposition!”4 In a similar tone, the 2017 symposium on Hofmannsthal’s comedy of failures (“Hofmannsthals Komödie des Scheiterns”) featured a dramatic reading called “Menschliches Gebiet” (Human territory), borrowing the title from Hofmannsthal’s a­ phorism: “The half, the fragmentary, is truly human territory.”5 Whether this is also a form of excuse for not finishing a work is debatable. Hofmannsthal often returned to literary material, even after it had been published, in order to rework it, to find a new angle, even a new genre. Die Frau ohne Schatten – first opera, then prose tale – is a case in point. It is not clear, however, whether or when Hofmannsthal ever planned to publish Andreas. If nothing else, the novel fragment can be read as a place for experimentation, a kind of sketchbook that accompanies, tracks, and comments on Hofmannsthal’s other writings. If one were to outline the “plot” it might look something like this: Andreas, a young and inexperienced man, is sent out on a journey of maturation. He wanders first through rural Austria, where he meets the ironically named Gotthelff (“God-help”), a devilish figure who forces his way into Andreas’s service. They travel together through Carinthia and stay at the farm of the noble Finazzer family. There, Andreas falls in love with the daughter, Romana. Gotthelff, however, ruins the idyllic sojourn by seducing (a charitable reading) a maid, tying her to a bed and starting a fire in the room, killing the family dog, and stealing Andreas’s horse and much of his money. Laden with guilt at having brought such a man into their world, Andreas leaves the Finazzer farm, and as he travels through the mountain passes and the distance grows, he senses that Romana will always be by his side. He plans to return and marry her one day, once he has redeemed himself – a violent but plausible beginning to a typical Bildungsroman.

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Upon arriving in the labyrinthine city of Venice, Andreas finds himself drawn into a twisted and confusing world: he stays with (another) noble family, though this family is struggling financially and has decided to set up a “lottery” with their youngest daughter, Zustina, as the prize. The elder daughter, Nina, is seen by everyone to be model of moral perfection: appropriately, she lives outside the house, removed from the mess, like a work of art. The painter Zorzi, whose room Andreas takes, serves as the young man’s guide during his first few days in the city, and introduces him to a number of people, including the mysterious Sacramozo (also called Sagredo), who will later be a kind of (flawed) mentor to Andreas. While on his way to meet Nina (and guided by Zorzi), Andreas is left alone briefly and wanders into a church. Out of nowhere a woman appears, praying. In fact, she seems to direct her supplication towards Andreas rather than towards the altar, before she sinks down again. He decides to leave the church, and as he is about to exit, he turns around briefly and a different woman appears in the same spot. (This is Maria/Mariquita – a woman who seems to be experiencing split personality. The many notes to Andreas sketch a growing relationship with “both women”). Andreas leaves the church and walks back towards Nina’s apartment, but cannot find the right door and wanders into the wrong building. In the building’s courtyard, he sees the woman from the church again, this time from below: she is balanced strangely above the latticework and gazes down on Andreas “with unending sympathy, nay, love,” as blood drips from her fingertips onto Andreas’s forehead, before she disappears again over a wall.6 It is as if she has anointed and incriminated him simultaneously. After these strange encounters, Andreas returns to the street, where he finds Zorzi once again, who leads him to Nina’s apartment. There he is asked to comment on her portrait (painted by Zorzi). Left alone with Nina, Andreas senses an erotic tension. The main fragment ends with Zorzi and Andreas’s departure from Nina’s apartment, but the notes continue to outline the relationships with Maria/Mariquita, Romana, and Nina, as well as a number of other characters. Sacramozo/Sagredo plays an increasingly important role as mentor. More so than Hofmannsthal’s other works, Andreas presents numerous interpretive problems. Even if the main fragment7 – those thirty-seven contiguous pages in the Kritische Ausgabe – is read

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without extensive reference to the copious notes (an approach taken by Katrin Scheffer and Waltraud Wiethölter, for example), the story itself is labyrinthine, full of changes in perspective, tone, and place. To complicate matters, it is not clear which, if any, versions of certain passages Hofmannsthal considered finished. Achim Aurnhammer observes that there are many places where different versions of the story are picked up and expanded; it becomes impossible to tell if Hofmannsthal favoured one version over another.8 It is possible that Andreas has an intentionally, radically “open” form; as such, it is difficult to offer a thoroughgoing interpretation of the whole work, because the “whole” work emphatically would not exist. And yet, as Scheffer has pointed out, this openness contributes to the kind of reader-response criticism in the classic sense articulated by Wolfgang Iser,9 and to the creative reception that Hofmannsthal strove after.10 Scheffer’s emphasis on communication, specifically as expressed in “Moments in Greece,” also resonates well: “They are here and are unattainable. So, too, am I. By this we communicate.”11 “Communication” here does not emphasize the content or the transmission of a particular, premeditated message. Rather, it is an exchange born out of a mutual (communal) recognition of difference. It is a communality born out of separation. The author cannot determine what the reader will “understand” or “feel” – the author can only create the form and space for a potential encounter. That form must be defined enough to have form at all, but it must be open enough to allow the Erlebnis of the aesthetic ­encounter to take place. For Hofmannsthal, holding the form open is the “primary social obligation” (“oberste gesellige Pflicht”) to others. Those who write books have a social obligation to the reader: they must allow readers to co-create through the use of the imaginative faculty, “for a gift cannot be presented without thinking of the recipient beforehand.”12 This is a reformulation of the notion of beauty developed in the “Address”: beauty is the word that binds (“verpflichtet”) most deeply. The “primary social obligation” of an author is to give a space for the reader to co-create (“mitzuschaffen”). From the depths (“am tiefsten”) to the heights (“die oberste”), there is this duty or obligation to others, where art is involved. In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” too, the idea of co-creation is present in the encounter with the paintings of Van Gogh. The “social obligation” is realized by both creator (Van Gogh) and viewer: together, they create the space for all those objects to be reborn aesthetically and phenomenologically.13

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But the rebirth of the subject’s relation to the world is not always successful. To continue the analogy, the encounter might not lead to co-creation; artists and viewers can fail to fulfil their duties to each other and to the objects they encounter and create. As in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” there is a prominent moment in Andreas wherein the titular character finds himself before a painting.14 But the encounter is far different – we might even speak of a non-encounter. The focal points of this chapter then are the conditions contributing to this ‘failed’ encounter and the meta-aesthetic commentary on Hofmannsthal’s artistic project. As with the other texts explored in this book, certain motifs and events prepare for this moment and should therefore be considered in relation to the ekphrastic passages. In particular, the depiction of ­suffering and identification with others, power structures between subject and object, and perceptions of reality will contribute to the analysis of this ‘failed’ aesthetic encounter.

T h e P a inti ng In the first note (N1), which sketches the initial narrative trajectory of Andreas’s travels, Hofmannsthal wrote: “Reasons for the educational journey [Bildungsreise]. Painters. Famous names. Palaces. Salon customs. Introductory conversations leading to an entrée into society. Seeming. Pleasing.”15 The goal of this educational journey is to teach the young man the ways of society – a society not unlike that portrayed in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.”16 It is puffed up and ­hollow – Andreas specifically feels that this journey is about “representation and reputation.”17 Representation can also refer to art, and painters are mentioned, inviting comparisons with Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian Journey), which describes, among other things, a number of outstanding examples of artworks in Italy. But the prospect of this kind of cultural Bildung is immediately compromised when, in this same first note, the word “painter” appears again, referring this time to a specific painter: the shady figure called Zorzi (and occasionally Galli).18 The first depiction of this painter – which is taken up in the main fragment – is telling: “Once again upstairs to the painter: he shows me a picture of a beautiful person (for dalla Torre). Promises to take me to her. Along the way, tells me the story of the two pictures of Count Camposagrado … how the brothers send their own to him, he laughs immoderately and displays

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a sum of money, so that they can send him the Goya and copy the Tintorettos. The painter promises to present me to the duke, etc.”19 In this brief sketch, there is enough indirect characterization to surmise that, for Zorzi, paintings are about money. Of course, this is not uncommon for the era portrayed. Andreas arrives in Venice on 12 September 1778, a time when artists lived from commissions; producing artworks was a breadwinning craft, and art for art’s sake was a rare luxury. Indeed, that very rareness of opportunity raises questions about the conditions of creativity both in the artist and in the society. In Andreas, just as in Die Frau ohne Schatten, the regard for art and beauty tracks the regard for people. Like Zorzi’s art, Andreas’ hosts’ young daughter Zustina is to be sold to the highest bidder in order to rescue the family from financial struggles.20 The immoderate laugh he lets forth while flashing his money to Andreas betrays this as well. Themes of commodification and possession are amplified and personalized throughout the text: Money is necessary for sustaining a certain lifestyle; Zustina’s family is noble but impoverished, and their poverty induces them to “sell” their daughter. Zustina even accepts this as the best solution because money sustains the family’s way of life. But Zorzi’s example shows that money is not simply a means to survive. Money has taken the place of art insofar as art exists to be sold, and insofar as the principle of art for art’s sake has been replaced with that of money for money’s sake. This fact and Zorzi’s unpleasant character throw into relief one of the deep problems of a decadent, sinking Venice: Just as family relations and art are in some sense ­corrupted, so too are the elements that help establish the relation between aesthetics and ethics. The experiences of suffering and empathic identification in the aesthetic encounter are the first to be compromised – even parodied. In the next note, the “Painter Galli” (i.e., Zorzi) is mentioned again: “has the stone he uses for crushing pigments placed on his stomach to help with stomach pains.”21 It is not clear what the origin of these stomach pains is, but the situation also appears in the larger fragment, where it becomes clear that this is a regular occurrence for the painter, and is not indicative of a serious health issue. According to Zustina, “he’s supposedly lying up there with his stomach-ache. At that, it was decided that the men should go up there in order to remove the useless person.”22 If the artist suffers for his art, this is an unusually comical depiction of that suffering. And yet this awkward moment plays into Hofmannsthal’s (perhaps self-parodic) depictions of the artist’s

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empathic ability to experience the suffering of others. Here, the painter Zorzi is experiencing his own (physical) pain, while Andreas (more typically artist-like) experiences pangs of sympathy for the man who is to be kicked out of a room so that he, Andreas, might have a place to sleep – but he does not feel badly enough to decline the room. There is a kind of base pragmatism at the foundation of things, which makes for unsure footing.23 In response to the nausea brought on by the consumerist society as presented in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Van Gogh’s paintings offered a different world (one might go so far as to speak of a Heideggerian “world-creating” moment), dramatizing the (re)birth pangs of objects from the terrible non-existence they suffered in a “reality” that had begun to consume itself, unable to escape its own confined system of empty circulation. This new world was conceived of as an “Antwort” – a response. Zorzi’s paintings are different: they attempt to replicate a world motivated by economic gain, and in turn act as that world’s mirror. Rather than “creating” the world, the paintings act as a narcissistic reflection of the world as it is. But if Zorzi, like Gotthelff, is a Mephistophelean character, then there is also, perhaps, an unintentionally creative side-effect produced by his world-ridding (and “reality”-asserting) paintings. One could entertain the idea of a productive failure in the case of Zorzi’s artwork. Why stage an aesthetic failure? What does the underwhelming moment of seeing an uninspired (and uninspiring) painting contribute to the fragmented text? The scene with the painting, short though it is, provides an opportunity for reflection on the circumstances of artistic creation; further, it is a commentary on the violence one sees in the protagonist, the painter, and the society; and finally, it illustrates both literally and figuratively the paradox of Hofmannsthal’s productive, perhaps even his (un-)beautiful failure. The reader has been prepared for an aesthetic encounter by the many instances of confusion between dream, imagination, memory, and the reality of the present. Even the meeting with Nina is described using the technique of ekphrasis. Nina looks like a work of art: “They found Nina on a sofa in a relaxed and handsome position: everything about her was tinged with light and had a lovely delicate roundness: her hair was light blond like faded gold and she wore it unpowdered: three things, which were fetchingly curvilinear and seemed of a piece: her eyebrows her mouth and her hand, which had an expression of serene curiosity and great kindness, were raised towards the guests

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as they entered. A picture without a frame was leaning, turned around, against the wall: through the canvas ran an incision, as if it had been slashed with a knife.”24 The irony is that the character Nina is more like an artwork than the painting turned to the wall. She is in a “­handsome position” (“hübschen Stellung”) as if she has been deliberately placed here, and her features are strikingly balanced, soft, and charming. The description itself is rather uninflected: all the sentences have standard, predictable syntax, and while the adjectives are descriptive, they are not particularly evocative. In fact, one might say the passage is almost naturalistic in its attempt to objectively depict the “reality.” It is worth considering for a moment, by way of contrast, the aestheticized description of the servant girl in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” The two instances mirror each other in a number of respects. In both cases, living people (both female) are juxtaposed to artworks. In “The Tale,” the older servant girl is framed by the two bronze deities she is carrying. She herself looks like work of art, practically immobile, while the dark gold ornamentation in her hair looks alive and moves against her temples in rhythm with the girl’s breath. This dark gold hair jewellery contrasts with Nina’s unpowdered, unadorned, light blonde hair. The passages also differ in one other striking way: the encounter in “The Tale” slips into free indirect speech (erlebte Rede), affirming the experiential quality of the moment (Erlebnis). For the duration of a sentence, the narrator speaks the mind of the observing merchant’s son: “Eigentlich aber,” the narrator says. It reads like a passing thought uttered unreflectively, as in English one might say: “But really.”25 The passage in “The Tale” stands out for its lyricism and sonority, the repeated sibilants tracing in language the curve of the jewellery, the long vowels weighing down the sentences like the  heavy adornment. The  sensuous language is exemplary for Hofmannsthal’s usual ekphrastic approach. And despite the Medusan evocations, the merchant’s son does not desire the servant in a sexual way. He looks at her like he would a work of art (and reminds the reader that works of art can be threatening in their allure). The highly wrought passage in “The Tale” could not be further from the plain, uninflected description in Andreas. In “The Tale,” the twisted language belies a fear inspired by the aesthetic, and the lack of a sexual desire; in Andreas, the ostensibly sober, objective tone belies an uncertainty in the face of the erotic.

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The two scenes resonate with each other through their difference because they both signal the de-centring of the protagonists. In “The Tale,” this takes the form of an uncanny aesthetic encounter, resulting from the impression that lifeless things are animate while living beings are inanimate. In Andreas, the very much alive woman attracts the young man. The narrator, in a kind of suppressed free indirect speech, does in fact take on the voice of Andreas, and it is one that attempts to counterfeit objectivity by taking inventory of what can be seen. But the realistic tone rings false. And indeed, this cool, objective approach towards representation is about to come under critique: “The picture was roughly similar: the features were Nina’s, but cold, crude. Her lightly upwardly curving brows were so fetching precisely because they were in a face that was almost too soft; a harsher critic might have found her neck somewhat wanting in slenderness – but something in the way her head was balanced upon it lent a charming je ne sais quoi of feminine helplessness … This was one of those embarrassing portraits about which one can say: it contains an inventory of the subject’s face, but betrays the soul of the painter.”26 The painting is imitative, not imaginative, but it is a misrepresentation in its imitation. The “inventory” of the face has no “soul” or life of its own, as is made clear by the oxymoronic descriptions: the narrator goes onto describe the fire in the painted subject’s eyes as cold; the definition of the eyebrows is common. Every potential point at which the dialogical aesthetic moment – that call to the other – might occur is quashed. There is neither humility nor artistic daring in this ­painting. It is a lifeless representation, and the beautiful imperfections of the living Nina are replaced with the meretricious strokes of hollow opulence. If Zorzi’s approach inflicts metaphorical violence on art and reality, then the slash through the canvas brings this metaphorical assault into the narrative “real” world. Nina even comments: “Get it out of my sight … it reminds me only of anger and brutality.”27 It is not entirely clear what anger and brutality are being referenced here: it could be something to do with the infamous violence of Nina’s “Protector,” Camposagrado. A page earlier, Zorzi alludes to Camposagrado’s temper: “in a fit of rage and jealousy, he bit off the head of a live rare bird – sent a day before by her Jewish admirer, Mr dalla Torre.”28 It is likely that Camposagrado, in his rage, also slashed the painting (probably commissioned by dalla Torre, as N1 suggests).

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But Zorzi, too, seems to be a culprit here in the sense that his painting does not move beyond mirroring his own soul, and only his own soul. That is perhaps why the painting is also a striking image of vanity in both senses of the word: it is the emptiness and futility of a narcissistic mirroring that is trapped in its self-­referentiality, unsuited to the dialogical aesthetic moment. One might counter that, in other texts, Hofmannsthal uses similar language: the soul of the painter is present, for instance, in Van Gogh’s paintings. Similarly, in the 1902 essay “Diese Rundschau” (This review), Hofmannsthal writes: “Correct: viewing the work of art as a continuous emanation of a personality, as happening now, illuminations which cast a soul into the world … We all, every one of us, can dissolve what we have made. To make it unending again. We do not keep silent.”29 But the soul in the portrait of Nina is not thrust into the world, it is self-centred (like Zorzi). Zorzi’s painting is not beautiful because, although the portrait resembles Nina (who is beautiful), it does not resonate with the viewer; it does not challenge or provoke Andreas, nor does it send him on a journey so that he might return to himself. It is ugly not because it is unpleasant, but because it is lifeless, in spite of being lifelike: the product of an all too tight grip on reality, the self,30 and profit. The otherness that is necessary for a work of art to stand on its own is absent here; so too is the “world” which the artwork needs.31 There is no “other” in the painting to call or command; in short, it is not beautiful. And Andreas says as much when asked his opinion: “I find it very like the subject, and very ugly.”32

D o g s a n d O t h e r A b j ect Creatures As a work of art, the painting is hollow, but as a literary symbol, it is a powerful recapitulation of a cycle of violence directed at both art and life. It depicts just how pervasive and indiscriminate violence can be, ignoring boundaries of person or fate. Camposagrado’s violence recalls Gotthelff’s, but Andreas himself is part of this triumvirate, and functions as “the locus of foreign fates.”33 Both notes and fragment suggest that Andreas’s past is besmirched with episodes of sadism, coupled with an identification with his victims.34 For Andreas, the sadistic acts he recalls are a source of shame – even when he is not quite sure he committed these acts in actuality. His capacity to imagine committing them is enough to make him feel culpable. Tied to this is a repetition compulsion: he desires

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to relive these events in order that he might once again sense that feeling of endlessness achieved in the moment of identification (with the victims). The secondary literature and Hofmannsthal’s own notes on the text make quite clear that Gotthelff is, among other things, a part of Andreas, expressing and performing those destructive and violent desires that the young man does not wish to act upon himself. Gotthelff represents one – or perhaps many – of Andreas’s fragments: the seducer, the arsonist, and the animal abuser. The dog, for Hofmannsthal, unites in one image the condition of the artist and the demands of ethics.35 In the case of Andreas, those demands become inescapable. The fate of the Finazzer-family dog, it turns out, reimagines a scene from Andreas’s adolescence. While walking one day, a dog crosses the youth’s path. Andreas is immediately struck: “The humility with which it looked at its master from their first encounter onwards was incomprehensible.”36 As discussed in chapter 3, humility before the incomprehensible and unattainable is a key component for Hofmannsthal’s understanding of art; but where the viewer (and the artist) must approach people and things with humility, here it is the dog approaching Andreas with humility. But the humility is not reciprocal in this instance, and when one day the twelve-year-old Andreas discovers that “his” dog does not exhibit this submissive behaviour to Andreas alone, but behaves the same before another (dominant) dog, the boy’s rage and jealousy become uncontainable – and that incomprehensible humility becomes a site of contact with the eternal: The fury rose up in him, he called the little dog over. At ten paces, the dog was already aware of his master’s ­wrathful mien and came crawling towards him, his trembling gaze riveted on Andres’s face. He scorned the dog, calling him a low and corruptible creature, and under the scorn the dog crept nearer and nearer: it seemed to him that he raised his foot and struck the spine from above with the heel of his shoe. It seemed to him – the little dog gave a short cry of pain and crumpled, but he wagged his tail at him. He turned suddenly and left, the little dog crept behind him, his back was broken, in spite of that he slid after his master, like a snake. Finally, he stopped, the little dog gazed up at him, and died, fawning. He was not sure whether he had done it or not; but it emanates from him. In this way, the infinite touches him.37

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The event is all the more disturbing for the calm and objective tone with which it is described. Yet throughout the entire passage there is a tension between this objective quality and how the event unfolds. The contrast between master and dog could not be clearer: high and low, fury and fear, authority and obedience, perpetrator and victim. And all of this is set up in a structure of call and response that comes from an overflow of energy: he calls the dog to him, to where the fury rises up in him, and upon seeing his master’s face the dog lowers himself, “crawling.” Almost every sentence begins with a focus on Andreas’s action and then depicts the dog’s response. Only the sentence that begins “At ten paces” focuses first on the dog; and this is still a response to the preceding sentence, “he called the little dog over to him.” This call/response structure increases in tension as the distance between Andreas and the dog closes, while the discrepancy between submission and domination grows. Fear and humility pull the dog down, while the boy’s wrath – like fire – burns upwards. The dog approaches humbly, while the boy reviles and humiliates his dog. They match each other in intensity; but at the moment of contact, marked by the colon, the vision becomes muddied. One can only see with the aid of distance. And here, Hofmannsthal’s use of converging perspectives signals the encounter: neither narrator nor Andreas really knows what happened. Two sentences, both introduced by the hesitant phrase “it seemed to him,” and both marked by their use of the subjunctive mood, express the unspeakable nature of the event. While the call and response structure of the passage imitates dialogue, the content of what happened resists direct, indicative discourse. Analogous to the aesthetic encounter, this encounter with the infinite defies objective description. And perhaps because the scene is so terrible, it must be dampened through a kind of dissociation or forgetting. As trauma victims sometimes cannot recall the moment of trauma in words or images, so Andreas cannot clearly recall what happened in that moment. It seemed to him that he raised his foot and trampled the dog’s spine under his heel. According to Robert Boehringer, the editor of the 1938 edition of Hofmannsthal’s and George’s correspondence, the real break between the two poets occurred when the seventeen-year-old Hofmannsthal witnessed George violently kick a stray dog, yelling at it as it whimpered and ran away.38 The situation that Andreas recalls is made more complex by the proliferation of what seem to be mixed signals: in spite of the pain, the dog “wedelte.” The verb “wedeln” typically refers to a gesture of

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excitement: in English, tail wagging or fawning. This might suggest a masochistic tendency, the deep-rooted character of happy submission: The dog did cry out, but he wagged his tail and followed his master despite the injury. The dog is also a kind of Philoctetes, or Oedipus: an image of suffering, walking, on the verge of death. The moment of contact between high and low is announced not with a bang, but a whimper. That this contact occurs at the level of the feet is significant. Andreas did not strike the dog with his hand or a stick. He trampled the dog’s back under the heel of his shoe.39 But feet have another significance in Andreas: They are associated with women Andreas has been romantically attracted to. Like Anton Reiser and Wilhelm Meister before him, Andreas loved the theatre as boy on the cusp of pubescence. Its allure for him was concentrated into a single fetishized object: The floor of the stage was uneven: the curtain was too short in some places, riding boots came and went … between the bridge of a contrabass and the head of a musician, one could see the feet of a lion, or – once – a bespangled sky-blue shoe. This sky-blue shoe was more wondrous than anything else – later there stood a creature who had this shoe on, it belonged to her, was one with her blue and silver robe: she was a princess, dangers surrounded her, dark figures, torches, a magical forest … all of that was lovely but it was not that double-edged sword of most delicate delight and profane desire that went through the soul, unto tears, when the blue shoe was there alone beneath the curtain.40 W.G. Sebald remarked that this passage exemplifies the connection between the forbidden delights of art and fetishism.41 Repressed art returns in strange ways: here it is the “forbidden” theatre (of which Andreas’s parents did not approve) – and the dangerous delights associated with it. Romana re-awakens this image at various instances, as when she suggestively touches the bedframe with the tips of her toes, just before she and Andreas kiss. Andreas later imagines her bare feet pulled up under her gown.42 But in a dream, a heavy left foot prevents him from reaching her, as she runs barefoot in the Viennese Spiegelgasse – with its suggestion of psychological mirroring. In this dream, the image of the dog and its broken spine return, but now as a cat: “It was the cat whose spine he had once struck with a carriage

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shaft and which would not die: and so she still was not dead, after so many years! … It’s no use, he must pass her, with unspeakable anguish he lifted his heavy left foot above the animal whose spine moved incessantly in serpentine fashion up and down, and the cat twisted its head and fixed its gaze on him, the roundness of the cat’s head with its simultaneously feline and canine face, filled with voluptuousness and agony in a grisly confusion – he wants to scream, at which point there is a scream inside, in the room.”43 As is not uncommon with Hofmannsthal, a symbol used often turns in on itself, like the cat’s twisted head, hinting at that great span that exists between and connects eros and thanatos: from desire to transcendence to violence. The violence of contact goes deeper. It is also figured in a dreammemory that suggests that Andreas was molested as a child: “A gaze which the boy dreaded more than any other, the gaze of his first ­catechist, shot through him and the dreaded little plump hand seized him, the repulsive face of a boy, who in the evening twilit hour on the back stairs told him what he did not wish to hear, pressed against his cheek, and how he struggled to push it away, there lay before the door, through which he had to pass in order to follow Romana, a creature and began to move towards him: it was the cat.”44 The cat, a symbol of eros and thanatos, blocks the door, just as Gotthelff’s foot earlier had blocked Andreas from closing his door. Andreas seems to be both a victim and a perpetrator of violence.45 From a psychoanalytic point of view, this helps to explain Andreas’s cruelty towards animals, as well as the erotic undertone in that violence. Andreas re-enacts the trauma, but he takes on the dominant role of agent (or master). It is a kind of lex talionis that has undergone transference: survivors of cruelty deal the blows of “justice” too late, and not on the original perpetrators, but on those who come after. The logic of trauma in Andreas operates the same way; the victim perpetuates the violence on an object perceived to be a threat to the subject’s authority, such as young Andreas’s little dog, which showed fealty to another dog, casting doubt on Andreas’s authority. But, as Hofmannsthal wrote in “Moments in Greece,” quoting the classicist Gilbert Murray: there is vengeance in heaven for an injured dog (εἰδὶ καὶ κυνῶν ἐρινύες). “The Conversation about Poems” offers an analog to the experience and perpetration of violence, namely in the moment of identification between the sacrificial victim and the person performing the ritual. Just as readers and audience members are “co-creators” of works of art, so too may victims of violence become co-producers of violence;

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this is the awful rite into which Andreas was initiated as a boy; this was his catechism. And it has indeed been given an aura of the “sacred” – that is, it is set apart. These events aspire towards eternity, towards being set outside of time and apart from the “real” life experienced in its chronic linearity. The trauma becomes, in a sense, unreal, because it was not experienced as happening in time; this is why its narration occurs in the contexts of memories and dreams. Elaine Scarry refers to this as “world-ridding”: “It is in part this world-­ ridding, path-clearing logic that explains the obsessive presence of pain in the rituals of large, widely shared religions … [and] why, though it occurs in widely different contexts and cultures, the metaphysical is insistently coupled with the physical with the equally insistent exclusion of the middle term, world.”46 Such world-ridding aspiration to eternity is relived in the moment the boy Andreas senses the rift from the real world in that violence which emanated from him: “He was not sure whether he had done it or not; but it emanates from him. In this way, the infinite touches him.”47 That moment of freedom from the temporal world is one of the hallmarks of the aesthetic, and heightened sensitivity to stimuli is the hallmark of the aesthete. To sense the touch of the infinite requires just such a heightened sensitivity. The downside is that undesired stimuli can seem louder and harsher, too. In the Finazzer home, before falling asleep, Andreas hears Romana’s mother and father in the room next door, as well as their dog, and recalls his childhood: “His senses were sharpened and he could hear that the farmer’s wife was braiding her hair while they conversed, and that the dog was gnawing away at something. Who feeds a dog at this hour of the night, the thought occurred to him, and at the same moment he felt pressed, as if he had to return to his childhood, when he still had the small room next to his parents and would overhear them through the recessed wardrobe whether he wanted to or not. He did not want to hear now either, and yet he heard.”48 The artist is indeed supposed to have a heightened sensibility, and this is also what allows the artist to feel the suffering of others. After this reminiscence and fantasizing about a happy future with Romana, he sees the dog in the courtyard: “The dog stood in the centre of the light, held his head strangely at an angle, turned in circles: it was as if he were enduring a great suffering, perhaps he was old and near death. Andres [sic] was beset with a dull sadness, he was tremendously ­distressed by the sufferings of the creature – when he was just now so

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happy – as if in this vision he were reminded of his father’s approaching death. He stepped away from the window, now he could think of his Romana.”49 For Andreas, empathy is an affliction. Not yet able to handle these overwhelming feelings for the suffering of the “creature,” he turns away from it. The circles traced by the dog suggest that Andreas, too, might well be turning in circles, only to confront again (or again avoid) traumatic events.50 Andreas’s experience of suffering either replicates itself on the abject, or is displaced into dreams, which then begin to dissolve the edges of reality. Writing about torture, Elaine Scarry says: “The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of ‘incontestable reality’ on that power that has brought it into being. It is of course precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used.”51 Andreas’s desire for his lack of agency (the experience of being touched against his will) to be unreal is reaffirmed in the desire for the agency to be real in that moment of perpetrating violence; but it is, ironically, only destruction. This circle is a vicious one. Although Andreas’s hypersensitivity is felt as an affliction, it does present a chance to transcend the repetition of violence: pain has the capacity to awaken a sense of shame and humility. The site of this awakening is, appropriately, the feet, which in turn are connected to Hofmannsthal’s definition of beauty. The polysemy of the foot becomes apparent when one considers the differences between Andreas and his mentor, Sacramozo. In N60 Sacramozo recounts two dreams he has had, the first of which features bare feet: “I. he resided in the palace. The tolling of a bell. The cock’s crow, A second one. He stands up barefoot. He feels through the soles of his feet everything all the way down into the mountain.”52 The elemental connection to the earth occurs at the contact point between the bare foot and the ground’s surface. That connection reaches – paradoxically – “down” into the mountain. This is a thing of beauty, combining humility and boldness, the depths and the heights. The word “schön” even appears at the end of this first dream: “On the other side, silvered ancestors step from out of the mountain wall, an image so beautiful that he cried out in his dream: ‘I am dreaming!’”53 The passage evokes the aesthetic imperative as it is described in the “Address”: “This demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected

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powers of the mysterious line of ancestors within us.”54 The second dream, however, speaks to Sacramozo’s sense of guilt and his desire to escape it: Sacramozo flies through (“durchfliegt”) the landscape, brooks, and cemeteries, echoing Andreas’s early aimless springing, leaping, and bounding through the landscape at the Finazzer farmyard: “finally he [Andreas] sprang from himself as if from a prison, he leapt in bounds and knew nothing of himself but the moment.”55 The attempt to avoid the command of the earth’s pull is either achieved in dream (as in Sacramozo’s flight) or in dissociation. Neither flight lasts. In seeking to escape the present and himself, Andreas finds himself at the grave of the dog Gotthelff had killed; and Sacramozo, in his second dream, breaks that connection to the earth (like the apparition of Plato gliding above the ground in “Moments in Greece”). But his flight suffers: “his flight already dull … now the cock crows. He knows it is the third time and Knows [sic] that he has betrayed his saviour.”56 The aesthetic exemplified in the beautiful image of ancestors before the barefooted Sacramozo, and the holiness that he denounced, come together again in several related notes concerning Andreas: N148: What kind of light is this. Clear transparent: the life of branches in this light: the distance as an exhilarating feeling. He disrobes and bathes in the river. A frightful moment, as he loses the ground beneath his feet. N149: while stepping into the water, naked, he believes he sees Romana doing the same He gives himself a fright. In the meantime, she is gone. He renounces her, so sure is he of her. He lived through one of the happiest days of his life and he did not know it. N150: After bathing and after losing consciousness: “He ­carried shoe and stockings in his hands and walked with ­bleeding feet across the meadow.”57 These three notes show how the elements of the aesthetic moment (such as the “exhilarating feeling” and “frightful moment” in N148) suffuse an event that has its nexus at the feet. The fear – even the loss of consciousness – that comes from losing one’s footing occurs in the aesthetic moment, as has been made clear in previous texts. This moment is not an encounter with a work of art, but it is an aesthetically informed way of encountering and experiencing the world. This is why Andreas can now perceive the life of the branches in the trees.

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The final words relating to the event speak to the asymptotic movement of aesthetics and ethics as they near each other: Andreas “walked with bleeding feet across the meadow.” Whatever Hofmannsthal might have been planning to do with this episode, it ends with a reference to pain, suffering, and humility: those qualities of the aesthetic that can never be erased from the work of art, but about which it can give no specific commentary – it can only bear witness. As is typical for Hofmannsthal, that moment of suffering is connected to piety. Sacramozo’s renunciation of the connection to the earth has been countered by Andreas’s bleeding feet. Like the Discalced Carmelites, whose bare feet are a sign of a life dedicated to poverty, Andreas accepts the pain of earth’s pull as he lifts his bare feet one at a time and sets them on the ground, again and again.

A B e a u t if u l F ai lure In a letter to Gershom Scholem from 1938, Benjamin characterized Kafka’s “failure” thus: “To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual ­failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.”58 Hofmannsthal, too, was keenly aware of his failure with Andreas. He knew that art in and of itself cannot make us ethical, and that aesthetics cannot be a handmaiden to ethics, nor vice versa. But his writings hold out a hope that the aesthetic encounter can still be an Erlebnis: A lived experience that destabilizes audiences and readers, and demands that they take steps to respond with a recognition of their shared human condition – that is, stepping out of their selfinflicted immaturity and self-absorption. At its best, Hofmannsthal’s work is not prescriptive; rather, it is experiential. It is suffused with unnamed ethical concerns that cannot be shaken off, and these are almost always linked to or encased in the question of the effect of the aesthetic on human beings. In another author’s hands, Andreas might have depicted the Bildung of its protagonist. But Hofmannsthal never completed a Bildungsroman. The failure adequately to depict a marriage of aesthetics and ethics in an imagined “real life” is a beautiful failure: beautiful in the sense that Hofmannsthal intended when he wrote of beautiful works of art: “For

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such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’ There is no word loftier, no word more dangerous. It is the word which binds most deeply.”59 It is a beautiful failure that recognizes the aesthetic responsibility of letting oneself go and providing instead a space for art; and it is a beautiful failure because, to use the language of ethics, it provokes its readers into engaging with it as something totally other. Beautiful is that failure which cannot help but try to imagine the impossible. Art is insistently “other.” And in this otherness of art, there is space for an ethical moment in the encounter, which cannot be translated or realized, but must be acknowledged. That is the aporia. But it is also why Hofmannsthal writes: “We feel the plunge of existence. We assume nothing. From ourselves we spin out the thread that carries us across the abyss, and sometimes we are blissful as wisps of cloud in the evening sky. We create our language in tandem with others, each quickening the other. We carry within us a vision, an affliction, a face, a tone … We do not keep silent.”60 Art speaks, as long as people are prepared to hear.

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Notes

I nt r o d uc t i o n   1 When citing Hofmannsthal’s work, I refer most often to the recently ­completed critical edition of the collected works: Sämtliche Werke (Kritische Ausgabe). When referring to an entire volume, rather than a ­specific work printed in the volume, I use the abbreviation ka followed by the volume number, a colon, and a short title of the volume (e.g., ka  40: Bibliothek). Volume titles are listed in full in the bibliography. In cases where I did not have access to the more recently published volumes of the critical edition, I cite two older but widely available editions, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden and Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben.   2 Payne and Barbera, A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, 16.   3 Schwarz, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Rainer Maria Rilke,” 165. Some recent translations include: Alexander Stillmark’s Hugo Von Hofmannsthal: Select Narrative Prose, from 2020; my own Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Writings on Art / Schriften zur Kunst, from 2017; David S. Luft’s Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–27, from 2011; and J.D. McClatchy’s The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, from 2008. With forty volumes of material, there is still very much left to translate.   4 By 1914, Hofmannsthal’s poetry had already entered the canon, even by international standards, as evidenced by the series “The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English,” edited by German-American educator Kuno Francke. Four years later, in 1918, the American author Charles Wharton Stork published an almost complete translation of Hofmannsthal’s Gesammelte Gedichte under the title The Lyrical Poems of Hofmannsthal, comprising his lyric poetry until 1907.

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  5 Hofmannsthal, “Sunt animae rerum,” 25.   6 “Drum flieh aus deinem Selbst, dem starren, kalten, / Des Weltalls Seele dafür einzutauschen, / Lass dir des Lebens wogende Gewalten, / Genuss und Qualen, durch die Seele rauschen, / Und kannst du eine Melodie erlauschen, / So strebe, ihren Nachhall festzuhalten!” Ibid.   7 Thomas Kovach’s Hofmannsthal and Symbolism: Art and Life in the Work of a Modern Poet and Robert Vilain’s The Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism treat this topic at length.   8 For more on this characterization, see Douglas A. Joyce’s contribution, “Hofmannsthal Reception in the Twentieth Century” in A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal.   9 Allan Janik’s representation of Hofmannsthal’s work in Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited exemplifies this view: “The cultural manifestation of this flight from society … typified the works of Hofmannsthal from his early world-weary lyricism to his later fairy-tale plays of social regeneration after the war, which would create a refuge from the real world for the alienated aesthete.” Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited, 39. Janik does not provide textual evidence for this assertion, and his allusion to Hofmannsthal’s “fairy-tale plays” is a misnomer. Hofmannsthal’s ­fairy-tale opera, on the other hand, calls up disturbing events that veterans of the First World War would have recognized. Janik’s comments adopt a narrative initially disseminated by Hofmannsthal’s contemporary, the critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936). 10 “Die sämtlichen merkwürdigen Bücher von d’Annunzio hatten ihr Befremdliches, ja wenn man will ihr Entsetzliches und Grauenhaftes darin, daß sie von einem geschrieben waren, der nicht im Leben stand. Der sie geschrieben hatte, wußte alle Zeichen des Lebens: wundervoll wußte er sie alle, und doch glaube ich heute, er war bis jetzt kein großer Dichter, überhaupt kein Dichter. Aber er war von der ersten Zeile an ein ­außerordentlicher Künstler.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 233. 11 Although the term “object-oriented” is suggestive of more recent posthumanist, objected-oriented ontologies, the moment discussed here has a distinct genealogy. Adorno summarizes the fascination with objects (“things”) well: “Instead of things yielding as symbols of subjectivity, ­subjectivity yields as the symbol of things, prepares itself to rigidify ­ultimately into the thing which society has in any case made of it.” (Anstatt daß die Dinge als Symbol der Subjektivität nachgäben, gibt Subjektivität nach als Symbol der Dinge, bereit, in sich selber schließlich zu dem Ding zu erstarren, zu dem sie von der Gesellschaft ohnehin

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gemacht wird.) Adorno, “The George-Hofmannsthal Correspondence,” 223; “George und Hofmannsthal,” 234. Though not specified by Adorno, for Hofmannsthal the relationship is more reciprocal: just as the thing ­animates the subject (viewer), so the viewer animates the thing. In the ­aesthetic experience, the two are mutually dependent and mutually distinct. 12 Committed art is not to be equated with propaganda: “Even if politically motivated, commitment in itself remains politically polyvalent so long as it is not reduced to propaganda, whose pliancy mocks any commitments by the subject.” (Engagement als solches, sei’s auch politisch gemeint, ­bleibt politisch vieldeutig, solange es nicht auf eine Propaganda sich reduziert, deren willfährige Gestalt alles Engagement des Subjekts ­verhöhnt.) Adorno, “Commitment,” 3; “Engagement,” 410. 13 In Kierkegaard’s various depictions of the demonic, there is always a clear temporal marker: suddenness. Suddenness represents the solipsistic ­opposite of continuity (associated with community). In the Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard writes “the demonic is the sudden” – but this is only one ­attribute of many that Kierkegaard posits, and it is difficult to understand without its counterpart notion, “reserve”: “Reserve shuts itself off ever more from communication. But communication is in turn the expression of continuity, and the negation of continuity is the sudden.” Kierkgeaard, Concept of Anxiety, 154, 156. Suddenness is “reserve” understood ­temporally. Language, on the other hand, is not about “reservedness,” but rather communication. For this reason, it is “subject to ethical ­categories.” Music, by contrast, has “the erotic sensual genius” as its object: “In other words, music is the demonic.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 75. 14 See the section “Für immer stolz und glücklich, diesem Volk anzugehören” in the program to Österreichs Antwort (exhibition concept by Katja Kaluga). Hofmannsthal’s initial enthusiasm for the war waned with time, and by 1917 he was thoroughly disillusioned. In a letter to the countess Ottonie Degenfeld from 1923, he writes: “With horror, I see now from the ­memoirs of Paléologue, together with those of Tirpitz, and now those of Conrad, that we – Berlin and Vienna – are completely to blame for the outbreak of this war.” (Mit Grausen sehe ich aus den Memoiren von Paléologue, zusammengehalten mit denen von Tirpitz, jetzt mit denen von Conrad, daß die ganze Schuld am eigentlichen Ausbruch bei uns liegt, Berlin u. Wien). This letter is quoted in the Epilogue of Österreichs Antwort. 15 Hofmannsthal finds an unlikely ally in the thought of Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse: “The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension. Its relation to praxis is inexorably indirect, mediated, and frustrating. The more immediately political the work of art, the more

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it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical transcendent goals of change.” The German reads slightly differently: “Nur in ihr selbst liegt ihr politisches Potential. Ihre Beziehung zur verändernden Praxis ist ­unentrinnbar ‘indirekt,’ vermittelt, frustrierend. Je unmittelbarer, direkter, expliziter politisch ein Werk sein will, desto weniger wird es revolutionär, subversiv sein.” Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, 70; Die Permanenz der Kunst, 9. Hofmannsthal’s relation to the Frankfurt School and critical theory is an unexplored, but promising topic, especially given Hofmannsthal’s ­correspondence with and early championing of Walter Benjamin. 16 “Politik ist Menschenkunde, Kunst des Umgangs auf einer höheren Stufe. Ein irrationales Element spielt hier mit … wer verborgenen Kräfte anzureden weiss, dem gehorchen sie. So offenbart sich der grosse ­politische Mensch. Vom Dichter ist es genug, wenn er die Mächte ahnt und mit untrüglichem Gefühl auf sie hinweist.” Hofmannsthal, “Grillparzers Politisches Vermächtnis,” 406. The above translation is my own. The entire essay can be found in English in David Luft’s Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea, 73–8. 17 Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 12. 18 See Anderson, “1963: Love as Fascism,” 882. This assessment rests uneasy with the fact that Hofmannsthal wrote and published drama and essays consistently throughout his writing career, even before his l­yrical output tapered off. The argument hinges on one’s definition of “socially engaged,” but Anderson does not go into specifics. 19 Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 114. 20 Kovach, A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 4. 21 The “call” in art and literature has a long history, and in the context of Aestheticism, the ethical relevance of this call gains traction. Elaine Scarry notes that many ancient and medieval writers (Homer, Plato, and Dante, among many others) considered beauty to be a kind of greeting or call. See Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 25, 126. Hofmannsthal’s prose tale “Die Wege und die Begegnungen” (Paths and Encounters) presents a ­similar idea: “A greeting is something boundless. Dante dates his ‘Vita Nuova’ to a greeting.” (Ein Gruß ist etwas Grenzenloses. Dante datiert sein ‘Neues Leben’ von einem Gruß.) Hofmannsthal, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 160. 22 “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” Rilke, “Archäischer Torso Apollos,” 557. 23 “Es führt kein direkter Weg ins Leben, aus dem Leben keiner in die Poesie. Das Wort als Träger eines Lebensinhaltes und das traumhafte Bruderwort,

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welches in einem Gedicht stehen kann, streben auseinander und schweben wie fremd aneinander vorüber, wie die beiden Eimer eines Brunnens. Kein äußerliches Gesetz verbannt aus der Kunst alles Vernünfteln, alles Hadern mit dem Leben, jeden unmittelbaren Bezug auf das Leben und jede direkte Nachahmung des Lebens, sondern die einfache Unmöglichkeit: diese schweren Dinge können dort ebensowenig leben als eine Kuh in den Wipfeln der Bäume.” Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 16. 24 “Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureuse / S’élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins; / Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes, / Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor, / – Qui plane sur la vie, et ­comprend sans effort / Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!” Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 17; Les Fleurs du mal, 12. 25 “Wie zeug ich dich aber im heiligtume / – So fragt ich wenn ich es sinnend durchmaß / In kühnen gespinsten der sorge vergaß – / Dunkle große schwarze blume?” George, Hymnen, Pilgerfahrten, Algabal, 96. 26 For the important role of forgetting and not being able to forget, see Matussek, “Tod und Transzendenz.” Similarly, Mayer notes that, in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos), the titular character cannot forget. Mayer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 103. Another opera, Die ägyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helen) also engages with the conflicting desires to forget and to remember. Moreover, memory has an ethical import for Hofmannsthal: see his annotation to Freud’s Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (Psychopathology of Everyday Life): “Forgetfulness from disregard for the other.” (Vergesslichkeit aus Geringschätzung des Andern.) Hofmannsthal, KA 40: Bibliothek, 214; *fdh 1308. The marker *fdh refers to the catalogue number in the Freies deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt. 27 “Schön ist mein Garten mit den goldnen Bäumen.” Hofmannsthal, “Mein Garten,” 20. 28 Tellingly, one of the earlier titles of the poem is “Midas’ Garten.” See Hofmannsthal, ka 1: Gedichte I, 135. The motif of gold will be ­discussed in the subsequent chapters. 29 Throughout his book, Schorske characterizes art at the turn of the century as a site of avoidance. Consider his comments on Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: “This psychological posture is classic for the weakened ego finding in f­ antasy a substitute for power over reality: wish is king; encounter is avoided.” Describing the aesthetic experience, he writes: “It gives form to the feelings arising out of experience, but not to the experience itself. By the very fact of standing for life, art separates us from it.” Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 258, 311. Schorske is charitable towards

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Hofmannsthal, whom he characterizes as having “sought to return art to ethics, aesthetic culture to society, and his cultivated class to fruitful participation in the body social.” Ibid. On the one hand, Hofmannsthal “returned to revitalize a traditional morality of personal responsibility; on the other, he thrust forward toward depth psychology and the ­affirmation of instinct … Hofmannsthal had rescued the function of art from the hedonistic isolation into which his class had carried it and had tried to redeem society through art’s reconciling power. But the rifts in the body social had proceeded too far. Society could tolerate tragedy or comedy, but not redemption through aesthetic harmonization.” Ibid., 313, 318. I am not entirely convinced Hofmannsthal was as consistently ­optimistic about art’s potential as Schorske makes him out to be. For more on Hofmannsthal’s doubts, see my discussion of Andreas in ­chapter 5 of this book. 30 Cf. Katherine Arens’s portrayal: “Hofmannsthal is by no means simply looking backwards (as critics like Michael Steinberg argue), but rather continuing a long-term project begun at the start of his career: the ­renovation of western traditions for a new generation … these essays [the late essays] document Hofmannsthal’s hopes for a cosmopolitan art that was not elitist or nationalist – an art that mediates rather than excludes because it grows from the historical experience of the group, not just from an elite.” Arens, “Hofmannsthal’s Essays,” 182. Egon Schwarz, with his expansive comparative work from 1962, Hofmannsthal und Calderon, makes a similar point about Hofmannsthal’s use of literary traditions. 31 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 45.

C hapt e r O n e   1 Carsten Strathausen posits that the gaze and its reversal is one of the ­central themes in fin-de-siècle literature. “The look of things,” he ­summarizes, “refers to the – possibly deceptive – visual appearance of external objects, but also evokes the power of everything to look back at us once we have learned to look at it.” Strathausen, The Look of Things, 27. Strathausen’s primary example is Rilke, though Hofmannsthal’s work would serve his purposes equally well. Strathausen does discuss Hofmannsthal in the context of the relation between speech and silence.   2 Quotes in English are from Heim’s translation in McClatchy’s The Whole Difference, unless otherwise stated. For brevity, I use the shortened title, “The Tale.”

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  3 The merchant’s son contrasts with other figures in Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre who are witness to, or objects of, degradation: Gianino in the lyrical drama Der Tod des Tizian (The Death of Titian) and the Empress in both opera and prose versions of Die Frau ohne Schatten are humanized and strengthened by their encounters with grime, ugliness, and poverty.   4 Charles Hammond’s sensitive readings of Hofmannsthal’s relation to Aestheticism and Decadence offer strong support for a moral ending: the merchant’s son’s Aestheticism, Hammond argues, “ultimately ­provokes society into exacting its own revenge against him.” Hammond, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Das Märchen,” 447. This is a valid reading, supported by the structure of the tale. That provocation, moreover, can come from within the individual: the antagonistic forces, for instance, include chance, which, according to Hofmannsthal’s views at the time, is motivated from within the self (not society). Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Richard Beer-Hofmann from 15 May 1895: “The fall of the cards … is something that one forces from the inside out; that is the deep, great truth of which Poldy’s story is meant to be a sign, and my Tale a childlike and crude allegory.” (Das Fallen der Karten … erzwingt man von innen her; das ist das tiefe grosse wahre wovon dem Poldy seine Geschichte ein ­hilfloses und mein Märchen ein kindlich rohes allegorisches Zeichen sein soll.) Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann, Briefwechsel, 48. Hofmannsthal refers in this letter to Leopold von Andrian’s novella, Der Garten der Erkenntnis (The Garden of Knowledge).   5 This is exemplified in the writings of Ernst Mach. The importance of Mach’s views was announced by Hermann Bahr in his 1903 essay, “Das unrettbare Ich” (The Unsalvageable Ego). Judith Ryan has treated the topic of impressionistic psychology at length in The Vanishing Subject.   6 Claudia Bamberg refers in this regard to the theatrum mundi of things. Bamberg, Hofmannsthal, 233.   7 Wolfgang Huemer argues that Husserl’s phenomenological reduction was inspired by a creative misunderstanding of Hofmannsthal’s ­portrayal of the ­aesthetic experience. Husserl would later understand the ­phenomenological reduction to lead only “to a solipsistic point of view that cannot provide a foundation to explain intersubjectivity.” Huemer, “Phenomenological Reduction,” 124. While I do not entirely agree with Huemer’s reading of Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter – a text critical to his argument – as an expression of a language crisis, I accept the g­ eneral direction of his article, and, in particular, the ­importance placed on the problem of intersubjectivity, which also ­occupied Hofmannsthal.

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  8 See Wallenstein, “Phenomenology.”   9 “Epoche der Freundschaft mit Poldy (‘Kaufmannssohn’ ‘Garten der Erkenntnis’): das Hauptproblem dieser sehr merkwürdigen Epoche liegt darin, daß Poldy vollständig (ich weniger vollständig, sondern ausweichend, indem ich eine Art Doppelleben führte) das Reale übersah: er suchte das Wesen der Dinge zu spüren – das andere Gesicht der Dinge beachtete er nicht, er wollte es absichtlich nicht beachten, für nichts ansehen.” Hofmannsthal, Ad me ipsum, 244. 10 This is also the criticism Hofmannsthal levies against Oscar Wilde, whose works he nevertheless valued for their aesthetic brilliance. See his essay “Sebastian Melmoth.” For a thorough study of Hofmannsthal’s early views on Wilde’s aesthetics, see the dissertation by Charles H. Hammond, Jr, Blind Alleys. 11 “Das Leben … läßt seiner nicht spotten. Verstoßen wird es böse und ­rachsüchtig.” Aleweyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 175. For a brief overview of the literature related to “The Tale,” see Meyer, “Erzählter Körper.” Meyer’s focus on the creation of an artificial world reformulates Alewyn’s thesis. 12 “Ein junger Kaufmannssohn, der sehr schön war und weder Vater noch Mutter hatte, wurde bald nach seinem fünfundzwanzigsten Jahre der Geselligkeit und des gastlichen Lebens überdrüssig.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 39; “Das Märchen,” 15. 13 Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 39–40; “Das Märchen,” 15. 14 Cf. Rasch, Die literarische Décadence, particularly the sections on “Welthaß und Willensschwäche,” “Ästhetizismus,” and “Lebensferne und Isolierung.” Hermann Bahr offers a similar view: “The decadence of Montesquiou and Wilde is a flight of dilettantes, who have a correct feeling for art but who lack the creative power of the artist” (Die Décadence der Montesquiou und Wilde ist eine Ausflucht von Dilettanten, die ein rechtes Gefühl der Kunst, aber die schöpferische Kraft der Künstler nicht haben.) Bahr, “Décadence,” 172. 15 “Die Idiosynkrasie des lyrischen Geistes gegen die Übergewalt der Dinge ist eine Reaktionsform auf die Verdinglichung der Welt, der Herrschaft von Waren über Menschen.” Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 40; “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,” 52. 16 The tension between the commercial and the aesthetic is central to “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (translated and published in English as “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”), discussed in chapter 2. 17 In contrast, Hinrich Seeba argues that “Hofmannsthal and many of his contemporaries, who considered themselves members of the cultural elite,

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if not the ruling class, seemed to live in denial of the alarming signs of what was in store for them.” Seeba, “Hofmannsthal and Wiener Moderne,” 33. Yet even an early passage like this one in “The Tale” ­indicates otherwise: Hofmannsthal was more self-reflective (and perhaps self-parodic) than scholars like Seeba have given him credit for. 18 Cf. Alewyn, who writes of the character Claudio in Der Tor und der Tod (Death and the Fool): “Unable to experience anything, be it a thing or a familiar person [ein Du], unable to act, unable even to enjoy, he lives out his life without a world, without a fate, in the dungeon of his ego [sein Ich]. The beautiful life is transformed from blessing to curse.” (Unfähig, etwas zu erleben, weder ein Ding noch ein Du, unfähig zu handeln, unfähig auch nur zu genießen, lebt er ohne Welt und ohne Schicksal in dem Kerker seines Ichs dahin. Das schöne Leben verkehrt sich aus einem Segen in einen Fluch.) Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 68. The absence of a “you” – “du” in German, the ­second person singular ­pronoun of familiarity – will be of greater ­concern in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” and the later works. 19 “Ja, die Schönheit der Teppiche und Gewebe und Seiden, der geschnitzten und getäfelten Wände, der Leuchter und Becken aus Metall, der gläsernen und irdenen Gefäße wurde ihm so bedeutungsvoll, wie er es nie geahnt hatte. Allmählich wurde er sehend dafür, wie alle Formen und Farben der Welt in seinen Geräten lebten. Er erkannte in den Ornamenten, die sich verschlingen, ein verzaubertes Bild der ­verschlungenen Wunder der Welt … Er war für lange Zeit trunken von dieser großen, tiefsinnigen Schönheit, die ihm gehörte, und alle seine Tage bewegten sich schöner und minder leer unter diesen Geräten, die nichts Totes und Niedriges mehr waren, sondern ein großes Erbe, das göttliche Werk aller Geschlechter.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 39–40; “Das Märchen,” 15–16. 20 “Modern sind alte Möbel und junge Nervositäten.” Hofmannsthal, “Gabriele d’Annunzio (I),” 176. 21 “Doch er fühlte ebenso die Nichtigkeit aller dieser Dinge wie ihre Schönheit; nie verließ ihn auf lange der Gedanke an den Tod und oft befiel er ihn unter lachenden und lärmenden Menschen, oft in der Nacht, oft beim Essen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 40; “Das Märchen,” 16. 22 Similar baroque themes abound in Hofmannsthal’s earlier works, like Der Tor und der Tod (Death and The Fool) and Der Tod des Tizian (The Death of Titian). The 1911 play Jedermann (Everyman), performed annually at the Salzburg Festival, and the late tragedy Der Turm (The Tower) can also be read as meditations on ars moriendi/ars vivendi.

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23 “Er sagte: ‘Wo du sterben sollst, dahin tragen dich deine Füße,’ und sah sich schön, wie ein auf der Jagd verirrter König, in einem unbekannten Wald unter seltsamen Bäumen einem fremden wunderbaren Geschick ­entgegengehen. Er sagte: ‘Wenn das Haus fertig ist, kommt der Tod,’ und sah jenen langsam heraufkommen über die von geflügelten Löwen getragene Brücke des Palastes, des fertigen Hauses, angefüllt mit der ­wundervollen Beute des Lebens.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 40; “Das Märchen,” 16. In his 1901 novel Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann puts the latter saying (ostensibly a Turkish adage) into the mouth of Thomas Buddenbrooks, who, having finished his own house, senses imminent decline. The deeper connections between decline, fulfilment, and ­bourgeois establishment ­cannot be addressed here, but certainly deserve further exploration. 24 “mit einer unbestimmten, ihn quälenden Forderung, die der Kleineren mit einer ungeduldigen, dann wieder höhnischen Aufmerksamkeit, die ihn noch mehr quälte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44; “Das Märchen,” 19. 25 See Hammond, “Das Märchen,” 454. 26 “ihm war, sie sahen sein ganzes Leben an, sein tiefstes Wesen, seine geheimnisvolle menschliche Unzulänglichkeit … daß sie ihn zwangen, in einer unfruchtbaren und so ermüdenden Weise an sich selbst zu denken.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44; “Das Märchen,” 19. 27 See, e.g., Wunberg, Der frühe Hofmannsthal, 57–8. 28 McGowan’s translation. The original, which is printed alongside the ­translation, reads: “La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; / L’homme y passe à travers de forêts de symbols / Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.” Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 18–19. 29 See Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 210. 30 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s notes for an essay entitled “Diese Rundschau” (This review): “false: to regard every work of art as definitive; always to say: he gave that up, he’s turned to this, he sees only that; he thinks, ­therefore, this and that; false, the definitive / false: all simple antitheses like ‘art’ und ‘life,’ Aesthete and its opposite.” (falsch: jedes Kunstwerk als ­definitiv anzusehen; immer zu sagen: er hat das aufgegeben, er wendet sich jenem zu, er sieht nur das; er meint also das und das; falsch das ­definitive / falsch: alle billigen Antithesen wie ‘Kunst’ und ‘Leben,’ Aesthet und Gegentheil von Aesthet.) Hofmannsthal, “Diese Rundschau,” 234. 31 “Sie trug in jedem Arme eine schwere hagere indische Gottheit aus dunkler Bronze. Die verzierten Füße der Figuren hielt sie in der hohlen Hand, von der Hüfte bis an die Schläfe reichten ihr die dunklen Göttinnen

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und lehnten mit ihrer toten Schwere an den lebendigen zarten Schultern; die dunklen Köpfe aber mit dem bösen Mund von Schlangen, drei wilden Augen in der Stirn und unheimlichem Schmuck in den kalten, harten Haaren, bewegten sich neben den atmenden Wangen und streiften die schönen Schläfen im Takt der langsamen Schritte. Eigentlich aber schien sie nicht an den Göttinnen schwer und feierlich zu tragen, sondern an der Schönheit ihres eigenen Hauptes mit dem schweren Schmuck aus ­lebendigem, dunklem Gold, zwei großen gewölbten Schnecken zu beiden Seiten der lichten Stirn, wie eine Königin im Kriege.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44–5; “Das Märchen,” 20. 32 See Hofmannsthal’s own comments on narration: the narrator “least of all finds the courage to disentangle the weave of motifs; after all, he has just spent a great deal of energy tying together the external and internal content, thread by thread, leaving not a single one of these threads loose that someone might pull at.” (findet am wenigsten den Mut, das Gewebe der Motive aufzulösen; er hat ja gerade alle Mühe darangestellt, das Außen mit dem Innen, Faden um Faden zu verknüpfen und nirgends den Faden hängen zu lassen, den man herausziehen könnte.) Hofmannsthal, “Die ägyptische Helene,” 216. 33 “In the afternoon, before the sun fell, he would sit in his garden, ­spending most of the time with a book that recorded the wars of a very great king of the past.” (Am Nachmittag, bis die Sonne hinter den Bergen hinunterfiel, saß er in seinem Garten und las meist in einem Buch, in welchem die Kriege eines sehr großen Königs der Vergangenheit ­aufgezeichnet waren). Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 42–3; “Das Märchen,” 18. This is a reversal of the notion that art imitates life; here, life imitates art. 34 “Er wurde ergriffen von ihrer großen Schönheit, aber gleichzeitig wußte er deutlich, daß es ihm nichts bedeuten würde, sie in seinen Armen zu halten. Er wußte es überhaupt, daß die Schönheit seiner Dienerin ihn mit Sehnsucht, aber nicht mit Verlangen erfüllte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 45; “Das Märchen,” 20. 35 Gumbrecht, “Epiphanien,” 206. 36 Hair is frequently a symbol of danger and attraction in literature. See for instance Hammer-Purgstall’s poem “Kraftlosigkeit der Talismane” (The powerlessness of talismans), especially verses 7–12: “who can save me from these enchanted chains which locks of hair have placed me in?” (Wer aber kann mich retten / Vor jenen Zauberketten, / Die mir die Locken legen an?) Purgstall, Duftkörner, 137. 37 Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” 197.

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38 Meyer-Sickendieck, Affektpoetik, 316. 39 “den süßen Reiz zu ruhigem Besitz … welcher in der Schönheit seiner Dienerin lag, die ihn verwirrte und beunruhigte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 45; “Das Märchen,” 20. 40 “In den Stielen der Nelken, die sich wiegten, im Duft des reifen Kornes erregtest du meine Sehnsucht; aber als ich dich fand, warst du es nicht, die ich gesucht hatte, sondern die Schwester deiner Seele.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 45; “Das Märchen,” 20–1. 41 In “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”), Hofmannsthal characterizes the material of poetry as “a weightless weave of words” (ein gewichtloses Gewebe aus Worten). Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 15. 42 Much later, Hofmannsthal will compile a series of poetological reflections on his own writing. In one observation, he notes that, following the fall from totality (also called pre-existence, and understood as the condition of fatelessness, analogous to the fall from grace), there is a subsequent search for some equivalent. Human beings want to get back to the Garden. Hofmannsthal, Ad me ipsum, 217. See also the passage ­concerning Des Esseintes’s pursuit of scent in the tenth chapter of Huysmans’s novel of decadence, À rebours (Against the Grain): “Fatigued by the tenacity of this imaginary scent, he resolves to bury himself in real perfumes.” (Fatigué par la ténacité de cet imaginaire arôme, il résolut de se plonger dans des parfums véritables.) Huysmans, À rebours, 216. 43 Impressed by the story, Arthur Schnitzler questioned Hofmannsthal’s motivation for the title. In a letter written on 26 November 1895, Schnitzler suggests the story resembles a dream more than a fairy tale or “Märchen.” Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, Briefwechsel, 63–4. 44 Grundmann, Mein Leben, 11. 45 Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 79. 46 See, for example, Waltraud Wiethölther’s monograph, Geometrie des Subjekts, and Dorrit Cohn’s article, “Als Traum erzählt.” 47 Ursula Renner in “Pavillons, Glashäuser und Seitenwege” and Alexej Žerebin in “Der unheimliche Garten” have noted the anticipatory ­character of the first section, particularly with respect to the garden. The merchant’s son sits contentedly in his garden at home, until he senses his servants watching him. In the second garden (after the fall, as it were), the gaze takes on a malevolent character. For other examples of the use of the garden in fin-de-siècle literature, see Thomas Koebner, “Der Garten” and Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 265–303. 48 Žerebin explores the merchant’s son’s desire to control his surroundings, playing a sort of aesthete-king in his garden. But the accompanying

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feeling of anxiety that comes with the desire for possession and “Erkenntnis” remains unexplained: this anxiety permeates ­practically all of Hofmannsthal’s loci amoeni. Even in the poem “Der Kaiser von China spricht:” (The Emperor of China speaks:) the ambiguous last two lines (40–1) threaten to reverse the ­subject-object hierarchy of ­perspective: “unto the sea, the last wall, / ­surrounding my kingdom and myself.” (Bis ans Meer, die letzte Mauer, / Die mein Reich und mich umgibt.) Hofmannsthal, “Der Kaiser von China spricht:” 72. 49 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note from 1894: “The garden of dilettantes in the feuilltonistic spirit … Fleetingly, the intimation of latent harmonies drifts towards them.” (Der Dilettantengarten in feuilletonistischem Geist … Flüchtig weht sie die Ahnung latenter Harmonien an.) Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen aus dem Nachlaß,” 381. 50 “Der Kaufmannssohn … trat ein und fand eine solche Fülle seltener und merkwürdiger Narzissen und Anemonen und so seltsames, ihm völlig unbekanntes Blattwerk, daß er sich lange nicht sattsehen konnte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 49; “Das Märchen,” 24. 51 Cf. Book 3, lines 334–50 in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 109: “Liriope gave birth to a child, already adorable, / called Narcissus. In course of time she consulted the seer; / ‘Tell me,’ she asked, ‘will my baby live to a ripe old age?’ / ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘so long as he never knows himself’ – / empty words, as they long appeared, but the prophet was proved right. / In the event, Narcissus died of a curious passion.” 52 “Denn das Kind, das ihn regungslos und böse ansah, glich in einer ­unbegreiflichen Weise dem fünfzehnjährigen Mädchen, das er in seinem Hause hatte. Alles war gleich, die lichten Augenbrauen, die feinen ­bebenden Nasenflügel, die dünnen Lippen; wie die andere zog auch das Kind eine der Schultern etwas in die Höhe. Alles war gleich, nur daß in dem Kind das alles einen Ausdruck gab, der ihm Entsetzen verursachte. Er wußte nicht, wovor er so namenlose Furcht empfand. Er wußte nur, daß er es nicht ertragen werde, sich umzudrehen und zu wissen, daß ­dieses Gesicht hinter ihm durch die Scheiben starrte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 49; “Das Märchen,” 24–5. 53 “Wir sind fast alle in der einen oder anderen Weise in eine durch das Medium der Künste angeschaute stilisierte Vergangenheit verliebt. Es ist dies sozusagen unsere Art, in ideales, wenigstens in idealisiertes Leben ­verliebt zu sein.” Hofmannsthal, “Walter Pater,” 204. 54 “mit einem dumpfen Gefühle, wie Haß gegen die Sinnlosigkeit dieser Qualen, ging er.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 52; “Das Märchen,” 27.

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55 “Mit einer kindischen Sehnsucht erinnerte er sich an die Schönheit seines eigenen breiten Bettes, und auch die Betten fielen ihm ein, die der große König der Vergangenheit für sich und seine Gefährten errichtet hatte, als sie Hochzeit hielten mit den Töchtern der unterworfenen Könige, für sich ein Bett von Gold, für die anderen von Silber; getragen von Greifen und geflügelten Stieren.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 52; “Das Märchen,” 27. 56 “Er sagte: ‘Wenn das Haus fertig ist, kommt der Tod,’ und sah jenen langsam heraufkommen über die von geflügelten Löwen getragene Brücke des Palastes, des fertigen Hauses, angefüllt mit der wundervollen Beute des Lebens.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 40; “Das Märchen,” 16. 57 The bridge, another important motif in Hofmannsthal’s work, features in Das kleine Welttheater (The Little Theatre of the World), “Reitergeschichte” (“A Tale of the Cavalry”), “Das Erlebnis des Marschalls von Bassompierre” (“An Episode in the Life of the Marshal de Bassompierre”), Die Frau ohne Schatten, as well as in the l­ittle-known poem, “Wir gingen einen Weg mit vielen Brücken” (We went along a path with many bridges) and even as a pun on the name of the Doctor and the popular card game in Der Schwierige (The Difficult Man). It also appears in another place here in “The Tale” as a counter-image to the bridge of the merchant’s son’s imagination. In order to leave the garden, the ­merchant’s son must cross a kind of makeshift bridge above an abyss. Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 51; “Das Märchen,” 26. 58 Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 50; “Das Märchen,” 25. 59 “Er haßte seinen vorzeitigen Tod so sehr, daß er sein Leben haßte, weil es ihn dahin geführt hatte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 55; “Das Märchen,” 30. 60 Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann, Briefwechsel, 48. 61 Hofmannsthal anticipates Levinas’s critique of Western philosophy’s ­privileging of totality (resulting in totalitarian thinking) as developed in Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity). The crucial difference between the two thinkers is that Levinas, in this book and indeed throughout most of his philosophical journey, maintained a highly sceptical stance towards art (see his most virulent attack: “La réalité et son ombre,” translated in English as “Reality and its Shadow”). Though he came to adjust these views later in life (as Reinhold Esterbauer points out in “Das Bild als Antlitz”), Levinas for many years saw the aesthetic experience as a way of avoiding responsibility and as an ultimately distracting enterprise. Hofmannsthal comes to a different conclusion, as will become clearer in the next chapters.

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62 “eine Lust … und eine Leidenschaft, eine bewußte empfangene Gabe, eine angeborene Kunst vielleicht wie Flötenspielen oder Tanzen, eine ­zerrüttende und stumme innere Orgie.” Hofmannsthal, “Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen,” 111; “Shakespeares Könige und große Männer,” 77. 63 See Streim, Das “Leben” in der Kunst, 88–90; and Grundmann, Mein Leben, 158. 64 Hofmannsthal’s critique of society’s failure to appreciate the role of the artist is most explicit in “Der Dichter und diese Zeit” (“The Poet and Our Time”), given first as a lecture in 1906 and published in 1907. 65 Mayer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 126. 66 Karl Pestalozzi wonders whether Hofmannsthal’s literary depictions have a biographical origin, or if rather his lived experiences have a literary inspiration. The latter represents the aestheticist notion popularized by Wilde in The Decay of Lying: namely, that life imitates art. We see with Hofmannsthal a tantalizing ambiguity – one, it seems, he wishes to ­preserve. See Pestalozzi, “Wandlungen,” 133. 67 “Alles was mich umgibt, ist häßlicher als Du denken kannst. Alles ist häßlich, elend und schmutzig, die Menschen, die Pferde, die Hunde, auch die Kinder.” Hofmannsthal and Andrian, Briefwechsel, 63. 68 “Gestern bin ich abends über einen alten Bettler, der im Halbdunkel auf allen vieren in mein Zimmer gekrochen ist und mir die Füße geküßt hat, so erschrocken, daß ich nachher ermüdet und verbittert war, wie nach einer vergeblichen großen Gefahr … Ich begreife nicht, wie alle diese Dinge eine solche Gewalt über mich haben können.” Ibid., 63–4. 69 “Solche Zustände sind eigentlich ängstliche. Aber sie sind auch wieder ganz gut … sie erweitern den innern Sinn, sie bringen vieles wieder, was wie vergraben war. Ich glaube, das schöne Leben verarmt einen. Wenn man immer so leben könnte, wie man will, würde man alle Kraft ­verlieren.” Ibid., 64. 70 “Wenn ich hier in der Nacht aufwache, bin ich so stark bei mir selbst, wie schon sehr lange nicht. Ich komme so zu mir zurück, wie einer der fortwährend Theater gespielt hat, zwar eine Rolle die diesem Wesen geheimnisvoll nachgeahmt ist, aber doch eine Rolle.” Ibid., 64. 71 “[A]nstößig ist aber alles wahrhaft Produktive.” Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 49. (*fdh 1756: 76). The marker *fd h refers to the ­catalogue number in the Freies deutsches Hochstift – which holds much of what remains of Hofmannsthal’s library – and the second number refers to the page in that edition.

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72 “Ich habe die Schönheit des Hereinkommens und Abgehens aller Personen gespürt, die Schönheit des Beisammenstehens von zweien oder dreien, und die Schönheit aller ihrer Reden und Gegenreden. Ich glaube, das ist etwas ungeheuer seltenes und damit es geschehen konnte, haben alle diese besonderen Umstände da sein müssen, das tagelange Alleinsein, die schlechten Nächte, und der Anblick so vieler elender Menschen, ja ihr Geruch und ihre Stimmen.” Hofmannsthal and Andrian, Briefwechsel, 64–5. 73 “Ich habe eine Stunde lang so geliebt, wie der Dichter es geliebt hat.” Ibid., 64. 74 “Wunderschön ist es auch, in einem Kunstwerk die Schwäche des Künstlers zu fühlen, die Stellen, wo er aus Unzulänglichkeit und Sehnsucht nach der Schönheit sonderbar und gewaltsam wird.” Ibid., 65. 75 As early as 1891 in “Das Tagebuch eines Willenskranken” (The diary of an invalid of the will), Hofmannsthal depicts the role of willful ­productivity in artistic creation. 76 “Nur das Tuen entbindet die Kraft und die Schönheit. Deswegen schicken wir dem Kind Herakles Schlangen in die Wiege und lassen ihn lächelnd mit den kleinen Händen sie erwürgen, weil nur so seine Kraft und Schönheit an den Tag kommt. Deswegen muß Odysseus hin und her geworfen werden von der trüglichen Salzflut, damit jene ungeheure Heimkehr entstehen könne, in Kleidern des Bettlers, von niemandem erkannt als dem Hund. Viele Wege muß einer gegangen sein und nie müßig, damit wir über ihn weinen können.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 237. 77 “Nur mit dem Gehen der Wege des Lebens, mit den Müdigkeiten ihrer Abgründe und den Müdigkeiten ihrer Gipfel wird das Verstehen der ­geistigen Kunst erkauft.” Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 19. 78 Cf. Novalis in a letter to his brother Karl von Hardenberg (end of March 1800): “Indeed: No imitation of nature. Poetry is thoroughly the opposite. At most, the imitation of nature, of reality, can be used now and then, but only allegorically, or in contrast, or for tragic or comic effects. / Everything must be poetic.” (Ja keine Nachahmung der Natur. Die Poësie ist durchaus das Gegentheil. Höchstens kann die Nachahmung der Natur, der Wircklichkeit nur allegorisch, oder im Gegensatz, oder des tragischen und lustigen Effects wegen hin und wieder gebraucht werden. / Alles muß poëtisch seyn.) Novalis, Tagebücher, Briefwechsel 4:327. 79 Holz, “Die Kunst,” 111. 80 “Sie wundern sich über mich. Sie sind enttäuscht und finden, daß ich das Leben aus der Poesie vertreibe.” Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 18.

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81 “Ich weiß, was das Leben mit der Kunst zu schaffen hat. Ich liebe das Leben, vielmehr ich liebe nichts als das Leben.” Ibid., 18. 82 “Es kann einer hier sein doch nicht im Leben sein: völlig ein Mysterium ist es, was ihn auf einmal umwirft und zu einem solchen macht, der nun erst schuldig und unschuldig werden kann, nun erst Kraft haben und Schönheit. Denn vorher konnte er weder gut noch böse Kraft haben und gar keine Schönheit; dazu war er viel zu nichtig, da doch Schönheit erst entsteht, wo eine Kraft und eine Bescheidenheit ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 235. 83 “Denn es ist mir oft erschienen, dass Musik eine solche Gewalt hat, schöne Gebilde leben zu machen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 46; “Ansprache,” 7. 84 I will be referring to the edited version as given in the Kritische Ausgabe. Hofmannsthal revised the address before having it published. See Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 251–2. 85 “Sie sind wie die Schatten, die den Odysseus umlagern und alle vom Blut trinken wollen, lautlos, gierig aneinander gedrängt, ihren dunklen hohlen Blick auf den Lebenden geheftet. Sie wollen ihren Antheil haben am Leben. Ja sie scheinen von einer eigenen verhaltenen Energie zu erglühen und zu erzittern, wenn man sie nicht beachtet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 46; “Ansprache,” 7. 86 “Und so vermag ein hangendes, ein hingebreitetes Gewebe für einen Augenblick gleichsam seinen Geist auszuhauchen: während es einer unterm Reden, unterm Schweigen starr ansieht, wird sich ihm auf einmal offenbaren, dass da Geknüpftes ist, von Menschenfingern in endlosen Stunden zu Tausenden von Knoten Zusammengeknüpftes, und einen Augenblick wird dies tausendfach Geknüpfte aufleuchten und die erstarrte Lebendigkeit, die Form gewordene Willkür der zusammentretenden Farben und Schattirungen erkennen lassen, wie eine nächtliche Landschaft unter einem grossen Blitz die Verknüpfung der Strassen und das Zusammentreten der Hügel für einen Augenblick erkennen und dann ­wieder ins Dunkel zusammensinken lässt.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 7–8. 87 “Sie wird den vielen nie und nie durch rede / Sie wird den seltnen selten im gebilde” (lines 15–16). This might be translated as: “Never to the many and never through speech / seldom to the select will it take on form.” George, Teppich des Lebens, 40. 88 “Und keiner ahnt das rätsel der verstrickten … / Da eines abends wird das werk lebendig.” George, Teppich des Lebens, 40. 89 “Dabei kann es [unser Inneres] sich in seltenem Grade zart empfänglich, ernst, mächtig, innig, gut erweisen und vielleicht selbst reicher als das

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Innere anderer Völker sein: aber als Ganzes bleibt es schwach, weil alle die schönen Fasern nicht in einen kräftigen Knoten geschlungen sind: so daß die sichtbare That nicht die Gesammtthat und Selbstoffenbarung ­dieses Inneren ist, sondern nur ein schwächlicher oder roher Versuch irgend einer Faser, zum Schein einmal für das Ganze gelten zu wollen.” Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 81; Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 272. 90 The idea that inanimate things take on a strong life is echoed by Rilke ­several times in his Sonnette an Orpheus from 1922. 91 “Es gibt Momente, und sie sind fast beängstigend, wo Alles rings um uns sein ganzes starkes Leben annehmen will. Wo wir sie alle, die stummen schönen Dinge, neben uns leben fühlen und unser Leben mehr in ihnen ist als in uns selber.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8. 92 The fascination with the limitations of language harks back to the Romantics (especiaally Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel) and is renewed in the work of the Symbolists and in philosophers of language of the time. A key name in this connection is Fritz Mauthner, with whose Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a critique of language) Hofmannsthal was familiar. Mauthner and Hofmannsthal corresponded during this time, acknowledging their shared interests. Both anticipate developments in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. See Nethersole, “The Limits of Language,” 652–8. 93 “Jeder von uns, auch wenn er dieses Haus nie betreten hat, wird hier ­herumgehen wie in der Heimat seiner Träume. Denn unsere Existenzen sind mit den Existenzen dieser Gebilde durchwachsen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8. 94 Cf. the similar disposition of the boy in “Dämmerung und nächtliches Gewitter” (“Dusk and Nocturnal Thunderstorms”): “He was at the edge of such despair and doubt, that it seemed to him a mother’s-hand-­ murderer’s-hand grasped at him, when in fact it was grasping at another being near him – and he could not distinguish between the two.” (Er war am Rand einer solchen Verzweiflung gewesen, daß ihm geschienen war, es greife eine Mutterhand-Mörderhand nach ihm, die doch nach einem Wesen neben ihm griff – und er vermöchte es nicht zu sondern.) Hofmannsthal, “Dämmerung und nächtliches Gewitter,” 440. 95 The editorial notes to the “Ansprache” in the critical edition suggest that Hofmannsthal was interested in the therapeutic effects of art in the sense described in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria. See Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 253. 96 “wie sie da stehen, umwebt vom Geheimniss der ungeheuren ­hinabgesunkenen Zeit, sie fassen uns dämonisch an: und jedes ist eine Welt,

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und alle sind aus einer Welt, die uns durch sie anrührt und ­anschauert bis ins Mark.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8–9.   97 “Es lebt für uns, es lebt durch uns. Es ist etwas in uns, das diesem Weltbild antwortet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 9.   98 “höchsterreichbare Ekstase, wahrscheinlich sein [human-kind’s] ­höchsterreichbarer Lebenswert überhaupt, und da eben dem Künstler diese Voll-Identifikation mit seinem Objekt zur Aufgabe, ja zur ­moralischen Aufgabe gestellt ist, hat sein Werk ihr Ausdruck, ihr Bild, ihr Symbol zu sein, wird es selber ekstasierend und gewinnt hierdurch jene spezifisch kunstwerkliche Qualität, für die das Wort schön geprägt worden ist.” Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time, 119; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 153.   99 “Diese Ohnmacht erzeugt daher leicht das Gefühl, von einem Unbekannten, Unbegreiflichen bedroht zu sein, das dem Individuum ebenso rätselfhaft ist, als gewöhnlich seine eigene Psyche auch.” Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie,” 204. 100 “Und nun die endlose Welt der Gemälde: sie hängen da, und immerfort ergiesst sich aus ihnen in uns, wie in ein geräumiges Becken, ein Längstvergangenes als Gegenwärtiges.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 52; “Ansprache,” 9. 101 “Ja, geformt haben Tausende, haben die Einzelnen und die Völker, und was sie zur Form emportreiben konnten, das lebt ewig: Kunstwerk, Symbol, Mythos, Religion.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 54; “Ansprache,” 10. 102 Hofmannsthal’s imperative anticipates Rilke’s famous line from the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” – “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” (“you must change your life”) – by about six years. Claims, such as Jahraus’s, that Rilke’s imperative initiates a revolution in lyrical, literary, aesthetic, and ­cultural paradigms are hasty because they read Rilke w ­ ithout reference to earlier and contemporary iterations of the same “­revolution.” See Jahraus, “Die Provokation der Wahrnehmung,” 123. In fact, the ­sociologist Georg Simmel is an even earlier “revolutionary” in this respect. He writes, for instance, of the “the ability of a tangible s­ ymbol to awaken in us … the ­feeling of obligation not to remain ­indifferent to great events, but to respond to them.” (Die Bedeutung irgend eines ­körperlichen Symbols, uns zu religiösen Gefühlen zu ­erregen … die ­pflichtartige Empfindung, grossen Ereignissen gegenüber nicht ­gleichgültig zu bleiben, sondern unsere Innerlichkeit auf sie reagieren zu lassen.) Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 71; Philosophie des Geldes, 9. Rilke’s and Hofmannsthal’s imperatives are part of a larger shift in the aesthetic discourse.

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103 “Denn wenn es uns versagt ist, den Geist der Zeiten betrachtend zu ­erkennen, so ist uns dafür gegeben, ihn zu fühlen, wenn er fordernd uns überfällt, mit dem Anhauch des Andersseins uns verlockend und quälend, beklemmend und bezaubernd.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 54; “Ansprache,” 10. 104 Broch, too, was aware of this impossibility and quickly qualifies his idea of full identification, while expounding on the unfinishable task at hand: “At stake here is not a static object but one that fluctuates to an ­uncommon degree; and not a single act of identification but an entire chain is required, an entire chain of symbolic constructions, symbol ­symbolizations which in their initial links may exhibit a certain ­similarity to primitive metaphor construction, but then reach way beyond that in order to provide by means of an ever closer rapport with reality at least the idea of a total symbol of the world from within the slice of reality it represents – tat twam asi of art.” (Statt mit einem statischen Objekt hat man es also mit einem ungemein flukturierenden zu tun, und statt eines einzigen Identifikationsaktes ist eine ganze Kette hievon erforderlich, eine ganze Kette von Symbolgebungen, von ­Symbol-Symbolisierungen, die in ihren ersten Gliedern noch eine gewisse Ähnlichkeit mit der primitiven Metapherkonstruktion aufweisen mögen, dann aber weit darüber h ­ inausreichen, um vermittels ständig enger ­werdender Anschmiegung an die Realität schließlich, wenigstens der Idee nach, im dargestellten Realitätsausschnitt ein Totalsymbol der Welt zu liefern, das tat twam asi der Kunst.) Broch, Hofmannthal and His Time, 120; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 153. What Broch calls the “tat twam asi of art” would have been familiar to his audience, and ­f­in-de-siècle discourse generally. The phrase is borrowed from the Hindu tradition and is sometimes translated as “thou art that,” referring to the unity of the absolute and the i­ndividual. The relevance of this concept to aesthetics has yet to be fully explored in the secondary literature and would offer insight into the m ­ etaphysical and cultural questions of the time. 105 “Und so tritt eine unendliche Forderung an uns heran, dem inneren Gleichgewicht höchst bedrohlich: die Forderung, mit tausendfachen Phantomen der Vergangenheit uns abzufinden, die von uns genährt sein wollen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 106 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen. Es gibt kein stolzeres, kein gefährlicheres Wort. Es ist das Wort, das am tiefsten verpflichtet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11.

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107 “Indem wir dieses Wort aussprechen, sagen wir, dass etwas in uns durch das Kunstgebilde erregt wird, wie nur Gleiches durch Gleiches erregt werden kann.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 108 “Und indem unser Mund es wieder und wieder auszusprechen von einer tiefen Magie gezwungen wird, nehmen wir an dem ungeheuren Reich der Kunst einen so ungeheuren Antheil, als wären es tausende Seelen in uns, die sich im Acte des ästhetischen Geniessens regen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 109 “Aber beruhigen wir uns: die Forderung, welche die Welt der Schönheit an uns stellt, jenes dämonische Aus-uns-heraus-locken ganzer Welten des Fühlens, diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos gross ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns, die übereinander gethürmten Schichten der aufgestapelten überindividuellen Erinnerung.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 110 “Hier scheinen wir etwa in Gefahr, uns selbst zu verlieren: großer Irrthum! Hier werden wir erst geweckt, uns selber zu besitzen: denn wir schaffen ja den unsterblichen Inhalt dieser Gebilde, indem wir sie lebendig ­nachfühlen.” Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 255. 111 “Denn ‘die Kunst,’ sagt Goethe, ‘lässt sich ohne Enthusiasmus weder ­fassen noch begreifen. Wer nicht mit Erstaunen und Bewunderung ­anfangen will, der findet nicht den Zugang in das innere Heiligthum. Und der Kopf allein fasst kein Kunstprodukt, als nur in Gesellschaft mit dem Herzen.’” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. The quote attributed to Goethe seems to be a redacted version of a statement Goethe made to Friedrich Schiller in a letter from 19 November 1796: “Unfortunately, I have again seen some of the most deplorable examples of passive interest, and it is always the same refrain: I can’t wrap my head around it! Of course, the head cannot grasp any product of art; it can only do so in the company of the heart.” (Von den passiven Teilnahmen habe ich leider schon die betrübtesten wieder erlebt, und es ist nur immer eine Wiederholung des Refrains: ich kanns zu Kopf nicht bringen! Freilich faßt der Kopf kein Kunstprodukt als nur in Gesellschaft mit dem Herzen.) Goethe, Briefe der Jahre 1786–1805, 245. 112 “Nicht als ob das Leiden aus dem Dasein auszuschneiden wäre: nein es ist der eigentliche Inhalt unseres Daseins und auch was wir das Schöne nennen, ist ohne das Leiden nicht denkbar – ja es ist die Blüthe die aus dem Leiden hervorwächst aber es ist ein Anderes ob wir leiden müssen und wovor keine Schutzwehr uns bewahren kann, oder ob Du Dich in ein unnotwendiges Leiden halb spielend halb begehrlich verstrickst.

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Hier ängstet mich nun die Verantwortung dass ich Dich so außerhalb der Convention leben lasse, die eben die natürlichen Schutzmauern der Existenz sind.” Quoted in Weinzierl, Hofmannsthal, 216.

C hapt e r T w o   1 For the history of its composition, see Hofmannsthal, KA 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 416–23; and Ellen Ritter, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten.”   2 Alice Bolterauer’s study, Zu den Dingen, offers a brief overview of turnof-the-century authors – including Hofmannsthal – whose works portray epiphanic moments catalyzed by an experience of “things.” See also Walter Jens, “Der Mensch und die Dinge.”   3 Hofmannsthal’s marriage of the aesthetic and ethical spheres occurs – ­significantly – not in a novel, but in a later fairy-tale: Die Frau ohne Schatten.   4 Ursula Renner in Zauberschrift der Bilder uses the designation Kaufmann, the German word for merchant. Renner’s designation is appropriate because it establishes a thematic (and contrastive) link to the merchant’s son (Kaufmannssohn) of the “Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.”   5 This is essentially Brian Coghlan’s argument. See Coghlan, “The Whole Man Must Move at Once.”   6 “Und nun sehe ich seit vier Monaten in die Gesichter der Wirklichen: nicht als ob sie seelenlos wären, gar nicht selten bricht ein Licht der Seele hervor, aber es huscht wieder weg, aber es ist ein ewiges Kommen und Wegfliegen wie in einem Taubenschlag.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 74; “Die Briefe,” 159.   7 “die Krise eines inneren Übelbefinden; dessen frühere Anwandlungen freilich waren so unscheinbar gewesen, wie nur möglich.” “The Letters,” 88; “Die Briefe,” 165.   8 “oder diesen Brief zerreißen und das weitere für immer ungesagt lassen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 88; “Die Briefe,” 166.   9 “Zuweilen kam es des Morgens, in diesen deutschen Hotelzimmern, daß mir der Krug und das Waschbecken – oder eine Ecke des Zimmers mit dem Tisch und dem Kleiderständer so nicht-wirklich vorkamen, trotz ihrer unbeschreiblichen Gewöhnlichkeit so ganz und gar nicht wirklich, gewissermaßen gespenstisch, und zugleich provisorisch, wartend, ­sozusagen vorläufig die Stelle des wirklichen Kruges, des wirklichen mit Wasser gefüllten Waschbeckens einnehmend.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 88; “Die Briefe,” 166.

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10 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 80. Hofmannsthal, “Die Briefe,” 162. 11 “In den andern Ländern drüben, selbst in meinen elendesten Zeiten, war der Krug oder der Eimer mit dem mehr oder minder frischen Wasser des Morgens etwas Selbstverständliches und zugleich Lebendiges: ein Freund. Hier war er, kann man sagen: ein Gespenst.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 90; “Die Briefe,” 166. 12 Metaphysically ambiguous houses that “are no longer” can be found as well in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge: “es waren Häuser, die nicht mehr da waren.” See Rilke, Malte, 749–51. Unlike Hofmannsthal, who emphasizes the ordinariness of the houses, Rilke highlights the gloom and delapidation, eventually focusing in on one of the remaining walls. Interestingly, Hofmannsthal in his notes to “The Letters” had at one point intended to allude to a similar moment in Robert Musil’s 1906 Bildungsroman, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless): “lonely times: the secret about which he brooded: the doubleness, that had to unite itself. (The sight of the wall in the novel Törless).” (einsame Zeit: das Geheimniss über dem er brütet: das Doppelte, das sich vereinigen muss. (Der Anblick der Mauer in dem Roman Törless)). Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 426. 13 In the first letter, the merchant mentions he will return to Gebhartsstetten, Austria, where he is sure to see again the scenes of his childhood: a fountain, and an old, crooked walnut tree that “will, in all its crookedness and age, somehow give a sign that it recognizes me, and that I am there again, and that it is there, as always.” (der wird in all seiner Schiefheit und ­seinem Alter irgendwie ein Zeichen geben, daß er mich erkennt und daß ich nun wieder da bin und er da ist, wie immer.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 66; “Die Briefe,” 155. 14 “It was the most delicate redolence of an entire existence, the German existence.” (Es war der zarteste Duft eines ganzen Daseins, des deutschen Daseins.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 66; “Die Briefe,” 155. 15 “und zugleich zitterte etwas durch mich hin, etwas, das mir die Brust ­entzweiteilte wie ein Hauch, ein so unbeschreibliches Anwehen des ­ewigen Nichts, des ewigen Nirgends, ein Atem nicht des Todes, sondern des Nicht-Lebens, unbeschreiblich.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 90; “Die Briefe,” 166. 16 By way of contrast, the landscape in “Moments in Greece” (discussed in chapter 3) has a physiognomy described as familiar and even charitable. In Tania and James Stern’s translation: “The mountains called to one another; the clefts were more alive than a face; each little fold on the ­distant flank of a hill lived; all this was as near to me as the palm of my

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hand. It was something that I shall never see again. It was the guest gift of all the lonely wanderers who had crossed our path.” (Die Berge riefen einander an; das Geklüftete war lebendiger als ein Gesicht; jedes Fältchen an der fernen Flanke eines Hügels lebte: dies alles war mir nahe wie die Wurzel meiner Hand. Es war, was ich nie mehr sehen werde. Es war das Gastgeschenk aller der einsamen Wanderer, die uns begegnet waren.) Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. Compare also the landscape in Andreas: “Yon mountain, which rose before him and buttressed the heavens, was a brother to him, and more than a brother … and as he looked across he realized that the mountain was his prayer. An ineffable sense of certainty befell him: it was the happiest moment of his life.” (Jener Berg, der vor ihm aufstieg und dem Himmel entgegen pfeilerte, war ihm ein Bruder und mehr als ein Bruder … und wie er hinübersah war er gewahr daß der Berg nichts anderes war als sein Gebet. Eine unsagbare Sicherheit fiel ihn an: es war der glücklichste Augenblick seines Lebens.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 76. 17 “das nahm ein Gesicht an, eine eigene zweideutige Miene so voll innerer Unsicherheit, bösartiger Unwirklichkeit: so nichtig lag es da – so ­gespensthaft nichtig.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 90; “Die Briefe,” 167. 18 “einem das Leben schöner, reicher und lieber macht … [und welches] durch den gefährlichen Anhauch der poetischen Vision von sich weg, aus dem Leben weg in die Traumwelt hinüber zu treiben [könnte].” Hofmannsthal and Thun-Salm, Briefwechsel, 170. 19 “sehr notwendig für mein Leben, für das Leben meiner Phantasie oder meiner Gedanken.” Hofmannsthal and Nostitz, Briefwechsel, 37. 20 Schuster, “Kunstleben,” 37. 21 “dies Europa könnte mich mir selber wegstehlen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 60; “Die Briefe,” 152. 22 “in der europäischen Luft für den bereitzuliegen scheint, der von weither zurückkommt, nachdem er sehr lange, vielleicht zu lange, fort war.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 167. 23 “zweistimmiges Selbstgespräch.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 466. 24 Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 177. 25 “Ich kann heute nicht in klare Worte bringen, was wirbelnd durch mein ganzes Ich ging: aber daß mein Geschäft und mein eigenes erworbenes Geld mich ekeln mußten … ich hatte zwanzigtausend Beispiele in mich hineingeschluckt: wie sie das Leben selber vergessen über dem, was nichts sein sollte als Mittel zum Leben und für nichts gelten dürfte als für ein Werkzeug.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 167–8.

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26 “Um mich war seit Monaten eine Sintflut von Gesichtern, die von nichts geritten wurden als von dem Geld, das sie hatten, oder von dem Geld, das andere hatten. Ihre Häuser, ihre Monumente, ihre Straßen, das war für mich in diesem etwas visionären Augenblick nichts als die tausendfach gespiegelte Fratze ihrer gespenstigen Nicht-Existenz.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 168. 27 “Je mehr das Leben der Gesellschaft ein geldwirtschaftliches wird, desto wirksamer und deutlicher prägt sich in dem bewußten Leben der ­relativistische Charakter des Seins aus, da das Geld nichts anderes ist, als die in einem Sondergebilde verkörperte Relativität der wirtschaftlichen Gegenstände, die ihren Wert bedeutet.” Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 555–6; Philosophie des Geldes, 716. Hofmannsthal was reading Simmel while working on “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” For Simmel’s influence on Hofmannsthal, see Lorenz Jäger’s study “Zwischen Soziologie und Mythos.” 28 The idea of “money for money’s sake” (l’argent pour l’argent, rather than l’art pour l’art) is also important for Andreas and the characterization of Zorzi (discussed in chapter 5). 29 Hofmannsthal’s merchant is like the later, weary Baudelaire who no ­longer enjoys the city streets as a flaneur, but feels jostled and lost. Benjamin traces Baudelaire’s development meticulously in the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” 30 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 94; “Die Briefe,” 168. 31 “schienen mir in den ersten Augenblicken grell und unruhig, ganz roh, ganz sonderbar, ich mußte mich erst zurechtfinden, um überhaupt die ersten als Bild, als Einheit zu sehen – dann aber, dann sah ich, dann sah ich sie alle so, jedes einzelne, und alle zusammen, und die Natur in ihnen, und die menschliche Seelenkraft, die hier die Natur geformt hatte, und Baum und Strauch und Acker und Abhang die da gemalt waren, und noch das andre, das, was hinter dem Gemalten war, das Eigentliche, das unbeschreiblich Schicksalhafte – das alles sah ich so, daß ich das Gefühl meiner selbst an diese Bilder verlor, und mächtig wieder zurückbekam, und wieder verlor! Wie aber könnte ich etwas so Unfaßliches in Worte bringen, etwas so Plötzliches, so Starkes, so Unzerlegbares!” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 94; “Die Briefe,” 169. 32 “Unser Publikum setzt sich vor einem Bild zu allen möglichen Nebensächlichkeiten des Kunstwerkes in Beziehung, nur nicht zur Hauptsache, zum eigentlich Malerischen; es interssiert sich für die Anekdote, für kleine Mätzchen und Kunststückchen, für alles, nur nicht für das eine Notwendige: ob hier eine künstlerische Individualität die freie

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Kraft gehabt hat, eine neue, aus lebendigen Augen erschaute Perzeption des Weltbildes in einer Weise darzustellen, die sich der Seele des Betrachters zu übertragen geeignet ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Painting in Vienna,” 20; “Die Malerei in Wien,” 526–7. 33 “von Menschenfingern in endlosen Stunden zu Tausenden von Knoten Zusammengeknüpftes.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 7. 34 “Tanzen heisst sich ganz und rein hingeben können. Nun ist dies. Dies ist Frömmigkeit. So waren unsere Mütter, Darum blieb der Fluss in seinen Grenzen Darum trug der Ölbaum. Darum gab der Brunnen.” Hofmannsthal, “Furcht,” 388. Emphasis as in original. 35 In “Das Gespräch über Gedichte” (“The Conversation about Poems”), the act of sacrifice is used to explain the moment of simultaneity and the traversion of difference which give rise to the symbol. With “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” sacrifice involves giving oneself over by extending oneself beyond the quotidian limits of subjectivity. This is taken up again with greater consequence in “Moments in Greece” (as discussed in chapter 3), and made explicitly ethical in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Cf. also Goethe’s definition of piety as “not an end, but a means to reach highest culture through the purest composure.” (Frömmigkeit ist kein Zweck, sondern ein Mittel um durch die reinste Gemüthsruhe zur ­höchsten Cultur zu gelangen.) Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, 815. 36 Cf. The merchant’s use of the English phrase “The whole man must move at once.” The ­merchant purports to have glimpsed the realization of this ideal in other places and cultures, from the exotic to the ­traditional, and even to the very centre of modern commerce, in the US, where the keen b ­ usinessman is characterized by “this almost insane, wild and at the same time cool and collected way they’ll ‘go in for’ ­something.” (dieses fast wahnwitzig wilde und zugleich fast kühl ­besonnene ‘Hineingehen’ für eine Sache.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 62; “Die Briefe,” 153. 37 “und der Glaube an die Gin-Flasche kann noch eine Art von Glaube sein. Aber hier, unter den gebildeten und besitzenden Deutschen, hier kann mir nicht wohl werden.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 76; “Die Briefe,” 161. 38 As Derrida has shown in Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie (Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money), it is nearly impossible to think of the gift outside of economic circulation, thereby rendering the “pure” gift ­impossible. This is a failure, for there is no opportunity for a moment of reciprocity (for instance, in the form of an answer) or exchange without the moment of giving, and without space. See also the role of space as khôra in chapter 3.

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39 Cf. one of the earlier versions of the “Ansprache”: “Here it would seem we are in danger of losing ourselves: a major error! / Here we are first awakened to possess ourselves.” (Hier scheinen wir etwa in Gefahr, uns selber zu verlieren: großer Irrthum! / Hier werden wir erst geweckt, uns selber zu besitzen.) Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 255. 40 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s essay “Die Bühne als Traumbild” (“The Stage as a Dream Image”), which also contains a depiction of suffering from ­phenomenological uncertainty: “Whoever wishes to erect a stage must have lived and suffered through the eyes. He must have sworn to himself a thousand times, that the visible alone exists, and a thousand times he must have asked himself with a shudder, whether this visible, above all, does not exist. The sight of the familiar tree, which transforms the full moon, raises it above its peers and crowns it king, must have shaken him … De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire are his favourite books. He measures the power and the intensitiy of colour against their enduring frightful ­solemn dreams.” (Wer die Bühne aufbauen wird, muß durchs Auge gelebt und gelitten haben. Tausendmal muß er sich geschworen haben, daß das Sichtbare allein existiert, und tausendmal muß er schaudernd sich gefragt haben, ob denn das Sichtbare nicht, vor allen Dingen, nicht existiert. Der Anblick des wohlbekannten Baumes, den der Vollmond verwandelt, zum König über seinesgleichen erhebt, muß ihn erschüttert haben. … De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire sind seine Lieblingsbücher. An ihren dauernden furchtbaren feierlichen Träumen mißt er die Macht und die Farbentiefe seiner eigenen Träume.) Hofmannsthal, “Die Bühne,” 42. Like the ­merchant, the artist measures not reality against imagination, but his dreams against his art. The stage – because it is constructed after one has suffered and doubted reality – is in this instance the standard. 41 “lebt in kontinuierlicher Selbstentäußerung aus jedem gegebenen Punkt heraus und bildet so den Gegenpol und die direkte Verneinung jedes Fürsichseins.” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 554; Philosophie des Geldes, 714. 42 “Von diesen Intuitionen aus führt kein regelmäßiger Weg in das Land der gespenstischen Schemata, der Abstraktionen: für sie ist das Wort nicht gemacht, der Mensch verstummt, wenn er sie sieht, oder redet in lauter verbotenen Metaphern und unerhörten Begriffsfügungen, um wenigstens durch das Zertrümmern und Verhöhnen der alten Begriffsschranken dem Eindrucke der mächtigen gegenwärtigen Intuition schöpferisch zu ­entsprechen.” Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie,” 39; Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge, 887. Ursual Renner remarks that imagery serves as an expression for intuitive creative ability. Renner, Zauberschrift, 158.

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43 Renner and Braegger both quote the following note from Hofmannsthal’s literary estate: “Scientists do everything they can to find out what can be calculated – artists are familiar with absolute variability and have the ­spiritual strength to strive towards expression, metaphorical expression … Art(-)Experience makes it possible to sense the essence of things: Scientists as victims of a mechanical use of their terminology: in contrast, Goethe’s treatment of colour theory.” (Wissenschaftlern ist alles darum zu thun, das ausrechenbare zu finden – Künstler ist sich des absolut variablen klar und hat Seelenstärke genug doch zum Ausdruck zu streben und zwar ein bildlicher … Kunst(-)Erfahrung gibt Möglichkeit sich dem Wesen der Dinge anzufühlen: Wissenschaftler Opfer des mechanischen Gebrauchs ihrer Termini: dagegen Behandlung der Farbenlehre durch Goethe.) Renner, “Der Augen Blick,” 140; Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 36. 44 As Carlpeter Braegger has shown, the importance of visual art for Hofmannsthal’s literary practice was established early on. Braegger’s study includes a reading of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” that is compatible with my own: Braegger suggests that part of Hofmannsthal’s cultural critique was catalyzed by what he (Hofmannsthal) saw as the ­relative dearth of art in Germany before and at the turn of the century. Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 95. 45 Rilke, for whom an excellent work of art must be completed in a ­trance-like, wholly sub-conscious state of mind, was disappointed by Van Gogh’s meticulousness and his ability to speak coherently about his own work. Rilke writes: “Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights … That Van Gogh’s letters are so readable, that they are so rich, basically argues against him, just as it argues against a painter (holding up Cézanne for comparison) that he wanted or knew or experienced this and that; that blue called for orange and green for red.” (Daß man Van Gogh’s Briefe so gut lesen kann, daß sie so viel enthalten, spricht im Grunde gegen ihn, wie es ja auch gegen den Maler spricht (Cézanne daneben gehalten), daß er das und das wollte, wußte, erfuhr; daß das Blau Orange aufrief und das Grün Rot.) Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 66–7; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 628. Hofmannsthal did not share this opinion. On the other hand, Rilke learned much from Van Gogh’s writings and adopted many of his literary strategies in the Cézanne letters. See Büssgen, “Bildende Kunst,” 143. 46 For an insightful history on the relation between painting (and colour in particular) and writing, see Le Rider’s Les couleurs et les mots. In this

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book, and in the chapter “Du musée des images à la couleur pure” of his Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Le Rider briefly treats Hofmannsthal and Rilke as part of a history of writers’ fascination with colour. 47 “Da ist ein unglaubliches, stärkstes Blau, das kommt immer wieder, ein Grün wie von geschmolzenen Smaragden, ein Gelb bis zum Orange.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 169. This echoes Van Gogh’s 22 May 1888 letter to Emil Bernard: “It’s thus a variation of blues enlivened by a series of yellows ranging all the way to orange.” On 21 August 1888, Van Gogh writes again to Emil Bernard of the ­intensitiy of the colours in a painting of sunflowers: “A decoration in which harsh or broken yellows will burst against various blue ­backgrounds, from the palest Veronese to royal blue, framed with thin laths painted in orange lead. Sorts of effects of stained-glass windows of a Gothic church.” Jansen, Luijten and Bakker, Vincent van Gogh, Letter 612; Letter 665. 48 “Aber was sind Farben, wofern nicht das innerste Leben der Gegenstände in ihnen hervorbricht! Und dieses innerste Leben war da, Baum und Stein und Mauer und Hohlweg gaben ihr Innerstes vor sich, gleichsam entgegen warfen sie es mir, aber nicht die Wollust und Harmonie ihres schönen stummen Lebens, wie sie mir vor Zeiten manchmal aus alten Bildern wie eine zauberische Atmosphäre entgegenfloß: nein, nur die Wucht ihres Daseins, das wütende, von Unglaublichkeit umstarrte Wunder ihres Daseins fiel meine Seele an.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 169. 49 Schneider likens this to a performative drama of the Four Last Things (death, judgement, heaven, and hell) and notes that several elements of classical rhetoric (the figurae sententiae) are present in the text. Schneider, Verheißung der Bilder, 223. 50 For a similar reading of the Chandos Letter, see Schuster, “Kunstleben,” 152. 51 “ein Wesen jeder Baum, jeder Streif gelben oder grünlichen Feldes, jeder Zaun, jeder in den Steinhügel gerissene Hohlweg, ein Wesen der zinnerne Krug, die irdene Schüssel, der Tisch, der plumpe Sessel – sich mir wie neugeboren aus dem furchtbaren Chaos des Nichtlebens, aus dem Abgrund der Wesenlosigkeit entgegenhob, daß ich fühlte, nein, daß ich wußte, wie jedes dieser Dinge, dieser Geschöpfe aus einem fürchterlichen Zweifel an der Welt herausgeboren war und nun mit seinem Dasein einen gräßlichen Schlund, gähnendes Nichts, für immer verdeckte!” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 52 “ein Gewoge, ein Chaos, ein Ungeborenes.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 66; “Die Briefe,” 155.

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53 “wo wir nie waren. Es sei denn, indem wir litten … Aber hier hat das Namenlose seinen Namen bekommen, das Stumme seine Sprache und das Gestaltlose seine Form. Hier haben Schöpferhände der Finsternis ein Gesicht gegeben und aus dem Alpdruck etwas gebaut und gebildet. Und wir erkennen die dumpfen Tiefen schwerer Stunden wieder.” Hofmannsthal, “Der Begrabene Gott,” 69–70. 54 “Und noch ein Wort: Groß, groß, groß. Und noch eins: Ehrfurcht.” Ibid., 71. 55 Cf. Rilke who, in a remarkably similar fashion, writes: “After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity … Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it, – : that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life says a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, as mere ­neecessity, as reality, as existence.” (Kunstdinge sind ja immer Ergebnisse des in Gefahrgewesen-Seins, des in einer Erfahrung bis ans EndeGegangenseins, bis wo kein Mensch mehr weiterkann. Je weiter man geht, desto eigener, desto persönlicher, desto einziger wird ja ein Erlebnis und das Kunstding endlich ist die notwendige, ununterdrückbare, möglichst endgültige Aussprache dieser Einzigkeit … Darin liegt die ungeheure Hülfe des Kunstdings für das Leben dessen, der es machen muß, – : daß es seine Zusammenfassung ist; der Knoten im Rosenkranz, bei dem sein Leben ein Gebet spricht, der immer wiederkehrende, für ihn selbst gegebene Beweis seiner Einheit und Wahrhaftigkeit, der doch nur ihm selber sich zukehrt und nach außen anonym wirkt, namenlos, als Notwendigkeit nur, als Wirklichkeit, als Dasein.) Rilke, Letters On Cézanne, 4; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 594. The motif of the return (here the “ever-returning proof”) is likewise present in both writers’ descriptions. 56 Simmel too emphasizes the clarifying process things undergo when they are represented artistically: “The work of art interprets the meaning of the phenomenon itself, whether it is embedded in the shaping of space or in the relations of colours or in the spirituality that exists, as it were, both in and beneath the visible … the artistic process is completed as soon as it has succeeded in presenting the object in its unique significance … The slogan ‘l’art pour l’art’ characterizes perfectly the self-sufficiency of

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the purely artistic tendency.” (Das Kunstwerk deutet uns doch gerade den Sinn der Erscheinung selbst, liege ihm dieser nun in der Gestaltung der Räumlichkeit oder in den Beziehungen der Farben oder in der Seelenhaftigkeit, die so in wie hinter dem Sichtbaren lebt … der artistische Prozeß ist abgeschlossen, sobald er den Gegenstand zu dessen eigenster Bedeutung entwickelt hat … das Stichwort des l’art pour l’art bezeichnet treffend die Selbstgenügsamkeit der rein künstlerischen Tendenz.) Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 485; Philosophie des Geldes, 618–19. 57 Cf. Goethe’s comment: “The colours are the deeds of light, the deeds and the suffering.” (Die Farben sind Taten des Lichts, Taten und Leiden). Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, 9. For more on Hofmannsthal’s ­reception of Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours), see Schneider, “Farbe. Farbe,” 83. 58 “wie eine[r], der nach ungemessenem Taumel festen Boden unter den Füßen fühlt und um den ein Sturm rast, in dessen Rasen hinein er j­auchzen möchte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 59 “was wirbelnd durch mein ganzes Ich ging.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 167. 60 “gebaren sich mir zu liebe diese Bäume, mit den Wurzeln starrend in der Erde, mit den Zweigen starrend gegen die Wolken, in einem Sturm gaben diese Erdenrisse, diese Täler zwischen Hügeln sich preis, noch im Wuchten der Felsblöcke war erstarrter Sturm.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 61 “unbekannte Seele von unfaßbarer Stärke.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 62 “hat gesprochen. In der Nähe des Werkes sind wir jäh anderswo gewesen, als wir gewöhnlich zu sein pflegen.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 15; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 21. 63 Heidegger’s comments on Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes ­resemble Hofmannsthal’s primarily with respect to the idea of revelation of truth-as-event. “What is happening here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, in truth is” (Was geschieht hier? Was ist im Werk am Werk? Van Goghs Gemälde ist die Eröffnung dessen, was das Zeug, das Paar Bauernschuhe, in Wahrheit ist.) Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 16; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 21. In order to w ­ itness the event (­disclosure) of truth, the subject must be shaken out of everyday habits of thought when confronting the aesthetic, according to Heidegger: “What really matters is that we open our eyes to the fact that the workliness of the work, the equipmentality of equipment, and the thingliness of the thing

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come nearer to us only when we think the being of beings. A c­ ondition of this is that the limits imposed by s­ elf-­evidence first fall away and that current pseudo-concepts be set aside.” (Worauf es ankommt, ist eine erste Öffnung des Blickes dafür, daß das Werkhafte des Werkes, das Zeughafte des Zeuges, das Dinghafte des Dinges uns erst näher kommen, wenn wir das Sein des Seienden d ­ enken.) Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 18;  “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 25. 64 “Und nun konnte ich … ein Etwas fühlen … konnte das Untereinander, das Miteinander der Gebilde fühlen, wie ihr innerstes Leben in der Farbe vorbrach und wie die Farben eine um der anderen willen lebten und wie eine, geheimnisvoll mächtig, die andern alle trug, und konnte in dem allem ein Herz spüren, die Seele dessen, der das gemacht hatte, der mit dieser Vision sich selbst antwortete auf den Sturrkrampf der fürchterlichsten Zweifel, konnte fühlen, konnte wissen, konnte durchblicken, konnte genießen Abgründe und Gipfel, Außen und Innen, eins und alles im zehntausendsten Teil der Zeit, als ich da die Worte hinschriebe, und war wie doppelt, war Herr über mein Leben zugleich, Herr über meine Kräfte, meinen Verstand, fühlte die Zeit vergehen, wußte, nun bleiben nur noch zwanzig Minuten, noch zehn, noch fünf, und stand draußen, rief einen Wagen, fuhr hin.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170, my emphasis. 65 “darum trug der Ölbaum.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 388. Cf. Rilke’s description of the colours in the Cézanne paintings: “There’s something else I wanted to say about Cézanne: that no one before him ever demonstrated so clearly the extent to which ­painting is something that takes place among the colors, and how one has to leave them completely alone, so that they can come to terms among themselves. Their mutual intercourse: this is the whole of painting.” (Ich wollte aber eigentlich noch von Cézanne sagen: daß es niemals noch so aufgezeigt worden ist, wie sehr das Malen unter den Farben vor sich geht, wie man sie ganz allein lassen muß, damit sie sich gegenseitig ­auseinandersetzen. Ihr Verkehr untereinander: das ist die ganze Malerei.) Rilke sees in the colours of Cézanne’s paintings a sacrificial component as well: “weaker local colors abandon themselves with reflecting the ­dominant ones. In this hither and back of mutual and manifold influence, the ­interior of the ­picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself, and does not have a single unmoving part.” (schwächere Lokalfarben geben sich ganz auf und ­begnügen sich damit, die stärkste vorhandene zu spiegeln. In diesem Hin und Wider von gegenseitigem vielartigen Einfluß schwingt das Bildinnere, steigt und fällt in sich selbst zurück und hat nicht eine

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s­ tehende Stelle.) Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 66, 72; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 627–8, 631. 66 “Werksein heißt: eine Welt aufstellen.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 22; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 31. 67 Heidegger sees this as justified: “So we must move in a circle. This is ­neither ad hoc nor deficient. To enter upon this path is the strength, and to remain on it the feast of thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art, like the step from art to work, a circle, but every individual step that we attempt circles within this ­circle.” (So müssen wir den Kreisgang vollziehen. Das ist kein Notbehelf und kein Mangel. Diesen Weg zu betreten, ist die Stärke, und auf diesem Weg zu bleiben, ist das Fest des Denkens, gesetzt, daß das Denken ein Handwerk ist. Nicht nur der Hauptschritt vom Werk zur Kunst ist als der Schritt von der Kunst zum Werk ein Zirkel, sondern jeder einzelne der Schritte, die wir versuchen, kreist in diesem Kreise.) Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 2; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 3. 68 Art reception for Hofmannsthal involves something of an artistic ­productivity as well, if not expressed, then at least in the imagination. Cf. “The Poet and Our Time”: “For he [the poet] suffers all things, and insofar as he suffers all things, he enjoys them.” (Denn er [der Dichter] leidet an allen Dingen und indem er an ihnen leidet, genießt er sie). Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 138. This notion has a ­predecessor in Goethe’s poem “An Suleika.” Suleika’s perfume can please only because thousands of roses have been sacrificed in the process. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 66. Katrin Scheffer has also noted the ­connection between suffering (“Leiden”) and enjoyment or pleasure (“Genuss” or “Genießen”). Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 297. 69 Split personality and schizophrenia are familiar themes in Hofmannsthal’s work, and especially in Andreas. Here we have the positive correlative, a multifaceted nature of the soul: others, including ancestral others, are present within the self. Depending on the circumstances and perspective, this can have the effect of empowerment or it can be overpowering. 70 Wellbery, “Die Opfer-Vorstellung,” 287. 71 Ten years later in his notes to “Über die europäische Idee” (On the European idea) Hofmannsthal asks this very question. Hofmannsthal, ka  34: Reden und Aufsätze 3, 325. 72 “Ich möchte in mir selber blühn, und dies Europa könnte mich mir selber wegstehlen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 60; “Die Briefe,” 152. 73 “ein europäisch-deutsches Gefühl.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 72; “Die Briefe,” 158.

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74 “Konferenzen von der Art, wo die Größe der Ziffern an die Phantasie appelliert und das Vielerlei, das Auseinander der Kräfte, die ins Spiel ­kommen, eine Gabe des Zusammensehens fordert, entscheidet nicht die Intelligenz, sondern es entscheidet sie eine geheimnisvolle Kraft.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 170. 75 Cf. Maren A. Joachimsen’s dissertation: Die Poetisierung der Ökonomie. 76 “Ich konnte für meine Gesellschaft mehr erreichen, als das Direktorium mir für den denkbar günstigsten Fall aufgelegt hatte, und ich erreichte es, wie man im Traum von einer kahlen Mauer Blumen abpflückt.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171. 77 Hofmannsthal would later make the connection explicit with his 1921 essay “Der Ersatz für die Träume” (“The Dream Replacement”). There he writes that city-dwellers, particularly those who have been sacrificed to the modern industrial way of life, have become machines, a tool among tools (“Werkzeug unter Werkzeugen”) in a world where only numbers speak. Unable to dream, people “wish to fill their fantasies with images, strong images, in which the essence of life is condensed.” (wollen ihre Phantasie mit Bildern füllen, starken Bildern, in denen sich Lebensessenz zusammenfaßt.) Be it a canvas or a movie screen, people flee “from cypher to dream vision” (von der Ziffer zur Vision). Hofmannsthal, “Der Ersatz für die Träume,” 141, 144. 78 “Sie bringt sie uns einerseits näher, zu ihrem eigentlichen und innersten Sinn setzt sie uns in ein unmittelbares Verhältnis, hinter der kühlen Fremdheit der Außenwelt verrät sie uns die Beseeltheit des Seins, durch die es uns verwandt und verständlich ist. Daneben aber stiftet jede Kunst eine Entfernung von der Unmittelbarkeit der Dinge, sie läßt die Konkretheit der Reize zurücktreten und spannt einen Schleier zwischen uns und sie, gleich dem feinen bläulichen Duft, der sich um ferne Berge legt.” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 513; Philosophie des Geldes, 658–9. 79 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s remark on poetic distance: “What we hold to be the transfiguring power of distance … is the poetic power in us, the poetic capability, the synthetic power: the begger, when he looks through the windows of the wealthy, is poetic.” (Was wir für die verklärende Macht der Entfernung halten … ist die poetische Macht in uns, das poetische Vermögen, die synthetische Kraft: der Bettler insofern er ins Fenster des Reichen hineinblickt, ist poetisch). Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 324. 80 “Die Gesichter der Herren, mit denen ich verhandelte, kamen mir ­merkwürdig nahe.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171.

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81 “Es ist etwas in mir, das mich zwingt zu glauben, er wäre von meiner Generation, wenig älter als ich selbst.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171. 82 “but no sooner did Gauguin, the comrade he’d longed for, the kindred spirit, arrive than he had to cut off his ear in despair, after they had both determined to hate one another and at the first opportunity to get rid of each other for good.” (kaum war Gauguin da, der ersehnte Genosse, der Gleichgesinnte – ; da mußte er sich schon aus Verzweiflung die Ohren abschneiden). Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 5–6; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 595. 83 Zilcosky, Uncanny Encounters, 211. 84 “Ich weiß nicht, ob ich vor diese Bilder ein zweites Mal hintreten werde, doch werde ich vermutlich eines davon kaufen, aber es nicht an mich nehmen, sondern dem Kunsthändler zur Bewahrung übergeben.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171. 85 “Feil! alles feil! die Ehre selber feil! / […] / Und meiner Verse Schar, so tändelnd schal, / Auf diesem Freibrief grenzenloser Qual, / Sie schienen mir wie Bildwerk und Gezweig / Auf einer Klinge tödtlich blankem Stahl.” Hofmannsthal, “Verse, auf eine Banknote geschrieben,” 29. 86 “Es ist nicht Geld, sondern Freiheit.” Hofmannsthal and Burckhardt, Briefwechsel, 36. 87 “Deinen Dich innigst umarmenden Sohn Hugo –Dichter und Handelsmann.” Quoted in Weinzierl, Hofmannsthal, 77. Weinzierl devotes an entire chapter to the biographical importance of art and money: “Von Kunst und Geld und vornehmer Natur.” 88 Hofmannsthal marked the following passage in his copy of Philosophie des Geldes with two daggers, “selbst für feinere und der Sache lebende Menschen kann in dem Gelingen der Leistung nach der ökonomischen Seite hin ein Trost, Ersatz, Rettung für die gefühlte Unzulänglichkeit nach der Seite des Haupterfolges hin liegen; zum mindesten etwa wie ein Ausruhen und eine momentane Verpflanzung des Interesses, die der Hauptsache schlieſslich gewachsene Kräfte zuführt.” *fd h 1910: 313; Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, 345. The English translation reads: “but also, for more sensitive and idealistic people, the material success of the performance may be a consolation, a substitute, a salvation for the ­insufficiency that is felt with regard to the primary goal. At the very least, it will be something like a respite and a momentary shift of interest which will finally channel new strength into the main objective.” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 336. 89 Renner, “Nachwort,” 408.

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90 Van Gogh himself had at one point planned to be an art dealer, like his brother Théodorus, and his uncle. Furthermore, it was his brother the art dealer who introduced him to the revolutionary new way of painting. See Margarete Mauthner’s introduction to Van Gogh’s Briefe; *fdh 5050: 1–2. 91 Gottschlich-Kempf, Identitätsbalance, 302. 92 Scharnowski, “Funktionen der Krise,” 59. 93 The notion that works of art lose presence is particularly evident in “Moments in Greece” (“Augenblicke in Griechenland”). Heidegger speaks of the Greek temples thus: “World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be reversed. The works are no longer what they were. The works themselves, it is true, are what we encounter; yet they themselves are what has been. As what has been they confront us within the realm of tradition and conservation. Henceforth, they remain nothing but objects of this kind.” (Weltentzug und Weltzerfall sind nie mehr ­rückgängig zu machen. Die Werke sind nicht mehr die, die sie waren. Sie selbst sind es zwar, die uns da begegnen, aber sie selbst sind die Gewesenen. Als die Gewesenen stehen sie uns im Bereich der Überlieferung und Aufbewahrung entgegen. Fortan bleiben sie nur solche Gegenstände.) Heiddegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 20; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 26–7. “Moments in Greece,” however, presents a chance at having a profound aesthetic encounter with such works of art, even if they are already “gewesen.” See my discussion in chapter 3. 94 “Was ich dir schrieb, wirst du kaum verstehen können, am wenigsten, wie mich diese Bilder so bewegen konnten.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 100; “Die Briefe,” 171. 95 “Es wird dir wie eine Schrulle vorkommen, wie ein Vereinzeltes, wie eine Sonderbarkeit, und doch – wenn man es nur hinstellen könnte, wenn man es nur aus sich herausreißen könnte und ins Licht bringen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 100; “Die Briefe,” 171. 96 “Er malte seine Bilder nicht, er stiess sie aus. Er fühlte sich nicht dabei, war eins mit dem Element, das er darstellte, malte sich selbst in den lodernden Wolken.” Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 136. 97 This recalls Albrecht Dürer’s aesthetic philosophy, according to which beauty is to be pulled out of nature. By referencing Dürer, Hofmannsthal is making a connection to the merchant’s childhood: in the third letter, the merchant recalls his affinity for Dürer’s copperplate engravings. See Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 103. 98 See also Riley, Color Codes, 50. 99 Simmel links this colourlessness to monetary transactions: “This ­colourlessness becomes, as it were, the colour of work activity at the

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high points of money transaction.” (An den Höhenpunkten des Geldverkehrs wird diese Farblosigkeit sozusagen zur Farbe von Berufsinhalten). Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 514; Philosophie des Geldes, 596. 100 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 169. 101 “Die Woge, die den Schiffbrüchigen schreckt, beschreibt eine göttliche Kurve, und selbst das entsetzte Gesicht des Unglücklichen, der sich an die Planke klammert, wirkt harmonisch in diesem Taumel der Wasser. So ordnen sich in den Bildern Van Goghs, die ein Paroxysmus der Naturerfassung entstehen liess.” Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 136. This passage was marked by Hofmannsthal in *fd h 1696: 136. 102 “das grenzenlos relative der Farbe: jede Farbe existiert nur durch ihre Nachbarschaft.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 437. 103 Jansen, Luijten and Bakker, Vincent van Gogh, Letter 622. 104 “nichts als diese zwei Farben gegeneinander, dies ewige Unnennbare, drang in diesem Augenblick in seine Seele und löste, was verbunden war, und verband, was gelöst war.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 102; “Die Briefe,” 172. 105 “Sagte ich nicht, die Farben der Dinge haben zu seltsamen Stunden einen Gewalt über mich? Doch bin’s nicht ich vielmehr, der die Macht bekommt über sie, die ganze, volle Macht für irgendeine Spanne Zeit, ihnen ihr wortloses, abgrundtiefes Geheimnis zu entreißen, ist sie nicht in meiner Brust als ein Schwellen, eine Fülle, eine Fremde, erhabene, entzückende Gegenwart, bei mir, in mir, an der Stelle, wo das Blut kommt und geht?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 102; “Die Briefe,” 173. 106 Büssgen, “Bildende Kunst,” 521. 107 Ibid., 534. 108 Renner, Zauberschrift, 389. While the experience is not brought about by personal memories, these nevertheless play a great role in preparation for the encounter with the work of art. The merchant, by remembering the ambiguous feelings of his child-self when contemplating the Dürer prints, is in effect preparing himself in a way that combines external ­reception and personal memory. See also Hoffmann, “Kunsterfahrung als Icherschließung,” 291, and Schuster, “Kunstleben,” 569. 109 “Aber wenn alles in mir war, warum konnte ich nicht die Augen schließen und stumm und blind eines unnennbaren Gefühles meiner selbst genießen, warum mußte ich mich auf Deck erhalten und schauen, vor mich hinschauen?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 102; “Die Briefe,” 173.

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110 “dies heilige Genießen meiner selbst und zugleich der Welt, die sich mir auftat, als wäre die Brust ihr aufgegangen, warum war dies Doppelte, dies Verschlungene, dies Außen und Innen, dies ineinanderschlagende Du an mein Schaun geknüpft?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 104; “Die Briefe,” 173. 111 Ursula Renner comes closest to offering an interpreation by highlighting the dialogical aspect with an “unknown ‘You’” (“unbekannten ‘Du’”). Renner, Zauberschrift, 412. 112 “hier ist ein Überwinden aller Hemmungen ein fast wüthendes Du.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 438. 113 “Novalis: Wir sollen alles in ein Du, ein zweites Ich verwandeln; nur dadurch erheben wir uns selbst zum großen Ich.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 324. 114 “diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu ­entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos gross ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns, die übereinander gethürmten Schichten der aufgestapelten überindividuellen Erinnerung.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 115 In his 1898 lecture “Moderne Lyrik” (Modern lyric poetry), which in ­several respects resembles Hofmannsthal’s 1896 lecture “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”), Rilke too invokes what Torsten Hoffmann calls a “dialogical aesthetic” between human and thing. He describes the striving of an individual to come to an understanding with all things through a constant “Zwiegespräch” or dialogue that brings one to the source of all life. Hoffmann, “Kunsterfahrung als Icherschließung,” ­294–5. For Rilke, as for Hofmannsthal, the intimacy of this dialogue finds expression in beauty. Rilke’s dialogical aesthetics thus bears a ­striking resemblance to Hofmannsthal’s; the key difference is that Rilke spends less time exploring the external world, the “Du,” and more time examining the inward experience. Hofmannsthal’s exploration takes the opposite course. 116 “Eines Freundes Da-sein gibt Maß. Müller-Hofmann. Man verbreitet durch ihn die Erlebnisbasis. Es ist immer das ganze Du, uns daran zu erproben.” Hofmannsthal, “Brief an einen Gleichaltrigen,” 214. Hofmannsthal refers here to the Austrian painter and graphic designer Wilhelm Müller-Hofmann, a friend of his from 1913 onward. 117 This affinity between Buber and Hofmannsthal has yet to be fully explored in the secondary literature. 118 “alle Kunst von ihrem Ursprung her [ist] wesenhaft dialogisch … daß alle Musik einem Ohr ruft, das nicht das eigne des Musikers, alle Bildnerei

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einem Auge, das nicht das eigne des Bildners ist … und daß sie alle dem sie Empfangenden etwas nur eben in dieser einen Sprache Sagbares sagen (nicht ein ‘Gefühl,’ sondern ein wahrgenommenes Geheimnis).” Buber, Zwiesprache, 176. 119 “Farbe. Farbe. Mir ist das Wort jetzt armselig. Ich fürchte, ich habe mich dir nicht erklärt, wie ich möchte. Und ich möchte nichts in mir stärken, was mich von den Menschen absondert.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 106; “Die Briefe,” 174. 120 “wenn das sich auftut und wie in einer Welle der Liebe mich mit sich s­ elber in eines schlingt. Und bin ich dann nicht im Innern der Dinge so sehr ein Mensch, so sehr ich selber wie nur je, namenlos, einsam, aber nicht erstarrt im Alleinsein, sondern als flösse von mir in Wellen die Kraft, die mich zum auserlesenen Genossen macht der starken stummen Mächte, die rungsum wie auf Thronen schweigend sitzen? Und ist dies nicht wohin du auf dunklen Wegen immer gelangst, wenn du tätig und leidend lebst unter den Lebenden?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 106; “Die Briefe,” 174. 121 The notion of Schuld, which can be translated as guilt, blame, debt, ­culpability, etc., has long been acknowledged as a condition for entering into “Existence” or life, in the Hofmannsthalian paradigm. See Walther Brecht, “Grundlinien,” 173. 122 “Und warum sollten nicht die Farben Brüder der Schmerzen sein, da diese wie jene uns ins Ewige ziehen?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 106; “Die Briefe,” 174. 123 In I and Thou, Buber will make a similar assertion, namely that the act or deed (“Tat”) consists of sacrifice and risk: “The deed involves a ­sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice: infinite possibility is surrendered on the altar of the form; all that but a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated. The risk: the basic word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits himself may not hold back part of himself … if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me.” (Die Tat umfasst ein Opfer und ein Wagnis. Das Opfer: Die unendliche Möglichkeit, die auf dem Altar der Gestalt dargebracht wird; alles, was eben noch spielend die Perspektive durchzog, muss ­ausgetilgt werden … Das Wagnis: Das Grundwort kann nur mit dem ­ganzen Wesen gesprochen werden; wer sich drangibt, darf von sich nichts vorenthalten … diene ich ihm nicht recht, so zerbricht es, oder es zerbricht mich.) Buber, I and Thou, 60–1; Ich und Du, 16–17. In his discussion of Hofmannsthal’s Chandos Letter, Wellbery notes that the fascination of revelatory moments is indebted to their evocation of sacrifice. Wellbery, “Opfer-Vorstellung,” 298.

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124 “Es ist, als habe ein Einziger den Vorwurf gegen den Egoismus unserer ganzen Epoche gefühlt und sich hingegeben, ganz wie einer jener grossen Märtyrer, deren Geschicke uns aus fernen Zeiten überliefert wurden.” Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 143. 125 Cf. Rilke’s comments: “weaker local colors abandon themselves with reflecting the dominant ones. In this hither and back of mutual and ­manifold influence, the interior of the picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself, and does not have a single unmoving part.” (schwächere Lokalfarben geben sich ganz auf und begnügen sich damit, die stärkste vorhandene zu spiegeln. In diesem Hin und Wider von gegenseitigem ­vielartigen Einfluß schwingt das Bildinnere, steigt und fällt in sich selbst zurück und hat nicht eine stehende Stelle.) Rilke, Letters on Cézanne 72; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 631. 126 “Diese Umformung, die sie [die Wirklichkeit] auf dem Wege in unser Bewußtsein erleidet, ist zwar eine Schranke zwischen uns und ihrem unmittelbaren Sein, aber zugleich die Bedingung, sie vorzustellen und ­darzustellen.” Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 559; Die Philosophie des Geldes, 659. 127 Jansen, Luijten, and Bakker, Letter 698. 128 Cf. Hermann Broch: “he recognized the dangers of pan-aestheticism: the idea of a work of art whose universality would by means of symbolic wealth produce an ultimate total knowledge appeared to him condemned in the end to a leap into a void, because the beautiful, even when ­surrounded with the nimbus of religiosity, can never be elevated to the absolute and must therefore remain mute in the transmission of knowledge.” (er erkannte die Gefahren des Pan-Ästhetizismus: die Idee von einem Kunstwerk, dessen Universalität infolge Symbolreichtums schließlich All-Erkenntnis vermitteln sollte, zeigte sich ihm als verurteilt, am Ende ins Leere zu stoßen, weil das Schöne, auch wenn man es mit dem Nimbus der Religiosität umgibt, nie und nimmer zu einem Absolutum erhebbar ist und daher erkenntnisstumm bleiben muß). Broch, Hofmannsthal and his Time, 121; Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 154. 129 “Die Maler sind da, uns mit der Erscheinung auszusöhnen, der Erscheinung ihr Pathos zurückzugeben. Aber vielleicht gilt auch von ihnen wie von den Dichtern das Wort: wir sind nicht die Ärzte wir sind der Schmerz.” See Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 438. 130 Bamberg quotes Celan in reference to the Chandos Letter, but the phrase is perhaps even more appropriate in the context of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” See Bamberg, Hofmannsthal, 262. Celan writes

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in his reception speech for the Bremen Literary Prize: “The poem is not timeless. True, it asserts a claim to infinity, it seeks to grasp through time – through it, not over and above it … It is the efforts of one who, overflown by the stars … approaches language with his being, wounded by reality, and seeking reality.” (Das Gedicht ist nicht zeitlos. Gewiß, es erhebt einen Unendlichkeitsanspruch, es sucht, durch die Zeit ­hindurchzugreifen – durch sie hindurch, nicht über sie hinweg … Es sind die Bemühungen dessen, der, überflogen von Sternen … mit seinem Dasein zur Sprache geht, wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend). Celan, “Ansprache,” 129. Celan’s vision overturns the idea of poetic ­elevation expressed by Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du mal. Incidentally, the manuscript of Celan’s acceptance speech for the Büchner Prize ­mentions Hofmannsthal several times. See the index (“Personenregister”) in Celan’s Der Meridian (The Meridian). For more on Celan’s ­reception of Hofmannsthal’s work, see Robert Vilain’s article, “Celan and Hofmannsthal.” 131 “ein bloßes Empfindungsgewühl, sage ich, ist ja nicht ein absolutes Nichts, es ist nur nichts, was eine dingliche Welt in sich konstituiert. Warum muß aber eine Welt existieren? Ich sehe in der Tat nicht ein, daß sie das müßte. Das betrifft die Welt im weitesten Sinn, einschließlich das Ich als Persönlichkeit und andere Ich … So kommen wir auf die Möglichkeit phänomenologischen Gewühls als einziges und letztes Sein, aber eines so sinnlosen Gewühls, daß es kein Ich gibt und kein Du gibt und daß es keine physiche Welt gibt.” Husserl, Thing and Space, 249–50; Vorlesungen über die Bedeutungslehre, 288. 132 “Offenbar wäre auch nicht ausgeschlossen, daß allmählich Regelmäßigkeit in Regellosigkeit überginge und sich die angesetzten Dingeinheiten wieder auflösten: in eine schöne Erinnerung und Phantasie, die sich nicht ­festhalten ließe.” Husserl, Thing and Space, 250; Vorlesungen über die Bedeutungslehre, 289.

C h apt e r T h re e    1 Hofmannsthal began working on his prose rendition of the events in 1908, and the first section, “Ritt durch Phokis” (“Ride through Phokis”) as it was previously called, was published the same year in Morgen (19 June 1908). For the German citations, I take the final (1923) version of the text, which includes all three sections (in ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe). Unless otherwise specified, the English citations refer to Tania and James Stern’s translation, printed in McClatchy’s The Whole Difference.

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  2 For a representative psychoanalytical approach, see Bärbel Götz, who interprets the encounter with the statues as a renewed experience of the mother-child unity that exists before birth, as well as a moment of the self’s sense of omnipotence. Götz, Erinnerung, 98. Erwin Kobel and ­Hans-Jürgen Schings highlight the mystical elements in the text, above all in Hofmannsthal’s presentation of universal connectivity. Schings in ­particular links Hofmannsthal’s text to the theological and mystical ­writings of Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, and Martin Buber. Friedmar Apel and Ernst-Otto Gerke are particularly interested in the text’s form; Gerke refers to Hofmannsthal’s composition as a “Gestaltungsakt” or “act of formation.” Gerke, Der Essay, 160.   3 “die Bilder des Lebens folgen ohne inneren Zusammenhang aufeinander und ermangeln gänzlich der effektvollen Komposition.” Hofmannsthal, Südfranzösische Eindrücke, 77.   4 Hofmannsthal will take up this travel experience yet again in his ­introduction to Hanns Holdt’s book of photography, Griechenland: Baukunst, Landschaft, Volksleben, published in 1923.   5 Christopher Meid explores in greater depth how Hofmannsthal refuses to offer even a semblance of objectivity. Both Hans-Jürgen Schings and Daria Santini, like Meid, identify the style of “Moments in Greece” as sui generis, something Hofmannsthal strove for in the context of c­ ontemporary travel writing, particularly about Greece. Gerhart Hauptmann’s very ­different Griechischer Frühling (Greek Spring), for instance, had been ­published shortly before Hofmannsthal’s “Moments in Greece.”   6 Cf. Gisbertz, “Zu einer Stimmungspoetik”; Wellbery, “Die OpferVorstellung”; and Heumann, “Stunde, Luft und Ort.”   7 In the last few decades Stimmung has become a keyword in philosophy and literary studies: Gernot Böhme, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and David Wellbery have all devoted several essays and books to the topic. Because Hofmannsthal often evokes different aspects of Stimmung in his writings, I keep the German term rather than choosing one or several of the English translations.   8 “Gesamtheit der augenblicklichen Vorstellungen, ist relatives Bewußtsein der Welt: je nach der Stimmung denken wir über das Geringste und Höchste anders, es gibt überhaupt keinen Vorstellungsinhalt, der nicht durch die Stimmung beeinflußt, vergrößert, verwischt, verzerrt, verklärt, begehrenswert, gleichgiltig, drohend, lind, dunkel, licht, weich, glatt, etc. etc. gemalt wird.” Hofmannsthal, ka 34: Reden und Aufsätze 3, 325.   9 Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. In a letter to Hofmannsthal (18 July 1908), Harry Kessler suggested striking

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this sentence because it was enigmatic, and because he thought the ­preceding sentence provided a more satisfying conclusion to the passage. See Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 703. Hofmannsthal did not follow Kessler’s advice. The penultimate sentence – “That was how this dialogue sounded” (So klang dieses Zwiegespräch) – must therefore be read in context of the concluding sentence. 10 I have slightly modified Tania and James Stern’s translation, which has: “We had been riding that day from nine to ten hours.” (Wir waren an ­diesem Tag neun oder zehn Stunden geritten). Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 80; “Augenblicke,” 180. 11 “So wirkte Natur auf mich und hier war etwas gemaltes. Hier war eine menschliche Sprache. In einem Blitz habe ich Function des Künstlers geahnt.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 438. 12 “und man schaute hinab und hinüber wie von einem Altan.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 81; “Augenblicke,” 181. 13 “In der Mauer zur Linken war eine kleine offene Tür; in der Tür lehnte ein Mönch.“ Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 81; “Augenblicke,” 181. 14 “Das schwarze lange Gewand, die schwarze hohe Kopfbedeckung, das ­lässige Dastehen mit dem Blick auf die Ankommenden, in dieser ­paradiesischen Einsamkeit, das alles hatte etwas vom Magier an sich.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 81–2; “Augenblicke,” 181. 15 E.g., the poem “Ein Traum von großer Magie” (A dream of great magic) and the character called “der Malteser” (which can be translated as “the man from Malta,” or the “Knight Hospitaller”) in the novel fragment Andreas. Robert Stockhammer observes that Hofmannsthal’s magicians are usually caught in a self-reflective and closed circle. Stockhammer, Zaubertexte, 129. 16 “Er war jung, hatte einen langen rötlich blonden Bart, von einem Schnitt, der an byzantinische Bildnisse erinnerte, eine Adlernase, ein unruhiges, fast zudringliches blaues Auge. Er begrüßte uns mit einer Neigung und einem Ausbreiten beider Arme, darin etwas Gewolltes war.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 82; “Augenblicke,” 181. 17 “gleich weit von Hast und von Langsamkeit … gleich weit von Klage und von Lust, etwas Feierliches, das von Ewigkeit her und weit in die Ewigkeit so forttönen mochte.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 83; “Augenblicke,” 181. 18 Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 181. 19 “Das Echohafte, das völlig Getreue jenem feierlichen, kaum noch menschlichen Klang, das Willenlose, fast Bewußtlose schien nicht aus der Brust einer Frau zu kommen. Es schien, als sänge dort das Geheimnis selber, ein Wesensloses.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 83; “Augenblicke,” 182.

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20 In his 14 November 1891 letter to Hermann Bahr, Hofmannsthal suggests Goethe’s Mignon represents a third gender, a stylized union of that which is good and beautiful in both male and female. Hugo und Gerty von Hofmannsthal and Hermann Bahr, Briefwechsel, 2:39. 21 Cf. Gregory Nagy’s definitions of myth and ritual: “Ritual is doing things and saying things in a way that is considered sacred. Myth is saying things in a way that is also considered sacred. So ritual frames myth.” Nagy, Ancient Greek Hero, 5. 22 Hofmannsthal, “Augenblicke,” 184. 23 On the relation between presence and Stimmung see Gumbrecht, Stimmung lesen, 7–34. 24 “Dies Zwiegespräch ist klein zwischen dem Priester und dem dienenden Mann. Aber der Ton war aus den Zeiten der Patriarchen … dies Unscheinbare, diese wenigen Worte, gewechselt in der Nacht, dies hat einen Rhythmus in sich, der von Ewigkeit her ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 184. 25 Hofmannsthal thus stands in a long tradition of what the nineteenth-­ century art historian Sulpiz Boisserée called, in referring to the brothers Grimm, the “Andacht zum Unbedeutenden” (devotion to the ­insignificant). Boisserée, Briefwechsel, 72. Such an appreciation for the importance of details and small things takes on a particular emphasis in the second half of the nineteenth century for people like Walter Pater; by the twentieth century, it becomes an indispensable point of orientation for Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Cf. Assmann, “Hofmannsthals Chandos-Brief,” 276. 26 “So klang dieses Zwiegespräch.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 185. 27 “Aus der Kirche drang mit den dunklen, weichen, tremulierenden Männerstimmen ein gemischter Duft von Wachs, Honig und Weihrauch, der wie der Geruch dieses Gesanges war.” (Together with the dark, soft, tremulous voices of the men, there came from the church a blended scent of wax, honey, and incense, like the redolence of song – my translation). Hofmannsthal, “Augenblicke,” 182. 28 “Stunde, Luft und Ort machen alles.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. 29 “Augen der Poesie, die jedes Ding jedesmal zum erstenmal sieht.” Hofmannsthal, “Gespräch,” 79. There is also a sense in which uniqueness functions as a life-changing moment; in the play Die Frau am Fenster (The Woman at the Window), this is implied as the moment of a ­maltreated woman’s self-assertion in the matters of love. Dianora loves

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a man other than her violent husband and defends herself before the latter by claiming she betrayed him only once – it was a unique incident. Hofmannsthal, Die Frau am Fenster, 112. The importance of singularity in repetition is a motif evoked throughout “Moments in Greece.” 30 “genug, es ist nahe.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 185. 31 “einer der seltsamsten und schönsten Gespräche, dessen ich mich ­entsinnen kann.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. 32 “Unsere Freunde erschienen uns, und indem sie sich selber brachten, brachten sie das Reinste unseres Daseins herangetragen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 33 “ernst und von einer fast beängstigenden Klarheit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 34 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 76. 35 “Gestalt auf Gestalt kommt heran, sättigt uns mit ihrem Anblick, begleitet uns, verfließt wieder.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 36 “andere, anklingend, haben schon gewartet, nehmen die leere Stelle ein, beglänzen einen Umkreis gelebten Lebens, bleiben dann gleichsam am Wege zurück, indessen wir gehen und gehen, als hinge von diesem Gehen die Fortdauer des Zaubers ab.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 37 “Indem sie vor uns lebten und uns anblickten, waren die kleinsten Umstände und Dinge gegenwärtig.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 38 “scheinbar unbedeutende kleine Sätze.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186. 39 “und ihre Gesichter sind mehr als Gesichter: das gleiche wie im Ton jener abgebrochenen Sätze steigt in ihnen auf, kommt näher und näher gegen uns heran, scheint in ihren Zügen, im Unsagbaren ihres Ausdrucks ­aufgefangen und darinnen befestigt, aber nicht beruhigt. Es ist ein endloses Wollen, Möglichkeiten, Bereitsein, Gelittenes, zu Leidendes. Jedes dieser Gesichter ist ein Geschick, etwas Einziges, das Einzelnste, was es gibt, und dabei ein Unendliches, ein Auf-der-Reise-sein nach einem unsagbar fernen Ziel. Es scheint nur zu leben, indem es uns anblickt: als wäre es unser Gegenblick, um dessenwillen es lebe.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186. 40 While Friedrich Schopenhauer’s notion of suffering is omnipresent for the fin-de-siècle, Georg Büchner’s (purported) views on the subject were closer to Hofmannsthal’s. These are the words attributed to Büchner on his

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death-bed: “We do not have too many pains, we have too few, for through pain we reach God! We are death, dust, ash, how should we complain?” (Wir haben der Schmerzen nicht zu viel, wir haben ihrer zu wenig, denn durch den Schmerz gehen wir zu Gott ein! Wir sind Tod, Staub, Asche, wie dürften wir da klagen?) These words can be found in several places in Hofmannsthal’s notes. See Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 327. 41 “geometrischer Ort der inneren Persönlichkeit, so weit sie anschaubar ist.” Simmel, “Die ästhetische Bedeutung des Gesichts,” 39. See also DangelPelloquin, “Ah, das Gesicht!” 54. 42 Heraclitus, Fragments, 69. 43 “Wir sind wie zwei Geister, die sich zärtlich erinnern, an den Mahlzeiten der sterblichen Menschen teilgenommen zu haben.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186–7. 44 A re-evaluation of Hofmannsthal’s writings on the themes of propriety, tact, and custom (Sitte, Gebräuche, Taktgefühl) would benefit from a look into his understanding of the ancient Greek themis. 45 Gadamer, Die Aktualität des Schönen, 41; The Relevance of the Beautiful, 31. 46 Gadamer, Die Aktualität des Schönen, 42; The Relevance of the Beautiful, 31. 47 “der am unsäglichsten gelitten hat … Er ist arm und leidet, aber wer dürfte wagen, ihm helfen zu wollen, maßlos einsam.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 187. 48 “gegen den eigenen Dämon um ein Ungeheures … ein nicht zu Nennendes.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 187. 49 “er will steil hinab, ohne Weg, schnell. Unsagbare Auflehnung, Trotz dem Tod bis ins Weiße des Augs, den Mund vor Qual verzogen und zu klagen verachtend.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 187. 50 Wellbery, “Die Opfer-Vorstellung,” 301. 51 “Fast drohend blickte die Morgensonne auf die fremde ernste Gegend … Fremde Schicksale, sonst unsichtbare Ströme, schlugen in uns auf Festes und offenbarten sich.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 188. 52 “Stunde, Luft und Ort machen alles.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. 53 Schings, “Hier oder nirgends,” 377. 54 Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 110. 55 The dog in Andreas is another example of Hofmannsthal’s interest in the final equality of all beings and the consequences of failing to acknowledge that equality. In that novel-fragment, the dog is the object of twelve-yearold Andreas’s sadistic brutality (itself a manifestation of possessive

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jealousy). The boy’s actions come back to haunt him later in life, both in his desire to return to that time, when “das Unendliche” (the infinite) touched him, and in his desire for a canine companion, which he knows he could never again have. Notably for the context of “Moments in Greece,” the dog approaches Andreas with an incomprehensible humility. This is different from Kafka’s image of the dog as an animal laden with shame: in The Trial, K.’s final words describe his own death: “‘Like a dog!’ he said, and it was as if the shame should outlive him” (“‘Wie ein Hund!’ sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.”) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 70; Kafka, Der Process, 1.11: 25. There are other examples in Hofmannsthal’s work of inflicted suffering or sacrifice associated with extraordinary sensation. One particularly disturbing image is that of the crucified sparrow-hawk in the opening of “Dämmerung und nächtliches Gewitter” (“Dusk and Nocturnal Thunderstorms”). Wellbery argues convincingly that the sacrifice is part of what lends such fascination to those special moments in Hofmannsthal’s work. Wellbery, “Opfer-Vorstellung,” 298. The artist is, like the dog or the sparrow-hawk, a victim of intense suffering; but in that suffering there is also pleasure: “For he [the poet] suffers from all things and insofar as he suffers from them, he enjoys them” (Denn er [der Dichter] leidet an allen Dingen und indem er an ihnen leidet, genießt er sie). Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 138. In general, it might be argued that Hofmannsthal’s images of sacrifice move from sacrifice of the other to ­sacrifice of the self; yet in all of these, there is a tangling of existences. This is why it is such a powerful trope for the symbol in “The Conversation about Poems.” See also Renate Böschenstein’s “Tiere als Elemente von Hofmannsthals Zeichensprache” and Kári Driscoll’s “Die Wurzel aller Poesie: Hofmannsthals Zoopoetik.” 56 Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 90; “Augenblicke,” 188. 57 The term (“der Schiffbrüchige” in German) conjures the image of someone who has escaped from a sinking ship. It recalls the “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” in which the merchant has exchanged his place at sea for a nauseous life on land. Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 92; “Augenblicke,” 190. The word also evokes Rimbaud’s famous verse poem of the sinking (or “drunken”) boat, “Le Bateau ivre.” 58 “Sonderbar unwirklich dies, wie er so mit Schweigen auf seinen Tod ­zuging.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 191. 59 “mit Anstand und Ehrerbietung.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 92; “Augenblicke,” 189. 60 Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 109–10.

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61 Katrin Scheffer notes that this image of water in its capacity to join ­disparate things is present early on in the travel essay “Sommerreise” (“Summer Trip”). Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 263. 62 “Sein Gesicht blickte mich an, wie früher jene Gesichter mich angeblickt hatten; ich verlor mich fast an sein Gesicht, und wie um mich zu retten vor seiner Umklammerung, sagte ich mir: ‘Wer ist dieser? Ein fremder Mensch!’ Da waren neben diesem Gesicht die anderen, die mich ansahen und ihre Macht an mir übten und viele mehr.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 92–3; “Augenblicke,” 190. 63 Cf. Murray, again referring to that quality the ancient Greeks called αἰδοῖος: (aidoîos) “It was an emotion, the keener because it was merely instinctive and was felt by a peculiarly sensitive people; an emotion of shame and awe, and perhaps something like guilt, in meeting the eyes of the oppressed of the earth; a feeling that a wrong done to these men is like no other wrong; that what these men report of you ultimately in the ear of Zeus will outweigh all the acute comments of the world and the gratifying reports of your official superiors.” Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 110. 64 “und war wie doppelt, war Herr über mein Leben zugleich, Herr über meine Kräfte, meinen Verstand, fühlte die Zeit vergehen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 170. 65 “Ein Knabe, an dem Gesichter von Soldaten vorüberziehen, Kompagnie auf Kompagnie, unzählig viele, ermüdete, verstaubte Gesichter, immer zu vieren, jeder doch ein Einzelner und keiner, dessen Gesicht der Knabe nicht in sich hineingerissen hätte, immer stumm von einem zum andern tastend, jeden berührend, innerlich zählend: ‘Dieser! Dieser! Dieser!’ indes die Tränen ihm in den Hals stiegen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 66 “Wer ist dieser? … Ein fremder Mensch!”; “Wer bin ich?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 190, 191. 67 “Wir sehen uns umgeben von schönen Formen und Farben. Genießen auf den ersten Blick vielfaches Gebilde der Natur und der Menschenhand … ‘Kunstfreund’ ein gefährliches Wort, nicht ohne dämonischen Inhalt. Hier scheinen wir etwa in Gefahr, uns selber zu verlieren: großer Irrthum! Hier werden wir erst geweckt, uns selber zu besitzen: denn wir schaffen ja den unsterblichen Inhalt dieser Gebilde, indem wir sie lebendig ­nachfühlen.” Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 255. 68 As the editors Konrad Heumann and Ellen Ritter have pointed out in their commentary to the critical edition, Hofmannsthal had at the time been assimilating into his own work the hypothesis raised by Freud and Breuer in Studies on Hysteria, namely that memory is organized as a structure

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of stratified layers. Hofmannsthal uses this image then to explain how an encounter with a work of art can have a – necessarily limited – (self-) revelatory effect on the viewer. Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 253. 69 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note from 4 January 1894, inspired by Ernst Mach: “We are no closer to our ‘I’ of ten years ago … Eternal physical continuity” (Wir sind unserem Ich von Vor-zehn-Jahren nicht näher … Ewige physische Kontinuität). Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen und Tagebücher, 107. 70 “Da, im Augenblick des bangsten Staunens, kam ich mir wieder, der Knabe sank in mich hinein, das Wasser floß unter meinem Gesicht hinweg und bespülte die eine Wange, die aufgestützten Arme hielten den Leib, ich hob mich, und es war nichts weiter als das Aufstehen eines, der an ­fließendem Wasser mit angelegten Lippen einen langen Zug getan hatte.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 71 In Die Frau ohne Schatten, for instance, the golden water is referred to as “the water of life” (das Wasser des Lebens.) See also Çakmur, Hofmannsthals Erzählung, 206. 72 Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 73 “Das Gedächtnis gehört nur dem Körper: er reproduziert scheinbar das Vergangene, d.h. er erzeugt ein ähnliches Neues in der Stimmung. Mein Ich von gestern geht mich so wenig an wie das Ich Napoleons oder Goethes.” Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen und Tagebücher, 93. 74 Cf. the “Address,” where Hofmannsthal asks with reference to the works of art: “Who amongst us can say: ‘Of what concern are they to me?’ Who could carve them out from his feeling and thought any more easily than a piece of flesh from his body?” (Wer ist unter uns, der sagen könnte: ‘Was gehen sie mich an?’ Wer könnte sie aus seinem Fühlen und Denken leichter herausschneiden als ein Stück Fleisch aus seinem Körper?) Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8. 75 “Verwandtschaft der schönen Dinge in der Zeit, und tiefer Sinn davon: die Bilderbücher von Crane Verwandtschaft derer von verschiedenen Zeiten … So umschweben uns die parallelen Gebärden der Unzähligen, unzählige Gesichter beugen sich mit uns Wasser [zu] trinken.” Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen aus dem Nachlass, 391–2. 76 “Jedes dieser Gesichter ist ein Geschick, etwas Einziges, das Einzelnste, was es gibt, und dabei ein Unendliches, ein Auf-der-Reise-sein nach einem unsagbar fernen Ziel.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186. 77 “Da, im Augenblick des bangsten Staunens … und es war nichts weiter als das Aufstehen eines, der an fließendem Wasser mit angelegten Lippen einen langen Zug getan hat.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191.

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78 “Die Berge riefen einander an; das Geklüftete war lebendiger als ein Gesicht; jedes Fältchen an der fernen Flanke eines Hügels lebte: dies alles war mir nahe wie die Wurzel meiner Hand. Es war, was ich nie mehr sehen werde. Es war das Gastgeschenk aller der einsamen Wanderer, die uns begegnet waren.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 79 “genug, es ist nahe.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 185. 80 “Einmal offenbart sich jedes Lebende, einmal jede Landschaft, und völlig: aber nur einem erschütterten Herzen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 81 “Gastgeschenk aller der einsamen Wanderer” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 82 “Aber mich verlangte nicht, noch weiter daran zu denken. ‘Gewesen,’ sagte ich unwillkürlich und hob den Fuß über die Trümer, die zu Hunderten hier umherlagen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 191. 83 “vom Alter verwesten [sic]” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. 84 “mit meinem Atemzug fühlte ich auch ihren Kontur sich heben und ­senken … Ohne mein Zutun wählte mein Blick.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. 85 Ending as a fragment, the poem (Sappho 31) links physical dissociation with poverty. In the translation by Anne Carson: “and cold sweat holds me and shaking / grips me all, greener than grass / I am and dead – or almost / I seem to me. / But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty.” Sappho, If Not, Winter, 63. 86 “Aber auch um sie spielte in dem Abendlicht, das klarer war als ­aufgelöstes Gold, der verzehrende Hauch der Vergänglichkeit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. 87 The most well-known expression of this is the play Jedermann (Everyman), which is performed every year at the Salzburg Festival. The play is based on the medieval tale of a rich man whose love of wealth has led to a sinful life. In Hofmannsthal’s version, responsibility towards ­others becomes an equally important theme. 88 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note: “The poet a reverse Midas: all lifeless things he touches he brings to life” (Dichter ein umgekehrter Midas: was er Erstarrtes berührt, erweckt er zum Leben.) Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen und Tagebücher, 93. For a detailed treatment and ­contextualization of this relation, see Mayer, “Midas statt Pygmalion,” 302–3. 89 With reference to the 1896 poem “Manche freilich,” (“Some, indeed,”) Judith Ryan states quite perceptively: “poetic utterance and what Pater

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called the ‘hard gem-like flame’ of passionate engagement in the present moment are not at all sufficient. The poet’s privileged position does not permit him to forget the problem of social class, illustrated at the ­beginning of the poem by the image of an ancient galley in which the free enjoy the vast perspectives of life above deck while the slaves toil away to their death below.” Ryan, Vanishing Subject, 122. “De cet égout immonde, l’or pur s’écoule. C’est là que l’esprit humain se perfectionne et s’abrutit, que la civilisation produit ses merveilles et que l’homme civilisé redevient presque sauvage.” De Tocqueville, Journeys, 107–8; “Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande,” 504. Morris, “The Socialist Ideal,” 257–8. “Ich wollte hinübergehen zu ihr; es trieb mich, um sie herumzugehen. Ihr Schatten strömte zu ihren Füßen auf den Boden hin; die abgewandte Seite, dorthin, gegen den Untergang der Sonne, diese schien mir das eigentliche Leben zu enthalten.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Der um Geld zu ringen meinte, um Geld, um Geld, und gegen den eigenen Dämon um ein Ungeheures ringt, ein nicht zu Nennendes.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 187. “Diese Griechen, fragte ich in mir, wo sind sie? Ich versuchte mich zu ­erinnern, aber ich erinnerte mich nur an Erinnerungen. Namen schwebten herbei, Gestalten; sie gingen ineinander über, als löste ich sie auf in einem grünlichen Rauch, darin sie verzerrten.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Form gewordene Willkür.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 8. Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Daß sie längst dahin waren, darum haßte ich sie, und daß sie so rasch dahingegangen waren.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Er haßte seinen vorzeitigen Tod so sehr, daß er sein Leben haßte, weil es ihn dahin geführt hatte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 55; “Das Märchen,” 30. “Schon war ja alles nicht, indem es zu sein glaubte! Und darüber ­schwebend die ewige Fata Morgana ihrer Poesie; und ihre Götter selber, welche unsicheren vorüberhastenden Phantome … Götter, ewige? Milesische Märchen, eine Dekoration an die Wand gemalt im Hause einer Buhlerin.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95; “Augenblicke,” 192–3. “da traf mich ein Blick; tief und zweideutig wie von einem Vorübergehenden. Er ging und war mir schon halb abgewandt, ­verachtungsvoll auch dieser Stadt, seiner Vaterstadt. Sein Blick ­enthüllte mir mich selbst und ihn: es war Platon. Um die Lippen des Mythenerfinders, des Verächters der Götter, spielten der Hochmut und

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geisterhafte Träume. In einem prunkvollen, unbefleckten Gewand, das ­lässig den Boden streifte, ging er hin, der Unbürger, der Königlicher; er schwebte vorüber, wie Geister, die mit geschlossenen Füßen gehen. Verachtend streifte er die Zeit und den Ort, er schien vom Osten ­herzukommen und nach dem Westen zu entschwinden.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95–6; “Augenblicke,” 193. 101 Hofmannsthal, “Einem, der vorübergeht,” 60. 102 Baudelaire, Die Blumen des Bösen, 137. 103 “Dichten ist ein Übermut, / Niemand schelte mich!” The lines come from the poem “Derb und tüchtig.” Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 16. 104 Cf. lines 4185–8 in Goethe’s Faust: “Sie schiebt sich langsam nur vom Ort, / Sie scheint mit geschloßnen Füßen zu gehen. / Ich muß bekennen, daß mir deucht, / Daß sie dem guten Gretchen gleicht.” (How slowly she moves now, / As if her feet were fastened somehow! / And as I look, it seems to me, / It’s poor dear Gretchen that I see!) Goethe, Faust, 131; Faust Part One, 132. 105 “Habe doch Mitleiden mit deinem Fusse! Speie lieber auf das Stadtthor und – kehre um!”; “‘wo man nicht mehr lieben kann, da soll man – ­vorübergehen! –’ … Also sprach Zarathustra und gieng an dem Narren und der grossen Stadt vorüber.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 176, 178; Also sprach Zarathustra, 221. 106 “Verachtend streifte er die Zeit und den Ort, er schien vom Osten ­herzukommen und nach dem Westen zu entschwinden … und meine Schuld lag am Tage. Es ist deine eigene Schwäche, rief ich mich an, du bist nicht fähig, dies zu beleben. Du selbst zitterst vor Vergänglichkeit, alles um dich tauchst du ins fürchterliche Bad der Zeit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 96; “Augenblicke,” 193. 107 See in particular Hofmannsthal’s essay “Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen”: “And now he, the reader, is nothing but an instrument: now the book plays on him.” (Und nun ist er, der Leser, nur ein Instrument: nun spielt das Buch auf ihm.) The reader must adopt the receptive attitude of the artist. Like Keats’ “negative capability,” Hofmannsthal’s poetic receptivity undermines the subject-object hierarchy. Hofmannsthal, “Shakespeare’s Kings,” 115; “Shakespeare’s Könige,” 81. 108 Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 109. 109 “‘Gewesen,’ sagte ich unwillkürlich und hob den Fuß über die Trümer, die zu Hunderten hier umherlagen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 193. 110 In André Gide’s 1898 play Philoctète, the protagonist is portrayed as a writer. Little has been written on Hofmannsthal and Gide, but Chryssoula

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Kambas mentions Gide’s acquaintance with Hofmannsthal (through Harry Kessler) around 1900. Kambas “Walter Benjamin,” 135. 111 “ohne Philoctetes selber die Stadt nicht fallen kann.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 96; “Augenblicke,” 194. 112 Like Gide’s character, the poet in Hofmannsthal’s essay “Der Dichter und diese Zeit” (“The Poet and Our Time”) is a figure whose presence is not desired; domiciled under the stair of his own house, he experiences suffering and pleasure, yet his presence remains unobserved. Hofmannsthal, “The Poet,” 41; “Der Dichter,” 137. 113 “Hier, wo ich es mit Händen zu greifen dachte, hier ist es dahin, hier erst recht.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 114 “Ich hob den Fuß, um die gespenstische Stätte des Nichtvorhandenen zu räumen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 115 “Kostbarkeiten … die aus dem Schutt der Gräber kommen: sie haben der Gewalt der Zeit widerstanden, für den Augenblick wenigstens, sie sprechen nur sich aus und sind von vollkommener Schönheit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 116 “Was die Dinge auszeichnet, dieses Ganz-mit-sich-Beschäftigtsein, das war es, was einer Plastik ihre Ruhe gab; sie durfte nichts von außen verlangen oder erwarten, sich auf nichts beziehen, was draußen lag, nichts sehen, was nicht in ihr war.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 42; Sämtliche Werke, 5:159. 117 Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1902 bis 1906, 112. 118 Cf. Mallarmé’s influential distinction: “To name an object is to ­suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which is intended to be divined bit by bit: to suggest it, there’s the dream. It is the perfect usage of this mystery which constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object, little by little, in order to reveal a state of the soul, or, conversely, to choose an object and to release from it a state of soul through a process of ­decryption.” (Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite de deviner peu à peu : le suggérer, voilà le rêve. C’est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le ­symbole : évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d’âme, ou, ­inversement, choisir un objet et en dégager un état d’âme, par une série de déchiffrements.) Mallarmé, Sur l’évolution ­littéraire, 700. 119 “Ein Becher gleicht der Rundung der Brüste oder der Schulter einer Göttin. Eine goldene Schlange, die einen Arm umwand, ruft diesen Arm herauf.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 120 “Sie trug den Becher in der Hand – / Ihr Kinn und Mund glich seinem Rand.” Hofmannsthal, “The Both of the Them,” 28; “Die Beiden,” 50.

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121 “die dunklen Köpfe aber mit dem bösen Mund von Schlangen, drei wilden Augen in der Stirn und unheimlichem Schmuck in den kalten, harten Haaren, bewegten sich neben den atmenden Wangen und streiften die schönen Schläfen im Takt der langsamen Schritte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44–5; “Das Märchen,” 20. 122 The gaze of Medusa works both ways: in the merchant’s son’s case, the snakes are part of the hair of the servant girl, fixing the viewer in their presence; on the other hand, the image of the Medusa-stare is “fixed” by “The Tale” itself, and thus by the reader’s aesthetic “gaze.” In the final section of “Moments in Greece,” a similar double gaze will be an ­important part of the aesthetic moment. 123 Schopenhauer makes a similar remark in identifying seemingly ordinary things as potential sites for the aesthetic experience. Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1:298. 124 “In diesem Augenblick geschah mir etwas: ein namenloses Erschrecken: es kam nicht von außen, sondern irgendwoher aus unmeßbaren Fernen eines inneren Abgrundes: es war wie ein Blitz: den Raum, wie er war, viereckig mit den getünchten Wänden und den Statuen, die dastanden, erfüllte im Augenblicke ein völlig anderes Licht, als wirklich da war: die Augen der Statuen waren plötzlich auf mich gerichtet, und in ihren Gesichtern vollzog sich ein völlig unsägliches Lächeln.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97–8; “Augenblicke,” 195. 125 “die Form gewordene Willkür der zusammentretenden Farben und Schattirungen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 7–8. 126 Plato, Timaeus, 1254–5. 127 Cf. Gregor Streim, Das Leben in der Kunst, 208–9, and Grundmann, Mein Leben, 117. 128 “Socrate n’est pas khôra mais il lui ressemblait beaucoup si elle était quelqu’un ou quelque chose … Cette place introuvable, Socrate n’occupe pas mais c’est elle depuis laquelle, dans le Timée et ailleurs, il répond à son nom. Car il faut toujours, comme khôra, ‘l’appeler de la même façon.’” Derrida, “Khōra,” 111; Khôra, 281. 129 “Deprived of a real referent, that which in effect resembles a proper name finds itself called an X which has as its property (as its physis and as its dynamis, Plato’s text will say) that it has nothing as its own and that it remains unformed, formless (amorphon). This very singular impropriety, which precisely is nothing, is just what khōra must, if you like, keep; it is just what must be kept for it, what we must keep for it.” (Privé de référent réel, ce qui en effet ressemble à un nom propre se trouve aussi appeler un X qui a pour propriété, pour physis et pour dynamis dira le texte,

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de n’avoir rien en propre et de rester informe (amorphon). Cette très ­singulière impropriété, qui justement n’est rien, voilà ce que chôra doit, si l’on peut dire, garder, voilà ce qu’il faut lui garder ce qu’il nous faut lui garder.) Derrida, “Khōra,” 97; Khôra, 271. 130 “den Raum … erfüllte … ein völlig anderes Licht, als wirklich da war.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 195. 131 Cf. Roberta Ascarelli, who in exploring the performative qualities of this “scene” in the museum notes how Hofmannsthal sets the statues in motion in a kind of auratic theatre. Ascarelli, “La danza,” 64. 132 Braegger notes the connection to the “Address” as well and traces this back to Lafcadio Hearn’s 1896 Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, which Hofmannsthal had read in 1901. Later, he wrote the introduction to the German translation. Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 118–21. See also Freny Mistry, “On the Notion of ‘Präexistenz’ in Hofmannsthal.” 133 “C’est à cette profondeur que nous ferait trembler la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas.” Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 82; “Violence et métaphysique,” 122. 134 “L’œuvre ne réussit pas – est mauvaise – lorsque elle n’a pas cette ­aspiration à la vie qui a emu Pygmalion. Mais ce n’est qu’une aspiration. L’artiste a donné à la statue une vie sans vie. Une vie dérisoire qui n’est pas maitresse d’elle-même, une caricature de vie. Une présence qui ne se ­recouvre pas elle-même et qui se déborde de tous côtés, qui ne tient pas en mains les fils de la marionnette qu’elle est.” Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 138; “La réalité et son ombre,” 182. 135 “Ne parlez pas, ne réfléchissez pas, admirez en silence et en paix – tels sont les conseils de la sagesse satisfaite devant le beau … qui ont des bouches, mais qui ne parlent plus.” Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 141. “La réalité et son ombre,” 787. 136 “L’infini se présente comme visage dans la résistance éthique qui paralyse mes pouvoirs et se lève dure et absolue du fond des yeux sans défense dans sa nudité et sa misère … Parler à moi c’est surmonter à tout moment, ce qu’il y a de nécessairement plastique dans la manifestation. Se manifester comme visage, c’est s’imposer par-delà la forme, manifestée et purement phénoménale … Dans le Désir se confondent les mouvements qui vont vers la Hauteur et l’Humilité de l’Autrui.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 200–1; Totalité et Infini, 174. 137 “Zugleich wußte ich: ich sehe dies nicht zum erstenmal.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 138 Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 193; Breier, “Zwischen Gewesenem und Gegenwärtigem,” 15.

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139 For the importance of the face and physiognomy in Hofmannsthal’s texts (especially as a reception of the work of Rudolf Kassner and Georg Simmel), see Dangel-Pelloquin’s article, “Ah, das Gesicht!” While DangelPelloquin’s study focuses on the faces of people, “Moments in Greece” demonstrates that Hofmannsthal’s interest in physiognomy extends to the inanimate (memories, landscapes, and art). 140 Pater, The Renaissance, 67, 79. 141 “in irgendwelcher Welt bin ich vor diesen gestanden, habe ich mit diesen irgendwelche Gemeinschaft gepflogen und seitdem habe alles in mir auf einen solchen Schrecken gewartet, und so furchtbar mußte ich mich in mir berühren, um wieder zu werden, der ich war.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 142 “In diesem Augenblick geschah mir etwas”; “es kam nicht von außen, sondern irgendwoher”; “in irgendwelcher Welt”; “irgendwelche Gemeinschaft.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97–8; “Augenblicke,” 195. Emphasis mine. 143 For extended discussions of Hofmannsthal’s use of the term “präexistenz,” see Freny Mistry’s “On the Notion of ‘Präexistenz’” and Walter Jens’s chapter on Hofmannsthal’s Ad me ipsum in Hofmannsthal und die Griechen. 144 “Irgendwo geschah eine Feierlichkeit, eine Schlacht, eine glorreiche Opferung: das bedeutete dieser Tumult in der Luft, das Weiter- und Engerwerden des Raumes – das in mir dieser unsagbare Aufschwung, diese überschwellende Geselligkeit, wechselnd mit diesem rätselhaften Erbangen und Verzagen: denn ich bin der Priester der die Zeremonie vollziehen wird – ich vielleicht auch das Opfer, das dargebracht wird: das alles drängt zur Entscheidung, es endet mit dem Überschreiten einer Schwelle, mit einem Gelandetsein.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 145 Claudia Bamberg notes that both the third “Augenblick” and Rilke’s poem “Wendung” (“Turn”), written in June of 1914, treat in similar ­fashion the question of “Schauen” (seeing). I would add here another point of ­commonality – that of sacrifice (Opfer). Printed above Rilke’s poem and below the title is a quote attributed to Rudolf Kassner: “Der Weg von der Innigkeit zur Größe geht durch das Opfer” (The way from interiority to greatness leads through sacrifice). Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, 2:82. 146 “Dichter und Priester waren im Anfang eins.” Novalis, Blüthenstaub, 441. 147 “Von jeher und zu allen Zeiten sind die Empfindungen, Gemütsbewegungen und Leidenschaften der Menschen auf ihre Religionsbegriffe gepfropfet, ein Mensch ohne alle Religion hat gar keine Empfindung (weh ihm!), ein Mensch mit schiefer Religion schiefe

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Empfindungen und ein Dichter, der die Religion seines Volks nicht ­gegründet hat, ist weniger als ein Meßmusikant.” Lenz, “Remarks,” 72; “Anmerkungen,” 35. 148 “Da verlischt schon dies in ihre versteinernden Gesichter hinein … nichts bleibt zurück, als eine totbehauchte Verzagtheit. Statuen sind um mich, fünf, jetzt erst wird mir ihre Zahl bewußt, fremd stehen sie vor mir, schwer und steinern, mit schiefgestellten Augen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195 149 Cf. Charles Baudelaire’s preface to the works of Edgar Allan Poe: “This primitive, irresistible force is the natural perversity that causes man to be simultaneously homicidal and suicidal, murderer and executioner, ­constantly” (Cette force primitive, irrésistible, est la Perversité naturelle, qui fait que l’homme est sans cesse et à la fois homicide et suicide, assassin et bourreau). Baudelaire, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe,” v. 150 “Stehe ich nicht vor dem Fremdesten vom Fremden? Blickt nicht hier aus fünf jungfräulichen Mienen das ewige Grausen des Chaos?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 151 “Aber, mein Gott, wie wirklich sind sie. Sie haben eine atemberaubende sinnliche Gegenwart.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 152 “Ihre Feierlichkeit hat nichts von Masken: das Gesicht empfängt seinen Sinn durch den Körper.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 153 Pater, The Renaissance, 128, 129. 154 “Sie nehmen an Dingen teil, die über jede gemeine Ahnung sind”; “Wie schön sie sind!” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 155 In older versions of the text, the narrator contemplates gazing upon the urns and goblets of the past which suggest but also subdue the power of eternity, resulting in the calm enjoyment of beauty without the disturbing, sublime element: “The meander with which they are ornamented brings the motif of the infinite before the soul, but so subjugated that (1) our ­disquiet is not awakened (2) / it does not threaten (1) us (2) our interiority / . In the delight of the eye (1) the senses satisfy themselves (2) the senses are contented (3) the senses content themselves / and their striving towards infinity (1) lulled to sleep (2) drops off. (Der Mäander, mit dem sie verziert sind, bringt das Motiv der Unendlichkeit vor die Seele, aber so unterjocht, dass (1) unsere Unruhe nicht erwacht (2) / es (1) uns (2) unser Inneres / nicht gefährdet / . In der Ergötzung des Auges (1) befriedigen sich die Sinne (2) sind die Sinne befriedigt (3) geben sich die Sinne zufrieden / und ihr Streben nach Unendlichkeit (1) eingeschläfert (2) schläft ein /). Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 674.

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156 “Ihre Körper sind mir überzeugender als mein eigener … Ich habe nie zuvor etwas gesehen, wie diese Masse und diese Oberfläche. War nicht für ein Wimperzucken das Universum mir offen?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 157 “Indem man von der Wirklichkeit irgend etwas Zusammenfassendes ­aussagt, nähert man sie schon dem Traum, vielmehr der Poesie.” Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, 45. 158 “es ist das Geheimnis der Unendlichkeit in diesen Gewändern.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 159 The idea of formal adequacy is developed in Hegel’s introduction to Aesthetics. 160 “Wer diesen wahrhaft gewachsen wäre, müßte sich anders ihnen nahen als durchs Auge, ehrfürchtiger zugleich und kühner. Und doch müßte ihm sein Auge dies gebieten, schauend, schauend, dann aber sinkend, brechend wie beim Überwältigten.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 161 “Mein Auge sank nicht, doch sank eine Gestalt über die Knie der einen Priesterin hin, jemand ruhte mit der Stirn auf dem Fuß einer Statue. Ich wußte nicht, ob ich dies dachte, oder ob dies geschah.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 162 “Willst du sicher gehn, so mußt du wissen / Schlangengift und Theriak zu sondern.” Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 22. 163 “Schlangengift und Theriak muß / Ihm das eine wie das andre scheinen.” Ibid. 164 “da doch Schönheit erst entsteht, wo eine Kraft und eine Bescheidenheit ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 235. 165 “Wenn das Unerreichliche sich speist aus meinem Innern und das Ewige aus mir seine Ewigkeit sich aufbaut, was wäre dann noch zwischen der Gottheit und mir?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 100; “Augenblicke,” 196. 166 Breier, “Zwischen Gewesenem und Gegenwärtigem,”16; Schings, “Hier oder nirgends,” 388. 167 “Vielleicht erfassen wir eine ganze Gestalt, die in Marmor vor uns aufsteht, noch immer mit einem romantischen Blick. Vielleicht leihen wir ihr zuviel von unserer Bewußtheit, von unserer ‘Seele.’” Holdt, Griechenland, viii. See also Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 110. 168 “Die Forderung, welche die Welt des Schönen an uns stellt, jenes dämonische Aus-uns-heraus-locken ganzer Welten des Fühlens, diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos gross ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns, die übereinander gethürmten Schichten der

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aufgestapelten überindividuellen Erinnerung.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 169 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 170 Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time, 119; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 153. 171 “Man muss das Tiefe verstecken. Wo? An der Oberfläche!” Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, 47; “From the Book of Friends,” 148. 172 “Es wäre ja undenkbar, sich an ihre Oberfläche anschmiegen zu wollen. Diese Oberfläche ist ja gar nicht da – sie entsteht durch ein beständiges Kommen aus unerschöpflichen Tiefen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 173 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis from 11 May 1908: “This journey has given me for the first time in my life that feeling of really travelling. The foreign, the absolutely foreign, foreign light, ­foreign air, as when one strays from the path, foreign people – I am very happy to have finally become acquainted with this. This is the only spot in Europe where one still can.” (Diese Reise gibt mir zum erstenmal im Leben das Gefühl, wirklich zu reisen. Das Fremde, das absolut Fremde, fremdes Licht, fremde Luft, sowie man von der Straße abweicht, fremde Menschen – ich bin sehr glücklich, dies endlich einmal kennengelerntzuhaben. Dies ist wohl der einzige Fleck in Europa, wo man es noch kann). Hofmannsthal, Briefe 1900–1909, 321–2. 174 “Sie sind da und sind unerreichlich. So bin auch ich. Dadurch kommunizieren wir.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 175 “Auf die Gegenständlichkeit geprüft, ist die Gestalt gar nicht ‘da’; aber was wäre gegenwärtiger als sie? Und wirkliche Beziehung ist es, darin ich zu ihr stehe: sie wirkt an mir wie ich an ihr wirke.” Buber, I and Thou, 61; Ich und Du, 17. 176 “Das Plastische entsteht nicht durch Schauen, sondern durch Identifikation.” Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, 73.

C hapt e r F o u r    1 “ihre eigene kritische Instanz.” Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time, 154; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 154.    2 Ellen Ritter has explored this most comprehensively. See Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 270–82.   3 See Konrad, Studien, 148–9.

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  4 See Mann, Die Opern, 153.   5 See Werbeck, Richard Strauss-Handbuch, 211.  6 Mann, Die Opern, 169.   7 “es stecken sechs Jahre Arbeit in dem Buch, alle guten reinen Momente, die ich diesen finsteren Jahren entreißen konnte, und eine unsägliche Bemühung.” Quoted in Hofmannsthal, KA 28: Erzählungen I, 424.   8 Harry Seelig succinctly argues for the aesthetic improvements achieved in the prose version of the story: “by boldly going beyond the operatic substance of the original, Hofmannsthal succeeds not only in finding for the original a more satisfying aesthetic-ethical shadow, but also in jumping over his own.” Seelig, “Musical Substance,” 70.   9 See Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 181; and Schwarz, Orient – Okzident, 175–88. Ellen Ritter further notes the contrastive fates of the merchant’s son in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Ritter, “Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” 77. 10 “Das Leben, so meint es Hofmannsthal, läßt seiner nicht spotten. Verstoßen – wird es böse und rachsüchtig.” Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 175. 11 Ibid., 181. 12 The flawed narrative of Hofmannsthal’s sudden interest in social concerns persists in Hofmannsthal studies. See, for instance, the 2014 dissertation of Teona Djibouti. As I have shown, ethical and social concerns were ­central to Hofmannsthal’s writing from the beginning. 13 “Nach einem unglücklichen Krieg müssen Komödien geschrieben werden.” Hofmannsthal, “Die Ironie der Dinge,” 138. 14 “But true comedy places individuals into an intricately knotted relationship to the world, it puts everything in relation to everything else, and thus it sets everything in a relationship of irony. In just such a manner proceeds the war, which affects all of us, and from which we still have not extirpated ourselves, and perhaps will not for another twenty years.” (Aber die wirkliche Komödie setzt ihre Individuen in ein tausendfach verhäkeltes Verhältnis zur Welt, sie setzt alles in ein Verhältnis zu allem und damit alles in ein Verhältnis der Ironie. Ganz so verfährt der Krieg, der über uns alle gekommen ist, und dem wir bis heute nicht entkommen sind, ja ­vielleicht noch zwanzig Jahre nicht entkommen werden). Ibid.   15 “gewinnt einen klaren Geist und kommt hinter die Dinge, beinahe wie ein Gestorbener.” Ibid., 140. 16 The trope is a familiar one in fairy tales. Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story) by Adalbert von

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Chamisso (1781–1838) is probably the most familiar example of a ­character selling his shadow for personal gain. 17 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 109. 18 Cf. Pannwitz’s description of the “Reich der Zeugung” (The Realm of Conception) – the so-called “underworld” of the unborn children: “The closest kinship is with Plato’s world of ideas. Except that this is not actually a transcendence, but rather it is contained by the earthly realm. But it is indeed also a μέσον, a μεταξὺ, a unique in-between-world. What is tremendous and novel about it, is that this in-between-world, which is ­presented with such ineffable delicacy, inwardness, and sanctity, as only the world of the dead, the underworld, is presented, is in fact the world of life, the world of the original being-becoming, of pre-childhood and eternal youth, indeed, that it is not the counterworld, but the world itself, the world of conception.” (Die nächste Verwandtschaft ist die mit Platons Welt der Ideen. Nur, daß es keine eigentliche Transzendenz ist, sondern ganz dem Erdenreiche einbegriffen. Wohl aber ist’s auch ein μέσον, eine μεταξὺ, eine eigentümliche Zwischen Welt. Das Ungeheure und Neugeartete ist, daß diese Zwischenwelt, die mit solcher namenlosen Zartheit, Innigkeit, Heiligkeit, wie sonst nur die Welt des Todes, die Unterwelt dargestellt ist, die Welt des Lebens, des Urseiend-Werdenden, der Vorkindheit und ewigen Jugend ist, ja daß sie nicht die Gegenwelt, sondern die Welt selbst der Zeugung ist). Pannwitz, “Hofmannsthals Erzählung,” 377. 19 Kobel rightly argues that the Emperor prevents the Empress from growing into her adult role, but fails to see that Empress is equally complicit in the Emperor’s failure to grow into his; as much as he prevents her from becoming a mother, she has not made him a father. She wishes to hold on to the “Flitterwochen” just as much as the Emperor does, as becomes evident in her nostalgic rehearsal of the moment of their meeting. See Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 272. 20 Hofmannsthal used the metaphor in a letter to Strauss from 2 January 1914: “And I believe too that your path for composing these three acts will be exactly like Dante’s: out of hell, through purgatory, to heaven in the third scene.” (Ich glaube auch, daß Ihr Weg bei der Komposition ­dieser drei Akte genau der des Dante sein wird: aus der Hölle durchs Fegefeuer in den Himmel des dritten Aufzuges). Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, 256. 21 “Weh spricht: Vergeh! Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit – , will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!” The verse is found in the “Mitternachtslied” in Thus Spake Zarathustra and features in Gustav Mahler’s third symphony, which ­premiered in 1902.

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22 “Der Kaiser trat leichten Fußes über den Leib der Amme hinweg, die ihr Gesicht an den Boden drückte. Er achtete ihrer so wenig, als läge hier nur ein Stück Teppich.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 110. 23 The Emperor’s explicit failure of visual and ethical recognition distinguishes him from the merchant’s son of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” 24 Schwarz, Orient – Okzident, 184. Helen Frink concludes that the “hunt almost always symbolizes a sexual relationship which is not a fulfilling one. The hunt depicts the initial encounter between the two partners, or shows that their acquaintance has not produced true intimacy and union.” Frink, “The Hunting Motif,” 691. We might extend this argument: In Die Frau ohne Schatten, both hunter (the Emperor) and hunted (the “Feentochter” before she becomes the Empress) are caught up in their active and passive roles respectively, but are both ultimately hindered by this repetition. Only later will they switch roles, such that the Emperor is rendered passive and the Empress becomes the agent. 25 “die Geschichte jener Jagd und ersten Liebesstunde kannte sie [die Amme] genau genug: dies alles war wie mit einem glühenden Griffel ihrer Seele eingebrannt.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 113. 26 “Warum sind Menschengesichter so wild und häßlich, und Tiergesichter so redlich und schön?” Ibid. 27 “Gesicht – Hieroglyphe. Es giebt keine hässlichen Menschen.” Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch und die Geschichte,” 56. 28 Pater, The Renaissance, 6. 29 “Ich will die Frist nicht wissen, vielleicht läuft sie in dieser Stunde ab, und ich könnte erstarren, wenn ich es wüßte … Hier und nicht anderswo wird der Weg angetreten, heute und nicht morgen, in dieser Stunde und nicht bis die Sonne höher steht … mir brennen die Sekunden auf dem Herzen.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 115–16. 30 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 147. 31 “trug große Flecken von dunkler Farbe dahin, die sich aus dem Viertel der Färber, das oberhalb der Brücke lag.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 118. 32 “C’est le Styx de ce nouvel enfer.” De Tocqueville, Journeys, 107; “Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande,” 503. 33 “Das Fürchterliche in den Gesichtern der Menschen traf sie aus solcher Nähe, wie noch nie. Mutig wollte sie hart an ihnen vorbei, ihre Füße ­vermochten es, ihr Herz nicht. Jede Hand, die sich regte, schien nach ihr zu greifen, gräßlich waren so viele Münder in solcher Nähe. Die

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e­ rbarmungslosen, gierigen, und dabei, wie ihr vorkam, angstvollen Blicke aus so vielen Gesichtern vereinigten sich in ihrer Brust.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 118. 34 “Sie sind wie die Schatten, die den Odysseus umlagern und alle vom Blut trinken wollen, lautlos, gierig aneinander gedrängt, ihren dunklen hohlen Blick auf den Lebenden geheftet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 46; “Ansprache,” 7. 35 “Sie fassen uns dämonisch an: und jedes ist eine Welt, und alle sind aus einer Welt, die uns durch sie anrührt und anschauert bis ins Mark.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8–9. 36 “[Die Kaiserin] ging fast unter in einem Knäuel von Menschen, auf ­einmal war sie vor den Hufen eines großen Maulesels, der wissende, sanfte Blick des Tieres traf sie, sie erholte sich an ihm. Der Reiter schlug den Esel, der zögerte, die zitternde Frau nicht zu treten, mit dem Stock über dem Kopf. – Ist es an dem, daß ich mich in ein Tier verwandeln und mich den grausamen Händen der Menschen preisgeben muß? ging es durch ihre Seele und sie schauderte, dabei vergaß sie sich einen Augenblick und fand sich, vom Strome geschoben, am Ende der Brücke, sie wußte nicht wie.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 118–19. 37 See Hofmannsthal’s note from 15 August 1913 for Andreas: “True poetry is the arcanum that unites us with life, severs us from life. The severance – only through severance do we begin to live … but just as severance is imperative, so too is the union, the aurea catena homeri.” (Die wahre Poesie ist das arcanum, das uns mit dem Leben vereinigt, uns vom Leben absondert. Das Sondern – durch Sondern erst leben wir … aber wie das Sondern, so ist auch das Vereinigen unerlässlich, die aurea catena Homeri). Hofmannsthal, KA 30: Andreas, 107. 38 This also bears a strong resemblance to the aforementioned epigraph in “Moments in Greece”: εἰδὶ καὶ κυνῶν ἐρινύες (there is vengeance in heaven for an injured dog). 39 Referring to Freud’s The Uncanny, John Zilcosky notes: “No European reader would, in 1919, have related these disjointed, severed, shaking bodies solely with fairy tales.” Zilcosky, Language of Trauma, 153. Christina Fossaluzza makes the argument that the story had great contemporary relevance and offered subtle reflections on the war and the social mission of art in that era of transition. Fossaluzza, “Zwischen Leben und Geist,” 106–7. 40 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 120. 41 She is also later described as behaving like an “unwilliges Kind” – a stubborn child. Ibid., 123.

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42 “Mutter, Mutter, laß uns nach Haus / Die Tür ist verriegelt: wir finden nicht hinein.” Ibid., 125. 43 “Jeder hat am Dichterischen teil, der Dichter an Jedem. Das Inkognito ist seine Lebensform. Hofmannsthal geleitet den Dichter herab von seinem Elfenbeinturm in das Gewimmel der Märkte und der Gassen … Wie der heilige Alexius der Legende liegt er im Bettlergewand in seinem Hause, dem Hause der Zeit, unter der Stiege, dort wo er alle sieht und alle hört … Ein Heiliger Sebastian steht er unter dem unerbittlichen Gesetz: keinen Ding den Eintritt in seine Seele zu wehren.” Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 8–9. 44 Fickert and Celms, “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” 37. 45 “Der Efrit ergriff mit beiden Händen die Handgelenke der Färberin und zwang sie, zu ihm aufzusehen; ihre Blicke konnten sich des Eindringens der seinigen nicht erwehren … das beklemmende Gefühl der Wirklichkeit hielt alles zusammen.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 134. 46 “Durch seine zwei ungleichen Augen grinsten die Abgründe des nie zu Betretenden herein, ein Grausen faßte sie, nicht für sich selber, sondern in der Seele der Färberin, daß diese in den Armen eines solchen Dämons liegen und ihren Atem mit dem seinen vermischen sollte … Ein ungeheures Gefühl durchfuhr die Kaiserin vom Wirbel bis zur Sohle. Sie wußte kaum mehr, wer sie war, nicht, wie sie hierhergekommen war.” Ibid., 136. 47 “Er bemerkte es nicht, daß sie an den Bissen würgte und unter seinen Liebkosungen starr blieb wie eine Tote.” Ibid., 137. 48 “Bereich seines ersten Abenteuers mit der geliebten Frau.” Ibid., 144. 49 This is a variation on one of the central questions in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”: Can the intensity of the first aesthetic encounter be repeated? 50 The quote is from Horace’s Ars poetica: “As is painting, so is poetry: some pieces will strike you more if you stand near, and some, if you are at a greater distance: one loves the dark; another, which is not afraid of the critic’s subtle judgment, chooses to be seen in the light; the one has pleased once the other will give pleasure if ten times repeated.” The quote can be read in context at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hor.% 20Ars%20381. Kierkegaard’s relation of love to aesthetics is a useful model for understanding the relationship between the Emperor and the Empress. 51 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 465. 52 “Was fruchtet dies, wir werden nicht geboren!” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 144. 53 “Er drückte die Hände über die Brust zusammen und verneigte sich … Der Knabe neigte sich vor dem Kaiser bis gegen die Erde und sprach kein

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Wort. Aber er wies mit einer ehrfurchtsvollen Gebärde auf den einen Sitz am oberen Ende der Tafel.” Ibid., 145. 54 “Es dauerte einen Augenblick, bis sich der Kaiser besann, daß es in jedem Fall an ihm wäre, die ersten Worte zu sprechen.” Ibid., 145. 55 “Sie ging langsam und mit Anstrengung, aber ganz aufrecht … von der Hüfte bis an die Schläfe reichten ihr die dunklen Göttinnen und lehnten mit ihrer toten Schwere an den lebendigen zarten Schultern … Eigentlich aber schien sie nicht an den Göttinnen schwer und feierlich zu tragen, sondern an der Schönheit ihres eigenen Hauptes mit dem schweren Schmuck aus lebendigem, dunklem Gold. ” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44–5; “Das Märchen,” 20. 56 “sie glitt mehr als sie ging auf den Kaiser zu … als ob sie mit geschlossenen Füßen auf ihn zugehe.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 145; 157. Mathias Mayer traces the image, which occurs in a number of Hofmannsthal’s texts. In the context of Die Frau ohne Schatten, it is used to depict the step into life (“Schritt ins Leben”) as well as the step into death (“Schritt in den Tod”). The Emperor, once petrified, has his feet in a sense bound together like those of the unborn children, but he does not move. Punning on the situation, Mayer notes that it is the Empress who takes the courageous step of sacrifice. Mayer, “Geschlossene Füße,” 59. See also Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 288–94. For Hofmannsthal, the challenges faced by ethical love have a counterpart in aesthetics, which he gestures towards in Ad me ipsum: “The danger, that the ego might unlearn love: in aesthetic terms, that the forms become rigid” (Gefahr, daß das Ego die Liebe verlerne: ästhetisch gesprochen, daß die Forme erstarren). Hofmannsthal, Ad me ipsum, 240–1. 57 “vergib, sagte sie, daß ich dein Kommen überhören konnte, vertieft in die Arbeit an diesem Teppich. Sollte er aber würdig werden bei der Mahlzeit, mit der wir dich vorlieb zu nehmen bitten, unter dir zu liegen, so durfte der Faden des Endes nicht abgerissen, sondern er mußte zurückgeschlungen werden in den Faden des Anfanges. – Sie brachte alles mit niedergeschlagenen Augen vor; der schöne Ton ihrer Stimme drückte sich dem Kaiser so tief ein, daß er den Sinn der Worte fast überhörte.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 145. 58 “Was für ein sonderbarer Traum ist ein früher Gobelin! Welche ganz gebundene, besondere Welt! … Es lebt für uns, es lebt durch uns. Es ist etwas in uns, das diesem Weltbild antwortet.” Hofmannthal, “Address,” 52; “Ansprache,” 9. 59 “Das Gewebe war unter seinen Füßen, Blumen gingen in Tiere über, aus den schönen Ranken wanden sich Jäger und Liebende los, Falken

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schwebten darüber hin wie fliegende Blumen, alles hielt einander umschlungen, eines war ins andere verrankt, das Ganze war maßlos ­herrlich, eine Kühle stieg aber davon auf, die ihm bis an die Hüften ging. – Wie hast du es zustande gebracht, dies zu entwerfen in solcher Vollkommenheit?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 147. 60 See the explanatory notes to Die Frau ohne Schatten in Hofmannsthal, KA  28: Erzählungen I, 431–2. The Pythagorean Theophron, a character in Wieland’s philosophical verse narrative Musarion, names beauty as the subject of love and proceeds to describe “the great art” as an act of ­stripping away the base material from the beautiful: “Die große Kunst”: “vom Stoff es [das Schöne] abzuschneiden.” Wieland, Musarion, 34. 61 “Ich scheide das Schöne vom Stoff, wenn ich webe; das was den Sinnen ein Köder ist und sie zur Torheit und zum Verderben klirrt, lass ich weg … Beim Weben verfahre ich, sagte sie, wie dein gesegnetes Auge beim Schauen. Ich sehe nicht was ist, und nicht was nicht ist, sondern was immer ist, und danach webe ich.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 147. 62 “Chaos des Nichtlebens.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 63 As pointed out by Hans-Günther Schwarz, Orient – Okzident, 186. 64 “Ist das Haus nahe oder fern? … Ist das das Ende einer Reise oder der Anfang?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 148. 65 “falsch: jedes Kunstwerk als definitiv anzusehen; immer zu sagen: er hat das aufgegeben, er wendet sich jenem zu, er sieht nur das; er meint also das und das; / falsch das definitive / falsch: alle billigen Antithesen wie ‘Kunst’ und ‘Leben’, Aesthet und Gegentheil von Aesthet … / richtig: die Production als eine dunkle Angelegenheit zwischen dem Einzelnen und dem verworrenen Dasein anzusehen.” Hofmannsthal, “Diese Rundschau,” 234. 66 “New seeing” occupied writers and visual artists from Cézanne in ­painting to Rilke and Hofmannsthal in literature and August Endell in architecture. Ursula Renner summarizes the concept of “Neues Sehen” as a view that wants to see new things, as in the sciences, but above all it is about seeing things anew. Renner, Die Zauberschrift, 13. 67 “Deine Fragen sind ungereimt, o großer Kaiser, wie eines kleinen Kindes. Denn sage uns dieses: wenn du zu Tische gehst, geschieht es, um in der Sättigung zu verharren oder dich wieder von ihr zu lösen? Und wenn du auf Reisen gehst, ist es, um fortzubleiben oder um zurückzukehren?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 148. See also Hofmannsthal, Der Schwierige, 129.

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68 “Ich bin gewohnt, zu erreichen, was ich begehre!” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 149. 69 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 151. 70 Hearn, In Ghostly Japan, 182. 71 “Nur ein Gran von Großmut!” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 156–7. 72 “Er haßte die Botschaft und die Botin und fühlte sein Herz völlig Stein geworden in sich. Ohne ein Wort suchte seine Hand nach dem Dolch in ­seinem Gürtel, um ihn nach dieser da zu werfen, da er ihn nicht nach seiner Frau werfen konnte; als die Finger der Rechten ihn nicht zu fühlen vermochten, wollten ihr die der Linken zur Hilfe kommen, aber beide Hände gehorchten nicht mehr, schon lagen die steinernen Arme starr an den versteinten Hüften und über die versteinten Lippen kam kein Laut.” Ibid., 157. 73 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note, where he has the children ask the Emperor: “do you not surrender yourself to the hunt, and when you see a beautiful woman, do you not desire to penetrate her middle like a murderous arrow?” (gibst du dich beim Jagen nicht hin und wenn du ein schönes Weib siehst, willst du nicht mitten in sie hinein wie der mörderische Pfeil?) Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 333. 74 “walkte er den Schmutz und das Blut aus dem Gewand eines Schlachters … Der Färber hatte das ausgetretene Gewand auf reine Bretter ausgebreitet und strich es aufs neue mit weißem Ton an. Die Kaiserin half ihm dabei. Das blutig gefärbte Abwasser rann aus dem umgestürzten Schaff in die Gosse. Die beiden arbeiteten eifrig und sahen nicht herüber.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 159–60. 75 One prominent production of the opera eliminates this element from Barak’s character entirely. In Claus Guth’s 2012 production for La Scala and Covent Garden, Barak is robbed of his defining work and made instead a tanner in order to highlight the misogynist undertones of the story. This alteration severely changes the character and the audience’s perception of the relationships portrayed in the opera. Losing his artist’s/ alchemist’s capacity for transforming matter (dying fabrics, infusing them with brilliance and new life), Barak is portrayed “stripping and gutting a gazelle that, in the person of the Empress, represents the feminine ‘other’ of which he remains oblivious.” Quantrill, “An elegantly staged subversion,” s.p. The ‘subversion’ here is forced and results from a depiction of the character that goes against both prose text and libretto. It also jars with the Empress’s positive assessment of Barak. 76 “Die Ceremonien die er macht … die Wege und die Vereinigungen, die seine gesegneten Hände bewirken, die Herrlichkeit der Farben und

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ihre Bescheidenheit, geleitet die Zauberkraft seines Gemütes: die Liebe zu seinen Werkzeugen: die Gelassenheit mit der er arbeitet und die fromme Sorgfalt auf ein Ziel: die Ehrfurcht vor sich selber und die Weg­ bereitung für ein Höheres … so künstlich arbeitet er. Wie hast Du mir nicht gesagt, dass die Menschen so gut sind?” Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 364. 77 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Strauss form 13 June 1913: “I dare not go beyond a certain boundary in concentrating the material, otherwise I’ll impoverish it, the characters will lose their appeal (which lies in their ­psychologically broken contours), they will become too schematic and the whole thing will be trivially operatic.” (Ich darf im Konzentrieren nicht über eine gewisse Grenze herausgehen, sonst verarme ich den Stoff, die Figuren verlieren ihren Reiz (der im psychologischen gebrochenen Konturen liegt), sie werden schematisch und das ganze trivial-opernhaft). Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, 233. 78 “Ehemals waren alle Kunstwerke an der grossen Feststrasse der Menschheit aufgestellt, als Erinnerungszeichen und Denkmäler hoher und seliger Momente. Jetzt will man mit den Kunstwerken die armen Erschöpften und Kranken von der grossen Leidensstrasse der Menschheit bei Seite locken, für ein lüsternes Augenblickchen; man bietet ihnen einen kleinen Rausch und Wahnsinn an.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 144; Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 122. 79 “Lohn? … Womit hätte der Elefant sich Lohn verdient?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 162. 80 Ibid., 159. 81 “Sie war schön in diesem Augenblick und von ihrem jungen Blut ­durchströmt, daß sie glühte, und die Alte betrachtete sie mit Lust. – Nein, nein, rief sie plötzlich mit leidenschaftlichem Entzücken, er ist schön, achte doch nicht auf mich, du Närrin, er ist schön wie der Morgenstern, und seine Schönheit, das ist das Widerhaken an der Angel.” Ibid., 161. 82 At the beginning of the next chapter, the Dyer’s Wife cries: “O my mother … what powers you assumed I had when you gave me to him, whom you brought to me, to love forever! And why did you not give me those same powers along with him?” (O meine Mutter … welche Kräfte hast du mir zugemutet, da du mir auferlegtest, den, welchen du mir ­zugeführt hast, auf immer lieben zu können! und wo hättest du ­dergleichen Kräfte mir mitgegeben?) Ibid., 167. 83 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, xviii. 84 “ihr Gesicht in Schmerz und Tränen schwamm, wie das einer sterblichen Frau.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 163.

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85 “der vertraute Laut ihrer Stimmen schien ihm an die Seele zu dringen.” Ibid., 165. 86 Ibid., 166. 87 The term was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to refer to “the epitome of all that makes humans morally and aesthetically superior to animals.” Curran, “Die schöne Seele,” 77. 88 “Schmutzig ist ein kleines Kind, und sie müssen es dem Haushund ­darreichen, um es rein zu lecken; und dennoch ist es schön wie die ­aufgehende Sonne; und solche sind wir zu opfern gesonnen. – Es war ein ganz seltsamer, fast singender Ton, in dem sie es sagte.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 168. 89 Hofmannsthal, “The Poet and Our Time,” 41; “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 137. 90 “ein … alte[s] Gesetz,” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 168. 91 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 168–9. 92 “Fleißige Kinder”; “reinliche kleine Hände,” Ibid., 170. 93 “Wir nehmen die Farben aus den Blumen heraus und heften sie auf die Tücher, so auch aus den Würmern, und von den Brüsten der Vögel dort, wo ihre Federn leuchtend und unbedeckt sind.” Ibid. This evokes the West-Östlicher Divan poem “An Suleika.” Suleika’s perfume exists because of the sacrifice of thousands of roses. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 61. 94 In chapter 4 of the story, the unborn child speaks about how she weaves; in chapter 5, Barak works with the Empress, cleaning and dyeing fabrics. 95 Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, chapter 3. 96 “es ist die Zartheit der Wangen auf immer, und die unverwelklichen Brüste, vor denen sie zittern, die da kommen sollen, mich zu begrüßen.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 171. 97 “Ihre Lippen bewegten sich, und sie murmelte die Worte, aber es war, als wüßte sie es nicht; sie hob die Hand mit den Fischen über die Schulter und warf, aber wie im Schlaf; sie tat das Bedungene, aber so als täte sie es nicht: ihre Augen hefteten auf dem Färber und ihre Lippen verzogen sich wie eines Kindes, das schreien will … Sie tat ein paar unschlüssige Schritte, nirgend sah sie Hilfe und sie preßte den Mund zusammen und blieb stehen.” Ibid., 172. 98 “einer Hündin Geschick.” Ibid., 173. 99 “sie hatte das Gesicht an den Boden gedrückt, mit unsäglicher Demut reckte sie den Arm aus, ohne ihr Gesicht zu heben, bis sie mit der Hand die Füße des Färbers erreichte, und umfaßte sie. Der Färber schien sie nicht zu beachten … Jetzt schob sich die Liegende auf den Händen näher

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100 101

102 103

104

105

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heran und ihr Kinn drückte sich auf die Füße des Färbers. Ihre Lippen murmelte ein Wort, das niemand hörte. Dann lag sie in dieser Stelle wie tot.” Ibid., 174. “eine wunderbare und dabei unschuldige Schönheit … die ungeheure Angst verzerrte sie nicht, sondern verklärte sie.” Ibid. Cf. the description in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” of ancient warriors. There, they are admired for their “steadfastness in the face of death” (“Todesfestigkeit,” in German). Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 78; “Die Briefe,” 162. Self-sacrifice and acceptance of mortality is by no means restricted to the female sex. Sigismund in Der Turm (The Tower), for instance, bears a striking resemblance to the Empress. Equally, the theme of sacrifice pervades and elevates even the mundane – as when the Marschallin in the opera Rosenkavalier gives up her dalliance with the young Octavian so that he might grow and find love. “in der Größe seines gewaltigen Leibes glich er einem Kinde, dem das Weinen nahe ist.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 174. Cf. Kobel, who writes of Barak’s encounter with his wife in a Heideggerian vein: Barak sees her for the first time not as something ­present-at-hand (“das Vorhandene”) or ready-to-hand (“das Zuhandene”), but rather in her ungraspable being. Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 277. “Mich dünkt, es ist nicht die Umarmung, sondern die Begegnung die eigentliche entscheidende erotische Pantomime. Es ist in keinem Augenblick das Sinnliche so seelenhaft, das Seelenhafte so sinnlich, als in der Begegnung … Hier ist ein Zueinandertrachten noch ohne Begierde, eine naive Beimischung von Zutraulichkeit und Scheu. Hier ist das Rehhafte, das Vogelhafte, das Tierischdumpfe, das Engelsreine, das Göttliche. Ein Gruß ist etwas Grenzenloses.” Hofmannsthal, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 155, 160. “Umarmung ohne Umschlingungen und einem Kusse, indem die Lippen sich weder berührten noch trennten.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 175. Hofmannsthal’s fictional dialogue “The Conversation about Poems” ­portrays the encounter this way: “Like the rainbow, unsubstantial, our soul spans across the inexorable plunge of existence … Enough, something returns. And there is an encounter within us. We are nothing more than a dovecote.” (Wie der wesenlose Regenbogen spannt sich unsere Seele über den unaufhaltsamen Sturz des Daseins … Genug, etwas kehrt wieder. Und etwas begegnet sich in uns mit anderem. Wir sind nicht mehr als ein Taubenschlag). Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 76.

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107 “Allein! Weh, ganz allein. Der Vater fort, / hinabgescheucht in seine kalten Klüfte. / Agamemnon! Agamemnon! / Wo bist du, Vater? Hast du nicht die Kraft, / dein Angesicht herauf zu mir zu schleppen? / Es ist die Stunde, unsre Stunde ist’s!” Hofmannsthal, Elektra, 117. 108 “rief … sehnlich, Vater, wo bist du? Das Wort verhallte.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 183. 109 “Sie rief gellend den Namen ihres Kindes, nichts antwortete, nicht einmal ein Widerhall.” Ibid. 110 “In seiner Unnahbarkeit fühlte sie ihn, auf ihrer Stirne leuchtete ein Abglanz von ihm.” Ibid., 184. 111 “Die Statue wurzelt im Boden, die Musik – und das abendländische Porträt ist Musik, aus Farbentönen gewebte Seele – durchdringt den ­grenzenlosen Raum. Das Freskogemälde ist mit der Wand verbunden, ­verwachsen; das Ölgemälde, als Tafelbild, ist frei von den Schranken eines Ortes. Die apollinische Formensprache offenbart ein Gewordenes, die faustische vor allem auch ein Werden.” Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 340–1. Emphasis in original. 112 “er trug ein Gewand von wunderbar blauer Farbe, nicht so, als hätte man ein weißes Gewebe in die Küpe gelegt, darin sich die Stärke des Indigo und des Waid vermischten, sondern so, als wäre die Bläue des Meeresgrundes selbst hervorgerissen und um seinen Leib gelegt worden.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 184. 113 Ibid., 170. In a later description, the allusion is even more direct: “a dress in splendid colours, as if they had been taken from the breast feathers of a bird of paradise.” ([E]in Kleid in herrlichen Farben, als wären sie von den Brustfedern eines Paradiesvogels genommen.) Ibid., 186. This also recalls Albrecht Dürer’s idea, discussed in chapter 2, that beauty is pulled out of nature. 114 “Schwarzblau, bevor die ersten Strahlen der Sonne den Himmel erhellen.” Ibid., 184. 115 Ibid., 168. 116 “von den zierlichen wie aus Wachs geformten Füßen bis zu dem dunklen wie Kupfer schimmernden Haar glich es der Färberin … auf dem grünen Grund heran wie auf Glas, mit geschlossenen Füßen, und keine Art sich zu bewegen hätte besser zu der Zartheit seiner Glieder und zu den Farben, in denen es glänzte, passen können.” Ibid. The children’s ­movement recalls the earlier description of one of the other unborn ­children before the Emperor: “as if she were moving towards him with her feet closed together” (als ob sie mit geschlossenen Füßen auf ihn zugehe). Ibid., 157.

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117 “Die Farbe schien aus der Ewigkeit her zu ihm zu kommen, so auch die Antworten, die langsam in ihm aufstiegen und zögernd den Rand seiner Lippen erreichten. – Wir bestellen nichts, wir verkünden nichts. Daß wir uns zeigen, Frau, ist alles, was uns gewährt ist.” Ibid., 185. 118 “Da und nicht da, Frau, wie es dir belieben wird! … und sein Gewand war wie Blut, das sich in Gold verwandelt; alle Bäume empfingen von ihm die Bestätigung ihres Lebens, wie vom ersten Glanz der aufgehenden Sonne.” Ibid. 119 “gleich einer Wolke am dunklen Abendhimmel … Nicht dir werden sie vorgeführt werden, Frau, sondern du wirst vorgeführt werden, und dies ist die Stunde.” Ibid. 120 “Dunkel war sein Gewand, wie der nächtliche Himmel ohne Sterne”; “Ich hab mich vergangen … Sie senkte die Augen und richtete sie gleich wieder auf ihn.” Ibid. 121 “Das muß jeder sagen, der einen Fuß vor den andern setzt. Darum gehen wir mit geschlossenen Füßen.” Ibid., 186. 122 “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Muthes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Sapere aude! Habe Muth, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.” Kant, Was ist Aufklärung, 20. 123 “ihre Ehrfurcht vor ihm, der so mit ihr sprach, war nicht geringer als die seine vor ihr.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 186. 124 “Im Augenblick ist alles, der Rat und die Tat!” Ibid. 125 “Ein Gruß ist etwas Grenzenloses … Dante datiert sein ‘Neues Leben’ von einem Gruß, der ihm zuteil geworden. Wunderbar ist der Schrei des großen Vogels, der seltsame, einsame, vorweltliche Laut im Morgengrauen von der höchsten Tanne, dem irgendwo die Henne lauscht. Dies Irgendwo, dies Unbestimmte und doch leidenschaftliche Begehrende, dies Schreien des Fremden nach der Fremden ist das Gewaltige.” Hofmannsthal, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 155, 160. 126 “Ach! kam über ihre Lippen, schamhaft und sehnsüchtig zugleich, und der klanggewordene Hauch aus ihrem eigenen Mund machte, daß sie erglühte von oben bis unten.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 188. 127 “die Säule gab, wie das Licht der Fackel sie berührte, einen schwellenden Klang, der ihr vor Süßigkeit fast das Herz spaltete.” Ibid., 189.

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128 “er schien lastend wie ein mitten in den Teich gebautes Grabmal aus Erz … unsäglich schön … aber unsäglich fremd.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 189. 129 “sie warf sich hinein in das goldene leise wogende Becken; wie ein Schwan mit gehobenen Flügeln rauschte sie auf den Geliebten zu.” Ibid. 130 The swan-maiden stories are listed in Antti Aarne’s tale type index under the general rubric no. 400, Supernatural or Magical Husbands and Wives. 131 The referenced instances appear in Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 176, 178, 187. 132 “es war die Gebärde des Sklaven, der sich völlig dahingibt, auf Leben und Tod … Sie fühlte, wie sie die Sinne verlieren und trinken würde.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 190. 133 “gräßlich und fremd wie aus der Brust eines Tiefschlafenden schlug aus der Tiefe ihrer eigenen Brust der Fluch an ihr Ohr … sie hörte innen ihr eigenes Herz schwer und langsam pochen, als wäre es ein fremdes. Sie sah mit einem Blick, als schwebe sie außerhalb, sich selber dastehen, zu ihren Füßen den Schatten des fremden Weibes, der ihr verfallen war, drüben die Statue. Das furchtbare Gefühl der Wirklichkeit hielt alles zusammen mit eisernen Banden. Die Kälte wehte zu ihr herüber bis ins Innerste und ­lähmte sie. Sie konnte keinen Schritt tun, nicht vor- noch rückwärts. Sie konnte nichts als dies: trinken und den Schatten gewinnen oder die Schale ausgießen.” Ibid. 134 Hofmannsthal’s interest in the dissociation of personality – especially his reception of Morton Prince’s 1906 study The Dissociation of a Personality – is well documented. See Ritter, “Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” 71. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) offer two other striking examples of ecstatic moments linked to pain, fear, and powerlessness. In Joyce’s text, Stephen Dedalus has just undergone the punishment of “pandying” – having his palms struck with a pandybat. The pain is excruciating, and Stephen briefly dissociates himself from the pain: “To think of them beaten and swollen with pain all in a moment made him feel so sorry for them as if they were not his own but someone else’s that he felt sorry for.” Joyce, Portrait, 51. Rilke, likewise, reflects on the uncanniness of hands: while drawing a knight, the young Malte drops his red pencil, which rolls under a desk. He creeps underneath in search of the pencil and observes his own hand: “I recognized in particular my own hand, with fingers outstretched … I remember clearly that I was watching it almost with curiosity; it seemed to me as if it was capable of things that I had never taught it, groping around down there independently with

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135 136 137

138

139 140

Notes to pages 145–6

movements that I had never seen it perform before.” (Ich erkannte vor allem meine eigene, ausgespreizte Hand … Ich sah ihr, weiß ich noch, fast neugierig zu; es kam mir vor, als könnte sie Dinge, die ich sie nicht gelehrt hatte, wie sie da unten so eigenmächtig herumtastete mit Bewegungen, die ich nie an ihr beobachtet hatte.) Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 54–5; Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 78. See Martin Buber’s description of “das Phänomen Projektion” in Ekstatische Konfessionen, xxxi. “Ich will nicht!” Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 587–8. “so als würden sie gesungen in großer Ferne; sie hatte sie nur nachzusprechen. Sie sprach sie nach, ohne Zögern. – Dir Barak bin ich mich schuldig! sprach sie … und goß die Schale aus vor die Füße der verhüllten Gestalt. Das goldene Wasser flammte in die Luft, die Schale in ihrer Hand verging zu nichts.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 191. “From the earliest customs of nations it seems to come to us as a warning that in accepting what nature so bountifully provides we should eschew the gesture of greed. For there is nothing of our own that we are able to give back. It is fitting, therefore, that we should show reverence in the ­taking by restoring to nature a portion of every single thing we receive before taking possession of it as our own. Such reverence finds expression in the ancient custom of libation.” (Aus den ältesten Gebräuchen der Völker scheint es wie eine Warnung an uns zu ergehen, im Entgegennehmen dessen, was wir von der Natur so reich empfangen, uns vor der Geste der Habgier zu hüten. Denn wir vermögen nichts der Muttererde aus Eigenem zu schenken. Daher gebührt es sich, Ehrfurcht im Nehmen zu zeigen, indem von allem, was wir je und je empfangen, wir einen Teil an sie zurückerstatten, noch ehe wir des Unseren uns bemächtigen. Diese Ehrfurcht spricht aus dem alten Brauch der libatio.) Benjamin, One-Way Street, 64–5; Einbahnstrasse, 37–8. “sie fühlte sich hinabgerissen ins Bodenlose.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 192. “Vor unbegreiflicher Qual zerrüteten sich ihr die Sinne. Sie fühlte den Tod ihr eigenes Herz überkriechen, aber zugleich die Statue in ihren Armen sich regen und lebendig werden. In einem unbegreiflichen Zustand gab sie sich selbst dahin und war zitternd nur mehr da in der Ahnung des Lebens, das der andere von ihr empfing. In ihn oder in sie drang das Gefühl einer Finsternis, die sich lichtete, eines Ortes, der aufnahm, eines Hauches von neuem Leben. Mit neugeborenen Sinnen nahmen sie es in sich: Hände, die sie trugen, ein Felsentor, das sich hinter ihnen schloß,

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142 143

144

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wehende Bäume, sanften festen Grund, auf dem die Leiber gebettet lagen, Weite des strahlenden Himmels.” Ibid. “In der Ferne glänzte der Fluß, hinter einem Hügel ging die Sonne herauf, und ihre ersten Strahlen trafen das Gesicht des Kaisers, der zu den Füßen seiner Frau lag, an ihre Knie geschmiegt wie ein Kind … ihre Schatten ­flossen in eins.” Ibid. “Wie der wesenlose Regenbogen spannt sich unsere Seele über den unaufhaltsamen Sturz des Daseins.” Ibid., “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 76. Cf. n68 to Andreas, wherein Hofmannsthal identifies love as both ­universal binding agent and universal solvent: Solve et coagula. Hofmannsthal, ka 30: Andreas, 102. “Er drückte die Hände vor der Brust zusammen und neigte sich vor ihr. Wie ein Stein schlug sie vor ihm hin, ihre Stirne, ihre Lippen berührten seine Füße … wie dort die Färberin vor ihrem Mann warf er [der Kaiser] sich vor seiner Frau und verbarg sein zuckendes Antlitz an ihren Knien. Sie kniete zu ihm nieder, auch ihr war zu weinen neu und süß.” Ibid., Die Frau ohne Schatten, 194. Hofmannsthal’s continued insistence on mutual humility and respect from both men and women is usually ignored in readings that assume the work is misogynistic. Pia Janke writes, for instance, that at the end of the story, the women are bound up in a hierarchical masculine cosmos. According to Janke, the Empress and the Dyer’s Wife have near-death experiences so that they might fulfil their biopolitical destinies as ­mothers. Janke, “Schattenlose Frauen,” 267. This reading does not take into account the near-death experience of the Emperor, nor the madness of the Dyer, both of whom must become fathers. It also ignores the emphasis on mutuality in relationships: Janke mentions, for instance, that the Dyer’s Wife bows to her husband as a sign of female submission to the male, but does not seem to notice that the Dyer bowed to his wife first, or that the Emperor bows to the Empress. Similarly, Marlies Janz emphasizes the “Tortur der Frau” (torture of women) but ignores the ­terror of being ­buried alive (experienced by the Emperor). Janz likewise attributes to Hofmannsthal a certain pleasure in describing in detail in the Empress’s suffering. Janz, Marmorbilder, 188. Aside from the ­dubiousness of reading a particular emotion into the author, Janz does not back up the statement with evidence. On the contrary, the ­descriptions of the Empress’s suffering are vague, universalistic in ­portrayal, and correspond to the sufferings of poets, as Hofmannsthal elsewhere portrays them (in both male and female figures).

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146 “wie ihn niemand hatte singen hören.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 195. 147 Ibid., 135. 148 “Unbegreiflich fanden zarte Worte, leise Töne den Weg aus dieser Höhe zu [ihr].” The Kritische Ausgabe seems to have an error here. The last phrases read: “aus dieser Höhe zu dir.” Ibid., 196, my emphasis. 149 “Wäre denn je ein Fest, / Wären wir insgeheim / Wir die Geladenen, / Wir auch die Wirte?” Ibid. 150 The phrase in the title of this section is taken from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wotton comments, “I should like to write a novel certainly; a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.” Wilde, Dorian Gray, 45. 151 Schneider, Verheißung der Bilder, 222. 152 Fickert and Celms, “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” 37. Somewhat confusingly, Fickert und Celms end their article on a more conciliatory note: “Confronting a world on the brink of destroying itself in a senseless war (a redundant phrase) over the maintenance of a mordant status quo, the creators of the opera The Woman without a Shadow turned Nietzsche’s plea for the revitalizing of all mankind into a somewhat bewildering but hopeful vision of a mythical world in which a union of the good and ­merciful (the province of morality) and the beautiful (the province of art) could prevail.” Ibid., 42. 153 Qtd. in Fickert and Celms, “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” 37. 154 “In diesen gräßlichen Wochen habe ich vielleicht das schönste Capital von dem Märchen geschrieben: wie der Kaiser zu den ungeborenen Kindern kommt … Eberhard sagte mir vor ein paar Monaten, wie wenig, wie nichts diese erträumten Harmonien doch mit dem Leben zu tun hätten, und wie über alles beglückend es doch wäre, daß sie da wären und immer welche entstünden.” Qtd. in Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 421. 155 “Inmitten all des Unerfreulichen, das – ausgenommen die glänzenden Taten unsrer Armee – dieser Krieg bringt, ist fleißiges Arbeiten die einzige Rettung. Sonst käme man um vor Ärger über die Tatenlosigkeit unserer Diplomatie, unserer Presse, des Kaisers Entschuldigungstelegramm an Wilson.” Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, 289.

C hapt e r F i ve    1 Although the accepted spelling of the novel fragment is “Andreas,” the notes and the fragment often use the spelling “Andres” (without the second “a,” an anagram of the word for anders, which means “other, different”).

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  2 Ellen Ritter gives slightly different dates: 1906 until his death in 1929. Ritter, “Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” 65.   3 Representatives of these views are summarized in Mayer and Werlitz, Hofmannsthal-Handbuch, 299–303.   4 “Hier bricht der Torso ab. Welch ein Werk! … Welche Fülle von Gestalten, welch wunderbarer Reichtum der Gegenüberstellung!” Hofmannsthal, “Wilhelm Meister in der Urform,” 33. See also Mayer and Werlitz, Hofmannsthal-Handbuch, 301.   5 “Das Halbe, Fragmentarische aber, ist eigentlich menschliches Gebiet.” See also Joachim Seng, “Das Halbe, Fragmentarische.”   6 “mit einer unendlichen Teilnahme, ja Liebe.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 90–1.   7 I use the term “fragment” to refer to the main section of the Andreas; when not referring to this larger text, I will use the term “Note” or the designation “N” followed by the note number.   8 Aurnhammer, “Hofmannsthals ‘Andreas,’” 278.   9 See Wolfgang Iser’s comments on the appeal of serial novels, in which he underscores the importance of gaps: “In view of the temporary ­withholding of information, the suggestive effect produced by details will increase, thus again mobilizing a new army of possible solutions. Such a technique arouses definite expectations which, if the novel is to have any real value, must never be completely fulfilled … this is clear evidence of the importance of indeterminacy in the text-reader relationship. Furthermore, it reveals the requisite degree of freedom which must be guaranteed to the reader in the communication act, so that the message can be adequately received and processed.” Iser, “Indeterminacy,” 16–17. 10 Scheffer refers to Mark W. Rien’s translation of Susan Sontag’s essay “On Style,” which uses a vocabulary strikingly similar to what I propose was Hofmannsthal’s understanding of the aesthetic encounter: “A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.” Sontag, “On Style,” 30. Qtd. in Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 22. 11 “Sie sind da und sind unerreichlich. So bin auch ich. Dadurch kommunizieren wir.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 12 “So sind wir denn beim Leser angelangt, den in seiner Einbildungskraft mitzuschaffen die oberste gesellige Pflicht dessen ist, der ein Buch macht. Denn eine Gabe kann nicht dargereicht werden, ohne dass zum voraus des Empfängers gedacht werde.” Hofmannsthal, “Deutsches Lesebuch,” 174.

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13 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 170. 14 The two texts have a complicated and connected genesis. See Hofmannsthal, KA 30: Andreas, 303–6. 15 “Gründe der Bildungsreise. Maler. Große Namen. Paläste. Sitten im Salon. entréegespräche. S c h e i n e n . G e f a l l e n .” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 7. Expanded spacing as in original. 16 In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” the merchant gives a list of contrasting character types, culminating in a judgment that things are not quite right in society: “There are the people of high rank and the people of low rank, the arrogant and the humble, the learned and those who live from yesterday’s gazette; some who pummel others, and others who cower, some who regard themselves as something, and others who are bashful: but all of that gives not a pure sound.” (Es gibt Vornehme und es gibt Subalterne, es gibt Anmaßende und es gibt Demütige, es gibt Gelehrte und es gibt, die vom gestrigen Zeitungsblatt leben; und die einen Puffen, die andern ducken sich, die einen dünken sich was, die andern genieren sich: aber es gibt alles keinen reinen Klang.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 78; “Die Briefe,” 161. In Andreas: “the faces of acquaintances and ­relatives rose before him, among them were sardonic faces, bloated, ­indifferent and also friendly faces, but not one of them could have opened his heart.” (Die Gesichter der Bekannten und Verwandten tauchten vor ihm auf, es waren hämische und aufgeblasene darunter, gleichgiltige und auch freundliche, aber nicht eines bei dem ihm die Brust weiter geworden wäre.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 69. 17 “die Repräsentation und das Ansehen.” Ibid. 18 Waltraut Wiethölter gives a convincing portrait of Zorzi, saying that he belongs to that group of dangerous bringers-of-light which one might term fallen angels. Wiethölter, Hofmannsthal oder die Geometrie des Subjekts, 170. 19 “Nochmals hinauf zum Maler: Er zeigt mir Bild einer schönen Person (für dalla Torre). Verspricht mich zu ihr zu führen. Erzählt auf dem Weg die Geschichte der 2 Bilder des Herzogs Camposagrado … Wie die Brüder ihm das ihrige schicken lacht er unmäßig und weist seine Summe Geld an, damit sie ihm den Goya schicken die Tintorettos c­ opieren. Maler verspricht, mich dem Herzog vorzustellen etc.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 8. 20 This is also one of the main plot points in Hofmannsthal’s opera libretto Arabella and its prose precursor, Lucidor. Figuren zu einer ungeschriebenen Komödie (Lucidor. Figures for an unwritten comedy). Further, as discussed with reference to “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal likewise found himself in the position of having to sell a

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number of his works of art when in a position of financial precarity. This was treated in the exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin entitled “Rodin – Rilke – Hofmannsthal: Der Mensch und sein Genius” (17 November 2017 to 18 March 2018). 21 “lässt sich gegen Magenschmerzen den Stein zum Farbenzerdrücken auf den Magen lagen.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 9. 22 “er liege oben und habe seinen Magenkrampf. Darauf hieß es, die Herren sollten nur hinaufgehen, den unnützen Menschen aus dem Zimmer zu ­entfernen.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 43. 23 In N85, another reason for the journey comes to light: “Reason to send him on the journey. Difficult, slow convalescence after an emotional ­crisis. Hints of anhedonia – of a loss of a sense of worth. Confusion of ­perceptions.” (Grund, ihn auf der Reise zu schicken. Schwierige ­schleppende Reconvaleszenz nach einer seelischen Krise. Spuren von Anhedonia – von Verlust des Wertgefühls. Verwirrung der Begriffe). Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 115. This bears a remarkable resemblance to the illness depicted in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” 24 “Sie fanden Fräulein Nina auf einem Sopha in einer sehr bequemen und hübschen Stellung: Alles an ihr war hell und von einer allerliebsten zarten Rundheit: ihr Haar war hellblond wie verblichenes Gold und sie trug es ungepudert: drei Dinge die in reizender Weise gekrümmt waren und ganz zu einander gehörten: ihre Augenbrauen ihr Mund und ihre Hand hoben sich mit dem Ausdruck von gelassener Neugierde u. großer Liebenswürdigkeit dem eintretenden Gast entgegen. Ein Bild ohne Rahmen lehnte verkehrt an der Wand: durch die Leinwand lief ein Schnitt wie von einem Messer.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 93. 25 Hofmannsthal, “Das Märchen,” 20. 26 “Das Bild war was ein grobes Auge sprechend ähnlich finden mochte: es waren Ninas Züge aber kalt, gemein. Ihre leicht nach oben gekrümmten Brauen waren darum so reizend, weil sie in einem fast zu weichen Gesichtchen saßen; ihre Hals hätte ein strenger Beurteiler zu wenig ­schlank finden können – aber wie der Kopf auf ihm saß gab es ein ­bezauberndes Ich weiß nicht was von frauenhafter Hilflosigkeit … Es war eines von jenen peinlichen Porträts von denen man sagen kann daß sie das Inventarium eines Gesichtes enthalten, aber die Seele des Malers verraten.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 93. 27 “Räum es mir aus den Augen … es erinnerte mich nur an Ärger und Brutalität.” Ibid. 28 “in einem Anfall von Wut und Eifersucht [hat Camposagrado] einen ­seltenen Vogel den ihr der jüdische Verehrer Herr dalla Torre tags zuvor

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geschickt hatte lebendig in den Mund gesteckt den Kopf ­abgebissen.” Ibid., 92. 29 “richtig: das Kunstwerk als fortlaufende Emanation einer Persönlichkeit anzusehen, als ‘heures,’ Beleuchtungen, die eine Seele auf die Welt wirft … Jeder einzelne vermag das, was er gemacht hat, wieder aufzulösen. Es ­wieder unendlich zu machen. Wir sind die, deren Mund nicht stumm ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Diese Rundschau,” 236. T.S. Eliot offers a contrasting view: “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 59. 30 Cf. N59, which sketches a conversation between Nina and Andreas: “On the fact that the man makes all portraits to resemble himself.” (Darüber daß der Mensch alle Porträts ihm selber ähnlich macht.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 37. The man (“der Mensch”) referred to is Zorzi. 31 N91 suggests that the aesthetic encounter is not out of Andreas’s reach. Sacramozo gives Andreas a copy of Ariosto’s work “for the wonderful ‘world’ therein … He understands the Maltese man’s comment, that ­nothing is past. Everything that exists is present, born in the moment. (The feeling when hearing Bach’s music).” (um der wunderbaren ‘welt’ welche darin ist … Er versteht die Bemerkung des Maltesers, dass es nichts Vergangenes gäbe. Alles was existiert, ist gegenwärtig, ja wird im Augenblick geboren. (Gefühl beim Anhören Bach’schen Musik).) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 116. 32 “Ich finde es recht ähnlich und recht häßlich.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 93. 33 N68 reads: “der geometrische Ort fremder Geschicke.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 102. 34 Cf. “The Conversation about Poems,” in which the genesis of the symbol is represented by a moment of identification between the sacrificial victim and the person making the sacrifice. 35 One of the titles Hofmannsthal considered for the main fragment was “Die Dame mit dem Hündchen” (The lady with the dog), evocative of Anton Chekhov’s short story of the same name, which ends famously without a resolution, but rather by indicating that the difficulties are just beginning. 36 “Die Demuth mit der es in ihm von ersten Begegnung an seinen Herrn erblickte, war unbegreiflich.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 70.

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37 “Die Wut stieg ihm auf, er rief das Hündlein zu sich. Schon auf zehn Schritte wurde es seine zornige Miene gewahr es kam kriechend heran, den zitternden Blick auf Andres [sic] Gesicht geheftet. Er schmähte es eine niedrige und feile Creatur unter der Schmähung kam es näher und näher: ihm war da habe er den Fuß gehoben und traf das Rückgrat von oben mit dem Schuhabsatz. Ihm war – das Hündlein gab einen kurzen Schmerzenslaut und knickte zusammen, aber es wedelte ihm zu. Er drehte sich jäh um und ging weg, das Hündlein kroch ihm nach, das Kreuz war gebrochen, trotzdem schob es sich seinem Herrn nach wie eine Schlange. Er blieb endlich stehen da heftete das Hündlein einen Blick auf ihn und verschied wedelnd. Ihm war unsicher ob ers gethan hatte oder nicht; aber es kommt aus ihm. So rührt ihn das Unendliche an.” Ibid., 71. 38 Cited in Adorno, “George und Hofmannsthal,” 206; and Norton, Secret Germany, 102. 39 Trampling the dog, who then creeps like a snake on the ground, evokes Biblical images of power, e.g., Psalm 91: “You will tread on the lion and the cobra; you will trample the great lion and the serpent”; and Luke 10:19: “I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.” Andreas’s bid for power, however, is in vain. 40 “Der Bühnenboden war uneben: der Vorhang an einigen Stellen zu kurz, Ritterstiefel kamen und gingen … zwischen dem Steg einer Baßgeige und dem Kopf eines Musikanten sah man die Füße eines Löwen, einmal einen himmelblauen Schuh mit Flitter bestickt. Der himmelblaue Schuh war wunderbarerer als alles – Später stand ein Wesen da, das diesen Schuh anhatte, er gehörte zu ihr, war eins mit ihrem blau und silber Gewand: sie war eine Prinzessin, Gefahren umgaben sie, dunkle Gestalten, Fackeln, ein Zauberwald … alles das war schön aber es war nicht das zweischneidige Schwert von zartester Wohllust und unseglicher Sehnsucht das durch die Seele ging bis zum Weinen, wenn der blaue Schuh allein unter dem Vorhang da war.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 46. 41 Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 76. 42 Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 59–60. 43 “es war die Katze der er einmal mit einer Wagendeichsel das Rückgrat abgeschlagen hat und die so lange nicht hatte sterben können: So war sie noch nicht gestorben nach so viel Jahren! … Es hilft nichts er muß über sie weg, den schweren linken Fuß hebte er mit unsäglicher Qual uber das Tier dessen Rücken in Windungen unaufhörlich auf und nieder geht, da trifft ihn der Blick des verdrehten Katzenkopfes von unten, die Rundheit des Katzenkopfes aus einem zugleich katzenhaften und hündischen Gesicht,

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erfüllt mit Wollust und Todesqual in gräßlicher Vermischung – er will ­schreien, indem schreit es auch drinnen im Zimmer.” Ibid., 64–5. 44 “Ein Blick den er als Knabe gefürchtet hatte wie keinen zweiten, der Blick seines ersten Katecheten, schoß durch ihn hindurch und die gefürchtete kleine feiste Hand faßte ihn an, das widerwärtige Gesicht eines Knaben der ihm in dämmernder Abendstunde auf der Hintertreppe erzählt hatte was er nicht hören wollte preßte sich gegen seine Wange und wie er diese mit Anstrengung zur Seite schob lag vor der Tür durch er jetzt Romana nach mußte ein Wesen und setze sich gegen ihn in Bewegung: es war die Katze.” Ibid., 64. 45 This confusion of experience is repeated in the confusion of persons, where dream-Romana takes on the abusive personality of Gotthelff: “What kind of a [woman] are you he yelled at her, astonished. This kind, she says and h o l d s her mouth up to him. No, this kind, she y e l l s as he is about to embrace her and s t r i k e s him with the rake. She hit him on the forehead there was a sharp bright chime, as against a glass pane. He started and was awake.” (Was bist den Du für eine rief er ihr staunend entgegen. So eine halt sagt sie und h ä l t ihm den Mund hin. Nein so eine – r u f t sie wie er sie umfassen will und s c h l ä g t mit dem Rechen nach ihm. Sie traf ihn an der Stirn es gab einen scharfen hellen Schlag, wie gegen eine Glasscheibe. Er fuhr auf und war wach.) Ibid., 73. Expanded spacing in original. 46 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 34. 47 “Ihm war unsicher, ob er es getan hatte oder nicht; – aber es kommt aus ihm. So rührt ihn das Unendliche an.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 71. 48 “Seine Sinne waren geschärft er konnte hören daß die Bäuerin unterm Reden ihr Haar flocht und zugleich wie unten der Hofhund tierig an etwas fraß. Wer füttert jetzt in der Nacht einen Hund dachte es in ihm und zugleich war ihm gepreßt zumut als müsse er nochmals zurück in seine Knabenzeit als er noch das kleine Zimmer neben den Eltern hatte und sie durch den in die Wand eingelassenen Kleiderschrank mußte abends reden hören er mochte wollen oder nicht. Er wollte auch jetzt nicht horchen und hörte doch.” Ibid., 60–1. 49 “der Hund stand mitten im Licht, hielt den Kopf sonderbar ganz schief, drehte sich in dieser Stellung immerfort um sich selber: es war als erduldete das Tier ein großes Leiden vielleicht war er alt und dem Tode nahe. Andres fiel eine dumpfe Traurigkeit an, ihm war unmäßig betrübt zu Mut über das Leiden der Creatur, wo er doch so glücklich war als werde er in diesem Anblick an den nahe bevorstehenden Tod seines Vaters gemahnt. Er trat vom Fenster Weg, nun konnte er an seine Romana denken.” Ibid., 62–3.

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50 The circular principle seems also to have been important for one of the ­discussions of poetry in Andreas. In N80, Sacramozo alludes to the idea of poetic circularity, and Hofmannsthal quotes the French writer Jacques Rivière: “And in effect, in a beautiful poem, there is no progression; the end is always on the same level as the beginning … everything is direct … The verses form a circle; they are turned towards each other, they regard each other, they lock us in their circle … The poetic emotion is a kind of eddy, through which a pool of eternity is formed in us, in the very midst of the flight of things.” (Et en effet, dans un beau poème, il n’y a jamais de progression; la fin est toujours au même niveau que le commencement … tout est de plain-pied … Les vers forment un cercle; ils sont tournés les uns vers les autres, ils se regardent, ils nous enferment dans leur ronde. … L’émotion poétique est une sorte de tournoiement par lequel se reforme en nous, au milieu même de la fuite des choses, une flaque d’éternité.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 111. The quote comes from Rivière’s 1913 text Le Roman d’aventure. Tropes of circularity, immediacy, the force of things, and even the pool of eternity with its connotations of Narcissus consumed by his own reflection present variations on the theme of “ideal art.” 51 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 27. 52 “I. er wohnte im Schloss. Ein Läuten. Hahnenschrei, Ein zweiter. Er steht auf blossfüßig. Er fühlt durch die Fussohlen [sic] alles bis hinunter in den Berg.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 103. Spacing as in original. 53 “Gegenüber aus der Bergwand treten silberne Ahnen, so schön dass er träumend ausruft: ich träume.” Ibid. 54 “diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu ­entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos groß ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 55 “endlich war er [Andreas] sich selber entsprungen wie einem Gefängnis, er stürmte in Sprüngen dahin, er wußte nichts von sich als den Augenblick.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 71. 56 “schon matten Fluges … Nun kräht der Hahn. Er weiss es ist zum dritten Mal und Weiss, er hat seinen Heiland verrathen.” Ibid., 103. 57 N148: “Was ist dies für ein Licht. Das klare durchsichtige: das Leben der Zweige in diesem Licht: die Ferne als ein beglückendes Gefühl. Er entledigt sich seiner Kleider und badet im Fluss. Ein ängstlicher Moment da er Boden unter den Füssen verliert.” N149: “er glaubt nackt ins Wasser steigend, Romana ebenso zu sehen Er erschrickt über sich. Indessen ist sie fort. Er verzichtet auf sie, so sicher ist er ihrer. / Er durchlebete einen der glücklichsten Tage seines Lebens u. er wusste es nicht.” N150: “Nach dem

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Bad und der Ohnmacht. ‘Er trug Schuh u. Strümpfe in den Händen und gieng mit blutenden Füssen über die Wiesen.’” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 136. 58 “Um Kafkas Figur in ihrer Reinheit und in ihrer eigentümlichen Schönheit gerecht zu werden, darf man das Eine nie aus dem Auge lassen: es ist d ­ ie von einem Gescheiterten. Die Umstände dieses Scheiterns sind mannigfache. Man moöchte sagen: war er des endlichen Mißlingens erst einmal sicher, so gelang ihm die Inbrunst, mit der Kafka sein Scheitern unterstrichen hat.” Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka,” 144–5; Gesammelte Briefe, 114. 59 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen. Es gibt kein stolzeres, kein gefährlicheres Wort. Es ist das Wort, das am tiefsten verpflichtet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 60 “Wir fühlen den Sturz des Daseins. Wir setzen nichts voraus. Wir spinnen aus uns selber den Faden der uns über den Abgrund trägt, und zuweilen sind wir selig wie Wölkchen am Abendhimmel. Wir schaffen uns einer am Andern unsere Sprache, beleben einer den andern. Wir tragen in uns einen Blick, ein Leiden, ein Gesicht, einen Ton … Wir sind die, deren Mund nicht stumm ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 236.

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– The Philosophy of Money. Translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby. New York: Routledge, 2011. Sontag, Susan. “On Style.” In Against Interpretation, 24–45. New York: Dell Publishing, 1966. Spengler, Oswald. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltsgeschichte. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988. Stillmark, Alexander, trans. Hugo Von Hofmannsthal: Select Narrative Prose. Riverside, ca: Ariadne Press, 2020. Stockhammer, Robert. Zaubertexte. Die Wiederkehr der Magie und die Literatur. 1808–1945. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000. Stork, Charles Wharton, trans. The Lyrical Poems of Hofmannsthal. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918. Strathausen, Carsten. The Look of Things. Poetry and Vision around 1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Strauss, Richard. Die Frau ohne Schatten. Oper in drei Akten von Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Op. 65. Studien-Partitur/Study Score. 1919. Vienna: Verlag Dr Richard Strauss GmbH & Co. k g, 1996. – Richard Strauss – Hugo von Hofmannsthal Briefwechsel. Edited by Willi Schuh. Zürich: Atlantis Verlag, 1970. Streim, Gregor. Das “Leben” in der Kunst. Untersuchungen zur Ästhetik des frühen Hofmannsthal. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1996. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Journeys to England and Ireland. Edited by J.P. Mayer. Translated by George Lawrence and K.P. Mayer. New Haven, c t : Yale University Press, 1958. – “Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande de 1835.” Vol. 1 of Œuvres, edited by André Jardin, in collaboration with Françoise Mélonio and Lise Queffélec, 461–609. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Vilain, Robert. “Celan and Hofmannsthal.” Austrian Studies 12 (2004): 172–95. – The Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wallenstein, Sven-Olov. “Phenomenology and the Possibility of a Pure Art: Husserl’s Letter to Hofmannsthal.” Site 26–7 (2009): 2–4. Weinzierl, Ulrich. Hofmannsthal. Skizzen zu einem Bild. Vienna: Zsolnay Verlag, 2005. Wellbery, David. “Die Opfer-Vorstellung als Quelle der Faszination. Anmerkungen zum Chandos-Brief und zur frühen Poetik Hofmannsthals.” Hofmannsthal – Jahrbuch 11 (2003): 281–310.

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277

– “Stimmung.” In Von Postmoderne bis Synästhesie, edited by Karlheinz Barck et al., vol. 5 of Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, 703–33. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2003. Werbeck, Walter, ed. Richard Strauss-Handbuch. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2014. Wieland, Christoph Martin. Musarion oder die Philosophie der Grazien. Ein Gedicht in drei Büchern. Edited by Hans Böhm. Vol. 3 of Wielands Werke in vier Bänden. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1969. 5–50. Wiethölter, Waltraut. Hofmannsthal oder die Geometrie des Subjekts. Psychostrukturelle und ikonographische Studien zum Prosawerk. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1990. Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” In Intentions, vol. 7 of The Complete Writings of Oscar Wilde, 3–57. New York: The Nottingham Society, 1909. – The Picture of Dorian Gray. In The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, introduced by Vyvyan Holland. London: Collins, 1967. Wunberg, Gotthart. Der frühe Hofmannsthal. Schizophrenie als ­dichterische Struktur. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1965. Žerebin, Alexej. “Der unheimliche Garten. Hofmannsthal und die ­russische Moderne.” Vortrag gehalten auf der Tagung der Hofmannsthla-Gesellschaft in Weimar, September 2000. http://www. navigare.de/hofmannsthal/zerebin.htm. Zilcosky, John. The Language of Trauma: War and Technology in Hoffmann, Freud, and Kafka. Toronto. University of Toronto Press, 2021. – Uncanny Encounters: Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the End of Alterity. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016.

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Index

abjection, 82, 134, 161–8 Adorno, Theodor W., 16, ­172–3n11, 178n15, 251n38; ­theory of engagement, 7, 173n12 aesthetic imperative, 7, 12, 21, 38–41, 166–7; blindness to, 117; and Martin Buber, 67–8; and the ethical demand, 144; and Rainer Maria Rilke, 9, 189n102 alienation. See labour Andrian, Leopold von, 15, 26, 31, 177n4 animals. See dogs anxiety, 18, 31–2, 104, 119, 182–3n48 Augenblick, 99–110, 137, 242n124, 250n31, 253n55 Bahr, Hermann, 3, 5–6, 177n5, 178n14, 214n20 Baudelaire, Charles, 120, 149, 195n29, 197n40, 227n149; Les Fleurs du mal, 10–11, 18–19, 25, 94, 211n130 Benjamin, Walter, 145, 174n15, 195n29, 214n25, 244n138; ­failure, 168, 254n58

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Bildung, 44, 155, 168 Bildungsroman, 44, 114, 151–2, 168 boldness, 109, 147 boredom. See ennui Broch, Hermann, 38, 110, 112, 190n104, 210n128 Büchner, Georg, 79, 98, 215n40 carpet, 23, 29, 34–7, 126–30, ­147–9. See also textiles colours, 54–8, 64–9, 128–31, ­139–42, 147, 149 communion, 40, 58–9, 80, 84, 104, 109–10 daimonic, 38, 40, 109, 120. See also demonic deities, bronze, 19–23, 31, 158 demonic, 7, 84, 95, 173n13. See also daimonic Derrida, Jacques, 100–1, 146, 196n38. See also khôra dialogical, 38, 58, 66–8, 111, 113, 159–60 dialogue, 5, 40, 64, 73, 77–8, 111, 113, 126 dilettante, 16, 29–30, 34, 178n14

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280 Index

dissociation, 48, 59, 100, 110–11, 145, 167, 220n85 dogs: and justice, 81–2, 216–17n55; and Odysseus, 33; as a symbol, 134, 161–7, 251n39 ekphrasis, 4, 9–10, 21, 98, 155, 157–8 Eliot, T.S., 12, 250n29 ennui, 15–60, 135 Erlebnis, 10, 22, 154, 158, 168 Erlebte Rede, 22, 158. See also free indirect speech face, 27–9, 78–87, 117–19, 133–7, 169; of the korai, 107; and Levinas, 101–3; of the petrified Emperor, 144–7; of Zorzi’s painting, 159 failure, 44, 151, 157, 168–9 feet, 17, 31, 136; and beauty, 19, 163, 166; locked or bound, 94–5, 126, 140–1; as a site of suffering, 96, 166–8 First World War, 8, 62, 173n14; and Die Frau ohne Schatten, 121, 150, 172n9 foreignness, 66, 68, 72, 106, 110, 160. See also other fragment, 6, 43–4, 146, 151–3 fragmentation, internal, 45, 161 free indirect speech, 21–2, 83, 146, 158–9 Freud, Sigmund, 68–9, 176n26, 188n95, 218–19n68 garden: in Algabal and “Mein Garten,” 11; as literary motif, 26–8, 86; as locus amoenus, 23, 181n33, 182n42, 182n47

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gaze: aesthetic, 14, 21–2, 36, 87–93; hierarchy of, 123, 164, 182n47; mutual, 133, 137, 143; phenomenological, 51; reversal of, 18, 35, 75–7, 83, 94, 101–2, 111, 120, 161 genre. See Märchen; Bildungsroman George, Stefan, 11, 26, 34, 36–7, 94–5; association with Hofmannsthal, 6, 95, 162 ghost, 47–9, 94–5, 126, 138 ghostly, 46–8, 50, 53, 97 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 33, 41, 108–9, 196n35; and poetry, 222n103, 228n162; ­sacrifice for beauty, 203n68, 239n93; theory of colours, 198n43, 201n57 gold, 89–92, 98–9, 140–5 guest, 87–8, 148. See also symbol guilt, 14, 34, 69, 84, 96, 137–41, 152, 209n121 Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis Hearn, Lafcadio, 129–30, 225n132 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 29, 107 Heidegger, Martin, 57–8, 63, 100, 157, 240n103 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, other works of: Ad me ipsum, 14, 16, 104, 182n42, 235n56; Ein Brief, 7, 9, 46, 177n7, 199n50, 209n123, 210n130; Buch der Freunde, 107, 110, 228n157, 229n171, 229n176; “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 123, 134, 185n64, 203n68, 217n55,

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Index

223n112; “Diese Rundschau,” 160, 180n30, 250n29; “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 25, 67, 77, 105, 146, 164, 196n35, 217n55, 240n106, 250n34; “Mein Garten,” 11, 26; “Der neue Roman von d’Annunzio.” 33–5, 109; “Poesie und Leben,” 10, 33; “Sunt animae rerum,” 5–6, 9; “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 137, 142, 174n21 hospitality, 80, 87. See also guest hubris, 40, 82, 95, 101–2 humility, 34–5, 37, 121, 133, 136, 148, 166, 245n145; in art and beauty, 18, 34, 37, 101–5, 109, 129–33, 147–8, 159, 168; and dogs, 161–2, 217n55 Husserl, Edmund, 14, 22, 70–1 innocence, 34, 69, 133–8. See also guilt justice, 96–7, 140, 164 Kant, 21, 23, 141 katabasis, 97, 110 Keats, John, 17, 19, 59, 222n107 khôra, 100, 146, 196n38 Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 125 korai, 99, 102–4, 124, 143 Kraus, Karl, 3, 172n9 labour, 52, 121, 123; and craft, 127–30; and devotion, 131–2, 141 landscape, 48, 75, 77–8, 87–9, 193–4n16 lists, 47, 51, 54, 248n16

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281

Mach, Ernst, 177n5, 219n69 magician, 75, 77 Mann, Thomas, 61, 76, 180n23 Märchen, 112–16, 148–50 Medusa, 21, 98, 102, 224n122 memory, 40, 67, 78, 80–9, 92, 109, 164, 175n26, 207n108 Midas, 89–90, 92, 98, 143 money, 45, 50, 53, 61–3, 71, 90, 156 Murray, Gilbert, 81–2, 96, 164 music, 7, 35, 76–7, 139, 145. See also opera; song Musil, Robert, 60, 193n12 Naturalism, 3, 34, 101, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 37, 53, 131–2 Novalis, 59, 67, 105, 114 obligation, 154, 189n102. See also aesthetic imperative Odysseus, 33, 35, 96–7, 119 Oedipus, 78, 82, 96 opera, 112–16, 122, 131, 138, 143–5, 149, 237n75 other, 7, 32, 38, 40–1, 59, 73–4, 82–4, 102, 111, ­134–7, ­159–60, 169. See also foreignness painting, 51–77, 139, 156–60 Pater, Walter, 27–8, 86, 103–7, 118, 220–1n89 Philoctetes, 96, 163, 222–3n110 piety, 52–8, 62, 69, 131, 141. See also reverence Plato, 7, 80, 92–6, 100–2 poverty, 29, 88–92, 99, 141, 156, 168

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282 Index

pre-existence, 104, 110, 128–9, 182n42 presence, 17–18, 46–7, 59, 66, 75–7, 88–92, 97–9 pride, 40, 95, 108, 121. See also hubris Pygmalion, 89–90, 101, 143 rebirth, 65, 128, 137, 142, 146, 154–5 repetition, 76–7, 116–18, ­123–5, 160, 166 reverence, 16, 82, 108–9, 129, 141, 244n138. See also piety Rilke, Rainer Maria, 9–10, 30–1, 54, 61, 97, 189n102 Rimbaud, Arthur, 80–2, 90, 92, 99, 217n57 rite, 105, 118, 165 ritual, 76–7, 104, 106–7, 116, 135–6, 145 river, 23–4, 34, 86–7, 119, 130, 146, 167. See also water rug. See carpet sacrifice, 25, 39, 54–9, 69–70, 104–5, 115, 134–5, 146 shame, 50, 83, 133, 142, 160, 166, 217n55, 218n633. See also guilt shoe, 161, 163, 167, 201n63

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Simmel, Georg, 50, 53, 60, 62, 69, 71, 79, 189n102 smile, 99–104, 143 song, 5, 75–6, 122, 124, 125, 134, 145, 148 Spengler, Oswald, 64–5, 139 statue, 99–111, 126, 139, 143–4, 149. See also deities, bronze Stimmung, 74–8, 81, 85 Strauss, Richard, 112–13, 131, 150 sublime, 22, 66, 74, 104 suddenness, 137, 173n13 symbol, 16, 25–6, 47, 52, 80, 87, 98, 105–6, 145–6 symbolism, 6, 8, 11, 98 textiles, 127, 130. See also carpet. theatre, 100–1, 163, 225n31 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 90, 119 trees, 47, 51–4, 58, 140 Van Gogh, Vincent, 54, 56–70, 157, 160 violence, 8, 88, 130, 152, 157, 159–66 water, 84–5 Wilde, Oscar, 93, 178n10, 178n14, 185n66, 246n150 wound, 55, 70, 96

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A e s t h e t ic Di lemmas

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Aesthetic Dilemmas Encounters with Art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Literary Modernism

Mar l o A l e x a n dr a B u r k s

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1665-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1795-0 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-2280-1796-7 (eP U B) Legal deposit second quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Aesthetic dilemmas: encounters with art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ­literary modernism / Marlo Alexandra Burks. Names: Burks, Marlo A., 1986- author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2023013260X | Canadiana (ebook) 20230132685 | ISBN 9780228016656 (cloth) | IS BN 9780228017950 (paper) | ISBN 9780228017967 (eP DF ) Subjects: LCSH : Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929—Criticism and interpretation. | LCSH : Art in literature. Classification: LCC P T 2617.O47 Z 527 2023 | DD C 831/.912—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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... greener than grass I am and dead – or almost I seem to me. But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

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Contents

Figures ix

A Note on Languages and Titles  xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Aestheticism  3

  1 Aestheticism in “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” (“The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two”) and the 1902 “Ansprache” (“Address”) 13   2 Art and Society in “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (“The Letters of the Man Who Returned”)  43   3 Art and History in “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”) 72   4 Aesthetic Transfiguration in Die Frau ohne Schatten 112   5 Violence and Art in Andreas 151 Notes 171 Bibliography 255 Index 279

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Figures

1.1

1.2

2.1

2.2

3.1

3.2

4.1

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Illustrated cover of the 1905 Wiener Verlag edition of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen. Photo by Marlo Alexandra Burks.  20 Dining room with tapestries in the Palais Lanckoroński in Vienna. Archiv Bezirksmuseum Landstraße, accessed through Wikimedia Commons.  36 Still Life with Blue Enamel Coffeepot, Earthenware and Fruit, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Accessed through WikiArt. 56 Wheatfield with Crows, by Vincent van Gogh, Auvers, June 1890. Van Gogh Museum, f _779 j h _2117, accessed through Wikimedia Commons.  66 Column at Delphi. Image from Hanns Holdt’s book Griechenland. Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth A.G., 1923).  91 Phrasikleia Kore, Ariston of Paros, 550–40 b c, exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Photo by Zdeněk Kratochvíl, accessed through Wikimedia Commons. 103 Sloth (Desidia), from the series The Seven Deadly Sins, Pieter van der Heyden’s engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 26.72.34.  122

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A Note on Language and Titles

In the case of German and French, translations are mine unless ­otherwise stated. When quoting from a published English translation, I refer additionally to an edition in the original language for comparison. Longer passages appear in the original language in the endnotes. There are numerous isolated translations of Hofmannsthal’s shorter works, some of which are out of print or difficult to access. Although I have tried to mention all the English translations of which I am aware, I have undoubtedly missed a few. Titles are given initially in both English and the original language in one of two ways: 1 For works that have been published in translation, I capitalize the English title headline-style: “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”); Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). 2 For works not published in translation (to my knowledge), I capitalize the English title sentence-style: “Verse, auf eine Banknote geschrieben” (Verses written onto a banknote). When discussing an English translation extensively, I use the English title primarily. An exception is Die Frau ohne Schatten, which is already well known in the English-speaking world by its German title.

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Acknowledgments

Gratitude is better expressed through action than in words, but this is a book, so a few of the latter are in order. Hans-Günther Schwarz at Dalhousie University encouraged my early interest in Hofmannsthal’s work. Working with him and Norman Diffey on Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Writings on Art/Schriften zur Kunst was one of the most intellectually gratifying experiences I’ve had over the last ten years, and it helped pave the way for the introduction to this book. Without my Heidelberg community, this book would not exist. Franz Wassermann and Lina Girdziute provided two essential things during its composition: music and hospitality. Andreea Miri-Wolf and Eva Lasch added coffee, wine, and conversations about art to the mix. Silvia Richter introduced me to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. My Berlin “family” – Michael Benson, Maureen Gallagher, Biz and Max Nijdam, Noelle Rettig, and Christy Wahl – helped in unexpected and subtle ways while I was writing the final chapter. I am also grateful to Karin Goihl – a renaissance woman if I ever met one – who made my postdoctoral stay in Berlin much less complicated than it could have been. John Zilcosky, my dissertation advisor, deserves special mention. He warned me once over lunch at the Joseph-Roth Diele not to let perfection be the enemy of the good. I know I have not fully internalized that lesson, but the fact that this book exists is proof I am trying. Similarly, Christine Lehleiter cautioned me early on against taking on too big a topic and developing too enthusiastic a style. She knew before I did that my eyes were bigger than my stomach.

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xiv Acknowledgments

Willi Goetschel, whose philosophical acumen was (and is) a constant inspiration, helped me keep my eyes open to unexpected affinities. Who else in Toronto would have talked with me about Georg Simmel and Fritz Mauthner and Sprachphilosophie? I am also grateful to Sepp Gumbrecht, whose insight and enthusiasm convinced me to take my rambling dissertation and give it new life and a sense of purpose. I’m not sure I got rid of all the rambling, though. This book would not have been possible without support from the Jackman Humanities Institute, the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, and the Hofmannsthal Gesellschaft. Thanks especially to Katja Kaluga and Konrad Heumann, who answered some very niggling questions. Those little interactions mean more than we know. In the same vein, I want to thank Richard Ratzlaff and McGillQueen’s University Press for acquiring the book. “Acquiring” – that single word entails so much. I (and by extension these 300 or so pages) have benefited from Richard’s talent, kindness, and impeccable email etiquette. Every single note he wrote brought a smile to my face and renewed conviction I should publish my research. Thank you also to my copy-editor, Kathryn Simpson, who caught a number of infelicitous and awkward formulations. I’m happy we were able to get those out of the book before print! The anonymous readers of the manuscript provided thoughtful, constructive, and in some cases downright ­brilliant feedback. I wish I could thank them in person. I would also like to express my appreciation to the University of Wisconsin Press for granting me permission to reproduce sections of my 2017 article for Monatshefte, “From Song to the Smiles of Stone: Aesthetic and Ethical Encounters in Hofmannsthal’s Augenblicke in Griechenland.” My family deserve a tome of thanks, but they already know that. Thank you to Andrew for bringing so much beauty into my life; to Nathaniel for all the humour, patience, and growth; to Phyllis for her unshakeable support; and to Enkidu for reminding me about the important things in life: walks, affection, and peanut butter.

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intr oduct ion Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Aestheticism

When a dramatis personae includes too many star actors, it can be difficult to know where, or with whom, to begin a story. Such is the case with Vienna around 1900. The imperial city’s many luminaries shared an historical moment on the stage of the Great Theatre of the World: Painters like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka offered new ways of seeing, while theorists like Sigmund Freud, Ernst Mach, and Fritz Mauthner showed how we might interpret those visions. In music, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and only a little later the Second Viennese School conjured drastically different and novel auditory experiences, while in the literary sphere, a proliferation of writers appeared on the scene and in the cafés: Peter Altenberg, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Salten, Karl Kraus (who later criticized his contemporaries in his satire Die demolirte Literatur [Demolished Literature]), Hermann Bahr, and Arthur Schnitzler were a few of the prominent writers in town and part of the leading literary circle known as Young Vienna or Jung-Wien. One of the youngest and most multifaceted of those writers was Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929).1 Deeply versed in the literary debates of his time, especially the anti-naturalist styles of symbolism and impressionism, Hofmannsthal was well-placed to consider the various roles played by art and aesthetics in society. His body of work – forty volumes in the critical edition, completed in 2022 – ­represents a sustained engagement with aesthetic debates over the first three decades of the twentieth century. Taking cues from his contemporaries in physics, psychology, sociology, and the arts (including music), he explored the connections between perceived reality, artistic representation, poetic language, and cultural developments. The

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4

Aesthetic Dilemmas

combination of breadth, nuance, and variety in Hofmannsthal’s writings gives readers an uncommonly kaleidoscopic view of the shifting values of his era while posing core questions about the human condition. More to the point: This book considers how and why suffering, ecstasy, and the encounter with otherness became defining aspects of Hofmannsthal’s modernist aesthetics. A few words about words are necessary. I use the term “aesthetics” in the sense given in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, namely: the “reflection on art and beauty.”2 To a greater extent than other authors of his generation, Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics involved cultivating an ekphrastic literary style: portraying art works from other media, including paintings, carpets, statues, music, and even dance. According to this approach, any encounter with a work of art involves reflecting upon it in terms not intrinsic to the work of art itself. The reflection on art and beauty, therefore, requires both ­distance and translation. Hofmannsthal is certainly not the only writer to have employed ekphrasis at the turn of the century. Many of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems, such as “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”), employed the technique to great effect. But Hofmannsthal’s use of ekphrasis was systematic, extensive, and ever evolving in response to the ideas and societal shifts of his time: scholars and s­ tudents of early twentieth-century Viennese and European culture have an unusually consistent object of study. But Hofmannsthal’s writing is relevant to a broader audience as well. Anyone invested in understanding how art and beauty affects our lives will find in his essays, libretti, stories, and dramatic works numerous points of interest. Yet Hofmannsthal is much less familiar to English-speaking audiences than some of his literary contemporaries, such as Rilke and Franz Kafka. While opera enthusiasts may recognize Hofmannsthal as Richard Strauss’s artistic collaborator and the author of some of the most sophisticated opera libretti in the repertoire, his reputation as a culturally conservative writer with an enigmatic and precious style has certainly helped to obscure his work from an Englishspeaking readership. The challenges of translation have not helped either. Egon Schwarz, an American literary scholar born in Austria, put it well when he contrasted Rilke’s (relatively translatable) poetry – especially the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies), whose “oracular atmosphere” appealed to poets and scholars – with Hofmannsthal’s more harmonious tones and culturally inflected subtilty.3

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Introduction 5

Hofmannsthal was widely appreciated in his lifetime, both at home and, to some extent, abroad,4 even at an early age. At sixteen, he began publishing poems (under various pseudonyms) notable for their ­sobriety and tinged with the world-weariness of a man reflecting upon a life already lived. Right from the beginning, Hofmannsthal’s writings displayed a preoccupation with ephemerality, the urge to escape an eremitic existence, and the importance of lived experience. An early Petrarchan sonnet from 1890, “Sunt animae rerum,”5 captures precisely that celebration of involvement in life. The poem’s octave reads like an extended meditation on Joseph von Eichendorff’s famous 1835 quatrain, “Wünschelrute” (“Wishing-Wand”), which tells of an omnipresent song that can be heard if one hits upon the magic word. Such is the power and purview of poetry. But instead of proclaiming a song in all things, Hofmannsthal’s sonnet speaks of the beating hearts within inanimate objects (“Herzen, die in toten Dingen schlagen”). Moreover, there is no magic word to be discovered – rather, one must pose the proper question, in the right way (“recht zu fragen”). Only then might the “silent mouth” reveal something (“aus stummen Munde”). Even in 1890, dialogue is at the heart of the ­aesthetic encounter for Hofmannsthal. It is the solicitation, not the proclamation, that fascinates him. True to form, the first line of the sestet marks the volta. With the word “Drum” (“Therefore”), the poem calls upon its readers to escape the confines of a solipsistic existence in favour of a life that welcomes joy as well as pain. This is made explicit in lines 9–14: Therefore flee thy self, cold and stiff, And change it for the cosmic soul unbound, And let the heaving forces of this life, Sough through thy soul with joy and woe profound, And if perchance a melody does sound, Then hold its echo fast: Thus shouldst thou strive!6 Hofmannsthal’s poetic sensibility for intertextuality, perfection of form, and maturity of subject matter impressed readers and writers alike. Hermann Bahr, spokesman for the Young Vienna literary circle, was surprised when he met (the very young indeed) Hofmannsthal. Bahr had expected to greet a mature gentleman who had lived abroad in Paris for some years – that, at least, would have explained why Bahr had never heard the name “Loris” (one of Hofmannsthal’s pseudonyms).

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Aesthetic Dilemmas

The fact that the young poet took great inspiration from French Symbolism no doubt played a role in Bahr’s expectations.7 Hofmannsthal’s immediate success and his early association with the elitist and eminently talented Stefan George (1868–1933) contributed to the impression that the young writer was an acolyte of this slightly older German poet and snobbish aesthete whose ivory-tower existence resulted in a solipsistic, if sophisticated, kind of art.8 Most readers of Hofmannsthal’s later essays would agree that political and social themes are more explicitly prominent than they were in his earlier essays and lyric poetry, but Hofmannsthal’s writing, from the very beginning, rejected solipsism and pointed to broader ethical and social questions. Even that youthful poem “Sunt animae rerum” expresses an impulse to engage with the world. The rhetorically powerful assertion that Hofmannsthal (and other writers of the time who were associated with Aestheticism) “fled” reality into the world of art is an exaggeration that, unfortunately, does little to further discussion of their work.9 Hofmannsthal himself endorses quite the opposite view in his essayistic writings, an early example of which is his 1896 review, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio” (“D’Annunzio’s New Novel”): “All those curious books of d’Annunzio’s had something disconcerting about them, indeed, there was something dreadful and horrific, if you like, because they were written by a man who did not know life. He who wrote them knew all the signs of life: he knew them wonderfully, and yet now I believe he was up until this time no great poet, no poet at all. But he was, from the first line, an extraordinary artiste.”10 Life – that is, lived experience – is not equated with poetry, but it is what makes poetry possible. Aware of this fact, Hofmannsthal repeatedly attempts to identify and create within the aesthetic experience an ethical moment that is world-oriented, even object-oriented (as opposed to purely subject-oriented).11 That is not to say that all or even most of Hofmannsthal’s work is tendentious. Hofmannsthal usually explores ethical, social, and cultural themes indirectly; they arise from the story, and often result in more than one outcome. Der Turm (The Tower), for instance, has multiple alternative endings – the first two, utopian; the third, dystopian – while the novel fragment Andreas (discussed in chapter 5 of this book) splinters into so many possible trajectories that it is impossible to say which version the author might have favoured. Hofmannsthal explores various possibilities of reception and transformation in the audience as well. Ideally, the work of art evokes a

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Introduction 7

response in the viewer or reader, and that response is deeply connected with responsibility. Similarly, the audience or reader may undergo a transformation brought on by that sense of responsibility. The recognition and acceptance of responsibility is what constitutes the ethical moment, which appears in art like a shock, without instructions. That shock is at the heart of art’s troubling nature. My inquiry is guided by those writings of Hofmannsthal’s that feature what we commonly acknowledge to be works of art. Hofmannsthal did believe other objects could awaken aesthetic moments – the canonical 1902 fictional letter Ein Brief (The Letter to Lord Chandos) is the most prominent example – but I am interested in the status of those things that we consider artworks because they are already charged with ambiguity (e.g., they provoke us or they leave us unaffected), and because there is so much debate around the usefulness and the dangers of art – its “barbarity,” even, to invoke Adorno’s dictum about postAuschwitz lyric poetry and, by extension, all art that is not “engagiert,” or “committed,” as the English translations have it.12 In Hofmannsthal’s writings, the aesthetic carries its ethical other along with it. I understand “ethical” here to refer to that aspect of the human experience that responds to a sense of duty and recognizes social bonds and responsibilities. The aesthetic encounter opposes the perceiver’s expectations and desires whenever art displays a life of its own while calling to mind a shared experience of suffering. The aesthetic encounter demands a response to this suffering, but it can neither enforce that demand nor prescribe its fulfillment. This is not an everyday experience of the world and the things in it. A glass, considered simply as a glass and not as an aesthetic object, generally poses no threat – we tend not to escape into the world of the glass, and it does not usually attract us or distract us with its beauty or sublimity; we use it unthinkingly; we have no duty to it. From the aesthetic lens however, things have challenged us with their ambiguous status since Plato’s warnings of art’s power to manipulate and distract us from reality, and Aristotle’s counterclaim that art serves a cathartic function. Søren Kierkegaard even posits a connection between the demonic and art, especially music.13 For the fin-de-siècle world of disenchantment, on the other hand, art served as a secular alter deus and provided a house for homeless piety, ritual, and passion. In this sense, Aestheticism threatens to devolve into a religion that reintroduces all the problems that the worship of gods presents us, including the risk of sacrificing our participation in the “real” world

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of suffering in order to dwell in a world of fantasy – whether it be art or the afterlife. For this reason Aestheticism is often criticized. The social and ethical complications of art are also apparent in the risk of misappropriation. Art can be a tool of manipulation. Although Hofmannsthal wrote propaganda during the First World War, he later acknowledged that this was not truly artistic work.14 Art can r­ eference political themes, but it loses something when it adopts a moralizing tone. 15 In his essay “Grillparzers Politisches Vermächtnis” (“Grillparzer’s Political Legacy”) from 1915, Hofmannsthal underscores the artist’s duty: “Politics is the study of human beings, the art of socializing on a higher level. There is an irrational element here … whoever knows how to conjure up hidden powers, commands ­obedience. Thus, the great politician is revealed. For the poet, it is enough to sense these powers and, with an infallible instinct, gesture towards them.”16 Art may hold us hostage with its powers of distraction and manipulation, but art can also be held hostage. When art is violently destroyed (through its misappropriation for propaganda, or through iconoclasm, violence, or terrorism – e.g., the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan or the Nazi book burnings), it is often done so in effort to demoralize and repress a people and their culture. The “life” and existence of art, in these cases, is tied to the life and existence of a people. —*— Hofmannsthal’s work portrays the deeper conflicts of his culture and the importance of art to that culture. In one of the early post-SecondWorld-War treatments of Hofmannsthal’s work, the literary critic and scholar Richard Alewyn wrote poignantly that in Hofmannsthal’s poetic development the natural life cycle was oddly reversed, beginning with perfection and ending in darkness and chaos. According to Alewyn, so long as we find ourselves on a path towards darkness and chaos, Hofmannsthal is our contemporary.17 The standard narrative of Hofmannsthal’s trajectory as an artist relates that, after his early success as a consummate poet in the ­symbolist manner, he turned away from verse poetry around 1902 in order to devote himself instead to the more “socially engaged” art forms – primarily those of theatre and opera.18 While Hofmannsthal did for the most part cease publishing new poems (he did not cease writing them), the reasons given by scholars present a caricature of an

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Introduction 9

artist who rejected the solitary world of the “lyrical-I” of poetry for the popular world of the people. If we take the statement at face value, we risk artificially dividing Hofmannsthal’s works into two distinct phases – the lyrical and the social  – marked by a language crisis. In their influential book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin claim that Hofmannsthal experienced “a crisis that compelled him to reject all that had gone before.” They take the 1902 fictional work, Letter to Lord Chandos, as autobiographical evidence.19 If, in 1902, Hofmannsthal did in fact reject “all that had gone before,” then why did he publish a collection of his lyric poetry, Gesammelte Gedichte, in 1907? Yet this myth has been powerful. Despite overwhelming textual evidence that there was no such “rejection,” Teona Djibouti’s 2014 dissertation, Aufnehmen und Verwandeln, repeats the narrative. Thomas A. Kovach takes a less drastic view in his account: “Having recognized and criticized the alienation from life characterizing the Aestheticism that constituted the milieu of his earlier life and work, he was concerned henceforth to find what he called a ‘Weg zum Sozialen’ in his writing.”20 But even a summary like Kovach’s does not take into account the fact that Hofmannsthal’s early work (like the 1890 sonnet “Sunt animae rerum”) very frequently and clearly articulates a desire to resist any alienation from life. The narrative of crisis and rejection offers an attractively simple framework, but it is false. Moreover, it obscures the much more compelling shades of ambivalence and ambiguity in Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the a­ esthetic, at all stages in his literary career. It bears repeating: Hofmannsthal was, even in his early lyrical poetry, always concerned with questions of the broader and deeper connections between people and the world, including the things in it, and the responsibilities that both constitute and grow out of those connections. His medium of choice was primarily literary, and even his essays and speeches – the most “engaged” or “committed” of his writings – abound in extravagant metaphors and lyricism. His love for the arabesque turn of a phrase might seem precious to an audience schooled in the style of Strunk and White, but those literary choices enact a deeper, unsettled relationship between aesthetics and ethics that can awaken in readers a critical impulse. This is the “call”21 – or the demand – that we find repeatedly in his work. A more famous instance of the call is Rilke’s 1908 sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” mentioned above, in which the ekphrastic impulse to induce an ethical

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Aesthetic Dilemmas

response is made explicit in the two concluding lines: “For there is no place / which does not see you. You must change your life.”22 When it comes to literary representations of the aesthetic experience, political and ethical counsels are absent: art is, in other words, still in some sense “autonomous,” as Aestheticism would have it. For Hofmannsthal, aesthetics and ethics are in constant tension with one another, but they are bound together by that tension. If art can be the catalyst for an epiphanic lived experience along the lines of that ­suggested in Rilke’s poem – an “Erlebnis” as it is called in German – then it would seem to have some deep, non-imitative connection to life (“Leben”). The notion of Erlebnis juxtaposes two domains: the domain of ethics, which considers action in lived life; and the domain of ­aesthetics, which considers art and active perception. Hofmannsthal’s 1896 lecture “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”) imagines this dynamic in the metaphor of two pails in a well: “There is no direct path that leads from poetry to life, or from life to poetry. The word as carrier of life’s content, and the dreamlike brother-word, which can be found in a poem, diverge and drift by each other, foreign, like the two pails of a well. There is no extrinsic law which bans from art all the rationalizing, all the struggle and railing against life, every immediate relation to life and every direct imitation of life; rather, it is this simple impossibility: such heavy things can live in poetry about as easily as a cow can live in the treetops.”23 During his entire literary career, from about 1890 till his death in 1929, Hofmannsthal for the most part adhered to the rule of l’art pour l’art – the idea that art is valuable apart from any didactic or moral purpose. Even the aesthetic cultivation of the self was not destructive per se, but it did require more than mere self-stylization. Art, in turn, required more of an engagement of the self with the world than a divine-like ironic distance or a flight of fancy could afford. Like the pails in the well, art and life run parallel courses. The image of parallel worlds held in tension marks a departure from an early iteration of Aestheticism which sees art as something s­uspended above life. Consider Baudelaire’s poem “Élévation” in Les Fleurs du mal, here in lines 15–21 of James McGowan’s translation: Happy the strong-winged man, who makes the great Leap upward to the bright and peaceful fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, take to their wings Each morning, freely speeding through the air,

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Introduction 11

 – Who soars above this life, interpreter Of flowers’ speech, the voice of silent things!24 The title evokes an image of the poet performing, in his poetic-priestly act, the raising (known as “elevation”) of the consecrated and transformed host – in this case, the words of the poem. But in the poem, it is also the poet who flies up above the mundane world to an elevation that affords perspective and understanding. Stefan George’s translation and transmission of Baudelaire helped introduce a petrified world of glorified art to German-language literature. In the post-Baudelaire context, as with George, who stylized himself as a priestly and prophetic poet, the troubling undercurrent below the crystallized surface began to rumble. The question at the end of the garden poem in George’s Algabal (from 1892) throws doubt onto the entire project of the poeta alter deus and the religion of art. George, the poet-priest par excellence, has gone so far as to inscribe this doubt into lines 16–20 of his own poem: How did I conceive you in this holy bower – So I asked myself as I walked in thought and forgot, in daring weaves distraught – dark great black flower?25 Just a year before Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, George gives poetic expression to the idea of the return of the repressed within the realm of art. For Hofmannsthal, whose work often lays stress on the pain of remembering,26 the crystallized world is set up against the world of growth and rot, and the speaker in his 1891 symbolist poem “Mein Garten” (“My Garden”) finds himself remembering longingly – and perhaps attempting to resist this longing – the world of organic, breathing life fated to decay. The speaker can assert: “Lovely is my garden with the golden trees,”27 but the repeated use of ellipses (four times in a poem of fourteen lines) points to what cannot be said. This symbolist penchant for suggestion rather than proclamation induces a mood of reminiscence: the poet desires to be in that other, living garden, “where I was before” (“wo ich früher war”). Rather than longing for an imagined Golden Age (as the Romantics might have done), Hofmannsthal’s speaker yearns for that which lives and breathes and dies.28

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—*— Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics engage with long-standing, persistent assumptions about art, what it does, and how we respond. His work can be assessed neither as a mere reproduction of his culture, nor as a deconstructive critique. In this respect, my approach is inspired by, and offers a qualification to, Carl Schorske’s Pulitzer Prize–winning study, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. The renowned historian gives a sensitive reading of Hofmannsthal’s views on art; ultimately, though, Schorske represents works of art as sites of avoidance: they are objects of refuge from an otherwise inhospitable reality that distract through their power to attract.29 My research has not so much resulted in a contrary reading as it has in a more nuanced one. Where Schorske sees avoidance, I find the possibility of engagement. For Hofmannsthal, the aesthetic encounter – a phrase Schorske would find oxymoronic – is a challenge to be taken up and responded to. Schorske is not wrong: Art can be a refuge; it can also pose a threat; and it can be a site of avoidance. But each encounter with a work of art presents various possible outcomes. Avoidance is not a foregone conclusion, and it is certainly not the one Hofmannsthal sought, because at the core of all those encounters is an aesthetic imperative: beauty and works of art place demands upon their audiences and viewers by issuing a call. The response will vary according to personal history, the history of the work, and the context of the encounter. While there is undeniably a culturally conservative strain in Hofmannsthal’s thought, it is there as part of a dialogue. Art confronts the human subject with the challenge of relating to the world. Simply to adopt old moralities would be insufficient. The past appears in Hofmannsthal’s work not as something towards which the present should reach back in facile emulation, but rather as an inspiration, a point of reference, or even a contrast.30 Past ideologies and works of art should not be forgotten, but it is naïve to think that they are stable or definitive. To borrow a sentiment from T.S. Eliot: “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”31 Hofmannsthal takes that notion of responsibility a step further in order to reassess the dilemma of the aesthetic encounter. In doing so, he finds something that calls to countless unreachable others of past, present, and future.

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1 Aestheticism in “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” (“The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two”) and the 1902 “Ansprache” (“Address”)

The movement known as Aestheticism has two major expressions: the cultivation of beauty in one’s surroundings – to the exclusion of anything ugly – with the aim of leading a ‘beautiful life’; and the direction of one’s aesthetic gaze at all the objects and people in one’s world. Hofmannsthal presents these two expressions of Aestheticism by exploring what they try to exclude; at the same time, he maintains a dual focus on the impossibility of ignoring the ugliness of life, and the power that beauty can exact on the subject (the viewer, reader, listener, etc.), effectively reversing the power dynamic assumed in the aesthetic gaze. Hofmannsthal’s bifocal fascination with the cultivation of beauty and the reversal of the gaze1 is already apparent in the 1895 tale, “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht,” translated into English as “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.”2 The plot can be summed up quickly: A wealthy merchant’s son lives almost entirely alone, ­surrounded by the beautiful furniture, tapestries, and other works of art he has inherited. The only people he sees with any frequency are his four servants. In the first half of the tale, nothing moves the plot forward, yet the atmospheric scenes suggest an internal struggle, which finds expression in the second half of the story: upon learning that his favourite servant is being accused (in very vague terms) of having committed a crime while in the service of a previous master, the Persian

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Emissary, the merchant’s son decides to travel to the city, with placatory intent. The reader follows the merchant’s son out of his house, through the dirty city streets, to his untimely and undignified death.3 In the secondary literature, the merchant’s son is most frequently portrayed as an aesthete who abandons his ivory-tower existence, prompted by some inner sense of guilt (regarding his Aestheticism, or perhaps his sexuality), and enters into the “real world,” where he is then punished by reality. The narrative is treated like a fable, and there is much that speaks in favour of this approach.4 On the other hand, the second half of the story (where the “real world” is depicted) introduces ambiguities that most fables cannot sustain. The “reality” of the second half of the story proves, in fact, stranger and more dreamlike than the fantasy-world of the first half. Important for understanding this curious inversion of reality and fantasy is the widespread turn-of-the-century interest in perception. According to impressionistic psychology – a growing field of inquiry at the time – the viewer-subject gathers impressions and then constructs from these impressions a reality.5 But there is also a growing interest in the object understood as a phenomenon, and in the subject’s perspective vis-à-vis the world of things outside the self and beyond the subject’s comprehension.6 Hofmannsthal’s tale invokes both impressionistic psychology and phenomenology. It has even been suggested that Hofmannsthal’s early writings exerted an influence on Edmund Husserl’s development of the phenomenological reduction.7 In a letter to Hofmannsthal, Husserl identifies a parallel between what he calls the “pure” aesthetic attitude of Hofmannsthal’s early dramas and the phenomenological method (a suspension of habitual existential attitudes) necessary for the ­critique of knowledge. What is common to both is an interest in how to face the external world: but aesthetics, as one aspect of this confrontation with the world, need not, indeed could not, be bracketed off from life and experience. Husserl, however, did not ever fully develop the aesthetic side of his phenomenology,8 and Hofmannsthal (who did not, as far as scholars can tell, respond to Husserl’s letter) developed the phenomenological side as it were only incidentally, in his literary production. In his notes from 1916 onward – published under the title Ad me ipsum by the Germanist Walter Brecht – Hofmannsthal identified the ambiguity of his own aesthetic attitude towards the phenomenal world, pointing specifically to “The Tale”: “Era of friendship with

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Aestheticism in “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” and “Ansprache”

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Poldy (‘merchant’s son’ ‘Garden of Knowledge’): The main problem of this very strange time lies herein: that Poldy completely (I less so, and in a rather indirect manner, insofar as I led a kind of double-life) overlooked the real: he sought to sense the essence of things – he took no account of the other face of things, he wanted intentionally not to notice it, to see it as nothing.”9 For Leopold (“Poldy”) von Andrian, a particular kind of ideality is made manifest in art (“the essence of things”); but there is another face of things: “the real.” The exclusion of either poses risks. In “The Tale,” the beautiful life – when understood as a flight from what is unpleasant  – comes under attack.10 The Hofmannsthal scholar Richard Alewyn wrote famously of the story that life will not be mocked; if defied, it becomes angry and vengeful.11 Put another way: the repressed can and often does return. This is equally true of the aesthetic: the human interest in art and beauty cannot be dismissed any more than real life can be. Hofmannsthal will argue in his writings that follow “The Tale” that we cannot simply ignore that aspect of the aesthetic that draws us out of our habitual mode of existence. For Friedrich Nietzsche, this might be called the Dionysian; for Freud, our unconscious drives; for Hofmannsthal, it is beauty.

E n c h a n t m e n t and Beauty: P a r t O n e o f “ The Tale” “A merchant’s son, a young man and very handsome who had neither father nor mother, grew weary of society and social intercourse soon after his twenty-fifth year.”12 So begins the story. “Schön” is one of the first adjectives used: here it means “handsome,” but its semantic flexibility is significant: it can also mean “beautiful,” “nice,” “lovely,” “pleasant,” “fine,” and even “considerable” when used in conjunction with another adjective. The word does not just describe the merchant’s son; it also sets the tone for the story. In the opening paragraph, it appears every few sentences like a leitmotiv: “sehr schön” (“very handsome”), “die Schönheit keiner einzigen Frau” (“nor … the beauty of any woman”), “seiner schönen Hände” (“his fine hands”), “die Schönheit der Teppiche” (“the beauty of the carpets”), “tiefsinnigen Schönheit” (“profound beauty”), “seine Tage bewegten sich schöner” (“his every day became fairer”).13 The word’s occurrences in the opening sections are so numerous that the reader becomes, like the merchant’s son, tired of the predictability. Indeed, each of the

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merchant’s son’s attributes has a formulaic significance: he is young, handsome, and weary – one might say today: bored. Ennui typifies the kind of decadence that Hofmannsthal’s story critiques.14 Yet readers are given rather little information and should not condemn the merchant’s son prematurely. He does not seem to harbour any misanthropic tendencies or desires; he is simply disengaged from it all. But why? One could read his weariness as what Adorno in his essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society” calls the “lyric spirit’s idiosyncratic opposition to the superior power of material things,” which is “a form of reaction to the reification of the world, to the dominion of human beings by commodities.”15 The character’s identity as a merchant’s son, after all, would suggest that the kinds of dealings he has with people and things are primarily of a commercial nature.16 Moreover, as the son of a merchant, his identity is already framed in opposition to the previous (absent) generation; he has inherited his mercantile relation to the world.17 Consider the abovequoted note from Ad me ipsum, in which Hofmannsthal nods to the broader social and cultural stakes with his reference to the “main problem of this very strange time.” The relation between subject and object has been altered in all areas of life – in physics, art, philosophy, psychology, economics, and even in the day-to-day interactions with other people. Philosophers, artists, and dilettantes alike must attempt to negotiate this new relation. In protest, Adorno’s “lyrical spirit” – the decadent aesthete – surrounds himself with beautiful objects and works of art. He sets up an artificial world in opposition to the hostile “real” world outside; he faces no challenges and can enjoy his surroundings unencumbered.18 In such a setting, the merchant’s son discovers meaning, life, and symbols: “Indeed, the beauty of the carpets and fabrics and silks, the carved and paneled walls, the metal sconces and basins, the glass and earthenware vessels had acquired a never imagined significance. He gradually came to see how all the shapes and colors in the world lived in his artifacts. In the intricacies of the ornaments he discerned an enchanted image of the intricate wonders of the world … He was long intoxicated by this great, profound beauty, all his, and his every day became fairer and less empty among these artifacts, which had ceased to be dead and lowly and were now a great legacy, the divine work of all nations.”19 Perfection and unity seem real – even tangible – in this divine image of generations spanning space and time. The merchant’s son can

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access that image through his possessions. But “possess” is a word to make us pause. On the one hand, these works of art have been passed on from previous generations, and as inherited possessions they call to mind Hofmannsthal’s tongue-in-cheek definition of “­modern” in the essay “Gabriele d’Annunzio”: “Modern are: old furniture and new nervosities.”20 On the other hand, possessions must be looked after and preserved. There is great responsibility in tending to such a great inheritance. But lofty thoughts like this are unsustainable, and Hofmannsthal’s irony cuts across the page: “Yet he likewise felt the vanity of all these things as much as their beauty, nor did the thought of death leave him for long: it would visit him amidst laughing, boisterous crowds, often in the night, often at table.”21 Even if one were to see in art a gesture towards continuity (the work exists long after its maker and awakens a sense of the infinite), art nevertheless does not allay the anxiety of life’s transience, giving credence to the saw: ars longa vita brevis. Beauty like this enlivens the surroundings of the merchant’s son, but the objects are also a memento mori, confronting him with the inevitability of death. The merchant’s son has not been able to reckon with his mortality,22 and art does not offer asylum to those in flight. Phenomenologically, the merchant’s son experiences art as full of life and, by extension, the promise of death. But instead of looking death in the face, so to speak, the merchant’s son attempts to mask any vanitas or meaninglessness (which he equates with ugliness), in essence ignoring the symptoms of an incipient existential dread; he tries to beautify death in the hope of rendering it harmless: “‘Your feet will take you to where you are to die,’ he would say, and saw himself, elegant, like a king lost on a hunt in an unfamiliar wood under exotic trees, meet a strange and wondrous fate. ‘Death will come when the house is done,’ he would say, and saw Death plod across a bridge resting on the backs of wingèd lions and leading to a palace, a house newly finished and filled with life’s spoils.”23 Like the speaker of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the merchant’s son is half in love with easeful Death. A death aesthetically adequate to a beautiful life, full of “profound beauty,” would not be so unwelcome a guest. Unsurprisingly, this mechanism of distancing typifies his approach to people as well. The merchant’s son’s four servants, whom he holds dear and without whom he cannot imagine living, pose a threat by the strength of their presence. The language of the narrative at this point oscillates between depictions of life and death, the distinction

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becoming increasingly blurred, just as the servants’ familiar gestures begin to change; their presence is oppressive precisely because they are alive, marching either towards death or into a kind of deadened life. Both fates are beyond the merchant’s son’s control, and yet they begin to mirror his own otiose existence. This kind of life has become a euphemism for meaninglessness – not death per se, but vain persistence. The merchant’s son is therefore disturbed when he senses his servants’ gazes resting upon him: “the older one’s listless and mournful, with a vague, disquieting challenge, the younger one’s with impatient or insolent vigilance he found even more disquieting.”24 Some scholars read the demand of the elder girl’s gaze as an expression of erotic attraction, which the merchant’s son is unable to recognize as such, let alone return.25 Whether or not the gaze is explicitly erotic (or ­derisive, as in the case of the younger girl), fear and vulnerability set the tone of the passage. The young man, accustomed to acting the observer, with increasing frequency feels himself the object of observation, like a hunted animal. Caught in and fully aware of his inadequacy, “he felt they were looking at his entire life, the depths of his being, his mysterious human inadequacy,” and his anxiety worsens as the servant girls’ gazes “forced him to think about himself in a fruitless and highly exhausting manner.”26 His inadequacy, which he is forced to acknowledge, is tied to the existential necessity of selfawareness in the face of others. It will soon become apparent that beauty is complicit in this imposed humility. The sensation of being watched has been read as a symptom of schizophrenia or a related psychotic illness.27 But Hofmannsthal is also working in an established literary tradition of observation, exemplified by Baudelaire. Compare this image from the opening lines of “Correspondences,” one of the sonnets in Fleurs du Mal: Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; Man walks within these groves of symbols, each of which regards him as a kindred thing.28 In “The Tale,” Hofmannsthal invokes and explores different aspects of Baudelaire’s motif of familiar gazes but creates an entirely d ­ ifferent atmosphere in the process. In Baudelaire’s image, the forest of symbols observes the man passing through. Their glances are familiar.

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At the heart of the poem is a sense of unity (line 6 ends with the word “unité”) and the identification of a space wherein “Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond” (“Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent”) in line 8. Where Baudelaire emphasizes correspondence, unity, and familiarity, Hofmannsthal evokes the uncanny. Two distinct aesthetic theories are at work here: Baudelaire’s, and that of John Keats. In his copy of Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), Hofmannsthal marked the quotation of Keats’ letter to Richard Woodhouse and wrote beside it: “Der Kaufmannssohn” (“The merchant’s son”).29 In that letter, Keats sketches his idea of the chameleon poet: one who loses his sense of self and disappears into his surroundings. The merchant’s son, having also lost his sense of self, is an observer caught between familiarity and non-identity. Such a state of ambiguity is made more palpable when a work of art is present. In a particularly elaborate scene – which featured on the cover of the Wiener Verlag 1905 printing of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen – Hofmannsthal juxtaposes the beauty of art to that of the human being through the description of phenomenological and existential oppositional pairs – death/life, immortality/ mortality, hard/soft, metal/flesh – only to have these distinctions ­collapse.30 In the same manner, the distinction between narrator and narration falls apart. In this scene, the merchant’s son observes the reflection of the elder of the two girls in a mirror. She is carrying two sculptures of bronze Indian deities. Thus doubly framed, the girl appears to approach the merchant’s son: She was carrying a gaunt, heavy, dark-bronze Indian deity under each arm, the figures’ ornamented feet resting in the ­hollows of her hands. The dark goddesses reached from her hips to her temples and leaned their dead weight against her soft, ­living shoulders, while their dark heads with evil snake mouths, three wild eyes in the foreheads, and eerie jewelry in the cold, hard hair moved next to her breathing cheeks, grazing her fair temples in time with her slow gait. However, it was not so much the goddesses’ weight and solemnity that seemed a burden to her as the beauty of her own head with its heavy jewelry of dark, vivid gold, two great arching coils on either side of her clear brow, like an Amazon queen.31

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Figure 1.1  Illustrated cover of the 1905 Wiener Verlag edition of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen.

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Hofmannsthal’s deployment of free indirect speech allows his narrator to adopt the evaluative habits of the merchant’s son, thereby blurring the boundary between narrator, narration, and narrative – right at the moment of the aesthetic encounter: that is, the encounter with the girl and the bronze deities, taken together as a single aesthetic vision.32 Hofmannsthal will again use this literary signal to great effect in the prose version of Die Frau ohne Schatten (the more mature sister of “The Tale”). In the present scene, the poetic device of free indirect speech lulls the reader into a similar aesthetic attitude, creating in effect an analogical (literary) aesthetic encounter for the reader, multiplying the reflections. The language is appropriately heavy, like the bronze deities, especially in the slowly rolling rhythms and the prevalence of darker, long vowels in the first sentence of the German. Alliteration, like the sinuous initial syllables (“sch,” “s”), traces in sound the twisting metal, and the grandeur and heaviness are echoed in the sonorous word pair “großen gewölbten” (“great arching”). The repeated velar stop consonants of “Königin im Kriege” (a warrior queen – here rendered “Amazon queen”) terminate the image with a sense of aural finality. Hofmannsthal’s ekphrastic approach draws readers into the world of the merchant’s son, and into the aesthetic moment, where “living” hair at once serves as a contrast to the hard, non-living icon, and yet adopts the aesthetic characteristics of that icon – it is metallic, ornamental, and heavy, like the language of the passage. The comparison of the girl to a queen in war is a vision likely suggested to the merchant’s son (and the narrator-character) by his own reading.33 The effects of art and beauty draw him in (along with the narrator and the reader); but with his aesthetic gaze, the merchant’s son is able to distance himself from the vision again: “He was taken by her great beauty, though he knew as well that to hold her in his arms would mean nothing to him; he knew that in the end his servant’s beauty filled him with longing rather than desire.”34 As if following the Kantian notion of taste, the merchant’s son seems to hold an uninterested appreciation for his servant’s beauty: he can look without desire. Still, the sense of being arrested (“ergriffen”) before the aesthetic vision, in all its Medusa-like ambiguity, taints the cool objectivity. Cognition occurs alongside the vision (“aber gleichzeitig wußte er”), but the expression of that cognition  – the recognition – must come after. In other words, the aesthetic encounter is broken down into two distinct moments: it is the momentary

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experience of sense perception and cognition, followed by the recognition of that experience. The merchant’s son shows signs that he wishes to narrate his own experience precisely at the moment that the narrator slips into the merchant’s son’s perspective. That coincidence of perspective is formulated and actualized in the paradox of free indirect speech. The German term erlebte Rede expresses the paradox more directly: it is, literally, lived and experienced speech. What Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls the “ästhetisches Erlebnis” (“aesthetic experience”)35 is present here within the nexus of erlebte Rede. Then, in a second move, the experience is made into an object of study. The risk of losing oneself or one’s ego is tempered when it is translated into an epistemological matter (“He knew”; “Er wußte”). But that does not quell the threat completely. Consider the adornment of the girl’s hair.36 In this image Hofmannsthal conveys the unsettling potential of beauty, and in doing so he anticipates Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 definition of the uncanny as a psychic uncertainty resulting from the phenomenological ambiguity of objects – that is, when lifeless things seem to be animate, or when living beings seem inanimate.37 The servant girl’s beauty is so mingled with that of the bronze deities that it becomes difficult to disentangle the two. Such mingling thwarts conceptual categories, much like the experience of the sublime. In his discussion of Hofmannsthal’s “Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” Burkhard Meyer-Sickendieck mentions, but does not develop, two important aspects of the story: the contemplation of the lives of others (“Kontemplation des fremden Lebens”) and the feeling of estrangement (“Befremdlichkeit”).38 These are key ingredients for a tale that engages with contemporary psychological and philosophical questions. While the importance of “Befremdlichkeit” becomes more apparent in the second half of the tale, we can already see how “Kontemplation” functions here: it is part of that distancing, “pure” aesthetic attitude, as Edmund Husserl put it in his letter to Hofmannsthal. When contemplating something or someone, there is always a negotiation of distance. The merchant’s son wishes to safeguard his subject-position by regarding others from afar, and when that distance is compromised (as when the servant girl draws nearer), the safety of the subject position and the possibility of contemplation are threatened. In the scene under discussion, the traditional subjectobject hierarchy is upended, such that the subject no longer feels master in his own house.

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How does this happen, and why? The enframement of the young woman between the icons and within the mirror’s edges is imperfect: any still image properly framed should not move, after all. The living, human element threatens to upset the Kantian aesthetic experience of beauty, and it challenges the viewer’s perception of those assumed boundaries; equally, the icons highlight the mortality, but also the unreachable otherness of the woman, and of art. Unlike, say, the Persian carpet, which reminds the merchant’s son of his mortality, the cosmic unity of the world, and the generations of fruitful creativity, the reflection of the servant girl awakens in him something more than a melancholic sense of distance and inevitable decay. She, together with the deities at her side, issues a challenge to him because she can look back at him and remind him of his powerlessness to possess and preserve this beauty. Even the word choice (“Sehnsucht” instead of “Verlangen,” translated here as “longing rather than desire”) suggests the perpetual nature of a want impossible to ­satisfy – or even an addiction predicated on a distance that cannot be traversed. The etymological associations with illness (“Sucht” in German) tinge the word. By contrast, “Verlangen,” with its homophonic verb, conjures up a different relation to desire: one of duration, necessity, and involvement. The merchant’s son’s response is to disengage himself from a threatening situation. His desire for possession is wedded to his desire for “Ruhe,” for peace and stasis, but not the kind of stasis that involves the finality of commitment. He wants the calm forgetfulness that is sealed off from the chaos and turmoil of life that lurk behind the image. And so he walks along a riverbank populated by gardeners and flower sellers, searching (yet recognizing the futility of his quest) for some bloom or spice that “might put him in tranquil possession of that sweet charm which lay in his servant’s disturbing, unnerving beauty.”39 The merchant’s son’s encounter with the servant girl cannot accommodate simple binaries, so he seeks other distractions. And yet it is telling that he searches for a solution in one of the most ephemeral of senses: scent. Even the location (the riverbank) calls to mind to the Heraclitan/Parmenidean bind in which all are caught. The desire for the security of possession and peace leads him to some of the most familiar symbols of transience: flowers and their scent. The transitional moment comes when the merchant’s son searches for a substitute – in vain. To speak in terms of tragedy: there is a

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moment of reversal, but without the satisfaction of recognition. Wandering among the various plants, the merchant’s son recalls the verses of a poem which present an inverted image of his own activity: “In the stems of swaying carnations, in the fragrance of ripe grain thou didst arouse my longing, but when I found thee, thou wert not she whom I sought but the sisters of your soul.”40 The sophistication of this passage lies in the repeatedly frustrated attempts to set up one-to-one correspondences through parallel equivalents; instead, the verses articulate a double-chiastic structure of correspondence. In this way, Hofmannsthal draws attention to the constructed character of the tale, its fabric woven of words.41 Having been inspired by the living and aesthetically reified vision of the servant girl, the merchant’s son seeks her corresponding, non-threatening, equivalent in the pleasantness of some scent or other.42 He does not find it. The verses in his head speak to the same condition (the inspiration and subsequent failure of one-to-one correspondence), which nevertheless seemed to arise from the opposite set of circumstances: having been inspired in and amid the scent of flowers and ripe corn, the unspecified “Du” (“you” or “thou”) awakens his desire. Yet upon locating this “Du,” the merchant’s son discovers it is only a shadowy double, the sister(s) of “your soul.” In disentangling this structure, a few important points concerning beauty and its relation to the real become apparent. We know that the merchant’s son wants to avoid the threats he perceives by immersing himself in sensory pleasure and its anaesthetizing effects. This is one direction. But the reverse is equally plausible: he moves away from a hard and heavy beauty towards the very image of transience and weightlessness, represented by the scent of flowers. Accompanying this movement is a desire for the real as opposed to the substitute; or perhaps instead, a desire for the substitute as opposed to the real. The ambivalence of the subject’s desire is matched by the ambiguity of the object’s ontological status: which is the real, original beauty, and which the substitute? This question is announced in the irrepressible lines of the poem, the speaker of which, beginning from the opposite pole, seeks the “Du” ­of another subject – which he had intuited in the fleeting, sweet scent of carnations and ripe corn. Upon finding this sought-after human “Du,” however, he realizes it is but a pale image of what he had sensed before. Thus “the main problem during this very strange time” returns: should one privilege the realm of the aesthetic or that of the living?

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The lines of poetry mark the point of transition to the second part of “The Tale” and uncover a moment of aporia. Original and copy, art and life, the aesthetic, the erotic, and the ethical, the solitary and the social: all are tied together in this literary chiasm, located at the figurative threshold between reality and dream,43 and at the structural break between parts one and two.

D is e n c h a n t m e n t a n d the Uncanny: P a r t T w o o f “The Tale” After receiving a strange and threatening letter from the messenger of the Persian prince concerning an unnamed crime supposedly committed by his favourite servant, the merchant’s son elects to venture out of his summer residence and into to the city. Day gives way to evening as he wanders, and soon he must find a place to spend the night. Like a lost tourist, somewhat dazed, he soon finds himself in a poorer part of the city, where he sees little along his path that could be called “schön”: even the flowers are “häßlich” (ugly) and “verstaubt” (dusty). This is a world fallen into disrepair. It has been neither preserved nor cultivated. Yet there is something oddly familiar about the place. The merchant’s son, in a kind of déjà-vu, recalls foggy memories from a forgotten past and recognizes strange moments of deceptive correspondence. The narrative of the second section repeatedly and explicitly invokes descriptions from the first. Heike Grundmann has observed that Hofmannsthal understands beauty not merely as a pleasure for the senses, but as the manifestation of a correspondence between interior and exterior, such that the art-object becomes a symbol.44 Read through this lens, the first part of the tale, with its focus on beauty and interiority, might be the symbol of the second, the “exterior” world. Grundmann is drawing on two notions of the “symbol”: the image presented in Baudelaire’s “Correspondences,” and the birth of the symbol recounted by the fictional interlocutor Gabriel in Hofmannsthal’s literary dialogue from 1904, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte” (“The Conversation about Poems”). In that work, Gabriel locates the origin of poetry in the identity between priest and sacrificial animal and emphasizes that symbols do indeed mean (he uses the verb “bedeuten” intransitively), but we should not say what they mean. In other words, we must hold meaning in abeyance; “bedeuten” (“to mean,” but also derived from “deuten,” “to point”) is understood here as an immediate, intransitive gesture.45

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In the context of “The Tale,” the origin and “meaning” of the symbol are not fully worked out, but they are hinted at. As will become evident, Hofmannsthal’s 1895 story highlights the tension between a desire to endow correspondences with a particular meaning and the impossibility of doing so (as suggested by the lines of poetry from the end of the first part of the tale). “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” is an articulate example of a “beautiful” construction of correspondences. The irony is that the correspondences are uncanny and, in the fictional dreamlike context, they portend death. With such a proliferation of correspondences, “The Tale” easily lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretations of mirroring,46 and it goes one step further by linking the correspondences to an unspoken ethical dilemma: How does the merchant’s son relate to the world? How does his interior, cloistered self interact with and correspond to the “exterior” reality of the city? The first truly unsettling encounter of the second half of the story takes place, with biting irony, in a garden – a literal hortus conclusus. After wandering into a jeweller’s shop to purchase a gift for one of his servants, the merchant’s son notices an adjacent vegetable garden, and upon entering it, he opens himself up not to the beauty of the flora or the countless exotic scents he expects to find, but to a series of uncanny visions that trigger indistinct but powerful memories. As a literary motif, the garden is especially polysemous, and Hofmannsthal used it frequently.47 In the introduction to this book, I referred to Hofmannsthal’s poem “Mein Garten,” which likewise presented two gardens: one of stasis, and one of life and decay. Hofmannsthal’s friend Leopold von Andrian had also already started writing his novella Der Garten der Erkenntnis (The Garden of Knowledge), and we have seen how Stefan George’s lyrical-I introduces a black flower to his garden of sanctity.48 Gardens offer the possibility of re-establishing an (aesthetic) order of living. But, as Alexej Žerebin notes, entering the garden is not simply about escaping an ugly or hostile world. It is also about the desire for a certain kind of Erkenntnis, to be achieved through aestheticizing all aspects of life. This helps to explain the merchant’s son’s desire to enter – and linger in – the garden. What guides him are his fascination, his insatiable gaze, and his overwhelming desire to take in the unknown world and comprehend totality through aesthetic correspondences.49 Hofmannsthal writes: “The merchant’s son went in … to find so rich a collection of rare and curious narcissi and anemones and such strange

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and totally unfamiliar foliage that he stood there for a long while transfixed.”50 The garden’s contents reinforce the desire for possession and comprehension. The narcissus points clearly to narcissism (and by extension to a particular kind of Aestheticism), and the ephemerality of the anemone (the wind-flower, according to its Greek etymology) symbolizes transience and death. Vanity in both its senses is pictured here. Narcissism in this light can be seen as a futile and misguided attempt to maintain the integrity of the self in the face of one’s own transience. In the myth, Narcissus’s life was predicated on a rejection of the Delphic command to “know thyself.” When he did in fact come to know himself, he perished.51 As the sun slowly sinks, the merchant’s son becomes aware of the passing of time, yet he still wishes to look into the second glasshouse, if only briefly, through the windows – perhaps another gesture towards Narcissus. Peering through the glass, he is startled to see the face of a four-year old child glaring at him. Although he overcomes his initial surprise, he is shocked a second time: “For the child, who, motionless, was glaring at him maliciously, bore an inconceivable resemblance to the fifteen-year-old girl he had in his house. Everything was the same: the light eyebrows, the fine, quivering nostrils, the thin lips, even the way she slightly raised one shoulder. Everything was the same, except that in the child it came together in a way that terrified him. He did not know what made him feel that nameless fear; all he knew was that he could not bear to turn around knowing that the face would be staring at him through the glass.”52 In his quest for correspondences, the merchant’s son finds distortion and parody. Ursula Renner, in her afterword to the Reclam edition of Hofmannsthal’s Erzählungen, notes that the relationship between a thing, its sign, and its meaning has fallen victim to idle analogies (“Nachwort” 426–7). The correspondence of this four-year-old child to the fifteen-year-old servant girl is one that remains indeterminate. He sees the servant girl in the child and is ­confronted with the contradiction of the ostensibly stable self in the ­passage of time, and with the identity of two separate beings. The whole passage is characterized by repetition in diction, initiated by shock. The word “erschrak” (“he gave a start”) and the phrase “Alles war gleich” (“Everything was the same”) appear twice, each in parallel syntax, and the proximity of the phrases “Er wußte nicht” (“He knew not”) and “Er wußte nur” (“He knew only”) reenforces the parallels. In an eponymous essay on the English theorist Walter Pater, Hofmannsthal writes: “We are, almost all of us, in one way or another

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in love with a past seen through and stylized by the medium of the arts. It is, so to speak, our way of being in love with an ideal, or at least an idealized, life.”53 For the merchant’s son, the idealized world mediated by art and beauty has been replaced by absurdity: he leaves the garden in a state of abstraction “and with a numb feeling of something akin to hatred for the senselessness of his torture.”54 Having managed to escape the prison-like garden, he longs for his idealized past in the form of his bed, becoming more childlike than the child he encountered. Such idealization is coupled with the very last use of the word “schön” in a reference to the past – both his own, and a literary, imagined past: “With childlike longing he recalled the beauty of his own wide bed; he thought too of the beds that the great king of the past had made for himself and his companions when celebrating their weddings to the daughters of subservient kings: a bed of gold for himself and of silver for the others, carried by griffins and wingèd bulls.”55 Beauty is linked to an imaginary, literary past. And there is another correspondence. The bed he imagines belongs in the finished house of the proverb: “‘Death will come when the house is done,’ he would say, and saw Death plod across a bridge resting on the backs of wingèd lions and leading to a palace, a house newly finished and filled with life’s spoils.”56 The parallel between the bed, carried by gryphons and winged bulls, and the palace bridge,57 carried by winged lions, reinforces the connection to death. In his quest for a bed, this travesty of a medieval knight finds himself at soldiers’ barracks. The soldiers speak to him incomprehensibly, the smells are repellent, and the horses look angry, ugly, and wretched, like the soldiers. Beauty is put to rest, and the word does not appear again. In a gesture of generosity, the merchant’s son reaches into his pocket to pull out a few coins, thereby reintroducing mercantile means of dealing with others. (He is still the son of a merchant.) Equally, the generosity can be interpreted as an attempt to allay his own feelings of discomfort brought on by a strange memory: The face of one of the horses reminds him of a poor man he once saw in his father’s shop. The man was being hounded because he was discovered to be in possession of a gold piece, and he would not say how he had obtained it. Such monetary exchanges are a failure of one-to-one correspondence, and seem to succeed only in provoking antagonism. Indeed, the merchant’s son had already tried to give a few silver coins to the child in the garden in an attempt to mollify her animosity; she let them fall, worthless, into the void.58

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This time, however, as he reaches into his pocket to pull out one of his remaining gold coins, an unclear thought seizes him. He hesitates and pulls out his hand, perhaps sensing in this moment that his gift will be of no value to a poor man, in whose possession it would only rouse suspicion. Inadvertently, in this one gesture, he tosses out the piece of jewellery intended for the old woman, one of his servants. He bends down to retrieve it and is violently kicked in the groin by a horse. In effect castrated, the wealthy merchant’s son is then brought to his final resting place: a low, iron bed. Here he dies alone, renouncing his entire life and all that was a joy to him. His story ends with the ugliness of hatred: “He hated his premature death so much that he hated his life for having brought him to it.”59 The merchant’s son dies with an expression on his face resembling that of the horses: pained and unpleasant. He has become his own grotesque parody. If the merchant’s son in some way “deserves” this fate, then it must be because his life – according to his own adage – has led him to this death, as Hofmannsthal indicated to Beer-Hofmann on 15 May 1895: “The fall of the cards … is something that one forces from the inside out.”60 But what aspect of his life has led him to this death? Part of the difficulty with interpreting this story is the absence of a contrastive figure. We see no portrait of unmitigated joy anywhere – in neither the luxury of the merchant’s son’s surroundings, nor, of course, in the miserable city. The merchant’s son is the centre of the story, to the almost total exclusion of the other figures. And yet, as with the fantastic logic of the carpet, all things here are connected. Luxury is woven with poverty, pleasure with pain, joy with suffering. The merchant’s son’s only hope for meaningful human interaction, it seems, was in his favourite servant, whose continued presence could not be safeguarded. Hegel’s lordship–bondage dialectic is full at work here: the master needs the servant just as the servant needed his master. The two men are in fact mutually dependent. One can imagine the fate of the servant will be equally unpleasant. —*— According to Gregor Streim, one of the most important distinctions to make when considering the power of art is that between the artist and the dilettante, the latter embodying a strange hybrid of the scientist and artist. The dilettante seeks to grasp the aesthetic in conceptual

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terms, to render it an object of study, and in doing so, to neutralize it. The artist, by contrast – and the aesthete may go either way – engages with the work of art, contributing to its expansion rather than trying to subsume it under a conceptual totality.61 Hofmannsthal himself expresses this productive kind of reception in his 1905 ceremonial address, “Shakespeares Könige und grosse Herren” (“Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen”). He describes reading Shakespeare as “a pleasure and a passion, a conscious talent, an imagination, an innate art perhaps, like playing the flute or dancing, a shattering but silent inner orgy.”62 That is, to be struck by a work of art in this way is also to become a kind of artist, to respond to this gift. Yet nowhere do we see the merchant’s son responding in this spirit  – even his altruism hints at egotism. He contemplates, he admires, he possesses (or believes to possess), but he does not respond to beauty’s challenge. In this respect he is like the dilettante that Streim describes, imagining himself to be merely an observer, letting the impressions of life wash over him.63 He has the prerequisite appreciation for beauty, yet he lacks the artistic-productive capacity for the perception and reception necessary to give this fantasy life (hence the castration). This would require him not only to acknowledge but also to live with death. Fourteen years later, Rilke’s narrator in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) says that when we are born, a death is born as well, and we carry our deaths with us throughout life. This fin-de-siècle theme is present in “The Tale of Night Six-Hundred and Seventy-Two” as well, and tightly woven into it is the experience of the beautiful and its challenge to the coherence and stability of the subject. As in Malte Laurids Brigge, there are hints in “The Tale” that art, as an intensified experience of the interconnectedness of life on the one hand, and a challenge to notions of the stable, isolated self on the other, becomes increasingly important in a world organized around economic exchange, acquisitiveness, and the passivity induced in the pleasure had from watching, unresponsive, as the world passes by. The only response the merchant’s son knows is exchange value, compensation, and substitution: in aesthetic terms, one-to-one correspondence. As much as the merchant’s son wants to escape the society he has grown weary of, he is still a product of that society; his inability to respond to art with a creative spirit reflects as much upon his culture and society’s relation to creativity as it does upon his own.64 To

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paraphrase Mathias Mayer, whose characterization of the merchant’s son’s death strongly echoes Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge as well: Inasmuch as he does not die a death he recognizes as his own, he has not found his life’s path.65

B e a u t y R e defi ned: T h e “ A ddr e s s ” of 1902 Neither artistic beauty, nor human beauty, nor the love of beauty is the cause of the merchant’s son’s downfall. In “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” beauty has the capacity to make one aware, sometimes painfully so, of the precariousness of life. As in the encounter with the girl and the bronze deities, beauty can be a memento mori. Buried in “The Tale” is a nuanced understanding of beauty, not yet fully articulated, but which prefigures certain of Hofmannsthal’s later ideas. In a letter to Leopold von Andrian, dated 4 May 1896, Hofmannsthal describes an experience that bears a remarkable resemblance to certain scenes in “The Tale.”66 From Tlumacz: “Everything around me is uglier than you can imagine. Everything is ugly, miserable, and filthy, the people, the horses, the dogs, the children too.”67 He also experiences this ugliness as an ambiguous, anonymous threat: “Yesterday evening I was so startled by an old beggar, who in the twilight crept on all fours into my room and kissed my feet, that I felt exhausted and bitter afterwards, as after some grave and pointless danger … I don’t understand how all these things can have such power over me.”68 The distinction between the writer Hofmannsthal and the fictional merchant’s son lies in Hofmannsthal’s ability to see value in suffering: “Actually, these are states of anxiety. But they are also very good … They expand the inner sense; they bring up things which were as if buried. I think the beautiful life impoverishes one. If one could live out life simply as one wanted, one would lose all vitality.”69 The destabilizing threat to an orderly life of comfort, which itself leads to a kind of melancholy l­assitude, has the power to shake the young Hofmannsthal out of his lethargy: “When I wake up at night here, I am present to myself more strongly than I have been for a long time. I return to myself, like one who has constantly been putting on an act; it is an act that in some mysterious manner imitates this being, but it is still an act.”70 The sensation of returning to oneself is made possible precisely in the condition of anxiety; those

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fears allow Hofmannsthal to see the “other” life in a new light, to see the theatre of it all. In Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässse Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), there is a particular passage Hofmannsthal marked in his pocket edition: “but anything truly productive is offensive.”71 Hofmannsthal had read the Untimely Meditations for the first time three years before his experience in Tlumacz, and though we do not know when he underlined the passage, it is not hard to imagine that the word “anstößig” (“offensive”) resonated with him early on. The statement is ambiguous: it could mean that all truly productive things are offensive, shocking, or even repulsive. In any case, Hofmannsthal’s experience seems to have validated the statement in all its valences; or, perhaps Nietzsche’s words provided a paradigm for Hofmannsthal’s reflection on his experience. However one interprets “anstößig,” the idea provides an angle from which to understand aesthetic creativity, and it will become an important component for Hofmannsthal’s reassessment of the beautiful in art. In light of his own revulsion, Hofmannsthal-as-reader reflects on his appreciation for beauty just a day later (“Am 5ten weitergeschrieben”). While perusing Otway’s Venice Preserv’d in all the discomforts of a dirty stable (calling to mind the merchant’s son’s place of death), something inexplicable awakens in him. Flummoxed, he grapples for an explanation: “I have felt the beauty of the entrance and departure of every person, the beauty of two or three people standing with each other, and the beauty of their dialogues. I believe this is something incredibly rare and, in order for it to occur, all these specific conditions had to be present, the solitude that went on for days, the bad nights, and the vision of so many suffering people, even their smell and their voices.”72 Hofmannsthal has rediscovered his appreciation for beauty in mere gestures and situations, as if kindled by the jolting occurrence from the day before. As a result, his understanding of beauty now includes an attention to suffering. Such attention involves something like empathy, and Hofmannsthal writes that he, at least on some level, identifies with Otway: “For an hour, I loved as the poet did.”73 This identification is achieved through a recognition of human imperfection, and here his conviction intensifies: “It is a wondrously beautiful thing to sense the weakness of the artist in a work of art, the places where he, from his inadequacy and desire for beauty, becomes strange and forceful.”74 Hofmannsthal, unlike the merchant’s son, values the shortcomings of being human

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and the subsequent striving towards beauty. In fact, feeling those shortcomings is itself something wondrously beautiful. If beauty can incorporate suffering, what does that say about aesthetics? Hofmannsthal seems tentatively to suggest a new vision of what is “aesthetic.” The new vision integrates human frailty as a challenge and spur, rather than something to avoid or paint over. Under this new attitude, the merchant’s son’s own human inadequacy – his “menschliche Unzulänglichkeit” – would be part of what makes beauty possible. Hofmannsthal’s views on aesthetics were driven in large part by a desire not to be lost in a world-denying fantasy, but rather to acknowledge the role of suffering and imperfection in the creation of beauty. It is no surprise that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe exerted such a great influence on Hofmannsthal’s understanding and portrayal of art. With her 1947 study Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Goethe, Grete Schaeder compared how Goethe and Hofmannsthal turned towards the outer world as a way of thwarting the potentially self-destructive (and Narcissistic) interiority of the artistic personality. And again, like Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal is keenly aware of the need to escape the cycle of interiority by giving external form to what is felt. A text such as the 1896 essay on D’Annunzio’s fiction shows this well. The prevalence of the words “Leben,” “Tun” or “Tuen,” and “wollen”75 – life, deed, and will – drive the essay forward: “Only the deed gives birth to power and beauty. For that reason, we lay snakes into the cradle of the babe Herakles and let him strangle them, smiling, with his little hands – only thus can such power and beauty see the light of day. For that reason, Odysseus must be tossed about by the deceitful salt tide, so that his tremendous return home can take place, himself clothed in beggars’ rags, known by no one but his dog. Many paths he had to tread, and never with ease, in order that we might weep for him.”76 In the examples given in the quote above – one taken from myth and one from epic – Hofmannsthal suggests that “the deed” is a criterion that overreaches the boundaries of genre and even begins to blur the line between life and art. As Hofmannsthal makes explicit in his lecture “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”) the experiences of life are necessary not only for the depiction of a character, but also for the reception of a work of art: “only by walking the paths of life – with its wearisome depths and its wearisome peaks – can one acquire an understanding of the spiritual art.”77 Yet art is not meant

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to imitate life. In this lecture, Hofmannsthal uses Stefan George’s anti-­Naturalist vision of absolute poetry to combat the proliferation of literature that takes its sustenance from “real life” to the detriment of the art itself. Hofmannsthal discriminates between poetry and life by ­maintaining that there is no direct path from one to the other. Like the Romantics before him,78 he asserts that the language of everyday life is distinct from the language of poetry. His argument is that one should not attempt to make art mirror life as precisely as possible, for in doing so, one neglects the cultivation of the creative element – in effect, laming art, rendering it lifeless. Hofmannsthal rejects the Naturalist aesthetic that follows Arno Holz’s formula: Art = Nature – x, with ‘x’ approaching zero.79 And his irony is incisive: “You are surprised. You are disappointed to discover I am banishing life from poetry.”80 On the contrary, it is the facile imitation of life (or “Nature”) as present in the work of “Dilettanten” that drives the life of poetry out of poetry: “I know what life has to do with art. I love life, moreover I love nothing but life.”81 Without experiencing the polarities of life, art has nothing to say to us, no substance, no reason to exist. Still, art does not, indeed should not, try to replicate life. In the following passage, Hofmannsthal describes the lifeless figures of D’Annunzio’s novel Le vergini delle rocce: “One can be here and yet not in life: whatever it is that turns a person around, that makes it possible for that person to experience guilt and innocence, to have power and beauty – that is a complete mystery. For before that moment, this person possessed power for neither good nor evil, and had no beauty at all; he was too vain for that; for beauty comes into being only where there is power and humility.”82 Hofmannsthal’s terms seem to get lost in one another, but if we tread slowly, we can follow their paths. In saying that “beauty [Schönheit] comes into being only where there is power [Kraft] and humility [Bescheidenheit],” Hofmannsthal seems to be relying on circular reasoning: humility and power – in the sense of energy, vitality, and strength – are necessary for the emergence of beauty, and indeed also for the emergence of power itself. The terms are so tangled that we see neither beginning nor end, neither cause nor effect. The paradox of origin (power and humility being the “origin” of power and beauty) is like the construction of the Persian carpet in “The Tale” and the lines of verse the merchant’s son recalls when walking along the riverbank. Origins remain elusive.

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Hofmannsthal had already hinted at the connection between humility and beauty in his letter to Leopold von Andrian, noting that the experience of beauty was tied, on the one hand, to the experience of the wretchedness of life and, on the other, to the experience of the author’s human inadequacy – that is, those characteristics which the  merchant’s son attempted to neutralize. In the essay on D’Annunzio’s novel, these features are grouped under the term “humility” (“Bescheidenheit”). Hofmannsthal develops and refines this relationship between power and humility in his understanding of beauty just a few years later.

B e a u t y R evi ved In 1902 Hofmannsthal was asked to provide some opening remarks at the house of the count Karol Lanckoroński before an audience gathered for a viewing of Lanckoroński’s overwhelmingly eclectic art  collection. Hofmannsthal’s intention with this “Ansprache” (“Address”) was to set the mood and put the audience into a responsive frame of mind conducive to viewing the collection. He compares his words to musical accompaniment: “For it has often seemed to me that music has such a power to bring beautiful images to life.”83 Hofmannsthal speaks reflectively about his own half-poetic, halfprogrammatic “Address” as something meant to facilitate the reception of beauty by bringing these works of art to life. Referring to the paintings,84 he writes: “They are like the shadows which surround Odysseus, all desirous to drink of his blood, silent, avidly pressed in upon one another, their dark, hollow gaze fixed upon his living form. They want to have their share of life. Indeed, they seem to glow and tremble with a restrained energy of their own when not observed.”85 In “The Tale,” the (aestheticized) servants mysteriously draw life from the merchant’s son; here in the “Address,” the beautiful images draw life from the viewers. But art gives something in return through the suggestive power of its material, shaped by human hands. This serves as an explication of that moment Hofmannsthal recorded in his letter to Andrian: the recognition of the hand at work in a piece of literature – a sign of the author’s (Otway’s) humanity – is now a part of Hofmannsthal’s conception of the aesthetic encounter. In the “Address,” Hofmannsthal focuses in on the dizzying effect of such a recognition. The following passage saw almost no changes in the ­different manuscripts, so one can assume Hofmannsthal read this

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Figure 1.2  Dining room with tapestries in the Palais Lanckoroński in Vienna. This image is part of a postcard series that was made specifically for the building and its collection.

vertiginous sentence aloud, pulling his listeners into its whorl: “And thus, for a moment, a hanging or outstretched weaving is, as it were, able to breathe out its spirit: while one gazes fixedly upon it, while speaking or in silence, it will suddenly reveal that here there is something which has been knotted together, knotted by human fingers over endless hours, and for a moment, this thousandfold knotted work will light up and let one catch a glimpse of the suddenly arrested vitality, the arbitrary-will-become-form of the joining colours and shades, like a nocturnal landscape which, under a great flash of lightning, lets one glimpse the junction of roads and meeting of hills, and lets it sink down again into darkness.”86 Else Lasker-Schüler said it succinctly, in one word (and line) in her 1910 poem “Ein Alter Tibetteppich” (“An Old Carpet of Tibet”): Maschentausendabertausendweit (thousands-upon-thousands-ofstitches-vast); and Stefan George said it more esoterically, intimating

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a cryptic revelation in his poem “Der Teppich” (The Carpet).87 But Hofmannsthal wants his listeners to follow the thread into the weave and to stop and wonder at its knots and ties. Hofmannsthal’s own written and spoken tapestry (his sentence) is waiting to reveal its life, too, much as the carpet described in George’s poem: “And no one senses the riddle of entanglement … / that one evening the work will come alive.”88 Hofmannsthal’s momentary revelation of complex connectivity seems itself to spin the sentence into rolling repetitions with variation, demonstrating the convergence of material and content, the creation of form out of arbitrary volition (“Form gewordene Willkür”). And yet, sustaining this tension for any length of time is too much. The vision sinks away again into darkness. The sentence comes to a full stop. Behind the description of the revelatory power of beautiful art is a cultural-critical impulse that becomes more apparent when compared with a passage that Hofmannsthal marked in his copy of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Referring to the inner world (“Innerlichkeit”) of the German people, Nietzsche writes: “The foreigner will still be to some extend justified in maintaining that our interior is too feeble and disorganized to produce an outward effect and endow itself with a form. The interior of Germans can be receptive to an exceptional degree: serious, powerful, profound, and perhaps even richer than that of other nations; but as a whole it remains weak because all these beautiful threads are not wound together into a powerful knot: so that the visible act is not the act and self-revelation of the totality of this interior but only a feeble or crude attempt on the part of one or other of these threads to pose as being the whole.”89 Hofmannsthal identifies in the collected works of art (tapestries and carpets being some of the most vivid examples) precisely that connectedness, that strong knot (“kräftiger Knoten”) that Nietzsche believes is missing in the German people. Beautiful works of art demand a peculiar blend of strength and humility from the viewer: “there are moments, and they are almost frightening, in which everything around us wants to assume its full, strong life.90 Moments in which we feel them all, these silent beautiful things, living by our side, and our life is more in them than in ourselves.”91 The beautiful is characterized by its conceptual and linguistic silence and its capacity to inspire awe. And while this aspect of beauty is not restricted to art objects, art as a medium of silent articulation (not naming the thing)92 is a privileged location for such moments.

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These moments are potentially accessible to anyone present: “Each of us, even if he has never set foot in this house, will wander this place like the native land of his dreams. For our existences are grown through and with the existences of these works.”93 The two existences are inseparable and interdependent.94 This is what makes the exchange – revelation for sacrifice – possible. We may recognize in this “native land of [our] dreams” strains of the Freudian unconscious, and Hofmannsthal was in fact reading the work on hysteria by Freud and Breuer at the time.95 But for Hofmannsthal, the native land of our dreams extends beyond the psychology of the individual. There are also hints of Goethe’s notion of daemonic creative faculties: “how they stand there enwrapped in the mystery of that immense age now vanished, they take hold of us daimonically: and each is a world, and all are from a world which touches us through them and makes us shudder to the core.”96 These works of art are, in a sense, our shadowselves, yet they also are a world unto themselves. It is this ambiguity of identity that gives them that strange familiarity and destabilizing potential, and it is also what will lead Hofmannsthal to develop a dialogical conception of the aesthetic experience. Here is one of the first expressions of this dynamic: “It lives for us, it lives through us. There is something in us that responds to this world-picture.”97 Hermann Broch, in his study Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (Hofmannsthal and His Time), comments on this defining aspect of the word “beautiful.” He notes first that the “rediscovery of complete world identification” is the “highest ecstasy man can attain, probably the very highest attainable life value, and precisely because this complete identification with his object has been posited as the artist’s task, indeed his moral task, his work must be its expression, its image, its symbol; the work itself becomes ecstasizing and thus wins that quality specific to works of art for which the word ‘beautiful’ was coined.”98 Broch’s comment is one of the few to identify the specificity that the word “beauty” had for Hofmannsthal. The “Address” helps to ­substantiate Broch’s interpretation, but we see also that there is an element important to Hofmannsthal’s understanding of beauty that Broch did not emphasize: namely, that the “moral task” is not the artist’s alone. By invoking the word “beautiful,” the viewer too – artist or not – must realize the consequences of taking the object world seriously, and appreciate its resistance to possession. The potential power of the beautiful for Hofmannsthal lies in the double-recognition of the other and oneself simultaneously, in one gesture.

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These beautiful images are a world to which we respond: the character of that response depends on our understanding of the character of the encounter. As we have already seen in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the engaged response is neither automatic nor guaranteed. At most we can say that the response is prompted by this dual characteristic of beauty: its familiarity and its threatening character. In the words of Ernst Jentsch: “This powerlessness generates a vague feeling of threat emanating from something unknown and ungraspable, something which is as enigmatic as one’s own psyche usually is.”99 For the remainder of the “Address,” Hofmannsthal develops a notion of beauty that is reflected not only in the visual (or poetic) content of the work of art, but also in the idea of art-as-gift – an idea that will become important for chapter 3. In the second half of the “Address,” Hofmannsthal reverses the sacrifice metaphor used in the first half: “And now the never-ending world of paintings: there they hang, and what is long since past continually pours out from them as something present.”100 Beautiful art takes and gives. And this is what the viewer does, too, when sensing the breath of eternity arising in these objects of human creation: “Yes, thousands, individuals and nations, have wrought form, and what they could exalt to form lives on forever: artwork, symbol, myth, religion.”101 This is not a question of whether a work of art will survive a fire or a flood, or whether one religion will continue to exist after being succeeded by another. All are ephemeral. Yet they do have something time-defying about them: they can outlive their creators, for one. But more than this, they point to the past and the future: in other words, to that which is beyond the here-and-now of the individual. At this point, Hofmannsthal’s poetic language intensifies, just as he approaches the crux of his address: art’s imperative.102 “For if we are barred from knowing the spirit of the times through contemplation, then it is given to us instead to feel it when it demandingly descends upon us, seducing and tantalizing, oppressing and enchanting us with the breath of Otherness.” 103 Hofmannsthal knows quite well we can never, epistemologically speaking, fully comprehend the past.104 We can sense it, however, through art. This happens in the demand that descends upon us, as if we had no choice in the matter. For Hofmannsthal, this is no ordinary demand. It is rather like a divine command, transcending the limitations of time and self: “And thus an infinite demand confronts us, one most dangerous to our inner

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equilibrium: the demand that we reconcile ourselves with the ­thousandfold phantoms of the past, which want to be nurtured [or nourished] by us.”105 We cannot remain apathetic, for this concerns all of us. The phantoms are a part of our own existence, and to ignore their demand is to reject participation in this world. With the invocation of a single word – beautiful – we declare our participation and responsibility: “For such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’ There is no word loftier, no word more dangerous. It is the word which binds most deeply.”106 The word is lofty, even proud (“stolz”) because we have an intimate connection to the objects we call beautiful. In some way, we identify with them. This opens up a world of reciprocal offering and receiving and presupposes our adequacy to the task: “By uttering this word, we say that something within is stirred by what art has formed as only like can be stirred by like.”107 Moreover, we become as much an object of that word as we are the subject that speaks it, insofar as our identity is upset and cast into the world of the work of art: “And insofar as our lips are compelled by a deep magic to speak it again and again, we assume such a tremendous kingdom of art, as if a thousand souls in us were stirred by the act of aesthetic enjoyment.”108 Again, there is a reversal of terms: we have a share in the kingdom of art, just as much as the work of art has a share in life. In the case of art, the situation – potentially at least – moves beyond narcissism and hubris by opening space for dialogue and a new experience of the world. The dénouement: “But let us calm ourselves: the demand imposed on us by the world of beauty, this daimonic process of enticing out of us entire worlds of feeling, this demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected power of the mysterious line of ancestors within us, the towering stacks of layers of our supra-individual memory, piled one upon the other.”109 The artworks displayed in Lanckoroński’s villa were mostly Trecento and Quattrocento paintings, statues, and artworks from the Far East. These works of far-flung origin surrounded the viewers, respirating into the air temporal, geographical, and cultural difference. But ­according to Hofmannsthal, our human capacity to call artworks “schön” allows for entire worlds to be drawn out of us. It is as if the viewers contribute to this beauty, are drawn into participation, or, as another version of the text has it, into what Hofmannsthal calls “Communion.” The world of the beautiful sets us in relation with the

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other by pulling us out of our mundane, subject-centred existences. In yet another version of the text, the question of the subject receives slightly different treatment: “Here it appears we are in danger of losing ourselves: a great error! For here it is that we first are awakened and able to possess ourselves; for indeed we create the immortal content of these images, insofar as we feel after them and empathize, alive.”110 Perhaps Hofmannsthal left this out of the final version because it jarred with the tone of the subsequent conclusion. His discussion of beauty, at this precise point, is less about losing oneself and finding oneself again than it is about the direct implications of the word itself; Hofmannsthal seems to want to awaken a sense of enthusiasm, rather than to offer promises as explicit and grandiose as self-discovery; perhaps he even had his doubts. Instead, he closes the address with Goethe’s comment on enthusiasm, complementing his own guiding, preparatory remarks: “For ‘without enthusiasm,’ Goethe says, ‘art allows itself to be neither grasped nor comprehended. Anyone unwilling to begin with amazement and admiration will not find access to the inner sanctum. And the head alone cannot grasp any product of art; it can only do so in the company of the heart.’”111 Readers are left at the end of the “Address” with a sense that Hofmannsthal, in an effort to convince his listeners of the greatness of their task, must rely on religious language. This is certainly not an uncommon move – the Germanist Heinz Schlaffer characterizes much of German literature as an ever-renewed engagement with religion – but it risks displacing the discussion of the experience of art into the realm of mysticism, moving away from the very “life” that Hofmannsthal enjoins us not to forget. —*— Understanding Hofmannsthal’s use of the word “beauty” is crucial to appreciating his literary works. It helps to give form to the aesthetic experience, which so tenaciously resists definition. “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” asks what to do when confronted with beauty-as-threat: to flee, to neutralize (anaesthetize), or to engage? Beauty can induce sensations of self-dissolution as well as interconnectedness, leading Hofmannsthal to identify an ethical moment in the aesthetic encounter, which he describes as a call that demands a response. The “Address” makes this last point clear. But is it enough?

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In a letter Hofmannsthal wrote in 1923 to his daughter, Christiane von Hofmannsthal, the ambiguity of beauty re-surfaces. Long after “The Tale” and long after Tlumacz, he writes on lovesickness and suffering: “Not that suffering should be excised from existence: no, it is the very stuff of our existence and even that which we call beautiful is unthinkable without suffering – indeed it is the blossom that ­burgeons forth from suffering, but it’s one thing if you get yourself tangled up in unnecessary suffering, half playing and half desiring, and another if we must suffer and have no bulwark to protect ourselves. And here I’m troubled by the responsibility that I carry for letting you live so outside of conventions, which are of course the natural defensive walls of existence.”112 It is remarkable that, in this letter to his daughter almost thirty years later, Hofmannsthal articulates the same conviction that beauty is not an escape from suffering, but rather the blossom that grows from it. Yet underlying this is a persistent worry that one might not be fully protected, that one might die full of regret, having failed in one’s responsibilities – that is, having failed to respond adequately.

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2 Art and Society in “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (“The Letters of the Man Who Returned”)

The cultural and intellectual changes in Germany and Europe at the turn of the century led to what one could consider a phenomenological crisis, the most prominent symptom of which was existential nausea. Literary works like Kafka’s “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” (“Description of a Struggle”) from 1909, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge from 1908–10, and Hofmannsthal’s “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (“The Letters of the Man Who Returned”) from 1907–08 all touch on this wide-spread sense of unease; even Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 Nausea can be read as part of this group and is a testament to the enduring nature of the “illness.” Hofmannsthal’s fictional letters ­present one of the earliest glimpses into this particular crisis. They do so – unusually, when compared with his contemporaries – within the framework of an aesthetic encounter. With its socially and ethically charged background, “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” was initially intended to be an ambitious multi-volume project tracing several generations of the protagonist’s family. For reasons unclear,1 Hofmannsthal abandoned the idea after having just five of the fictional letters published. The text forms not only the beginning of an aborted project; it also embodies one of the work’s central themes of fragmentation and cohesion. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” bears a striking resemblance to Hofmannsthal’s great unfinished novel Andreas. Both are fragments, but there is more than a structural affinity; many of the characters initially planned for “The Letter of the Man Who Returned”

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found their way into the Andreas fragments, which the author continued to revisit in the two decades between 1907 and 1927. Hofmannsthal’s failure to bring his novelistic intentions to completion might well be interpreted in light of the drastic societal, cultural, and scientific changes of the early twentieth century: The idea of the novel, as a literary genre steeped in the tradition of ethical and aesthetic education, could not adequately demonstrate the internal contradictions and fragmentation of a protagonist destined not to follow a progressive (even if meandering) path of Bildung (i.e., education and formation of moral character), but rather a circular route that returns to the “self.” It is telling that, in 1905, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey took the Bildungsroman and its cousins (like the coming-ofage story and the Künstlerroman) as objects of study: as if these genres had already become artifacts in literary history. Unlike the more “complete” novels of German literature (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, for example) or the examples of Bildungsroman in other European literatures, Andreas and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” are defined by their failure to demonstrate clear development, education, progress, and arrival. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” is not a story about the development of moral character, or at least not in the Bildungsroman sense; and despite the importance of art for the letters, it is not a story about developing artistic ability, in the sense of the Künstlerroman. There is a moral dimension, but it hovers above the action, suspended in the text’s own aesthetics – that is, its reflections on art and beauty. Furthermore, while the novelistic form accommodates subplots, detours, and aesthetic encounters, the fragmentary nature of these letters has the aesthetic advantage of performing its subject matter: the ecstatic moment of the aesthetic encounter is cut off from the rest of the character’s experiences, and cut off from the narrative elaborations in the unfinished Andreas.2 The letters were never published together in Hofmannsthal’s lifetime. The first three found an audience with the journal Morgen in the summer of 1907, while the last two were published in Kunst und Künstler in early February of 1908 under the title “Die Farben. Aus den ‘Briefen des Zurückgekehrten.’” Nonetheless, there is a line of continuity that has become evident in the more recent editions, r­ anging from the pocket-sized Reclam edition of the short stories, Erzählungen (edited by Ursula Renner-Henke), to the critical edition with notes and variora. In Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Writings on Art / Schriften

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zur Kunst I have translated the letters in full. Despite the clear connection between the letters, the text as a whole lacks a novelistic coherence and telos. It seems Hofmannsthal felt this too. Interest in such “productive failures” of Hofmannsthal has gained momentum: in 2017 the Hofmannsthal Gesellschaft hosted a conference on the author’s “produktives Scheitern.” It is evident that Hofmannsthal’s work – and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” is a particularly illustrative example – is interesting at least in part precisely because of the mysterious allure of its internal discord. This comes to a climax where ethics and aesthetics meet.3 The collection of fictional letters portrays a financially established man just returned from travelling the world on business (the nature of which is not explained). The year is 1901, and upon his arrival in Europe after eighteen years, the writer of the letters – henceforth referred to as the merchant4 – can no longer hold any meaningful concepts (“Begriffe”) about his own culture at the beginning of the new century. At the personal level, people seem internally fragmented and distracted, lacking in character, and guided by a desire for money. As if infected by this profit-seeking drive, the merchant repeatedly rejects the idea that he is a dreamer of any kind: for what could be less profitable than dreams (unless one is a successful psychoanalyst)? The merchant may be unhappy with modernity’s mercenary turn, but his own patterns of thought show how infectious that drive is. Still, there is a distinctly dream-like quality to his memories and thoughts. He will even come to designate some of his thoughts as “dreams” (“Träume”), and the last two letters (the focus of this chapter) present an aesthetic encounter which questions the value system that places a status-quo reality above the world of the imagination. Once this happens, it seems the merchant’s confidence in life and sense of stability is restored: he accomplishes his work as an exemplary capitalist and thereby embodies, as some scholars see it, the ideal of a human being of practical activity rather than passivity.5 I interpret this as a deceptive resolution, however: The end is not only about a successful business endeavour, nor is it an untainted triumph of activity and practicality. It is an unresolved struggle with the demands of a capitalism and the awareness that art, while it may provide a moment of relief from a mercenary world, contains its fair share of suffering as well. Hofmannsthal’s spin on the matter is a creative response (not a remedy) to the relation between social life and art.

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As discussed in chapter 1, Hofmannsthal was fascinated by the idea of a challenge, or demand, issued by beauty. Now the task is to see how reflections on beauty function in a literary text, and what the nature of that challenge is. Hofmannsthal does not write in a philosophically rigorous manner, but “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” (as well as other of Hofmannsthal’s works, notably the Chandos Letter) do engage with topics that interested psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers at the time; Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Edmund Husserl would all find in Hofmannsthal a literary colleague in the study of perception. In this epistolary collection, the final two letters trace the connection between the phenomenological and the aesthetic experiences of life, primarily by way of questioning the status of reality and art, and, by extension, the possibility of community and dialogue.

T h e P h e n o m e n o l o gi cal Cri s i s The final two letters depict the personal consequences of the merchant’s return home. His uneasiness in this society has already manifested as a psychological sickness, foreshadowed in the first letter by the merchant’s mal de débarquement. Such seasickness on land is triggered not by getting off the boat and setting foot upon terra firma once more after a long voyage, but rather by leaving the terra cognita of an ordered worldview and stepping into the whirling flux of a new reality. The symptoms worsen over the course of the letters, until the merchant loses his sense for the reality of things altogether: he suffers a phenomenological crisis, and his nausea takes on an existential significance. The merchant has lost his sense of orientation, and the world he finds himself in seems ghostly, tentative, and hollow in comparison to the Germany he imagined while on his travels. In the second letter, he has already written of the people: “And now I have for the last four months been looking into the faces of the real people: not that they were soulless, for it is not seldom that a ray of light of the soul breaks forth, but it flits away again, it is an eternal coming and flying away as at a dovecote.”6 In the fourth letter, the merchant describes how this fleeting reality comes to be characterized not by presence, but by absence. This ­dizzying destabilization of reality results in what the merchant calls “the crisis of an inner malaise; its earlier manifestations, admittedly, were as inconspicuous as was possible.”7 That sickness is insidious.

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It creeps into the merchant’s life and poisons his environment until the physical objects come unmoored. Through itemizing, the merchant attempts to re-establish the presence of the particular objects; he must list them, he says, “or tear this letter to shreds and leave the rest unsaid forever.”8 The presence of a symbol or sign (the word on the paper) and the second set of eyes (the recipient of the letter) both attest to the objects’ existence and significance. Listing also allows the merchant to move forward and write about his experience. Like lowering an anchor, listing alleviates some of the nausea by establishing a point of reference, even if the objects referred to seem elusive: “Sometimes it befell me in the morning, in these German hotel rooms, a jug or the wash basin – or a corner of the room with the table and the clothesstand – sometimes these things seemed to me so not-real, despite their indescribable ordinariness, so completely and utterly not real, ghostly in a way, and provisional at the same time, waiting, as it were, temporarily taking the place of the real jug, of the real wash basin filled with water.”9 Typically, the physical object is understood to be more “real” than its representation: works of art, dreams, and memories are supposed to be of lower orders of reality. But just one letter earlier, the merchant described a set of Albrecht Dürer prints he often looked at when he was a child; he initially described them as “unreal” (“unwirklich”) but then, as if seeking greater precision, appended the  adjective “surreal” (“überwirklich”).10 By contrast, in this ­letter, the real jug and the real wash basin are “so completely and utterly not real.” In this Biedermeier room of familiar objects, things are not quite as they should be. In fact, they do not seem to be at all. The diagnosis of the phenomenological crisis resembles the cultural critique that pervades the first three letters. In the cultural critique, Hofmannsthal focuses on what the merchant depicts as a lack of character in his compatriots. In the phenomenological crisis, the focus reveals a lack of presence. In articulating the cultural critique in the first three letters, the merchant gives a series of counterexamples; here, too, with the phenomenological crisis. There is even a link to the cultural critique in the merchant’s contrast between “here” and abroad: “Over there, in other lands, even in the most miserable of times, the jug or the pail with more or less fresh water in the morning was a given, and it was something living: a friend. Here, it was, one could say: a ghost.”11 Even houses12 and trees – in contrast to the beloved walnut tree of his childhood13 – induce this nausea with their ghostly, non-real aspect. And in contrast to the breath of fresh air he

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experienced while thinking of Germany from abroad,14 he now senses stagnation: “something shuddered through me, something that split my breast in two like a breath, a wafting, so indescribable, of eternal nothingness, of eternal nowhere, a breath not of death, but of not-life, indescribable.”15 The age-old trope of the internal split – like the two souls in Faust’s single breast or the medieval Parzival’s doubt, “zwîvel” – has been adapted to emphasize the actively separating, dissociating implications. Dissociation and parody are also worked into the description of the landscape16 as he now sees it: “it took on a face, its own ambiguous countenance so full of inner uncertainty, pernicious non-reality: it lay there so void – so spectrally void.”17 In the context of this ghostly reality, Jörg Schuster draws attention to Hofmannsthal’s confession to worrying that “real” people and things might be lost to him; they might instead be absorbed into his fantasy. Schuster cites a number of letters Hofmannsthal wrote to the countess Christiana Thun-Salm, the most striking of which dates to early January 1908 – that is, about a month before the last two epistles of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” were published. In the letter to Thun-Salm, Hofmannsthal writes of those things that make life “more beautiful, richer, and more endearing … and which, through the dangerous afflatus of poetic vision, could be driven out of life away into the world of fantasy.”18 Schuster reads this, and indeed most of Hofmannsthal’s epistolary writings – fictional and nonfictional – as the writer’s way of exploiting life by aestheticizing it and using it for his work. Schuster’s evidence is strong. He cites, for instance, a passage from another of Hofmannsthal’s letters, this time to Helene von Nostitz from 15 May 1907, wherein the author writes that the addressee is “necessary for my life, for the life of my fantasy or my thoughts.”19 According to Schuster, this statement makes use of a rhetorical correctio that reduces life to aesthetic production.20 This is one possible way to read the sentence, but there are others. It is not clear from Hofmannsthal’s statement that the movement from “my life” to “the life of my fantasy” is merely correctio; it can also be read (simultaneously perhaps) as amplificatio: that is, through repetition and further specification, he asserts how powerful an effect Nostitz has had on his life. In spite of his desire for community, Hofmannsthal constantly reminds us that our condition is always also one of isolation, and the monologic quality of the letters underscores this fact. Aestheticization is not so much an attempt to create distance – we already perceive the

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world at a distance – as it is a reification or acknowledgment of the human condition. Ignoring the essential difference that separates us and makes us particular may be even more severe a disease than trying to give form to our frustration with this condition. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” give that frustration form. In fact, this text develops the content of the letters to Christiana ­Thun-Salm and Helene von Nostitz. In the letter to Thun-Salm, Hofmannsthal writes that he fears the better parts of life might be “driven out of life away into fantasy”; the merchant expresses a similar fear that Europe “could steal me away from myself.”21 The so-called “reality” steals away (“wegstehlen”) the self, just as the poetic vision drives away (“­wegtreiben”) the “real” other. How these displacements occur is equally relevant: namely, with a breath. In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” it is “a breath [Hauch], a wafting, so indescribable” which threatens the subject; in the letter to Thun-Salm, it is “the dangerous afflatus [Anhauch] of poetic vision” which threatens real people and things. This is the same movement described from ­opposite perspectives. From the perspective of “real” life and the “real” letter, art is the danger. But from the perspective of the “­fictional” letter and the “fictional” life of the merchant, a fictionalized “reality” poses the threat. In light of the existential malaise and phenomenological precariousness, the merchant attempts a self-diagnosis. He wonders if his illness is psychosomatic, brought about by something that “the European air seems to lay out ready for him who has returned from far away after having been gone for a long time, perhaps too long.”22 Has the merchant abandoned something? Has he been avoiding something? Or has he, like another medieval German traveller, Iwein, simply been enjoying his adventure, without considering how much time has passed, without fulfilling his responsibility to return home punctually? Or is this a broader issue of time always being out of joint? Readers never get to learn what it was that started the merchant on his journey, or why it took eighteen years, but the reference to avoidance is intentional. While working on “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal was also writing a series of notes for what he called a “two-voiced soliloquy.”23 The speaker is a “Revenant” – a ghost or spirit returned to the world – that possesses two voices: a chiding voice that emanates from below, and an ameliorative one from above.24 The soliloquy embraces contradictory voices and highlights internal division. Like the Revenant, the merchant is a being who

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has returned (he is the “Zurückgekehrter”). He even experiences his world as splintered and ghostly; he feels separated from his body, and is simultaneously ashamed and in denial about his role in society. The source of his shame is the money he has made, or rather, the significance money has acquired. That is, in fact, the one thing that has become clear: “Today I cannot clearly express what went whirling through my whole self: but that my business and my own acquired money disgusted me … I had taken in twenty-thousand examples: how they forgot life itself in favour of that which should only be a means to living and should have no other value than as a tool.”25 As with the inversion of reality and non-reality, so too there has been an inversion of money and life. He continues: “For months, a flood of faces driven by nothing other than the money they had or the money others had. Their houses, their monuments, their streets, all that was for me in this somewhat visionary moment nothing more than the thousandfold reflected grimace of their ghostly non-­ existence.”26 This description alludes to the contemporary sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel’s diagnosis that “the more the life of society becomes dominated by monetary relationships, the more the relativistic character of existence finds its expression in conscious life, since money is nothing other than a special form of embodied relativity of economic goods that signifies their value.”27 Capital gain is lifeless growth without character. The preoccupation with money has morphed into something akin to a religion, so thoroughly do people desire the growth of capital for its own sake.28 This way of thinking has pervaded even the merchant’s own life, such that the physical objects before him exist, like money, only as provisional things, waiting in anticipation. Money, as a symbol of modern flux (evoked in the image of the flood of faces driven by greed), comes to stand in for a view of a world that resists reification, character formation, and existential coherence.

Visio Divina a s A e s t h eti c Encounter These thoughts seize the merchant just an hour before a meeting, at which he is meant to speak on behalf of his company’s interests. He contemplates his options but feels he has nowhere to go – everything reminds him of money and greed. To escape these impressions, he ducks into a quiet side street. The stillness, contrasting with both the hectic movement and the noise of the bustling streets,29 initiates the merchant into a new atmosphere. Upon noticing a placard advertising an

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exhibition of paintings and illustrations, he decides this will be a good distraction from his “absurd thoughts” (“unsinnigen Gedanken”).30 As a man in spiritual crisis might find himself drawn to a place of worship, so this merchant enters a gallery, not consciously looking for guidance. Formally, the visit to the gallery repeats the structure of flight depicted in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” but with key differences. Whereas the merchant’s son flees an uncanny beauty for pleasant fragrances, the merchant abandons the noxious air and lifeless world of things and directs himself towards art – and the nature and humanity discernible in it. He begins by attempting to catalogue what he sees: the subject matter, the number and kinds of works. Initially, the tone is suffused with the equanimity of the phenomenological gaze. The pictures seemed to me rather garish, unsettled, quite rough, quite ­peculiar, I had first to find my bearings in order even to see the first ones as pictures, as a unity – but then, then I saw, then I saw them all in this way, every single one, and all of them together, and the nature in them, and the human power of soul that formed the nature here, and tree and bush and field and hillside which were painted there, and that other thing as well, that which was behind what had been painted, the essence, the ­indescribably fateful –, I saw all this in such a way that I lost the feeling of myself in these pictures, then powerfully regained it, and then lost it again! … But how could I put into words something so incomprehensible, something so sudden, so ­powerful, so impossible to analyse!31 The initial confusion, which hitherto manifested in terms of a vague disjunction of things from reality, now has been given form (and fate); it has been reified in the artwork and set into motion by the overwhelming intensity of colour. The excited pace of the text – accelerated by repetition and intensification with each new beginning (“but then, then I saw, then I saw them all”) – reflects this bombardment with an altogether new tone for “The Letters,” recalling the language of a mystical vision – a visio divina. He identifies a substantial, unified otherness that has specificity and existence: first the internal cohesion of this world (a closed and self-sufficient, aesthetic world), then the sense of the artist behind it all (formed by nature and in turn a giver of form) then, finally, that essential (unnamed) thing.

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This vision recalls a much earlier essay by Hofmannsthal, “Die Malerei in Wien” (“Painting in Vienna”). In this 1893 text, the ­nineteen-year-old Hofmannsthal expresses an urgent call for a new sensibility: “In the presence of a painting, our public relates to everything that is inessential in a work of art, but never to the main thing, the truly painterly; it is interested in the anecdote, in tricks and ­gimmicks, everything but the one necessary thing: whether an artistic individuality has had the free power to offer a new perception of how the world is seen, gained through living eyes, in such a way that it might be conveyed to the soul of the viewer.”32 The merchant – ­perhaps because he has been spared eighteen years of philistinism – is able to and does see what he suspects is the essential in these paintings, and in them he sees too that they were made by an “artistic individuality,” one who had the “free power” to give form to his perception of the world-picture. In chapter 1, I referred to Hofmannsthal’s experience reading Otway’s Venice Preserv’d and his recognition of the faults and greatness of the human being who composed it. Likewise, in the 1902 “Address,” Hofmannsthal draws attention to the material construction of tapestries, “knotted by human fingers over endless hours.”33 His is an aesthetic appreciation insofar as it responds to the elements of the artwork that appeal to the senses; but crucially, in addition to this, he almost always invokes the person behind the work’s existence and the effort, ardour, and even suffering that went into its creation. If in modern society workers are alienated from their labour and what they produce, then the artist’s relation to the artwork presents a counterimage. Part of what constitutes this alternative is what Hofmannsthal calls “Frömmigkeit,” often translated as “piety.” In one of the variants of the dialogue “Furcht” (Fear), there is a definition of piety articulated with reference to the art of dance: “Dancing is being able to give oneself over totally and purely. Now this is. This is piety. Our mothers were such, for that reason the river stayed within its banks. For that reason the olive tree bore. For that reason the fountain gave.”34 “Piety” is: to give oneself over to something.35 It exhibits the same deictic structure as the symbol: it points beyond itself. And it seems to establish context for the flux – it does not halt it, but it ideally keeps it from inundating the world. Even the tree (here: the olive tree; in the letters: the walnut tree) bears intransitively (“the olive tree bore”), and does so out of piety. The fountain, that magical place from the

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merchant’s childhood, likewise gives out of piety (“Darum gab der Brunnen”). In a human being, piety would entail the whole person moving at once – in other words, overcoming that internal division and lack of character.36 This is why the dance is such an appropriate visualization. It is a kind of poising of the will, an intentionality or a posture of being, and an act of giving oneself, all in one gesture. After considering the inhumane and impious deeds perpetrated by Germans in China – a reference to the Siege of the International Legations ­during the Boxer Rebellion – the merchant asks himself: “Am I myself perhaps a pious man? No. But there is a piety of life,” he writes, and it is not a matter of praying in a church or temple: “and faith in the gin bottle is still a kind of faith. But here amidst the educated and propertied Germans, here I am uneasy.”37 Germany is stifling, and every act is performed without devotion, without giving – and without giving space. And all the intellectual training and money in the world cannot change that.38 And thus, for the first time in two decades, perhaps longer, the merchant himself is able to feel that sort of piety that involves giving himself over to something completely. Insofar as it requires him totally in this moment of dedication, it allows for a sense of the self as whole.39 The work of art, in l’art pour l’art fashion, is a world unto itself: it is given a frame, a stage upon which to present itself, in the particular artwork, at this particular hour, and here, in the effect of the colours.40 The merchant concedes: this is a highly personal response to a vivid portrayal of mundane objects. He cannot expect his reader to have the same experience. But this is precisely the point: in viewing the works of art, he has rediscovered the particularity and specificity that a world governed by monetary exchange negates. In a similar vein, Georg Simmel notes that money “lives in continuous self-alienation from any given point and thus forms the counterpart and direct ­negation of all being in itself.”41 The work of art, in this case, has cordoned off a space for autonomy and particularity. Yet, as Nietzsche says: “There is no regular path leading from those intui­ tions into the land of ghostly schemata, of abstractions: there are no words for them; man falls silent when he sees them or speaks in strictly forbidden metaphors and egregious combinations of concepts in order to correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition, at least by demolishing and ridiculing the old ­conception restraints.”42

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The merchant has found himself in this position. He does not remain silent, but he recognizes the futility of trying to give an objective representation of the encounter with the works of art. Listing off the scenes and subject matter portrayed in the paintings does nothing to reify a subjective experience; instead, he must make use of “egregious combinations of concepts in order to correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.” To do this, he devotes most of the remainder of this letter and the next to praising the power of colour.43 Colour, in fact, became a topic of great interest in the early years of the new century.44 1907 was a year that marked Hofmannsthal’s fascination with Van Gogh and Rilke’s fascination with Cézanne.45 The two authors’ writings on colour in painting have a remarkable number of points of contact; and both authors felt the epistolary form was an appropriate medium for presenting the experience. Moreover, both collections were written with publication in mind, and one ­wonders whether there was some undocumented contact between Rilke and Hofmannsthal during this time that led to their treatment of the topic. In any case, it seems they came to their particular formulations independently during the summer of 1907.46 I will occasionally compare their views in order to give greater articulation to the ­particularities of Hofmannsthal’s “Letters of the Man Who Returned” in light of their cultural context. The merchant’s initial description of the colours evokes something of the intensity of a medieval illuminated manuscript: “There is an unbelievable, most powerful blue that returns again and again, a green as if made from melted emeralds, a yellow ranging as far as orange.”47 And very quickly the descriptions move beyond the visible to suggest something of that longed-for piety: “But what are colours, if the innermost life of the objects does not break forth through them! And this innermost life was there, tree and stone and wall and sunken road proclaimed their innermost life, casting it towards me as it were, but it was not the ecstasy and harmony of their beautiful silent life, as long ago it sometimes flowed towards me from old pictures like a magical atmosphere; no, only the force of their existence, the raging wonder of their existence stared at with incredibility, assailed my soul.”48 Indeed, these colours do illuminate as in a manuscript: what they illuminate is a bearing so devotional that it begins to approach self-sacrifice. But this sacrifice is not self-annihilation. If anything, it dramatizes the struggle against the fall into a lacklustre deportment of non-existence.49

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The colours display, instead, an energetic and assertive movement: “Wucht” and “Wunder ihres Daseins” (“force” and “wonder of their existence”) instead of “Wollust und Harmonie” (“ecstasy and harmony”); their innermost life “assailed [his] soul” (“fiel [seine] Seele an”) instead of flowing to him, as happened with the Albrecht Dürer pictures from his childhood. This depiction of piety is anything but the quiet attitude of passivity: It is self-assertive and yet also altruistic. This could be read as a kind of psychological projection, devoid of any real interaction or communication.50 The highly personal nature of the experience – which the merchant himself has already highlighted – would support this view. Further, the subsequent description seems to apply just as much to the merchant as it does to the visual experience: “One being, every tree, every streak of yellow or virescent field, every fence, every sunken road torn into the stony hill, one being the tin jug, the clay bowl, the table, the heavy cushioned chair – they all held themselves up to me as if newly born from the terrible chaos of Not-living, from the abyss of non-existence, so that I felt – no – I knew how each of these things, these creatures, was born out of a terrible doubt concerning the world, and now covered up with its existence a horrible gorge, a yawning nothingness, for ever!”51 Can we presume that these depicted pitchers and tables and bowls – all things that the merchant had earlier experienced as not real – have truly been through this fight for existence that the merchant portrays? Is this the positive image of that mysterious thing that the merchant earlier described as lying within him, “a surge, a chaos, something unborn”?52 If one subscribes to Nietzsche’s early notion of the eternal wound of existence, “die ewige Wunde des Daseins” (which even seems to resonate in “Wunder ihres Daseins”), then yes. Art exposes the wound of existence, and is born out of it, but – this is crucial – it does not heal it. In a similar vein, Hofmannsthal wrote an essay in 1905 about Hermann Stehr’s book, Der begrabene Gott (The Buried God) in which he praises Stehr for taking readers into depths, “where we had never been before. Except perhaps insofar as we have suffered … But here, the nameless receives a name, the mute receives its language, and the formless its form. Here, the hands of creators have given the darkness a face and have built and shaped something from the nightmare. And we again recognize the gloomy depths of difficult times.”53 Anyone who has suffered knows the anguish of ­anonymity, formlessness, lifelessness. The human hands that can give the darkness a face do us all a service insofar as they give form

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Figure 2.1  Still Life with Blue Enamel Coffeepot, Earthenware and Fruit, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Features still life objects discussed in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.”

to that which in its formlessness makes us feel powerless; they render its visage visible to the eye or to the imagination. The paintings the merchant sees perform a similar function. At the end of the essay, Hofmannsthal writes two more sentences important in this context, showing a remarkable consistency of thought: “And a word more: Great, great, great. And one more: Reverence.”54 If the depths of being are to be given form, greatness must coexist with reverence and piety.

S u ffe r in g a n d Sacri fi ce Art works, as creative products of expression, give these things that have suffered55 a place to exist; in this way, suffering is as much a precondition for the success of this struggle as the willingness and devotion of the artist’s hand are.56 The images are all one being: they have all suffered57 through birth, have been born out of a “terrible doubt,” and are all made of the same thing, of paint on canvas. The merchant encounters a world in colour as an answer to his to struggle

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to locate reality in the colourless things around him. The colours and the created nature of the paintings allow him finally to set foot on a metaphorical terra firma, “like one who, after immeasurable reeling, feels solid ground beneath his feet and around him rages a storm, into whose whirling rage he wants to exult.”58 That which earlier “went whirling through my whole self”59 has been externalized and exorcized, such that he stands in the calm and silent centre, while the storm churns around him. The coloured forms contain this raging storm within themselves, and they in turn are born in it: in the storm “there were born before my eyes, born for my sake, these trees, with the roots staring in the earth, with the branches staring towards the clouds, in a storm, these fissures in the earth, these valleys between the hills revealed themselves, in even the heaviness of the boulders, the frozen storm was there.”60 More than that, the storm is also an answer from an “unknown soul of inconceivable strength.”61 The calm and (aesthetic) distance – achieved paradoxically by being in the centre of the storm – give the viewer the space requisite for desire, will, and relation, and even that piety which had been absent all along. Martin Heidegger’s words will later echo this idea of repositioning through speaking. Van Gogh’s work, Heidegger writes, “spoke. In proximity to the work we were suddenly somewhere other than we are usually accustomed to be.”62 With Hofmannsthal, however, there is an emphasis not on speaking as such, but on answering.63 Now that the merchant can see the world, he wishes to join in, close the distance, rejoice, and give himself over in answer to the soul who painted this world of revealed interconnectivity. Colours do not just mediate the experience. That experience exists, for the merchant, in the colours themselves. He writes: And now I could feel a certain something … could feel what was amongst them, with them, how their innermost life broke forth in colour and how the colours lived, each for the sake of the other, and how one, mysteriously powerful, bore all the ­others, and in all of this I could feel a heart, the soul of him who had made this, who himself with this vision gave answer to the catalepsy of the most dreadful doubt, could feel, could know, could see through, could enjoy the chasms and peaks, exterior and interior, one and all in one ten-thousandth a fragment of time as I jotted down the words, it was as though I was double, was lord over my life all at the same time, lord over my faculties,

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my understanding, felt time passing, knew, now only twenty minutes remain, now ten, now five, stood outside, hailed a coach, rode off.64 I have included almost the entire sentence in this quote because it is noteworthy for its length, rhythm, and, most importantly, its gradual descriptive movement from the centre of the storm to the open city street. The sentence aesthetically enacts through its syntax and length and through the openness of the conclusion (“rode off”), the connectivity that it describes. This connectivity is not casual; it is intended, and it is another example of Hofmannsthal’s concept of piety. Colours bear each other, reminding one of the olive tree that bears out of piety.65 Because the colours bear each other, it is possible to discern the “heart” of the person who gave these colours their place. In creating this vision, the artist “gave answer to the catalepsy of the most dreadful doubt.” He was strong enough to paint, in spite of the great doubt that threatened him. Painting was his defiant, worldforming answer to the abyss – and he gave this answer to himself. In doing so, he also gave the paintings their existence; and finally, he gave their potential audience (the merchant) a new picture of the world. This act, which originated from a sense of self-preservation, is altruistic by virtue of its effect and the attitude of piety. It is also artificial, insofar as it expresses a desire to see the world as picture – a Weltbild in the Heideggerian sense of the term – but in a new way. When Heidegger writes in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that “To be a work means: to set up a world,” he is suggesting that the work – the object – is the creator of the world; but we must also remember, he reminds us at the beginning of that text, that the work is created by and in turn helps to create the artist.66 The genetic origin gets lost in circularity.67 In a similar manner, the content of this aesthetic answer – the colours bearing each other in support – plays up the interdependence and confusion of internal and external worlds, and of subject and object: this can be conceived as a gesture of altruism just as much as it is one of egotism, highlighting an ethical moment in the dialogical (if also circular) movement of the aesthetic. The gesture of piety spins the wheel and seems to allow for that communion with the observer in his aesthetic enjoyment – perhaps the highest point for the merchant is this moment of taking pleasure in the contrasts brought together. But the word Hofmannsthal uses

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(“Genießen”) is multilayered: underneath enjoyment is an awareness that something has been sacrificed. There is always a sense of loss even in the moment of most profoundly felt presence.68 As if “doubled,” he no longer senses internal separation, dissociation, or doubt, so much as multiplication: presence is intensified.69 The internal chasm is experienced in its Keatsian negative capability rather than as something privative. He is able, as it were, to greet the other within. And with this awareness of doubleness comes also double perspective: he is here, amidst the paintings, but also acutely aware of the passage of time and the impossibility of the sustained moment. David Wellbery notes that aesthetic presence is characterized, for Hofmannsthal, by simultaneity and by a recognition of the passing of time.70 This doubleness gives the merchant the ability to direct himself wholly to the task at hand – and with that, he rides off to his meeting. The conference and its mundane financial concerns are re-­introduced almost in the same breath. There is no abrupt shift, and, from the merchant’s point of view, the financial world can be “conquered” by the heightened awareness achieved in that aesthetic moment, ­surrounded by Van Gogh’s paintings. Common to both situations is an appreciation for the interdependence of things in the world. Hofmannsthal is not the first to bring the economic and the aesthetic under the same umbrella: in the arch-Romantic novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis notably has the merchants (“Kaufleute”) teach the young Heinrich about poetry. In such a fairy-tale world, economics and aesthetics co-exist. Capital is not dead, but rather part of a larger life cycle of activity, production, and enjoyment of commodities and works. Economics is intimately linked to a healthy ecology, where the fruits of labour can be enjoyed by everyone. But what makes capital grow? Is capital, in fact, the unmoved mover, the new god?71 Must it be appeased? The merchant had earlier written: “I want to flourish within myself, and this Europe could steal me away from myself.”72 Perhaps capital, like its divine predecessors, demands a sacrifice from time to time; in order to grow, it parasitically steals from the other faculties of human experience – and especially from the imagination. The merchant has repeatedly written that he had no time to tarry with the creatures of his imagination. Yet if the imaginative faculty is necessary for the human experience, then it would seem art is a potential corrective to the “European-German feeling of presence” identified in the second letter.73 The merchant certainly alludes to that possibility

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when he says that “Conferences of this sort, where the magnitude of numbers appeal to the imagination, and the variety, the separation of the forces that come into play, require a talent for seeing the connections, the outcome is decided not by intelligence, but rather by a mysterious power for which I know no name.”74 If we did not know any better, we might think this were a matter of art, not economics. Appealing to the fantasy, to variety (as in Hogarth’s understanding of beauty as “composed variety”), to play, and to the connectivity of things – all of this sounds like a discourse on art. Can there be a poetry of economics? Perhaps yes,75 and perhaps this is the awareness that has been awakened in the merchant during the aesthetic experience: he now sees the world, including the economic world, with the sensitive eyes of poetry: “I was able to achieve more for my company than the board of directors had expected in even the best of cases, and I achieved it like someone in a dream who plucks a flower from a bare wall.”76 With the business growing, he can finally pluck the flowers – rather than the more useful fruits – of his investment, as if “in a dream.” So says the man who does not daydream! It also helps to recall that the wall – here, as in Robert Musil’s Young Törleß and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge – is a surface for projection. His life, in this moment, has become dreamlike, but also in some way cinematic.77 The dream here stands in metonymically for the aesthetic. It is that creative element – manifested convincingly in the paintings of Van Gogh – that does not attempt to reproduce a vision of reality, but rather to create a world out of a profound ­existential and phenomenological doubt. The repressed has returned: initially in its malicious form as the non-reality of the objects around him, and finally in its poeticized, aesthetic form. Georg Simmel articulates precisely the shift in perspective vis-à-vis reality that the merchant has experienced: “On the one hand, art brings us closer to reality; it places us in a more immediate relationship to its distinctive and innermost meaning; behind the cold strangeness of the external world it reveals to us the spirituality of existence through which it is related and made intelligible to us. In addition, however, all art brings about a distancing from the immediacy of things; it allows the concreteness of stimuli to recede and stretches a veil between us and them just like the fine bluish haze that envelops distant mountains.”78 The merchant has achieved a wide-angle ­perspective, seeing things at a distance, through a coloured haze.79 Yet he also sees things up close: “The faces of the gentlemen with whom

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I conducted this business came remarkably close to me.”80 In this moment, the nearness and the distance are united. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” could end here, in this moment of paradoxical union, with the merchant standing face-to-face with his colleagues and compatriots. It would end on a fantastic note of poetic economy. But the fourth letter continues with a postscript that reintroduces doubt about the harmonious coexistence of a world of business and the world of art. At the same time, the tension between the desire for community and the desire for isolation is brought into focus. The merchant identifies the artist as “Vincenz van Gogh” and notes that there “is something in me that compels me to believe he is of my generation, not much older than I am.”81 But we might ask: why does he feel compelled? Why does he not write simply: “I think”? Even in this moment of community, there is a tension: does the merchant value this moment of shared existence (and suffering), or does he, as Rilke says of Van Gogh in his Letters on Cézanne, find it in unbearable?82 Let us for a moment compare a similar fear of closing the distance, of leaping into the abyss understood as fear of intimacy, but also fear of identification or loss of self. In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the narrator remarks on the embarrassment and impotence one experiences with intimacy. John Zilcosky, in his book Uncanny Encounters, argues that, given the similarities between the youth Tadzio and the aging Aschenbach, a relationship “with this narcissistic double would signify the ‘return home’ (Heimkehr) and to ‘himself’ (in sich) that Aschenbach dreads.”83 The expressive affinities between Mann’s and Hofmannsthal’s texts raise the question: to what might the merchant return? To home? To himself? Does this inform his desire to maintain the security of distance? Perhaps the desire to keep at a distance is what prompts the merchant to entertain the following idea: “I don’t know if I will stand before these pictures a second time, though I will probably buy one of them, but not to take possession of it, but rather to give it to the art dealer for safekeeping.”84 With this consideration, the merchant has introduced a whole new set of problems. He is, first of all, acknowledging and supporting the commercialization of art. And maybe, from his new perspective, he can see the practical connection between money and art clearly: the artist, after all, has to make a living (in Van Gogh’s l­etters, money troubles are a recurring theme). The suggestion here would be that we should not try to sequester the aesthetic object and preserve its “sanctity” by refusing to treat it as a saleable commodity.

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In 1890, a youthful Hofmannsthal, much in the spirit of the sickened merchant, wrote a poem he called “Verse, auf eine Banknote geschrieben” (Verses written onto a banknote). That poem includes the following diatribe: Venal! All is venal! Honour too! … And all my verses, petty and decayed, Do grace this note of anguish ne’er allayed, To me they seemed as figures, branching out, Yet carved upon a deadly, glistening blade …85 What makes the anger expressed here particularly cutting is the realization that art is a secular commodity, and that its very existence and circulation depend upon this banknote (which doubles as a blade). To follow the thread a little further: Hofmannsthal himself collected art – and sold it, when he found himself in financial straits after the First World War and while working on one of the most demanding writing projects of his life, Der Turm (The Tower). In a letter to Carl J. Burckhardt, he states: “It isn’t money, it’s freedom.”86 The very real concerns for personal economic stability make way for what Simmel calls a “negative freedom,” which is financial independence – that is, if one wishes to make art, at least. In a sense, nearly all verses are written on banknotes. Hofmannsthal realized this early on. In one of the letters to his father, he signed off with: “Embracing you most warmly, your Son Hugo – poet and merchant.”87 In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” purchasing the painting is, from the ­perspective of the merchant, a sensible investment (even if idealistic sensibilities might be offended); but it is also an acknowledgment of necessity. Buying the painting is, moreover, a way of supporting artistic endeavours. And finally, it can be seen as a positive response to both painting (the product and the activity) and painter.88 But why give the paintings to an art dealer for safekeeping? Ursula Renner sees the paintings as having returned to the merchant his ­ability to carry out his mercantile duties and dealings – now with art understood as a commodity.89 Moreover, not all art dealers are ­created equal – presumably the merchant would find a trustworthy, knowledgeable person (perhaps like Vincent Van Gogh’s brother, Théo).90 But why does he not want to have the paintings in his presence? Simone Gottschlich-Kempf makes the case that the merchant’s

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act is one of resistance – an action of mixed sentiment, combining the desire to preserve with the desire never again to experience this moment for fear it might reveal itself as false or ineffective the second time around.91 In a similar vein, Susanne Scharnowski argues that this moment threatens the relation between self and world that the ­aesthetic experience allowed for in the first place. The purchase of a work of art would subject it to the same processes of capitalism that led to the merchant’s sickness.92 Gottschlich-Kempf’s point about resistance is key. However, given the merchant casually states he feels compelled to believe the artist is of his generation, I suspect this resistance has more to do with a desire for keeping the subjective, aesthetic world separate from the “real” world, and to thwart any ensuing experience of the works’ worldwithdrawal and world-decay, as Heidegger would say (“Weltentzug und Weltzerfall”).93 Yet in this desire lies an economic contradiction: money pulls art into the world. This in turn reveals the conflicting nature at the heart of the aesthetic experience: the closed world has a context, and that context is the ever-changing “real” world that ­surrounds it like water around an island. The paintings are born out of what is “real,” but then they are also able to create a more convincing, more assertive reality or terra firma than that out of which they are born. The contemporary dates of the artist make the experience that much more real. Whether the merchant wishes to preserve the aesthetic moment from reality, himself from community, his finances from loss, or the painting from deterioration, is left open. That Hofmannsthal has his merchant consider handing the purchase over to an art dealer for preservation is deliberate. In other words, the merchant’s transformation is not – nor can it ever be – a transformation that disregards his history and context. The merchant is still a merchant, and he still embodies and replicates the contradictions of his world. —*— “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” is structured around reflections and parodies and is itself a highly self-reflexive work of literature. But that raises a question: Is the production and reception of art condemned to the solipsistic, mirroring interiority of the artist (or the viewer)? The final published letter explores the relation between aesthetics and ethics with reference to this question.

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Each letter is a text, usually marked by a time and place. The letters can be read in isolation, but we know that they are part of a correspondence. Like beads on a chain, their overall effect is produced not in isolation, but in relation. And, like words in a sentence, the smallest unit of meaning never originates in the single word (or the single ­letter), but rather in the relation between words (or letters). When the merchant begins his “last” letter, it is with deliberate reference to the preceding one: “You will hardly be able to understand what I wrote to you, least of all how these pictures could so move me.”94 By making reference to the previous letter, this sentence heralds the focus of this letter, establishing a link between the two. Further, by emphasizing the singularity and subjectivity of the event, the merchant also attempts to set this event in relation to others, and to create out of it something that can be shared: “It will seem to you like a whimsy, an isolated incident, an oddity, and yet – if only one could place it, if only one could pull it out of oneself and bring it to light.”95 The merchant is describing three processes in one: the writing process, the communication process, and the productive-creative process, using a turn of phrase that is reminiscent of the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe’s description of Van Gogh’s artistic process: “He did not paint his p ­ ictures, he cast them forth … He did not feel himself there, he was one with the element which he represented, and painted himself in the flaming clouds.”96 The gesture is slightly modified in Hofmannsthal’s text: rather than pushing the pictures out or casting them forth, the merchant desires to tear or pull them out (“herausreißen”).97 The ­subtle relation between the pushing and pulling, between casting forth and tearing out, suggests more basic, organic movements of relation, of dialogue, of giving and taking, and of exchange. What is it that he wishes to draw out and expose? ­The answer would seem to be: the effect of colours. And Van Gogh’s paintings, with their intense use of contrastive colours as opposed to gradual changes in tone, are an apt point of departure. The use of colour in this manner expressed something modern: painters around the last part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century had discovered (or rather re-discovered) the expressive, affective quality of colour. On a psychological and sociological level, this makes perfect sense: the colours initially appear garish in contrast to what Spengler in Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) calls “studio brown” (“atelierbraun”), which he associated with the culture and

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faith of the baroque era.98 Further, the colours of modernity mirror those of the placard-speckled city, with its chaotic palette meant to distract, entertain, and advertise, the general effect of which might very well be a kind of colourlessness of modern urban society.99 The colours in Van Gogh’s paintings, however, reveal a different kind of correspondence, born out of the “the force of their existence” (“die Wucht ihres Daseins”).100 As Meier-Graefe has it: “The surge of water which frightens the shipwrecked describes a divine curve, and even the horrified face of the unlucky one, who clings to a plank, seems harmonious in this whirling rage of water. Van Gogh’s images are ordered in this manner. They give rise to a paroxysmic apprehension of nature.”101 The relation between colours strikes the merchant, too. At first, they shock: but unlike the colours of the city, which risk cancelling each other out, here they are organized into a composed variety, in which each enhances the other. Just as these letters are fragments of a larger epistolary collection, so too do the hues work together, producing a consonance of images and phrases. In one of the notes to “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal went so far as to write of “the boundless relativity of the colours: every colour exists only through its contiguity.”102 This note is an existential distillation of Van Gogh’s observations that colours appear only when their complements are also present. Otherwise, they appear “colourless”: “Fromentin and Gérôme see the earth in the south as colourless, and a whole lot of people saw it that way. My God, yes, if you take dry sand in your hand and if you look at it closely. Water, too, air, too, considered this way, are colourless. n o b l u e w i t h o u t ye l l o w and wit hout o r a nge , and if you do blue, then do yellow and orange as well, surely.”103 This aesthetic rule is adopted and given a central place in the context of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” Relationality is necessary for the perception of a thing’s existence, and a clearer vision of existence is accompanied by the aesthetic perception of harmony. In order to describe the effect of consonance, the merchant turns to a story of Rama Krishna he once heard, and which made a deep impression on him. The story of the Brahman’s experience of Enlightenment highlights the visual moment in which Rama Krishna fell to the ground and stood up, as if reborn. The visual experience is a result of the juxtaposition of two colours: “nothing more than these two colours against each other, this eternal unnameable thing, pierced his soul in this moment and loosed what was bound, and joined what

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Figure 2.2  Wheatfield with Crows, by Vincent van Gogh, Auvers, June 1890. Features the typical contrasting colours and the “paroxysmic apprehension of nature” described by Julius Meier-Graefe.

was unbound.”104 The imagery has an aesthetic analog in the material that is woven or knotted together to form a tapestry or a text: We are once again in Hofmannsthal’s image-world of art and (ethical) ties. But where does this “power” originate: in the colours, or in the merchant himself? The merchant asks: “Did I not say that at strange hours the colours of things have a power over me? But isn’t it I, rather, who takes on a power over them, the entire, full power, for some length of time, to wrest from them their wordless, abysmal secret, is not the force in me, do I not feel it in my breast as a swelling, a fullness, a foreign, sublime, enrapturing presence, with me, in me, in that place where blood comes and goes?”105 This passage has given rise to opposing interpretations: Antje Büssgen, for instance, sees the merchant’s experience of Van Gogh’s paintings as ultimately originating in the self and characterizes that experience as monological rather than dialogical or dialectical; duality of any kind is sublated in this colour-mysticism.106 Reading Hofmannsthal’s text alongside Gottfried Benn’s “Garten von Arles” (“The Garden of Arles”), Büssgen sees here a quest for authenticity, which is sought and asserted wherever dissociated parts (e.g., subject and object, word and thing) cannot be reconciled; only in the ecstatic visionary moment can their unity be (merely) imagined.107 Ursula Renner, on the other hand, reminds us that these moments are not set off by memories or daydreams, but rather by something in the external world – that is, the event cannot originate solely in the

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mind.108 The merchant’s vacillation marks this double-origin. The moment is structured, a priori, as a dynamic relation. That the moment may take place subjectively, for the merchant, is not the question at hand: what is in question is whether the subject can exist without reference to the outside. Further: what is the nature of this relation between subject and object? The merchant goes on to doubt his own power once again: “But if everything was in me, why couldn’t I close my eyes and, dumb and blind, enjoy the unnameable feeling of my self, why did I have to keep myself there … and look, look into the space before me?”109 Earlier, the merchant’s knowledge of his own existence was predicated upon the existence of the external world which also knows suffering. Here, his enjoyment of his sense of self depends on an altruistic gesture issued by the world: “this sacred simultaneous enjoyment of my self and the world, which opened up before me, as if it had opened up its breast, why was this doubleness, this entwinement, this outside and inside, this interlocked rhythmically beating You [“dies ineinanderschlagende Du”] tied to my looking?”110 Who exactly the “You” refers to is something of a mystery, and I have not found a single interpretation of it in the secondary literature.111 In one of his notes to the “Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal penned the following in a stream of consciousness: “Here there’s an overcoming of all inhibitions an almost raging You.”112 Similarly, in his notes to “The Conversation about Poems,” a reference to Novalis points the reader again in the direction of this relational “Du”: “Novalis: We should transform everything into a You, a second I; only by doing this do we lift ourselves to the great I.”113 While the drama might play in the head of the subject, that subject must at least entertain the idea that everything (“alles”) has a ­subject position. The statement is a paradox: only by recognizing that we are not the only I’s (and eyes) in the room, only by positing the I’s of others and of the world, can we be “great.” With “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal has reworked the notion he developed earlier in the “Address.” In that early lecture, he says that when we behold works of art and call something beautiful, we are subject to the great demand of the world of beauty: “this demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected power of the mysterious line of ancestors within us, the towering stacks of layers of our supra-individual memory, piled one upon the other.”114 In positing – or

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recognizing – the “You,” the merchant answers to a demand issued by beauty.115 Almost two decades later, Hofmannsthal will draft plans for a “Brief an einen Gleichaltrigen” (Letter to a contemporary) whose imagined recipient was to be modelled on the philosopher of religion Martin Buber. One of the notes reads: “A friend’s presence gives measure. Müller-Hofmann. Through him one expands the bedrock of experience. We put ourselves to the test of the whole You.”116 The “Du” of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” certainly resembles Buber’s notion of “Du,” and these notes would seem to indicate that Hofmannsthal was aware of an intellectual affinity between Buber and himself, particularly with respect to the development of dialogical thought.117 Consider the following passage from Buber’s 1932 philosophical treatise, Zwiesprache (Dialogue): “all art is, from its origin, essentially dialogical: … all music calls to an ear, which is not the ear of the musician’s, all visual art an eye, which is not the eye of the artist’s … they all in their unique language say something (not a ‘feeling,’ but rather a perceived secret) to the receiver.”118 Buber’s dialogical principle eventually finds a home in the “ethics” corner of philosophy, but the “Du” in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” even with its ethical overtones, is integral to the merchant’s experience of colours, which falls under the domain of aesthetics. And yet, to speak of such things is insufficient. “Colour. Colour. To me the word is now impoverished. I fear I haven’t explained myself to you as I wished. And I don’t want to strengthen anything in me that separates me from people.”119 These letters, monologic in nature, are nevertheless an attempt to express to someone else as much as to oneself something that is inexpressible: the word – the specific word “colour,” but also language in general – is and always will be “impoverished” in this respect. The merchant senses his very life in the revelation of what can only be described as force and foreignness: “And am I not there, in the inside of things, so very much a human being, myself more than ever before, nameless, alone, yet not benumbed in solitude, but rather as if the power flowed from me in waves, the power which makes me a chosen companion of the strong and mute forces that silently sit in a circle as if upon thrones and I among them? And is this not the place you always come to along dark paths when living, active and suffering, amongst the living?”120 This description suggests something of the “oceanic feeling” Freud famously outlined in the first chapter of Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents). Here, however, the emphasis is on

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a sense of belonging, not of dissipation. The sensation is characterized by the shelter of waves – as if the merchant were once again at sea – but also the comfort of anonymity and the recognition of difference. To be able to feel alone in the company of others, but not lonely, and to sense one’s power (“as if the power flowed from me in waves”) is to become aware of the connection of things in the flux. The waves ­resonate with each other. And yet accompanying that resonance is the suggestion that there is suffering involved, perhaps even a sense of guilt.121 The suffering is present in the colours themselves: “And why shouldn’t colours be the brothers of pain, for these, like it, draw us into the eternal?”122 In art there is sacrifice.123 Meier-Graefe wrote of Van Gogh: “It is as though a single person has felt the reproach of our whole era’s egotism and has sacrificed himself, much like one of these great martyrs whose fates have come down to us from a distant past.”124 According to such hagiographic logic, Van Gogh’s piety resounds in his colours, which carry each other. Some of those colours even display a willingness to recede into the background in order that others may shine forth more brilliantly.125 It is this gesture of giving oneself over that allows for the viewer to be pulled into “the eternal,” beyond the limitations of concepts. Perhaps the sacrificial aspect is an atonement as well, for, as Simmel says: “This transformation that reality suffers on its way to our consciousness is certainly a barrier between us and its immediate existence, but is at the same time the precondition for our perception and representation of it.”126 But the religious language of sacrifice and suffering is an aesthetic piety and can be understood metaphorically: Those with this peculiar aesthetic sensibility cannot bask innocently in the sensation of mystical union between art and reality; one must acknowledge the suffering that reality undergoes when observed, for it must, as it were, be bracketed off. In art, it is further manipulated and fashioned, but through that very manipulation a new kind of world is born. Van Gogh writes: “I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but still I don’t invent the whole of the painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made – but to be untangled – in the real world.”127 The “revelation” of art, then, is barely a revelation at all, except insofar as it reveals the precarity of an objective reality and one’s comprehension of it. The best way to counteract this suffering is not to work imitatively or with the assumption that the world is as one perceives it, but rather to engage with it by representing it symbolically, expressively, and most of all,

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creatively, by letting something in it be born – both in the sense of birth and endurance. The innovative use of colour in Van Gogh’s paintings would never heal the wound of existence, but it would at least be a testament to inevitable suffering. The image of the artist as martyr or as sacrificial victim is just that: an image, with all its potential and limitations. Art has no salvific power.128 In another note, Hofmannsthal writes with typical ambivalence: “Painters are there to reconcile us with appearances, and to give back to appearances their pathos. But perhaps what applies to poets applies also to painters: we are not the physicians, we are the pain.”129 Pain does not heal the wound; it makes us more sensitive to it. There may be no perfect, immediate communication between subject and object, but there is the deictic gesture of giving form (even if it is unfinished) in response to what one sees, hears, and receives. That gesture opens the dialogue, even as the dialogue opens the wound. The text – itself wounded and in search of reality, “wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend,” to quote Celan’s German130 – does not close it. —*— In 1907, Edmund Husserl scratched just below the surface of what one experiences as the overwhelming “tumult” or “maelstrom” of sensations: a mere maelstrom of sensations, I say, is indeed not absolute nothingness. But why must a world exist, and why must it have to exist? In fact, I do not see that it would have to. This ­concerns the world in the broadest sense, including the Ego as a person and other Egos. Thus we arrive at the possibility of a ­phenomenological maelstrom as unique and ultimate Being. It would be a maelstrom so meaningless that there would be no I and no Thou, as well as no physical world – in short, no reality in the pregnant sense.131 For Husserl, this possibility of dissolution is a possibility of experiencing “ultimate Being” in a phenomenological way. But the “I” that experiences it, the I of a “reality” that is constituted by more or less stable impressions, would not be able to reconcile that experience with a reality that has some semblance of regularity and relative stability.

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The phenomenologist goes on to say: “Obviously … regularity might gradually pass over into irregularity and … the presumed unity of things might again be dissolved – into a beautiful memory and phantasy, impossible to hold fast.”132 Husserl’s remarks depict a move towards theorizing an experience that was becoming increasingly common in the early years of the twentieth century. The typical conditions of modern urban life provided for just such a confusion of impressions and senses. From the sociological perspective, this results in what Simmel calls “characterlessness” (“Charakterlosigkeit”) on the level of the individual and of society, with money as its symbol. This confusion can further result in the destabilization of one’s mental and existential framework for understanding the world, leading to a kind of disorientation much like the merchant’s mal de débarquement. Although it cannot repair the world, art does not ignore the problems of society by causing the viewer to turn inward towards narcissism or egotism. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” suggests that the typical conditions of ­modern art give rise to the creative expression of – though not a solution to – the instability of reality, the disorientation and “maelstrom of the senses,” and the displacement of self.

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3 Art and History in “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”)

Over the course of the next decade, and even into the 1920s, Hofmannsthal continued to explore the facets of the aesthetic encounter in different cultural, psychological, and sociological ­contexts. Many of the motifs explored in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the “Address,” and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” became an integral part of his literary repertoire. In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” the merchant finds his country utterly foreign and the things around him lifeless, but through an encounter with (contemporary) art and the humanity behind it, the world and the things around him come to life again. In “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”), the ­situation is reversed: artists travel away from home, and the foreignness of Greece becomes, towards the culmination of the text, almost unbearable. “Moments in Greece” is based on Hofmannsthal’s actual travels.1 The text is divided into three sections, which highlight distinct but interrelated “moments,” expressed as encounters. As is characteristic for Hofmannsthal, the text engages in contemporary discussions of psychology, social thought, mysticism, and especially aesthetics.2 Underwriting the narrator’s encounters with places, people, and works of art is a recurring encounter with an otherness that renders communication and transformation of the subject possible by drawing the narrator into a dialogical relationship.

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Although Hofmannsthal’s actual experiences while travelling in Greece with his friend Harry Kessler and the French artist Aristide Maillot form the core of this text, Hofmannsthal deliberately arranges the events in reverse chronology, setting the aesthetic encounter at the culmination rather than at the beginning, when it probably would have occurred. “Moments in Greece” thus has a clear trajectory with dramatic intensification emerging out of otherwise discrete moments. This trajectory significantly qualifies a statement Hofmannsthal had made in his 1892 essay, “Südfranzösische Eindrücke” (Impressions of Southern France) concerning travel writing. In that short piece he writes that, as in a Chinese picture book, “the images of life [as presented in travel writing] follow each other without internal coherence and completely lack effective composition.”3 In other words, there is no necessary relation between the moments. The poetic impulse, however, is to seek out or even create coherence. I am inclined to see Hofmannsthal’s middle and later ­writings, such as those on Greece,4 as a deliberate move away from this earlier prescription of impressionistic representation; for Hofmannsthal’s middle period (roughly 1907–18), the connections may not be there by necessity, but they can be located, created, projected, and constructed. “Moments in Greece” is not about Greece as a place to be studied, observed, or reported on; it can only be experienced by the subject in a way that rejects essentialism and feigned objectivity. Hofmannsthal’s prose, likewise, departs markedly from the rhetoric of reportage that was common at the time.5 “Moments in Greece” depicts a twofold recognition: the impossibility of ever fully understanding the other, even in a transformative encounter; and the necessity of a non-ego-centric consciousness for any meaningful experience. The subject can move beyond narcissistic or solipsistic modes of being after recognizing that a necessary condition of being is coexistence. At the structural level, the text’s proliferation of internal correspondences and resonances seem to function as a metaphor for dialogue. Thus, while my main interest lies in the third section of “Moments in Greece,” it is important to understand how motifs in the first two sections relate to, inform, and are refashioned in the third. For this reason, I let the text’s tripartite division guide my reading, beginning with the encounters in “The Monastery of St Luke,” proceeding to “The Wanderer,” and ending with “The Statues.”

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E ch o e s in “ T h e M o n a s t ery of St Luke” Though originally published as a separate text, the first section sets the stage for the work as a whole, introducing motifs that are adapted and further developed in the subsequent sections: the importance of atmosphere (Stimmung); the connection between religious and aesthetic experiences; the paradoxical co-occurrence of the lofty and the lowly, or the sublime and the mundane; and the structural relationship of call and response as a religious, ethical, and aesthetic move that attempts to bridge the perceived distance between the self and the other. The German concept of Stimmung can be understood with reference to atmosphere, mood, and even musical tuning and voice (Stimme). Stimmung often colours the space of mediation between observer and object and, as several scholars have pointed out,6 even blurs the distinctions between the two: it can refer to the internal, psychological stance of the observer as well as the external environment and how it touches everything.7 It is, according to Hofmannsthal, the “totality of momentary imaginings, the relative consciousness of the world: depending on the Stimmung, we think about the lowliest and the loftiest things differently, there is simply no content of the imagination which is not influenced and painted by Stimmung, enlarged, obliterated, distorted, transfigured, desirable, apathetic, threatening, mild, dark, light, soft, smooth, etc. etc.”8 Stimmung’s connection to art is key. The content of imagination is painted (“gemalt”) according to the Stimmung. Stimmung can also result in a creative response in the imagination of the subject. It has a potentially aesthetic quality not only in its influence on the external surroundings, but also in the response to its influence. And it is no mere whim that prompted Hofmannsthal to conclude “The Monastery of St Luke” with the sentence, “Stunde, Luft und Ort machen alles.” Hour, air, and place – all of which contribute to Stimmung – are everything.9 The section’s opening sentence, on the other hand, seems to establish an objective tone; it is written in the indicative and devoid of any judgment or qualification: “We had been riding that day for nine to ten hours.”10 This objectivity, however, almost immediately gives way to a nuanced depiction of the world opening up before the travellers. In a note to “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal writes in a similar vein: “Nature had this effect on me, and here, something was painted. Here was a human language. In a flash I glimpsed the function of the artist.”11 The link between the thing

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painted (whether in paint or words) and human language suggests a communicative function of the artist. In “Moments in Greece,” the traveller/narrator experiences a similar phenomenon: the landscape (like “Nature” in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”) and the events that occur are collected in an undeviating rhythm of simple, repetitive syntax, expressing what one might see through the veil of distance: “and we looked down and across, as though from a balcony.”12 Looking out from above allows for a serene and totalizing vista, like that presented in a landscape painting. The “human language,” though, is yet to be heard. Gradually, the reader is visually guided into the monastery proper and made aware of the picturesque quality of the unchanging scene. The view closes in on a door, like a picture frame: “In the wall on the left was a small open door; in the doorway leaned a monk.”13 Upon arrival at the monastery, the prosaic style changes, though quite subtly. Hofmannsthal introduces rhetorical repetition and anaphora, charging the sentences with a more assertive tenor that seems inspired by the monk’s presence: “The long black gown, the high black headgear, the casual way he stood there, gazing towards us in this paradisal solitude – all this gave him the air of a magician.”14 In Hofmannsthal’s work, the magician is a being possessed of great creative force who lives in splendid isolation.15 The monk, too, inhabits a space isolated from the sorrows of the world. His very posture confirms this, as he leans languidly at the doorway, gazing at the visitors as they approach. For the first time in “Moments in Greece,” someone other than the first-person narrator is portrayed as commanding the faculty of sight; with the cenobite’s gaze directed at the narrator, Hofmannsthal opens the possibility for co-presence and multiple perspectives. And yet the monk’s location at the threshold also announces an ambiguity, ­mirrored in his countenance: “He was young, with a long, light red beard, its cut reminiscent of Byzantine portraits, an eagle nose, restless, almost intrusive blue eyes. He greeted us with a bow and a spreading of both arms, in which there was something forced.”16 The monk’s posture, his gesture of welcome, and the unsettled and forced quality of his expression which greet the travellers are the first indications of a powerful encounter with an uncanny otherness. For now, however, the visitors are led into the monastery grounds, where they perceive everywhere a constant rhythm “as far removed from haste as from slowness” and catch the strains of psalms being sung, “as remote from lamentation as from desire, something solemn

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which might have been sounding from eternity and continue to sound far into eternity.”17 Erwin Kobel described the music as the play of contrasts between human beings and God; its nature, he says, is both physical and religious.18 The observation is astute. It is worth noting, additionally, that the word “might” (in German “mochte”) pulls the moment into a space of uncertainty. The reality of the song’s path from and back to eternity is qualified by this “mochte” at the end of the sentence, and its metaphysical ambiguity is strengthened in the narrator’s description of another sound emanating from the voice of an unseen singer: “The echo-like quality, the utterly faithful following of this solemn, hardly any longer human sound, this will-less, almost unconscious voice, did not seem to issue from the breast of woman. It sounded as if mystery itself were singing, something insubstantial.”19 The inconclusiveness of “mochte” has given over now to appearance (“seem”) and to the counterfactual subjunctive mood (“as if mystery itself were singing”). The narrator then discovers that the voice belongs to a young boy, striking in his beauty, which transcends the division of gender, as if in answer to Goethe’s Mignon,20 or as a precursor to Thomas Mann’s Tadzio. And yet this boy does seem to embody duration, repetition, and those rituals conveyed through the ages. In him the narrator sees the  coming generation of monks performing the same ancient ­rituals manifest in song.21 Few things in the world (art perhaps being one of them) are comparable to this enduring enactment; and yet it is ­r e-enactment, each and every time. The ritual is the same and  ­different – not dasselbe (the self-same) but rather das Gleiche (a ­different instantiation of the same). For Hofmannsthal’s traveller, this is not a matter of identity, but of repeated sameness, which is established through participation. In the German text, the language itself performs this sameness in the rhythm of the syntax and even the rhyming of keywords: “Der gleiche Boden, die gleichen Lüfte, das gleiche Tun, das gleiche Ruhn” (the same ground, the same air, the same action, the same repose).22 Standing out like an errant line of poetry, the sentence re-enacts in miniature the rhythm and ritual of song. It is therefore especially striking when, in the same paragraph, Hofmannsthal switches tenses and brings that distant past into the present of the text. It is near to the reader as well. For Hofmannsthal’s narrator, there is something inexpressible that is calling from the past, through time, for a response. It does this by making its presence known in the serenely vibrating Stimmung.23

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Shortly after registering the echoes of the past in the presence of the music, the narrator overhears two men conversing, now with attuned (“abgestimmt”) ears: “The dialogue between the priest and the serving man is short. But its tone is from the time of the ­patriarchs … this insignificant incident, these few words exchanged in the night, have in them a rhythm hailing from eternity.”24 Eternity is transported on the wings of such small things: the seemingly ­insignificant incidents, the gestures, the few words exchanged. 25 We can understand what prompted Kessler to express preference for the text’s conclusion with the sentence: “That was how this dialogue sounded.”26 Yet for Hofmannsthal the dialogue is born out of a Stimmung that evokes and sustains a sense of continuity, connecting the conversation to the space; just as the scent of wax, honey, and incense is like the redolence of song,27 so too is there a very real, physical sense in which “The hour, the air, and the place are all-important.”28 —*— While “Moments in Greece” can be read as a series of juxtaposed episodes, any interpretation of the text will benefit from a reading that finds in these discrete moments intentional and meaningful repetition. Put another way: Hofmannsthal’s writing continuously – we might even say ritualistically – calls forth images and forms of expression already presented in the text, rendering them familiar while paying tribute to their uniqueness. In “The Conversation about Poems,” the fictitious interlocutor Gabriel conjectures that the eyes of poetry see everything for the first time.29 It is with such eyes that Hofmannsthal wants his readers to approach “Moments in Greece.” Each moment is a distinct event that occurs in relation to other moments. The paradox of the encounter lies in its preservation of distance and difference, as well as individuality; that is, there is no full identity. As the traveller says: “enough, it is near.”30 The religious Stimmung of the monastery is aesthetically evocative. The landscape is like a painting, and the monk, with his ambiguous gaze, is like the artist-as-magician. Even ritual – an interruption in linear temporality akin to the aesthetic moment of encounter – finds aesthetic expression in the music of a boy’s voice (Stimme). That voice calls out in answer to another voice; and, like beauty, it calls for a response.

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F a c e s a n d F a t e s in “ The Wanderer” Leaving the cyclical rhythms and echoes of the monastery, the travellers once more take to the road, where they engage in conversation. Passing through the landscape on foot, they become aware of the stark contrast between that sense of eternity in the monastery and the transience of their individual lives. Personal memories and once-familiar faces now become the focus of “one of the strangest and most beautiful conversations” the narrator can recall.31 The conversation consists not in a merely enjoyable exchange of opinions – it is treated as an aesthetic occasion. The travelling companions take turns evoking memories of significant encounters with other people, investing them (both the memories and the people) with new life; each memory then calls up other memories, each face answering the previous one. In this manner the conversation sustains itself: a sea of ever-changing faces gradually swelling up from the past. The setting and Stimmung, too, are important for the conversation. At the foot of Mount Parnassus – the famed home of the muses – and along the path where Oedipus is said to have journeyed, the clarity of the air, the lack of sleep, and the sense of connection to the past and to myth attune the travellers to their own bygone days. Much as the monks’ rituals invoke age-old practices, so this dialogue of memories draws poetic inspiration from the home of the muses and the path of Oedipus. The memories may stem from the individuals, but the setting lends those recollections an almost mythical status. With time, the travelling companions become acutely aware of their own existence: “Our friends rose before us and, by bringing themselves, brought with them the purest essence of our existence.”32 For Hofmannsthal, reciprocity is a condition for beauty, and this “most beautiful” of conversations adheres to the definition outlined in the “Address” of 1902 – as does the description of the travellers’ utterances as “serious and of almost frightening clarity.”33 Hofmannsthal repurposes a memorable image from the “Address”: “For such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’”34 Here, we have the counterpart: “Figure after figure rises up, satisfying us with its appearance, accompanies us, and vanishes again.” The word “satisfying” translates the German “sättigt,” which might equally be rendered “­satiates.”35 The metaphor of sustenance suggests that the faces of memory have a life of their own. But, like the ancient Greek spirits in Hades, they must wait

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their turn to imbibe the libations and speak: “others, evocative, have already been waiting to occupy the empty place. They illuminate a circle of lived life, then fall behind, as it were, on the road, while we walk on and on – as though it were upon our walking that the continuance of this enchantment depended.”36 Hofmannsthal’s travellers find themselves in the literary territory of some of the classic narratives: The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy. In all these stories, wanderers must speak with the dead in order to continue their journeys. Hofmannsthal’s “Moments in Greece” has a different tenor, however, which comes out most clearly in a description of the faces the narrator sees. Significance is to be found in trivial events rather than the heroic or legendary deeds: “While they were standing before us and looking at us, the smallest circumstances and things, through which our union with them had come to pass, were present.”37 The travellers imagine hearing the voices of those they once encountered and the “seemingly trifling short sentences.”38 Yet contained in these sparse words is the entire human being, and more: “and their faces are more than faces: the same quality as from the sound of their broken sentences surges up in them, comes nearer and nearer towards us, seems to be caught and confirmed in their features, in the inexpressible of their expressions, yet not quite at rest. It is a never-ending desire, possibility, readiness, something suffered and still to be suffered. Each of these faces is a destiny, is unique, the most singular that can be, and at the same time infinite, a wandering on to an immeasurably distant destination. It seems to exist only while it is looking at us, as though it were living merely for the sake of our responsive glance.”39 In this passage one can discern traces of the Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian concepts of will (“ein endloses Wollen,” translated as “a never-ending desire”), as well as a recognition of suffering (“Gelittenes, zu Leidendes,” translated as “something suffered and still to be suffered”) that evokes the writings of Georg Büchner.40 This is the fate of humanity, which should come as no surprise, for the face here is also fate. If we take the face to be, as Simmel calls it, the “locus of inner personality insofar as it is visible,”41 then we are also not far from that “dark” Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and his 119th fragment: character is fate.42 Each face shares in the same fate, yet it does so individually: each face is das Gleiche, not dasselbe. The fate in which all faces share is itself a kind of history, a part of which the two wanderers recall through the veil of time: “We are like two spirits that fondly remember having taken part in the banquets of mortal men.”43

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The likening of this encounter to that of spirits who once partook in the communion of mortals is inspired by ancient and Classical Greek. Plato’s Symposium, in particular, proves illuminating. The title of the dialogue derives from the verb συμπίνειν (sympinein), which means “to drink together.” Such communal repasts were opportunities to enjoy the company of others, to carry out customs (θέμις, themis), and to establish relationships based on hospitality, which was then given material representation in the form of a gift.44 Gadamer reminds us in Die Aktualität des Schönen (The Relevance of the Beautiful) that the σύμβολον (symbolon, symbol) was, for the ancient Greeks, ­precisely this gift of hospitality. It is a gift, furthermore, of recognition: “eine Erinnerungsscherbe”  – literally: a shard of memory. 45 As Gadamer explains, the symbolon was a kind of passport and token of hospitality of antiquity. One half of a broken plate, when reunited with its other half, might be the sign for recognition after years or generations of absence. In Plato’s dialogue, Aristophanes tells a story in praise of Eros using the symbolon as a metaphor for love, which, in this context, is imagined as elective affinity or marriage of the minds: two people existed as one but were separated, and now each half seeks the other. Gadamer suggests that the referential character of the symbolon, together with the sense of completion it suggests, is easily translated into the world of beauty.46 As in the experience of love, so too in the experience of beauty one is able to sense the open-ended conjuration of a possible ideal world. The faces the travellers see are such shards of memory, symbols that recall something lost or desired. The allusion to the “banquets of mortal men” seems an appropriate scene for the symbol of hospitality. Yet, for Hofmannsthal, a confrontation with memories is also a confrontation with suffering and loneliness. He draws our attention to one figure in particular: “him, who had suffered so unspeakably … He is poor and suffers, but who could dare to offer him help, this boy lonely beyond words?”47 The unnamed figure, whose affliction is demarcated by the limits of language, bears a resemblance to Arthur Rimbaud, who, when still a young man, rejected his vocation as a poet and chose instead a solitary wanderer’s life out of contempt for his former self. Impoverished, the young man of memory set out to secure financial stability, but in doing so, strove against “his own demon for something gigantic, which cannot be named.”48 The Rimbaud-like figure of memory disdains his situation and even seems to be in denial about his imminent death. The reader learns he, while

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incapacitated during a journey, would not let himself be borne down a hillside easily, but insisted rather “on a steep, fast descent, across country. Indescribable rebellion, defiance of death up to the whites of his eyes, the mouth distorted with suffering, yet refusing to complain.” 49 He may exhibit the same qualities of solitude and independence of will presaged by the monk at the Monastery of St Luke, but his world is no serene cloister – it is a long road of pain. As Wellbery aptly points out, the physical traits described recall the face of the merchant’s son on his deathbed.50 As if to reinforce the image of the defiant, solitary wanderer, the Stimmung too begins to feel antagonistic: “The morning sun shone almost threateningly on this solemn, foreign landscape … Strange destinies, normally invisible currents, struck some strong chord in us and revealed themselves.”51 These fates and faces, strange perhaps by nature of their reluctance to partake in the banquet of mortals, ­nevertheless approach the conversing travellers. The shared, though internal, world of memory extends its sphere of influence outward just as much as the environment affects the world of interiority. Whereas at the monastery of St Luke, “the hour, the air, and the place are all-important,”52 here Hofmannsthal draws from the subjective, internal world of reminiscence a literary anticipation of an actual encounter with another human being, one of these “strange destinies.” Subjectivity and even the implicit sense of responsibility that accompanies the (beautiful) conversation prepare the reader and the travellers for an encounter with what lies beyond their sphere of influence, and beyond their personal memories.

T h e r e is V e n g e a n ce i n Heaven f o r a n I n j u r ed Dog Set above the section heading of “The Wanderer” is an epigraph in Greek: εἰδὶ καὶ κυνῶν ἐρινύες. Hofmannsthal takes this quote from the classicist Gilbert Murray’s collection of lectures, The Rise of the Greek Epic: “There is vengeance in heaven for an injured dog.” Murray’s work was crucial to Hofmannsthal’s literary treatment of his 1908 Greek travels, as made plain by the many markings he made in his copy of The Rise of the Greek Epic [*fd h 1738]. As Hans-Jürgen Schings has pointed out, Murray’s commentary on social responsibility is echoed repeatedly in “Moments in Greece.”53 The classical scholar notes: “If you made a man your slave, that showed you did not regard

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him with aidôs … Of course a wrong done to a slave was hated by the gods and, one might hope, duly avenged. But that was the same with animals.”54 For the ancient Greeks, every dog, however lowly and abject, has his day.55 No dogs are mentioned in “The Wanderer,” yet the question of how to treat the abject other – whether human or animal – is omnipresent. The failure to treat another being with respect is represented by the tragic figure of memory who, filled with contempt for his community and for himself, suffered from a twisted kind of hubris. Like Oedipus, whose path the travellers have been walking, the man did not know, or rather, he refused to acknowledge his identity. In doing so, he also cut himself off from others and abrogated all social responsibility. The meeting with the man in memory anticipates a meeting with a “real” man along the road to Thebes: The travellers encounter by chance a German wanderer, whose life, they learn, also resembles that of Rimbaud’s. The German is a formerly strong young man of twenty-one, weakened by unceasing pain. He is helpless and barefoot. His face is described as “suffering” and his eyes are like those of a “tortured animal,” reminiscent of Murray’s injured dog.56 Yet unlike Rimbaud, he is trying to return home from his travels. This “shipwrecked” man is ill and in need of rest.57 Nevertheless, he refuses to retrace his steps and return to a place nearby where he could convalesce. Instead, he sets himself on a strictly linear path forwards: “Strangely unreal the way he had walked in silence towards his death.”58 But his initial refusal gives way to consent: he agrees to be accompanied to a town in the direction he wishes to travel, and to be tended to “with decorum and reverence.”59 The man in need who can accept help is also worthy of respect. As Gilbert Murray would have it, his aidôs is recognized: “The disinherited of the earth, the injured, the helpless, and among them the most utterly helpless of all, the dead. All these, the dead, the stranger, the beggar, the orphan, the  merely unhappy, are from the outset αἰδοῖοι, ‘charged with αἰδώς’ … It is the counterpart of what we, in our modern and scientific prose, call ‘a sense of moral responsibility’ or the like; the feeling roused more or less in most people by the existence of great misery in our wealthy societies.”60 That sense of moral responsibility is given symbolic expression in Hofmannsthal’s narrative. The travellers arrive at a spring, from which the injured German wanderer had earlier drunk; bowing down (very nearly mimicking the religious gesture of proskynesis – prostration

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whereby one kisses the ground), they take a drink from this same spring.61 Remembering the German wanderer and his suffering, the narrator suddenly senses the antagonism of the world, as if sharing in that suffering. The troubles of the German traveller become the narrator’s own as he recalls the man’s face inscribed with pain: “His face looked at me, as hitherto those other faces had looked at me; I almost lost myself to his face, and as if to save myself from his embrace, I said to myself, ‘Who is this? A strange man!’ Then alongside this face were the others, looking at me and exerting their power over me, and there were many more.”62 This one face has now joined the ranks of those faces of memory, and in doing so has unleashed the power of the o ­ thers, such that the force of the wanderer’s gaze threatens to disrupt the cohesiveness and sense of presence of the self. The desire to rescue the self reads like a deliberate response to Ernst Mach’s well-known proclamation in the Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations): “Das Ich ist unrettbar” – the I is unsalvageable. The coping mechanism used to achieve distance from such shame-conjuring faces63 is to deny their familiarity, to deny any relation or point of commonality, and to label them “fremd.” But such refusal is tantamount to ignoring social responsibility. Not surprisingly, the instinct backfires: the faces of the past reassert themselves in the form of what seems to be an early memory, yet the narrator, speaking now in the third person, does not identify it explicitly as his own. In contrast to free indirect speech (whereby the third person narrator approaches that of the first person), the narrator describes his own vision by sacrificing his first-person perspective for the third, essentially rendering in literary form the sensation of the doubled self described in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”: “It was as though I was double, was lord over my life all at the same time, lord over my faculties, my understanding, felt time passing.”64 Yet here, the experience is more traumatic than transformative, split rather than multiplied, and motivated by memories of the past rather than an encounter in the present moment: “a boy watching the faces of soldiers pass, company after company, countless numbers, tired dusty faces, always in fours, each a single individual and none whose face the boy had not absorbed into himself, forever groping mutely from one to the other, touching each one, counting to himself, ‘This one, this one, this one!’ while tears were rising in his throat.”65 The young boy – the narrator’s childhood self – is overwhelmed by each soldier’s individual suffering; and this suffering cannot be assuaged by any

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actions the boy might take. As in the Iliad’s catalogues of the dead and those about to die, the intensity and amount of suffering grows, etched as it is upon each and every face. And the boy senses that anonymous enjoinment to take responsibility for all. He would – if he could, hence the subjunctive hätte, not rendered in the English translation here – draw each of these faces into himself, all of them strangers, and all of them individuals, united in the human experience of pain and suffering. This awakens in the boy a desire to feel, to touch each one with his sympathetic counting, his acknowledging the other. Though he does not experience the suffering of the other directly, he is an active viewer of it, a witness, and his mere existence apart from what he witnesses makes him sense in his being – again, indirectly – a kind of guilt. This vision compels the narrator to turn his earlier question to himself: this time, he does not ask “Who is this?” and respond with “A strange man!” – instead, he asks: “Who am I?”66 This question arises out of the encounter with the many faces flooding his child-self’s vision; the narrator is overwhelmed completely by his own past, and yet it is also the moment where the self exists in communion with others, as symbolized by drinking and partial submersion in water. At one point in his notes to the “Address,” Hofmannsthal approached a similar dramatic peak when describing the confrontation with a work of art: “We see ourselves surrounded by beautiful forms and colours. Enjoying at first sight the manifold creations of nature and of the human hand … ‘Friend of Art’: A dangerous word, not without demonic content. Here we seem to be in danger of losing ourselves: a great mistake! Here we are first awakened to possess ourselves: for we do create the undying content of these creations in so far as we, alive, empathize with them.”67 The “Address” also points to the potentially positive, if also painful, effects of recognizing the stratified layers of supra-individual memory in one’s own psychic organization.68 In this division of the self, there is an opportunity to experience the self as other; in “Moments in Greece,” the narrator observes at a distance his younger self, the boy.69 Yet he also then must make the journey back to his present “self.” Paradoxically, this happens precisely when, caught in a state of wonder, he fears the total loss of his sense of self: “Then, in the moment of most anxious wondering, I once more came to, the boy sank into me, the water flowed by under my face, bathing one cheek, the propped-up arms supported my body, and I raised myself and it was nothing more than the rising of one who, with his lips lying upon the

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flowing water, had taken a long draught.”70 The dénouement is so quick as almost not to exist. In one sweeping sentence Hofmannsthal brings together the most intense moment and the return to the mundane, linking them with the multivalent symbolism of water. Like Narcissus, the narrator bows down to the water and initially does not recognize himself (“Who am I?”). But water also carries the opposite connotations of the symposium he shares with his former self – and with the German traveller he had encountered earlier. Finally, it is an image of life’s renewal,71 and of the flux of existence. In drinking from the spring, the narrator reveals the identity of the self precisely in its multiplicity and its participatory existence in the ever-changing flow of life. This is the moment when Narcissus listens to Echo and recognizes her voice’s similarity to and difference from his own. Even once the “boy” has sunk again into the narrator’s memory, the narrator still experiences the world as at once split and unified. He speaks of his body as both separate from and one with himself. “The propped arms”  – in German: “Die aufgestützten Arme” – hold up “the body” (“den Leib”).72 Rather than using the first-person pronoun and possessive adjectives, the narrator employs reflexive verbs to render the subject split, an object separated from itself. Finally, this most intense of moments is swept up entirely into generality, as if it were nothing more than some person – any person – standing up from taking a drink of water. In the end, the individual is just as much himself as he is everyman. In his notebooks, Hofmannsthal writes, referring to his play Gestern (Yesterday): “Memory belongs to the body alone: the body seems to reproduce the past, that is, it gives rise to something similar and new in Stimmung. My ‘I’ from yesterday is as irrelevant to me as the ‘I’ of Napoleon or Goethe.”73 In “Moments in Greece,” this is fully overturned. The traveller’s “I” from yesterday is still present and relevant to him, as are the “I’s” of others – be they soldiers, wanderers, or injured dogs. The ethical implication that the being of others is of relevance to the traveller is, furthermore, a thing of beauty.74 As early as the mid 1890s, Hofmannsthal had connected ethical and aesthetic sensibilities in a strikingly similar fashion. In a note from those years, he writes: “The kinship of beautiful things in time, and the deep sense of it: the picture books from Crane the kinship of those of different times … and so the parallel gestures of the countless hover around us, countless faces bow down to drink water with us.”75 The kinship of beautiful things transcends generations, revealing a moment of sameness in spite

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of the incorrigible march of historical time. Thus, Walter Crane’s images can share in their beauty with the medieval or – according to Pater, Hofmannsthal’s source – renaissance world’s celebration of the senses. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Hofmannsthal had located the countless faces kneeling down to drink of the same water we drink – the same unnamed inspirational source – in the invisible enchanted world-garden. The water in this locus amoenus is then transformed in “Moments in Greece” into an “actual” water source, where “real” travellers, including the weary German wanderer, drink. The “countless faces” in the imagined garden become the “countless numbers, tired dusty faces” in memory, revived and resurfacing like one’s reflection upon bending down towards the water. And it is no coincidence that both drink from the source. In the “Address,” the subject and the beautiful object exist in a relationship of mutual exchange. The narrator’s relationship to his memories of past encounters has a similar structure. In the case of the faces of the soldiers, the narrator maintains that “their faces are more than faces,” elaborating thus: “Each of these faces is a destiny, is unique, the most singular that can be, and at the same time infinite, a wandering on to an immeasurably distant destination.”76 We might very well read this distant destination as that fate shared by everyone who lives and ­suffers, yet unique always in its specific manifestation: individual death. The river is an image of life as much as it is of death, for it is also Acheron, the river of woe. This woe is integrated into the mere act of taking a drink of water: “Then, in the moment of most anxious wondering … and it was nothing more than the rising of one who, with his lips lying upon the flowing water, had taken a long draught.”77 This radical levelling of experiences – bringing together the ecstatic and the mundane – does indeed find its most final actualization in death, the most mundane and the most ecstatic moment we can imagine. As in both “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and in the letters Hofmannsthal wrote during his time in Tlumacz, ­witnessing the suffering of others – if that suffering cannot be experienced directly  – is for Hofmannsthal potential grounds for an experience of beauty. This is not just a matter of knowing beauty through its opposite, ugliness; rather, the very foundation of beauty, if there is one, is the ugliness of suffering, like the mud out of which a lotus flower grows. In “Moments in Greece,” this relationship of suffering to beauty is repeated and elaborated: the singularity of an

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event that revealed to the narrator the suffering of others becomes the underpinnings for the experience of beauty, and the text’s evocative qualities intensify the sense of beauty. In the few hours after this moment at the river, the narrator gazes at a nameless landscape, and yet the anonymity speaks: “The mountains called to one another; the clefts were more alive than a face; each little fold on the distant flank of a hill lived; all this was as near to me as the palm of my hand. It was something that I shall never see again. It was the guest gift of all the lonely wanderers who had crossed our path.”78 The vulnerability of the self and the confrontation with death (in one of its many forms) has opened up the opportunity to witness life external to the self: the earth itself proudly exhibits life in every crease of its physiognomy, and this life is close to the traveller, recalling the phrase from the first section: “enough, it is near.”79 Yet this is all nearer than near; it is almost a part of him, like the “Wurzel meiner Hand,” – the palm, or literally the “root” of his hand. This familiarity with the unnamed landscape reconciles the traveller with his own body, at least in language. Hofmannsthal has moved from the reflexive verbal structure of the propped-up arms holding “the” body to an analogy of familiarity focused on the hand of the traveller, which he refers to using the possessive adjective, “my.” The landscape calls, and in this call the narrator senses its nearness, and even his own body. And yet there is no delusion of grandeur in this; it does not give the narrator a sense of power or stability of being. It is also singular in incarnation; he will never see it like this again. And yet he calls this the “Gastgeschenk” – the “guest gift” – of all the lonely wanderers encountered, the gift of hospitality being the symbolon that suggests the infinite relationship of reciprocity and the covenant between host and guest. If the guest gift is a symbol, that is, something that has a complement elsewhere, it is also nevertheless still unique, because to see with the eyes of poetry is to see everything for the first time, and to do so requires the knowledge of suffering. “Everything alive, every landscape, reveals itself once, and in its entirety: but only to a heart deeply moved.”80 To those who have witnessed and been “deeply moved” (“erschüttert” is stronger, more like shattered or shocked) by affliction, beauty is a gift. In his copy of The Rise of the Greek Epic, Hofmannsthal made a note on the endpaper: “Der Bettler der Hilfelose beladen mit αἰδώς” (The beggar the helpless one, laden with αἰδώς). Aidôs is that which, in heaven, may be attributed even to injured dogs; on earth, it is the

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gift which the impoverished and afflicted have the right to bestow: it is a gift of beauty. Yet with the acceptance of this gift comes the awareness of taking on an unpayable debt. The luxury to enjoy the aesthetic all too often comes at the expense of others’ well-being. Whereas Hofmannsthal makes the connection to the social and economic forces explicit in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” here they are rendered as an existential problem, for beauty bears upon it the mark of suffering; it is not a place of solace, but rather a fraught reminder of both participation and the great divide between “subject” and perceived “object.” Once one is aware of the violent sacrifice at the altar of beauty, one cannot experience the same simple pleasure and enjoyment of seeing a work of art fashioned out of human misery by human hands. Any attempt to aestheticize the unpleasant and make it more palatable fails. We could read Hofmannsthal’s work as an exploitation of the unpleasant, but we would not be saying anything Hofmannsthal did not already know – nor would it make us, the “critical reader,” in any way morally superior to the writer. As readers, we are already implicated. Hofmannsthal consciously uses the unpleasant to literary effect – but he is also aware that the aesthetic is not an anaesthetic. Art is born out of a desire to make manifest indirectly what will not be articulated directly. For Hofmannsthal, the artist is always involved, interested, and implicated in the object, which comes to have a life – and demands – of its own. Some works of art are even capable of making us uncomfortably aware of the unpayable debt and that impassable divide; they issue a command to us to give up something of our own inner world in order to sustain what the artist began.

T h e P o v e r t y o f Presence Only a day after his encounter with the wanderer from Lauffen an der Salzach, his powerful vision at the spring, and the train ride during which he saw in the living landscape the “guest gift of all the lonely wanderers”81 who had crossed their path – only a day after this whirlwind of experiences, the narrator finds himself in the disappointing anti-climax of the present. Indeed, as if ashamed, he wants to forget the German traveller (and the pain of others) and all traces of the encounter: “But I was not tempted to think any more about it. ‘Passed,’ said I involuntarily, and lifted my foot over the fragments of ruin that

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lay around here by the hundreds.”82 The irony of this statement becomes apparent when we see that “passed” (gewesen in German, which is also the past participle of “to be”) refers not only to the man of yesterday, but to the narrator’s surroundings as well. The narrator’s desire to forget the encounter with the man affects his reception of the world around him, for now things take on a painful quality of transience as they threaten to slip out of the reach of the present. Even the stones on the hill seem now to be “decaying with age.”83 And so, whereas the previous day’s encounter had awakened the memories of yesteryear and the potential of life in memory and landscape, we have here the desire to forget the discomfort of that encounter, resulting in the narrator’s vision of a landscape receding into the past. The narrator wishes to seize control and halt the flow of time, ever out of joint, by placing the past securely in the past, and holding the present in the here and now; but the wish is never fulfilled. In Hofmannsthal’s hand, the temporal disconnection finds spatial expression as well. The narrator views the world around him, in this case focusing on a column: it is a thing of solidity and stability, and it is a monument to past cultural achievement. But there is something peculiar about the narrator’s view: He sees the column as though it were intimately linked to his own being and its mode of existence and behaviour dependent upon his own life-giving breath. He is transposing that feeling of shared existence, yet the selection of the object of his gaze – Pygmalion-like in its inspirational power – is beyond his control: “I felt that as I breathed, its contour rose and fell  … Unintentionally, my eye chose.”84 Much like the gaze in Sappho’s celebrated poem φαίνεταί μοι (phainetai moi), the eyes here seem to be somehow separate from the willing self; this distance creates a sense of poverty rather than possession (self-possession or otherwise).85 And yet this poverty, or lack, is ironically presented in terms of the richness of gold: “But in the evening light, clearer than dissolved gold, the consuming whiff of mortality also played around it.”86 What unites the column and the observer is neither the observer’s megalomaniacal gaze, nor his quickening artist’s eye, but the richness of their shared golden transience. Poverty and wealth are recurring themes in Hofmannsthal’s writings.87 In his early works, the poet or artist, portrayed as a reverse Midas, is the figure whose craft has the power to imbue a lifeless object with something much like life; whereas Midas turns living things into beautiful but lifeless gold.88 In “Moments in Greece,” the gold of the

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sun is rich; and while the enjoyment of beauty is often considered a privilege of the wealthy, it is never enough to purchase meaningful experiences. One must know poverty.89 Hofmannsthal critiques his own narrator, who wishes to forget the suffering of others and leave it in the past; yet the narrator cannot, if he is to see the world with the eyes of poetry, ignore the world’s own misery: for the world too slips away from him as he walks. Midas, as Mayer has pointed out, is a metamorphosis of Pygmalion: he freezes the motion of organic nature into inert gold. Yet for Hofmannsthal, art reveals itself to be always in motion, slipping out of one’s hands, exposing the uncomfortable relation between poverty and wealth as well as absence and presence. This has sociopolitical implications. Though neither sociologist nor political philosopher, Hofmannsthal puts into poetic form what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about industrialization: “From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.”90 And he even approaches William Morris’s socialist critique: “The necessity of the time, I say, is to feed the commercial war which we are all of us ­waging in some way or another; if, while we are doing this, we can manage, some of us, to adorn our lives with some little pleasure of the eyes, it is well, but it is no necessity, it is a luxury, the lack of which we must endure. Thus, in this matter also does the artificial famine of inequality, felt in so many other ways, impoverish us despite of our riches; and we sit starving amidst our gold, the Midas of the ages.”91 An impulse to uphold Midas’s alchemic art drives the ­narrator to the column: “I felt the urge to walk around it; the side turned away from me, facing the setting sun, this held the promise of real life.”92 The narrator’s desires echo those attributed to the poet Rimbaud, “who believes he is struggling for money, money, and more money, but who is really struggling with his own demon for something gigantic, which cannot be named.”93 Though the narrator is not striving for money per se, he is striving for that security that comes with permanence, which the gilded life of the wealthy often seems to offer but cannot. He seeks that golden life that fades away with the setting sun. The narrator has already noted his anticipated disappointment, and the paragraph that follows confirms it: everything he has seen in Athens, everything in Greece, all of it is of the past, all of it a

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Figure 3.1  Column at Delphi. Image from Hanns Holdt’s book of photographs, Griechenland. Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben, with an introduction by Hofmannsthal.

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tribute to decay and the poverty of presence, frustrating Midas’ art with the tireless persistence of time. Even memory, which before had held such power, seems now to be only of a second order to itself, useless for enlivening the relics of the past. Having descended a rung on the ontological ladder, the memory of memories can offer only a distorted view of things; indeed, its ontological status resembles that of art (much maligned) in Plato’s Republic: “These Greeks, I asked within myself, where are they? I tried to remember, but I remembered only memories. Names came floating near, figures; they merged into one another as though I had dissolved them into a greenish smoke wherein they appeared distorted.”94 The description of images intertwining is not new to readers of Hofmannsthal: it was an important leitmotif for “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and was also used in the “Address” (see chapter 1). In both of the earlier instances, the effect of this ­weaving is a revelation of vitality and connection; here the image is transformed so that the individual ties are loosed. The identities meld and distinction disappears, becoming formless rather than “arbitrary-will-become-form.”95 The language here subtly recalls that used to describe the sunlight three paragraphs earlier. First, the past participle used above to describe the gold, “aufgelöst” (“dissolved”), reappears here in the phrase “als löste ich sie auf” (“as though I had dissolved them”), thereby introducing by way of the subjunctive mood the possibility – but not the reality – of the subject acting upon an object. The atmospheric quality, too, is underlined in this moment, except that  the golden light is replaced with a greenish smoke; and even the ­distortion (“verzerrten”) is as much a distorted auditory echo of “der verzehrende Hauch der Vergänglichkeit” (“consuming whiff of ­mortality”), as it is a visual one. The distortion dissolves the ­earlier descriptions, while at the same time recalling them as memories.96 The attempt to render presence tangible and lasting has failed in both instances: neither column nor memories of memories can fulfil the narrator’s desire for presence as an escape from the past and its reminders of poverty. His response is yet again reminiscent of the figure of Rimbaud, above all in its disdainful tone: “Because they had passed long ago I hated them, and also because they had passed so fast.”97 This sentence is also remarkably similar to the merchant’s son’s renunciation upon his deathbed: “He hated his premature death so much that he hated his life for having brought him to it.”98

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This disdain colours his entire judgment of the cultural artifacts the ancient Greeks had left behind, and does so in an antagonistic spirit akin to Plato’s critique of art in the Republic, expanding that critique to the Greek pantheon: “All was gone, even while it still believed it existed! And over it, floating, the eternal fata morgana of their poetry; and their deities themselves, what uncertain phantoms flitting by … Gods, eternal gods? Milesian fables, a decoration painted on the wall of a wanton’s house.”99 The critique rests on an ontology that identifies the true with existence and its eternal ebb and flow: art is no longer, precisely insofar as it believed itself to be. A clumsier but equally ­possible translation of the first sentence in the block quote would be: “Already, everything was not, insofar as it believed itself to be!” The word “indem” can mean both “while” (as in the quoted translation) and “insofar as” or “by doing something.” In any case, attributing the faculty of belief to the ostensibly inanimate object suggests that these figures, names, and fragments have an ambiguous ontological status. A distorted version of René Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, these objects believe they are, therefore they are not – or are they? If they can believe, then they are not merely objects for the subject’s cognition and gaze; they are also subjects in their own right – a factor that raises the phenomenological experience to the aesthetic, as will be made clearer in the encounter with the statues. I classify these things as part of the aesthetic because the narrator himself describes the “fata morgana of their poetry” that hovers above. We need not go back as far as Plato to understand the significance of this miragelike quality for the aesthetic; Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense” speaks precisely to this aspect of non-identification, uncertainty, and slippage, while Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” celebrates it. But even if we can attribute a “subjective” quality to these aesthetically experienced objects and thoughts, their coherence is still always in the process of dissolving and reforming. Art is ­evanescent; and so are the “eternal” gods, those “uncertain phantoms flitting by” whose existences have been relegated to murals in some wanton’s house. I have mentioned Plato in this chapter more than once, primarily in the context of his sceptical stance towards art. But Plato plays more than one role and even appears explicitly in a vision, amplifying the sense of disdain and even arrogance that the reader witnesses in the narrator:

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The sun must have sunk lower, the shadows lengthened, when a glance met mine – deep and equivocal as that of a passerby. He walked on and was already half-turned away from me, also ­contemptuous of this town, his hometown. His glance revealed me to myself, and revealed him: it was Plato. Around the lips of the inventor of myths, the despiser of gods, hovered arrogance and spook-like dreams. In a magnificent, spotless garment ­carelessly brushing the ground, he walked along, the non-citizen, the regal man; he floated past, like ghosts who walk with locked feet. Contemptuously he touched time and place, he seemed to hail from the East and to disappear towards the West.100 Plato becomes a placeholder for several qualities already at play in “Moments in Greece.” First, Plato’s gaze meets the narrator: The narrator is the object of the gaze as much as he himself is a gazer. The philosopher-ghost’s gaze and the careless (“lässig”) brushing of his gown upon the ground recall the figure of the monk from the monastery and his casual (also described as “lässig”) way of standing with his gaze directed towards the travellers. Plato’s gaze is also “equivocal as that of a passerby,” recalling the wanderer from Lauffen an der Salzach. And, if inclined to an intertextual reading, the reader is thrown into an abyss of allusion and suggestion. Consider Hofmannsthal’s laudatory yet eerie poem “Einem, der vorübergeht” (To one who passes by) with its poetic reference to and distortion of the poet Stefan George, with whom the young Hofmannsthal briefly associated. The poem depicts the power of another person to reveal to oneself aspects within oneself forgotten or unknown. The line in “Moments in Greece” – “His glance revealed me to myself, and revealed him” (Sein Blick enthüllte mir mich selbst und ihn) – echoes the poem’s first two lines: “You reminded me of things / hidden within myself” (Du hast mich an Dinge gemahnet, / Die heimlich in mir sind).101 This passage in “Moments in Greece” also seems to reference Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal poem “À une passante” and George’s 1901 translation, “Einer Vorübergehenden,” in Die Blumen des Bösen. In the Baudelaire poem and in George’s translation, we see imagery similar to that of this passage on the phantom Plato; in both the poem and the description of Plato, special attention is drawn to the hem of the “magnificent, spotless garment, carelessly brushing the ground.” This is where high meets low. In Baudelaire’s poem, a majestically

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melancholy woman walks by, “Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet” (George: “Ihr finger gravitätisch / Erhob und wiegte kleidbesatz und saum” – “her fingers ponderously / lifted and balanced the dress’s trimmings and hem”).102 Plato’s disdain, by contrast, is not for the low, as might be read in the image of the lady lifting her skirt to keep it clean. Rather, his ­disdain is for the high, or the high-seeming – he is a “despiser of gods,” and a disdainer of art (again, associated with “high culture” and the delusion of wealth); and yet he also betrays the arrogance of the mythmaker, the poet. Plato embodies the essential paradox of the ­aesthetic: its power, its ineffectuality (Plato is an insubstantial phantom), its height and depth. Plato is sceptical of art’s deception and power over the passions, yet he, “the inventor of myths,” is a great artist himself. Recalling Goethe’s famous proclamation in the West-östlicher Divan, Hofmannsthal reminds us that poetic writing is a kind of arrogance for which the poet should not be chid.103 Goethe’s poem is an apology for the artistic hubris of the poet who defies rational logic. Yet as we have seen, the lowly monk in “The Monastery of St Luke” displays something suggestive of a similar kind of arrogance. For the poet, arrogance is displayed in the very act of writing and is linked to the sin of pride. That is, this is demonic work. The image of Plato floating along with his feet locked is borrowed here (and again later in Die Frau ohne Schatten) from Goethe’s Faust. In that play, the titular character sees a magically conjured image (“Zauberbild”) floating by with locked feet. He believes this image to be his beloved Gretchen, yet it turns out to be the work of demonic magic.104 Art, even as a creative product of the poet as alter deus, has something vaguely diabolical about it. Yet Hofmannsthal, in grappling with the place and purpose of art, is not satisfied to leave it all up to arrogance and illusions. The narrator himself takes on the role of the passerby (der Vorübergehende). Jerry Glenn has suggested that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is also lurking behind the words of the poem addressed to George, namely, when the fool counsels Zarathustra to abandon the city: “Have pity on your foot! Rather spit on the city gate and turn back.” And Zarathustra, grown weary of the fool’s ramblings, concludes: “where one can no longer love, there one should pass by [vorübergehen].”105 If Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was an influence on the poem, it seems to have had an even stronger role to play in Hofmannsthal’s characterization of this ghost of Plato, a figure that combines the image of passing by with

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that of disdain for the city and the times (and more broadly, temporality itself) and space: “Contemptuously he touched time and place.” His disdain has the function of revealing to the narrator his own artistic weakness: “and my guilt lay clear as the day. It is your own weakness, I called to myself, you are unable to revive all this. It is you yourself who tremble with transience, you who steep all about you in the ­terrible bath of time.”106 In a gesture of frustration, the narrator decides that, if he cannot exercise his creative powers, he will at least read. But according to Hofmannsthal active reading involves creativity and a certain suspension of the notion of self-as-agent.107 The narrator’s choice of reading matter – the Sophoclean tragedy Philoctetes – is also significant: like Oedipus (whose path the travellers have walked), Philoctetes is wounded in the foot and cannot walk without constant pain. The German wanderer, too, walked barefoot, suffering the entire way; and, like the German wanderer, Philoctetes makes one uncomfortably aware of one’s own guilt. Gilbert Murray says of him: “So when Philoctetes charges Neoptolemus to look him in the face: τòν προστρóπαιον, τòν ἱκέτην, ὦ σχέτλιε; he means: ‘Me, charged with the wrath of God; me, who kneel before thee, O hard heart.’”108 Zarathustra is urged to have pity on his own feet and not enter the city. Plato practically hovers, his feet locked, neither one touching the ground. Even the verb vorübergehen is closely associated with the feet – gehen means “to walk,” and walking in this setting brings ­constant reminders of the passing (das Vorübergehen) of time, as we saw at the beginning of this section: “‘Passed,’ said I involuntarily, and lifted my foot over the fragments of ruin that lay around here by the hundreds.”109 Frustrated with the unclear motives of the character Odysseus in the play Philoctetes and the injustice that seems to govern so much of human actions, the narrator finds himself sympathizing with Philoctetes, thereby establishing a connection to the character’s dramatic fate.110 Yet there is something of a dramatic irony in this identity; the narrator does not seem himself to be aware of it and instead focuses on the incomprehensibility and vanity of the dramatic action, underscoring the necessity of Philoctetes’ presence: “they must know that without Philoctetes himself the town cannot fall.”111 The Sophoclean drama, beautifully written and enchanting, explains neither why this man need suffer, nor why the other characters do not see his importance.112 Frustrated with the other characters’ actions and apathy, the narrator puts down the book: he cannot be the stage upon which Sophocles’ drama plays out.

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The unbridgeable chasm between the narrator and the “impossible antiquity” he has encountered at every turn – the gods, the column, the book – is characterized first by the unavoidable transience of things; it is as if only the shell of the ancient world were left behind, its substance or essence having long since taken flight into the air: “Here, where I had hoped to touch it with my hands, here it is gone, here more than anywhere else.”113 This is more than an expression of frustration; it is a careful reworking of the ancient Greek (and Roman) encounter with the shades. Achilles in The Iliad sees a dream image of Patroclus and tries to embrace him, to no avail. Odysseus, likewise, in his katabasis thrice tries to embrace his mother, Anticleia, and thrice encounters only air. Now the narrator is faced with physically tangible ruins: columns, books, rocks, temples. But he cannot grasp antiquity. Its essence, its meaning, its explanation for the absurd injustices of life and suffering are absent. All these things have slipped from him as the shades from Achilles’ and Odysseus’ searching arms. The only possible response he can entertain is to abandon it all for lost, and to walk on: “I raised my foot to leave the ghostly place of the Nonexistent.”114 Despising that which seems to have no presence, the traveller betakes himself to a place where he expects to be surrounded by real presence – a museum, with “treasures found in the rubble of the graves: they have resisted, at least for the moment, the power of time; they express only themselves and are of incomparable beauty.”115 His hope is influenced not by a worldview associated with antiquity, but rather by a modernity enamoured with the small things that, in their simplicity and presence, are beautiful and promise a place of respite from an incomprehensible world. That is, Hofmannsthal’s narrator wishes to escape to the present, to his present. And he thinks he can achieve this by surrounding himself with things of enduring presence. In his essay on Auguste Rodin, Rilke writes of “things” and “the unwritten law that lived in the sculpture of the past,” noting that the “distinguishing characteristic of things – this complete self-­ absorption – was what gave sculpture its serenity; it could neither demand nor expect anything from outside itself, and it could refer to nothing and see nothing that was not within itself.”116 The emphasis on autotelic existence – on answering to no purpose other than its own existence – is what is meant by “autonomy of art,” here attributed to things. On 8 August 1903, Rilke writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé of the “art-thing,” or Kunst-Ding: it is removed from ravenous time,

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and given over to space  – the space, in this instance, being the museum.117 Yet the art-object itself is, in one respect, like a museum: it houses the beauty that otherwise would be subject to decay, not through imitative representation, but through the evocation or suggestion of something absent.118 Hofmannsthal, like Rilke, is fully aware of the suggestive potential of art objects (heir to symbolism that he is), and infuses this potential with his own melancholic nuance. The object exists as a productive absence; the presence of the thing is a monument to that absence; the museum is a mausoleum, with an aesthetic turn of the screw. The self-sufficiency of the symbolic art-objects segues into the Symbolist air of fin-de-siècle Vienna as the narrator very nearly quotes Hofmannsthal’s own 1896 poem, “Die Beiden” (translated as “The Both of Them” by McClatchy in The Whole Difference). The narrator moves from a general remark about these Kunst-Dinge (art-things) to a particular hypothetical example: “A goblet [Becher] resembles the roundness of a breast or the shoulder of a goddess. A golden snake that once encircled an arm evokes that arm.”119 In a similar gesture, the poem of 1896 opens: “In her hand she carried the cup [Becher] to him – Her chin and mouth were like its rim.”120 The physical body is compared with and then spatially juxtaposed to and expressed through reference to the cup. They share a space of existence, calling each other and responding within the framework of the symbol. In a similar manner, the imagined golden serpent once wound round an arm evokes the arm itself, now gone. Art recalls life through evocation and suggestion. The snake recalls the arm, but it also, indirectly, recalls another ekphrastic moment: the serpentine coils of gold in the servant girl’s hair in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” In that story, discussed at length in chapter 1, the living servant is framed by and arises out of a description of golden ornamentation, evoking the powers of Midas and Medusa: “while their dark heads with evil snake mouths, three wild eyes in the foreheads, and eerie jewelry in the cold, hard hair moved next to her breathing cheeks, grazing her fair temples in time with her slow gait.”121 The pull of such things is strong, for they promise duration – a satisfaction of the desire to fix beauty in space. In Georg Büchner’s 1836 novella, Lenz, the eponymous protagonist expresses a desire to fix beauty with a Medusa-like stare122 so that it might be preserved and shared with others. Similarly, in “Moments in Greece,” the narrator’s desire for preservation suggests a deeper

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discontent and a greater loss suffered. Turning something to gold or to stone is the mythical expression of a desire to overcome the poverty one feels when encountering death or absence. But to what degree can one rely on an economy of presence? The narrator himself, recalling yet again the image of Rimbaud and his quest for money, knows that any supposed essence or true being of Greek antiquity is unattainable, and so sets his sights on the lowly, the graspable, the Kunst-Dinge, that recall the life that once surrounded them.123

A e s t h e t ic E n c o u n t e r as Augenbli ck The first half of this third section has been concerned with the poverty of presence. The second half presents a complement in the overwhelming presence of a collection of Greek statues. That presence is felt in the aesthetic moment or Augenblick, a word whose etymology refers to “the glimpse (or blink) of an eye.” The moment is a double motion: the eye opens for an instant before it closes again. In the final “moment” in Greece, the Augenblick itself becomes an object of consideration. Upon entering the museum, the narrator encounters something far grander than the charming but unassuming goblet with its wispy hints of life. He encounters, instead, something that seems to have a life of its own: the faces of a collection of korai – those freestanding statues of ancient Greece known for their “archaic smile.” The narrator’s frustrated attempts to describe the last “moment” result in a proliferation of words strung together by colons, with each successive phrase serving as an attempt to clarify and inch towards an adequate description; but with each phrase, the immeasurability of the moment continues to overwhelm the words. Hofmannsthal’s sentences form a wavelike rhythm; the iterations and reiterations of this ineffable presence do not cease until the narrator comes to describing his vision of that mysterious, time-defying smile – a smile that has played so central a role in the long history of aesthetic discussions: “At that moment something happened to me: an indescribable shock. It came not from outside but from some immeasurable distance of an inner abyss: it was like lightning: the room, as it was, rectangular with whitewashed walls and the statues that stood there, became for an instant filled with a light utterly different from that which was really there: the eyes of the statues were all at once turned towards me and

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an unspeakable smile occurred in their faces.”124 Expressible only obliquely, this “something” is a “shock,” the source of which is located, if it can be located at all, in that distance within the interior abyss, its temporal quality conveyed only as the flash of an instant. The description resembles the visionary Augenblick in the “Address”: there, a hanging tapestry has the capacity to illuminate the “arbitrarywill-become-form of the joining colours and shades.”125 Here, too, the connectivity of things has been rendered aesthetically – or perhaps we could reverse the terms and say that aesthetic manifestation is rendered through connectivity. The surroundings in which this “something” takes place – its atmosphere – is a kind of Hofmannsthalian version of the Platonic khôra, the space described in the Timaeus (52a-b),126 where things come into being and form is given (as in the smile: “an unspeakable smile occurred in their faces”). It is the space of the universe of forms and their representation. Hofmannsthal gives this space an aesthetic emphasis: this is where the work of art can reveal its form. But that revelation, as scholars have affirmed, involves a moment of dissociation.127 That raises the question: What is it about the aesthetic experience and momentary revelation that brings us back to ourselves – after the dissociation? For Hofmannsthal, one answer is: beauty’s capacity to awaken a response. Khôra can prepare us to answer. Keeping beauty’s call to responsibility in mind, we see that Hofmannsthal’s idea of space here would in at least one respect be closer to Derrida’s explanation of the khôra than to, say, Heidegger’s “clearing” (Lichtung), insofar as there is ultimately a call of responsibility within this formproducing space. This is evident, for instance, in Derrida’s analogy between Socrates and khôra: “Socrates is not khôra, but he would look a lot like it/her if it/she were someone or something … Socrates does not occupy this undiscoverable place, but it is the one from which, in the Timaeus and elsewhere, he answers to his name. For as khôra he must always ‘be called in the same way.’”128 There is a call in the khôra, as there is in the aesthetic space. Responding to one’s name and doing so in a like (or adequate) fashion are demanded of the viewer (or listener). For Derrida, this kind of response involves a degree of effacement. In Ancient Greek theatre, effacement was commonly enacted by the humble character of the εἴρων (eiron), whence the phrase “Socratic irony” and, further down the line, our own literary understanding of the term. The effacement can be expressed as privation of any real

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referent.129 In Hofmannsthal’s text, too, there seems to be no real referent (the critique of Naturalism is still hale and hearty): “the room … became for an instant filled with a light utterly different from that which was really there.”130 And yet for Hofmannsthal, the work of art – “arbitrary-will-become-form” – will take on a face in this space, uniting humility and hubris. In fact, the face issues the call for responsibility. Hofmannsthal uses this space as a stage for the work of art and its ironic face.131 Keeping in mind the notion that beauty binds us to some duty,132 we see this expression of responsibility emanating from the eyes of the statues. In this moment of shock, being subjected to the statues’ gaze is indeed one of those profound moments that “can make us tremble.”133 Derrida uses that phrase when describing the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and it might seem strange to invoke the name of a man who wrote so eloquently on the nefarious appeal of art; yet Hofmannsthal himself has already done this for us in his vision of the phantom Plato. All three thinkers  – Plato, Hofmannsthal, and Levinas – wrestled with the same issues: art threatens to overtake us and to steal us away from reality by offering a fantasy world. Art is, like writing, a pharmakon, a drug with the capacity to heal and to harm. Hofmannsthal clearly falls on the side of art, but he does so in a way that accounts for the inherent ambiguity of the aesthetic. In “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas argues that art inspires disengagement. He uses Pygmalion’s statue as an example par excellence for art: “The artwork does not succeed, is bad, when it does not have that aspiration for life which moved Pygmalion. But it is only an aspiration. The artist has given the statue a lifeless life, a derisory life that is not master of itself, a caricature of life. Its presence does not cover over itself and overflows on all sides, does not hold in its own hands the strings of the puppet it is.”134 The lifeless statue and other works of art by their very nature, according to Levinas, induce a similarly lifeless stupor in the observer: “Do not speak, do not reflect, admire in silence and peace – such are the counsels of wisdom satisfied before the beautiful.” The statues are, for Hofmannsthal too, speechless in that they, as Levinas says “have mouths but do not speak.”135 But Hofmannsthal does attribute faces to them (a distinctly ethically charged image for both Hofmannsthal and Levinas) and, more essentially, a physicality that demands response, and even responsibility. Levinas would argue against any kind of phenomenological or aesthetic mediation in the confrontation with the face: “Infinity presents

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itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyses my powers and from the depths of defenceless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution. The comprehension of this destitution and this hunger establishes the very proximity of the other … To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation. To manifest oneself as a face is to impose oneself above and beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form … In Desire are conjoined the movements unto the Height and unto the Humility of the Other.”136 There are remarkable parallels between Levinas’s description of the encounter with the face in its “ethical resistance” and Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the encounter with the statues’ faces – with their aesthetic resistance. One might argue, again along Platonic lines, that in the statues we have only images of faces (that is, a phenomenological intermediary, not self-made, mute, existing but not alive), but for Hofmannsthal’s narrator these images call attention to and validate physical existence. They possess, through their very plasticity and Medusa-like gaze, their own means to call to the observer and recall that “nudity and destitution.” The statues are a site wherein “are conjoined the movements unto the Height and unto the Humility of the Other” – and for Hofmannsthal, these movements of recognizing the other involve a return to the self. Height and humility, hubris and meekness, are united in the work of art. Shock is the traveller’s first (involuntary) response to the statues’ eyes and the “unsägliches Lächeln” (unspeakable smile) that graces their faces. The smile is associated with the beauty and mystery of the Mona Lisa as much as with the archaic smile of a statue like the Peplos Kore of Athens. It is worth lingering on this smile, which in the secondary literature on “Moments in Greece” has received surprisingly little ­attention; yet the image is key to the passage and to the narrator’s own awareness: “At the same time I knew: I am not seeing this for the first time.”137 Erwin Kobel and Zsuzsa Breier acknowledge that, with this smile, Hofmannsthal would be thinking of Leonardo da Vinci. Kobel calls this an “archaisches Lächeln” (archaic smile), which, while ­certainly not incorrect – it is the proper term from an art historical perspective – is inadequate, since it does not account for the timelessness and even the modernity of the moment; nor does Kobel ask what this smile could be suggesting. He leaves the allusion unexplored. Breier reduces the smile and the eyes to memory’s handmaidens, stating that they are important in this respect alone.138 It seems to me that Hofmannsthal’s images are more complex and meaningful than that.

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Figure 3.2  Phrasikleia Kore, Ariston of Paros, 550–540 bc. Depicts a typical archaic smile.

The eyes and the mouth are perhaps the most expressive parts of the face in Western physiognomy.139 Hofmannsthal is deliberately drawing on Walter Pater’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci (in The Renaissance), parts of which he had translated some years earlier.

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Towards the beginning of the essay, Pater identifies two of Leonardo’s early influences: “the smiling of women and the motion of great waters,” that is, the beautiful and the sublime. That the moment of shock in “The Statues” should be connected with the faces and smiles of the korai is meaningful first of all insofar as it unites the beautiful and the sublime in one aesthetic experience. Their “unspeakable smile” is practically a translation of what Pater identifies as the “­germinal principle” of Leonardo’s work, namely “the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it.” La Giaconda’s smile, one of the most well-known of such enigmatic expressions to grace canvas, embodies for Pater countless fates and histories, radiating outward from the present moment, as much an expression of today as of yesteryear, as familiar as it is strange.140 Hofmannsthal has located this smile in the korai, such that the narrator too recognizes something of the countless fates and stories in these faces – not just his own, but others’ as well. Yet Hofmannsthal resists the idea of totality as a final negation of particularity. Instead, communion is the key, as it was in “The Wanderer”: “in some other world I have stood before these, have had some kind of communion with them, and ever since then everything in me has been waiting for just this shock, and so dreadfully I had to be shaken thus within my innermost self in order to become again what I had been.”141 The insistent use of the demonstrative pronouns (“these,” “them,” “this”) highlights the importance of particularity and nearness; on the other hand, one can indeed be lost in a place and time defined only by vagueness, suggesting the indefinite rather than the definite: “At that moment something happened to me”; “It came not from outside but from some immeasurable distance of an inner abyss”; “in some other world”; “had some kind of communion.”142 This is a world of suspension between definitudes. It is what Hofmannsthal, in his notes to himself, entitled Ad me ipsum, calls “Präexistenz.”143 It is a moment of shared ritual – each repeated performance a unique occurrence (here, before the statues) yet partaking in a common practice – and a rite of passage, as Hofmannsthal clearly indicates, subject to the laws of neither space nor time: “Somewhere a ceremony was taking place, a battle, a glorious sacrificial offering: that was the meaning of this tumult in the air, of the expanding and shrinking of the room, the meaning of this unspeakable exaltation in me, of this effervescing sociability, alternating with this mysterious anxiety and despondency: for I am the priest who will

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perform the ceremony – I, too, perhaps the victim [“Opfer”] that will be offered: all this presses towards decision, it ends with the crossing of a threshold, with a landing.”144 The “landing” is a clear reference to the ship-wrecked man from the “The Wanderer,” but the link this time is marked by humility and sacrificial offering.145 Such sacrificial humility can be attributed to the poet-figure. The poet as priest (related to but distinct from the poet as alter deus) in German literature is a familiar trope. Novalis famously noted in Blüthenstaub (Pollen): “In the beginning, Poet and Priest were one.”146 But the connection between religion and the poet goes further back: the Sturm und Drang playwright and theorist Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz wrote in his Anmerkungen übers Theater (Remarks Concerning the Theatre): “For ever and always the feelings, emotions and passions of men have been grafted on to their religious concepts, a man with no religion has no sensibility whatsoever (woe to him!), a man of twisted religion has twisted sensibilities, and a poet who did not found the religion of his people is worth less than a fairground musician.”147 If art is to be a substitute for religion, however, there must be a way whereby the mystery is made manifest and ­aesthetic (plastic or otherwise). For Hofmannsthal, this is most elegantly achieved in the symbol, the idea of identity that is das Gleiche but not dasselbe. In “The Conversation about Poems,” the origin of the symbol is one of identity between the sacrificial offering and the person performing the sacrifice: the man, as priest, dies in the moment, for the moment, with the animal he sacrifices. In “Moments in Greece,” the scene is more elaborate, the paradoxical nature of the identity more prominent: “effervescing sociability” and “despondency” coexist. Furthermore, the movement arises out of participatory identification: “all this presses towards decision.” This is not a decisionist philosophy in the sense of Carl Schmitt – it is not about the existence of authority justifying the content of the decision – but rather about the necessity of response, of the deed: “it ends with the crossing of a threshold, with a landing.” This action is framed as a poetic rite. “At that moment something happened to me.” This sentence opens the long paragraph detailing the auratic experience, but it seems to end as quickly as it came on. The face – both in art and in life – is the window to this chaos, this ultimate confusion from which the ordered cosmos must again and again be separated: “And now already all this dies down into their faces turning back into stone, it expires and is gone; nothing remains but the death-sigh of despondency. Statues stand

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about me, five of them, only now am I aware of their number, strange they stand before me, heavy and stonelike, with slanting eyes.”148 These statues preserve and re-enact that moment of being in the world before the separation of light from darkness. That confusion exists like a vestige in the work of art. This can be seen in the image of petrification as a continual process, rendered grammatically as a present participle: “turning back into stone.” Crossing the threshold is a kind of death, and whatever remains after this event still is tainted with that death. The moment of identification – which seems not only to have threatened the observer’s independent existence, but even to have killed some part of him – gives way to impenetrable difference.149 The statues’ physical outline is as much a rift in space (frustrating any totalizing identification) as it is a demarcation of their physical presence; at every point along this line of demarcation there is an abyss of difference. The narrator goes on, drawing attention to the particularity of the physical statues before him and to their now seemingly static presence: note the change from present participle “versteinernden” (turning into stone) to the simple adjective “steinern” (stonelike). The ritual has been accomplished. He counts the statues – five – repeating the child’s counting of the soldiers’ faces, only here the number is finite. It is the limiting adumbration of materiality – in short, their physical presence, which will now challenge the observer’s notions of life, of subject and object, and of reality. The narrator writes that there is a life that plays around their chins: they have in their aesthetic presence an aesthetic vitality that appears to have been given them in that moment of strange identification between observer and observed. And yet now, given that life, they stand before him, utterly foreign and ­unattainable symbols of the original chaos: “Am I not standing before the strangest of the strange? Does not the eternal dread of chaos stare at me here from five virginal faces?”150 Despite the shock, the statues, in their imposing physical presence, nearly force a response from the observer. And the narrator does respond, with a kind of paean: “Yet, my God, how real they are! They have a breathtaking sensual presence.”151 The description “breathtaking” (“atemberaubend”) operates chiastically with the above “death sigh of despondency” (“totbehauchte Verzagtheit”) said to have been left behind. Whereas before, held in the throes of ambiguity, the narrator is left with a despondence, the only quality of which is that it has upon it the breath of death, here the narrator’s breath is taken away in amazement at the form and its life. This form is made

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manifest, first, as the reality of physical presence (the phenomenon), a presence appropriately likened to the temple with its architectonic clarity and its privilege as the site of sacrifice and ritual, and also as a metaphor for the body itself. The sentence that follows establishes the link between the body and the face, the seat of represented personality: “Their solemnity has nothing of masks: the face receives its meaning from the body.”152 Moving from the temple of the body to the inner sanctum of the face with its commanding presence and distinction, we trace the trajectories from both the phenomenological and the religious to the aesthetic. Walter Pater writes in his essay on the eighteenth-century German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann: “Greek art … is entangled with Greek religion.” Greek religion, he says, like all religions, is founded on a “pagan sentiment” that “measures the ­sadness with which the human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander far from what is here, and now.”153 Hofmannsthal identifies this pagan sentiment as common to religion, art, and phenomena generally; that is, what unites all three is the condition of difference, distance, and absence. Yet Hofmannsthal does not forfeit the notion of participation – rather, he elevates it: “They participate in things that are above any common conception.” This pronouncement ­heralds the move from the phenomenological to the aesthetic: “How beautiful they are!”154 Beauty, in this sense, is not the pleasant loveliness of the objects the narrator had expected to find,155 but something overpowering that emanates from the statues’ bodies: “Their bodies are more convincing to me than my own … Never before have I seen anything like these proportions and this surface. Did not the universe, for a fleeting moment, open up to me?”156 The universe’s revelation through the physical presence of the statues seems a thoroughly mystical moment. The narrator aptly compares himself to a dreamer. But dreams  – and poetry  – have a special ­connection to reality, according to an aphorism from Hofmannsthal’s collection Buch der Freunde (Book of Friends): “Insofar as one can say anything conclusive about reality, one approaches dream, or rather poetry.”157 For “Moments in Greece,” it is the realm of physical reality that houses this eternity, providing the material for its expression: “it is the secret of infinity in these garments.”158 The material is, in a Hegelian sense, adequate to the idea.159 The statues’ physical presence – their grandeur – is in this aesthetic, sensual moment nevertheless receding and unattainable.

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In light of this aesthetic encounter, and sensing its inevitable ephemerality, the narrator draws a conclusion: “He who would truly be a match for them must approach them by means other than the eye, with greater reverence yet with more daring. And still, it is the eye that would have to bid him, beholding, absorbing, but then drooping, growing dim as with one overwhelmed.”160 This statement is key to understanding Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics. It is the conundrum of Hofmannsthal’s artist-viewer. Just as critical observers have become artists, so too must artists become critical observers while preserving their identity as creators. They must approach with reverence, as one would approach an altar. Yet the eye, in all its metaphorical multivalence, is a necessary medium for that approach; an affected observer responds by sinking, bowing, breaking, and ultimately being overpowered by the vision of the divine, falling into a proskynesis: “My eye did not droop, but a figure sank down over the knees of the priestess, someone rested his forehead on the foot of a statue. I know not whether I thought this or if it happened.”161 There is a sense in which the self is separated from itself in the aesthetic encounter, as if undergoing a near-death experience. The scene recalls an earlier moment, when the traveller takes a drink from the spring. Yet unlike the earlier instance, here the grammatical subject “Ich” is still present; that is, here the self experiences itself as multiplicity. But the artist’s approach is not only reverential; it is bold and at times defiant. Pride functions as a necessary antidote that accompanies its correlative poison – that is, whatever might stifle the creative force, be it anxiety of influence, a sense of inadequacy, or deference to an object more idolized than aestheticized. Defiance and self-assertion, through creating that which is beyond the self, rise to meet the ­aesthetic object, itself a formidable thing. The Platonic pharmakon reasserts itself in the “Moments in Greece” and elsewhere – we might again refer to Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan and the confusion of “Gift” and “Theriak,” that is poison and its antidote. In one of the poems from that collection, Ebusuud Efendi praises Hafis for his poetry, but warns against the excesses of aesthetic indulgence: If you want to err on the side of caution, you must know how to differentiate between snake venom and theriac.162 In “Der Deutsche dankt” (The German gives thanks), which directly follows, one reads the counterstatement: Snake venom and theriac must seem alike to the poet; the one will not kill, the other will not heal.163 As in Goethe, so too in Hofmannsthal one witnesses the yoking together of opposites.

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Both reverence and boldness must be present even to approach such an encounter and to see the world with the eyes of a poet. The importance of power and boldness for artistic creation – especially innovation – is apparent. And if we are unsure, Hofmannsthal himself has already told us, for example, in one of his essays on D’Annunzio, “for beauty comes about there, where there is power [Kraft] and humility [Bescheidenheit].”164 Art transcends the rules of the quotidian by transgressing the boundaries of discursive reason. But how does Hofmannsthal explain the humility necessary for the generation of beauty, and the awe (Ehrfurcht) needed in approaching it? Hofmannsthal has repeatedly invoked notions of communion and participation, and it is this which allows him to conclude the “Moments in Greece” with the triumphal sentence: “If the Unattainable feeds on my innermost being and the Eternal builds out of me its eternity, what then still stands between me and the Deity?”165 Scholars have not offered a satisfying interpretation of this sentence. Zsuzsa Breier calls it “radikal” but does not elaborate. Hans-Jürgen Schings refers to the “Kühnheit der Schlußwendung” – the brazenness of the conclusion’s turn – but he does not explore this further either.166 Carlpeter Braegger, on the other hand, makes an interesting point in referring to the much later introduction Hofmannsthal wrote to Hanns Holdt’s Griechenland: “Perhaps we still take in a complete form, made of marble and rising before us, with a romantic view. Perhaps we lend it too much of our consciousness, of our soul.”167 We also find an interpretive clue in the “Address” from 1902: “The demand imposed on us by the world of beauty, this daimonic process of enticing out of us entire worlds of feeling, this demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected power of the mysterious line of ancestors within us, the towering stacks of layers of our supra-individual memory, piled one upon the other.”168 From a “Romantic” point of view, we are more than merely individuals; at the moment of such an encounter, we live beyond our selves, and we offer ourselves up as sustenance to the other. Where does this ability to offer ourselves up come from? Again, the 1902 “Address”: “For such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’”169 In “Moments in Greece,” the narrator has emphatically designated the statues “schön.” Moreover, the beauty of these statues is tied to something we might call a phenomenological suffering, or sadness. I have already discussed the role of suffering in Hofmannsthal’s “The

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Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” and here it takes several forms as well, the most explicit of which is the depiction of the German wanderer. But even in the statues – these nonhuman entities – the viewer is made privy to a peculiar kind of suffering that arises from phenomena and speaks to the passing away of great things. Having offered himself up to the ecstatic moment of the encounter with the beautiful – his own katabasis – the traveller is then “returned” (the anabasis) and given an understanding of the transience of experiencing that atemporal moment – that Augenblick – and of the interdependence of human being and artwork that gives the moment vitality. In his long study Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (Hofmannsthal and His Time), Hermann Broch describes Hofmannsthal’s “Moments in Greece” in terms of a poetic ecstasy, whereby the artistic mind finds its way back to complete identification and pre-existence. The question remains, though: is this a complete identification? Broch qualifies his statement upon further reflection: the artist, like anyone, must deal with the flux, the constant motion of the world.170 In “Moments in Greece,” there is a heightened awareness of the unknown and of the impossibility of penetrating the surface of things. As Hofmannsthal himself writes in Buch der Freunde (The Book of Friends): “Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface.”171 The statement betrays a typically fin-de-siècle appreciation for the surface, relief, and outline of things, and marks an aesthetic view that focuses on materiality. But the surface is anything but stable: “It would be unthinkable to want to cling to their surface. This surface actually is not there – it grows by a continuous coming from inexhaustible depths.”172 The surface is not; rather, it becomes. Insofar as it comes into being, it passes away as well. Of course, this can be said of all things, animate or otherwise. But in this particular moment, the narrator is able to experience communion with the world. But that connection is tinged with the melancholy of untraversable distance to and universal difference from what is foreign, unknown, and other.173 “They are here and are unattainable. So, too, am I. By this we communicate.”174 —*— As with “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” one might here be tempted to call this encounter a mystical one and leave it at that. The religious tone, the temporal suspension, and the feeling of dissociation

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would all support such an interpretation. The contraction and expansion of space, the very notion of the Reise (as pilgrimage or as metempsychosis), and the sacrifice all read like a medieval dream vision. It seems no coincidence that Hofmannsthal wrote on the final leaf of his copy of The Rise of the Greek Epic the name “Buber,” as if the philosopher Martin Buber’s 1909 Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions) were a source of inspiration. Hofmannsthal adopts much of the imagery associated with the ecstatic, mystical experience as outlined in Buber’s book, yet he creates a literary text that ultimately represents an aesthetic moment. For Buber, the mystical, ecstatic moment is characterized by unity (Einheit); for Hofmannsthal, unity is impossible, except as participation, and even this comes about with the recognition of unreachable otherness. At the same time, Hofmannsthal stresses the dialogical reciprocity in the encounter, quoted above: “They are here and are unattainable. So, too, am I. By this we communicate.” Such reciprocity represents a departure from the ecstatic confession in the sense that Buber describes. This last of the Moments does not exhibit unity, but comes about in the face of the other. If anything, “Moments in Greece” has more in common with Buber’s later work on dialogical philosophy, here anticipated in Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the work of art. Some fourteen years later Buber will write in Ich und Du (I and Thou) about art in a way that recalls “Moments in Greece”: “Tested for its objectivity, the form is not ‘there’ at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it.”175 The surface, too, is not there, but is in a process of becoming; and both the viewer and the statue have the power to affect each other through a kind of identification. In The Book of Friends, Hofmannsthal writes of the generation of “das Plastische,” which can refer to sculpture, threedimensionality, and malleability: “The plastic does not arise from seeing, but rather from identification.”176 The hierarchy of the gaze must be overturned in that momentary loss of the sense of Ego (the self, standing in opposition to the other). The ontological (not simply epistemological) realization comes about in the aesthetic encounter, suggesting that art, too, participates in that dialogue which recognizes and can only exist in conjunction with an other. This is for Hofmannsthal the ethical moment in art. But it remains to be seen whether the union of ethics and aesthetics can ever be realized in the world beyond the page, and beyond the gaze.

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4 Aesthetic Transfiguration in Die Frau ohne Schatten

The Märchen, or fairy-tale, is the least realistic of literary genres. On a philosophical level, it serves a similar experimental function to that of the essay. But unlike the essay, the aesthetic features of the text are not merely aides for the imagination, they are frequently objects of reflection. Just as beauty cannot be, as Hermann Broch says, “its own critical authority,” neither can ethics.1 Die Frau ohne Schatten, Hofmannsthal’s most convoluted Märchen is, paradoxically, also one of his most sustained meditations on ethics. Die Frau ohne Schatten has an unusual genesis.2 As early as 1909, Hofmannsthal had an idea for a fairy-tale opera, which would eventually result in a grandiose and difficult collaboration with Richard Strauss. Ten years later, the opera premiered in Vienna on 10 October 1919 under the direction of Franz Schalk. But post-war circumstances had a considerable effect on both the staging and the reception. The situation was neither economically nor socially propitious. Restricted imports from Czechoslovakia – especially coal, reduced steel, and iron – brought industry to a halt, and limitations on power usage and the reduction of food imports contributed to a generally unpleasant life in Austria. The change in the form of government did, however, introduce ­subventions for theatre and music – a product of the Social Democrats’ ambition to make “high art” available to more people.3 After the war, Strauss was asked to be co-director (together with Schalk) of the Wiener Staatsoper – hence the choice of Vienna for the opera’s premiere. He accepted a substantially reduced income, which nevertheless seemed to many rather high for such a city with such economic woes.4

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For an opera like Die Frau ohne Schatten, the financial limitations could have proven fatal. This is Strauss’s and Hofmannsthal’s most demanding work: it is their longest opera, and it requires five worldclass singers and an immense (and tireless) orchestra. Hofmannsthal’s symbol-laden libretto and cinematic stage directions likewise require many resources that opera companies for years after the war simply lacked.5 Many critics did receive the opera positively, but audiences were not as enthusiastic.6 Though staging the opera so soon after the war was far from ideal, the other option would have been to hold off indefinitely. Technical and financial difficulties aside, Hofmannsthal began to sense while writing the libretto that the material of Die Frau ohne Schatten demanded more than one approach. He decided to work on a prose version of the story while still writing the libretto. In October of 1919, he penned a letter to a fellow writer, Raoul Auernheimer, and explained: “There are six years of work in this book, all the good, pure moments I was able to salvage from these dark times, and an unspeakable effort.”7 Like the opera, the prose version bears the scars of its conception. But this prose Märchen could say more, because the stage of the imagination has fewer limitations than a physical stage. The prose tale is interesting also because of what Hofmannsthal added to the story.8 Key elements like the carpet motif, the elaborate description of the Emperor’s petrification (the human being transformed into a work of art), and the explosion of colour at the end of the story are absent from the opera, or function merely as part of the background. Furthermore, the prose version, both in its structure and its imagery, offers a response to the problems of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” Not only the broader narrative strokes – a protagonist from a world of beauty descends to a world of ugliness – but also particular motifs, such as the carpet, recall the earlier work.9 Most importantly, in both tales, the question of beauty and the confrontation with works of art explore the dialogical relationship between ethics and aesthetics, this time in a wartime and post-war context. In an essay from 1949 entitled “Hofmannsthals Wandlung” (Hofmannsthal’s Transformation), Richard Alewyn formulated what became an oft-cited interpretation of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” thus: “Life – according to Hofmannsthal – will not be mocked. If defied, it becomes angry and vengeful.”10 Alewyn reads

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Die Frau ohne Schatten as a transformation of the aestheticism conundrum presented in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,”11 but his observations want demonstration. In what, precisely, does this transformation (“Wandlung”) consist? Hofmannsthal’s transformation need not be read as a refutation of earlier work, nor as a herald of a sudden, new interest in social or ethical concerns.12 Transformation can incorporate what existed before. In the case in Die Frau ohne Schatten, the earlier literary material is clarified – one might even say “transfigured” (verklärt). In a literary studies context, “transformation” as a motif occurs most frequently in two kinds of stories: the novel genre of Bildungs­ roman, and mythical stories like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and fairy tales. The characters in Die Frau ohne Schatten are not novelistic, and although they are treated with subtlety and given a complexity of emotion, they are more like the characters of Shakespeare’s Tempest than of his Hamlet, still somehow of the aether, even if they gain shadows in the end. The ethical resolution is too magical a transformation to realize in a novel. In this wartime Märchen, unlike the Märchen from 1895, the resolution is a happy one, but it is achieved artificially (or artfully) through a logic of deus-ex-machina in the guise of sacrifice. In his essay “Die Ironie der Dinge” (“The Irony of Things”), written in 1921, Hofmannsthal reflects on a fragmentary observation attributed to Novalis: “After an unhappy war, comedies must be written.”13 According to Hofmannsthal, comedy is the genre of irony par excellence.14 Whoever has survived a crisis gains the clear spirit and insight of irony, much like one who has died and returned.15 Die Frau ohne Schatten can therefore be described as a comedic Märchen (by contrast, the “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” would be a tragic Märchen), which explores the possibility of life after death (of some kind), not just of the individuals who have survived trauma, but of future generations. If there is a message or a moral in the story it is this very obvious one: Life may persist after death insofar as we create the conditions for future generations to thrive. The story is complex, so a summary is in order. The setting is a mythical empire of the Southeastern Islands. While hunting, the Emperor of the land comes upon a shadowless gazelle and shoots it. The gazelle transforms before his eyes into a woman, the daughter of the Spirit King (“Geisterkönig”) Keikobad. The Emperor’s falcon attacks the

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gazelle-woman in the moment of her transformation, for which it is chastised before flying away. The Emperor and this newly transformed woman fall in love, but their union is troubled. In marrying a mortal, the woman loses her ability to change shape at will; furthermore, if within a year she still casts no shadow – a sign that she will bear no children – then her husband, the Emperor, will turn to stone. The Empress (now wife of the Emperor) has mysteriously forgotten (or repressed) her knowledge of the curse. Only her Nurse, who harbours a deep distrust of and aversion to humans, remembers. Time passes, and with every new month a messenger from the spirit realm comes to the palace to remind the Nurse of what will happen if the Empress fails to cast a shadow. But the Nurse keeps her knowledge silent, hoping for an eventual return to Keikobad’s realm. There are now three days remaining. This is when the narrative begins. When the Empress awakes one morning, her husband is already away again on one of his daily hunts. As she speaks with her Nurse, a falcon suddenly appears in the sky – the same falcon that had flown away – and with its appearance, the Empress recalls the curse. She then commands the Nurse to help her acquire a shadow. To do so, they must descend to the city below, where suffering souls might be willing to sell their shadows. According to the Nurse, humans are venal creatures. The two make their way through the city and find a woman, the wife of a Dyer named Barak (the Semitic root of which means “to kneel down”). The Dyer’s Wife is unhappy in her marriage and says she is prepared to exchange her shadow for a life of eternal beauty and freedom from her aging husband. This means she will never be able to bear children and must abandon Barak for a demon. With time, the Empress comes to see the suffering such an exchange will bring about: Barak will lose his wife and any hope of a family; and his wife will lose not just her ability to bear children but her humanity as well.16 With this knowledge, the Empress decides to sacrifice her own and her husband’s lives for those of the poor couple. In doing so, she restores the shadow to the Dyer’s Wife, gains her own, and saves her husband. This is a summary of the story’s plot; but woven into the plot is another story about the power of art and its relation to ethics. How these two stories inform each other is central to Hofmannsthal’s reflections on the encounter with art.

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T h e P a l a t ia l Ves ti bule Die Frau ohne Schatten begins, like the “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” with a description of the world that the Empress inhabits: a secluded blue palace on an island in an almost magical, typically German Kunstmärchen setting  – an imaginative space removed not only from the reader’s world, but also from the harsher climes of other, impoverished people in the tale itself.17 The story begins with the Empress’s Nurse as she nostalgically recalls in the early ­morning darkness how the Empress, before her marriage to the mortal Emperor, could change her shape at will and live as any and all creatures. Now enclosed in the palace, which belongs neither to the spirit realm nor to the city below, the Empress and the Nurse are as if suspended between dream and reality.18 In many ways, this world is antagonistic to the characters’ development.19 Neither here nor there, neither this nor that, there is something ontologically ambiguous about the place, which recalls that “Nicht-Leben” (not-life) described in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” as well as Dante’s vestibule to Hell. Here, Hell is the city below, where mortals toil and suffer.20 Stuck in this vestibule, the Nurse has been counting the fruitless months and monotonous days as they die away. The Emperor goes out to hunt and returns late at night to sleep at the Empress’s side. This repetition is not ritual; it is an attempt to hold on to what has passed. Or, in Nietzsche’s words: “Woe speaks: Vanish! Yet all delight desires eternity – profound eternity!”21 All three characters at this point are possessed by their desire to retain something of the past, something that can and will slip through their fingers into oblivion. For the Nurse, the goal is to repurchase what was lost; for the Emperor and the Empress, the goal is to re-enact daily their moment of falling in love. One might say they are trying to capture their moment of Kairos and smuggle it into the regularity of Chronos. In the Emperor’s case, this sort of regularity induces blindness to the flow of time, which has several repercussions. He enters the scene only briefly – the description takes up a mere eighteen lines – and his gestures are telling. In the opera, the Emperor has a memorably long aria in which he waxes lyrical about his quests – his hunt of the gazelle transformed into the Empress, and of his search for the red falcon, who disappeared after the Emperor had chastised it for causing injury to the future-Empress. He even talks to the Nurse briefly. In the prose version, however, Hofmannsthal paints with a few simple strokes three

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important aspects of the Emperor’s character: 1) rising fully clothed from his bed, he seems not to have engaged in sexual activity with the Empress, thus not conceiving with her, meaning she will still cast no shadow; 2) his activities are repetitive (as described above), and a result of habit; and 3) he is blind to beauty and its ethical command. The last point is an inference informed by Hofmannsthal’s other writings. Consider the Emperor’s encounter with the Nurse in this scene: “With a light foot, the Emperor stepped over the body of the Nurse, who pressed her face to the ground. He paid her no more attention than if she had been a rug.”22 Like the souls in Dante’s Vestibule to Hell, the Emperor (and the Empress, it might also be argued) is not malicious; his failure is one of sight – a strikingly Dantean sin.23 This is the first time the Emperor’s ethical insufficiency is presented, and it is done so by way of reference to a work of art: the carpet. Like the merchant’s son of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the Emperor owns many beautiful objects but takes no notice of them, and – worse yet – he takes no notice of the living being at his feet, whom he treats as if she were merely a rug upon the floor. This instance foreshadows the dramatic tension to come: later in the story, the Emperor will behold a beautiful carpet, at which point his moral fortitude will be put to the test. Hans-Günther Schwarz put it succinctly when he argued that the Emperor’s eyes must be opened to life as well as to the carpet. For now, however, he is set only on re-enacting the pursuit, and goes again on the hunt.24 The Empress, upon waking from unpleasant dreams, repeats to the Nurse the story of that fateful hunt that brought the two lovers together and sent the red falcon flying. She too replays this moment, even before those who witnessed it at the time: “The story of that hunt and the first hour our love was familiar enough to her [the Nurse]: it was as if a red-hot stylus had burnt the story into her soul.”25 The Nurse becomes angry, however, when the discussion shifts to the subject of the Empress’s dreams: namely, human beings. The Nurse is keen to see that the Empress remain secluded from those other mortal creatures who, unlike the wealthy and handsome Emperor, are ugly, both in face and in soul. The Empress betrays the same prejudice, despite her marriage to a mortal: “Why,” she asks, “are human faces so wild and ugly, and animal faces so honest and pleasing?” 26 Reversing the typical characteristics of human and animal, she attributes wildness and ugliness to the former, but tameness and beauty to the creatures of nature. It is worth noting that elsewhere Hofmannsthal

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has had his characters express precisely the opposite view: in “Das Gespräch und die Geschichte der Frau von W.” (The conversation and the story of Frau von W.) one reads: “Face – hieroglyph. There are no ugly people.”27 But when the red falcon suddenly appears with the Empress’s talisman, upon which the curse is etched, the Empress knows that she – like the merchant’s son in the “Tale,” and like Gianino in The Death of Titian – must descend into the hideous lower world of humankind to find a shadow. The Empress has failed to remember something of great importance – the curse. What alerts her to her error is the talisman: in Arabic, the word ‫مسلط‬ (ṭillasm) means “magical picture” and derives from the Greek τελέω (teleō), “I complete, perform a rite.” While not explicitly an encounter with a work of art (as in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” or “Moments in Greece”), this reunion with the talisman recalls the power that Walter Pater ascribes to beautiful, if seemingly trivial objects: “That sense of fate, which hangs so much of the shaping of human life on trivial objects, like Othello’s strawberry handkerchief.”28 Quite literally, the talisman – a beautiful, pale white stone upon which the symbols glow like fire – is an object upon which the fates of the Emperor and the Empress hang. And the pictorial quality of the talisman further suggests the possibility that the Emperor and Empress will have their eyes opened; this is what enables the ultimate move from repetition to rite and consummation. With this recognition, however, comes a sense of time quite different from that of the Nurse’s: “I will not know how much time is left! Perhaps it shall elapse this hour, and I might freeze, if I knew … Here and nowhere else begins the path, today and not tomorrow, in this hour and not only once the sun is higher in the sky … the seconds are burning my heart.”29 The hic et nunc imperative of desire is, in its active quality, distinct from the desire to tarry in the sweetness of the honeymoon, or before a work of art – or the hesitation before taking decisive and life-changing action. As with the hunt, this spirit of adventure seeks its fulfillment in the pursuit and capture of something outside the ­palace; but unlike the Emperor, the Empress is motivated by a different temporal sensibility: she feels each second burn away. Driven by this almost Faustian exigency, the Empress must descend into the city. The Nurse, too, bears Mephistophelean traces. Like Goethe’s Mephisto, the Nurse leads the Empress through the world on a quest. And like Christopher Marlowe’s Mephistophilis, she hates this world. In answer to Faustus’s inquiry as to how Mephistophilis

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was able to leave Hell, the devil replies with words that could equally be spoken by the Nurse: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss?30 The elision of the difference between Hell and Earth is telling. In Die Frau ohne Schatten, “Heaven” is, for the Nurse, Keikobad’s realm of timeless beauty and endless possibility; all else is Hell in comparison. But it is her experience of the lower pits of a worldly Hell that make her qualified to be the Empress’s guide in the quest for a shadow.

T h e P o e t in t h e Ci ty of Woe Having disguised themselves to be as inconspicuous as possible, the two travellers descend into the city. As in the “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the city is deliberately contrasted to the palace. Even the palette is reversed: instead of the crystal-clear blue of the palace, we have the dirty yellow water of the river which “flowed with great spots of dark colour that came from the Dyers’ Quarter beyond the bridge.”31 To borrow Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the Manchester waterways: “It is the Styx of this new Hades.”32 This multisensory hellscape is composed from the stench rising from the tanneries (where one finds the poorest of the poor); the sight and smell of hanging skins; the clangour of hammers; the stink of hooves burnt for shoe fitting. Masses of people crowd around the Empress, disorienting her in the process. Like a modern metropolis, this city overwhelms the senses and awakens an unnamed anxiety. “The dreadful aspect in the faces of the people struck her from such nearness as never before. She wanted boldly to pass by them, her feet were willing, her heart was not. Every hand that moved seemed to grasp at her, ghastly were these many mouths in such closeness. The merciless, greedy, and, as it seemed to her, anxious glances from so many faces blended into one another in her breast.”33 This passage echoes aspects of the “Address,” yet what there was a metaphor is here a physical reality for the Empress. There the works of art are “like the shadows which surround Odysseus, all desirous to drink of

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his blood, silent, avidly pressed in upon one another.”34 The works of art as well as the faces and hands of the people in the crowd are portrayed as having a desire to possess. They are threatening and greedy. In the works of art, however, this experience is transfigured: “they take hold of us daimonically: and each is a world, and all are from a world which touches us through them and makes us shudder to the core.”35 In the case of the Empress, the experience presents itself as a real physical threat. But here too, as so often with Hofmannsthal, there is a chiastic relationship between the real and the imagined. The encounter with the work of art is presented in the indicative mood – that is, the mood of reality: “they take hold of us.” By contrast, the ‘reality’ of the Empress’s experience is qualified by one word: “Every hand that moved seemed to grasp at her” (my emphasis). As in Baudelaire’s work, ugliness is here made the object of an aesthetic depiction of something like modernity, infused with a Hofmannsthalian sensibility for empathy (with notes from Keats): “[The Empress] nearly went under in the tangle [Knäuel] of people, all of a sudden she found herself before the hoof of a large hinny, whose knowing and soft animal’s gaze met her, and she recovered. The rider struck the head of the hinny, which hesitated so as not to tread upon the trembling woman. – Is it for him to decide that I must transform into an animal and expose myself to the cruel hands of human beings? This thought went through her soul and she shivered, and with that she forgot herself for a moment and found herself c­ arried by the current to the end of the bridge, she knew not how.”36 The narrator presents the Empress’s limited point of view: the “Knäuel” threatens to pull her under and suffocate her. But this tangle will later unravel and be re-tied in an aurea catena homeri – an alchemical image of a chain of transformations, made popular in the eighteenth century by Anton Josef Kirchweger.37 The focus on the hinny contributes to this consideration as well: The animal’s gaze spurs the Empress to consider her own ability to transform into any animal she wishes: that is, she is in some essential way connected to the animal. They are both part of that golden chain. There is an emotional connection as well: As in Raskolnikov’s dream of the pitiable horse,38 the animal here is struck by his rider, awakening in the Empress a sympathy that will later come to guide her actions. Her question – “Is it for him to decide?” – is akin to that posed in Crime and Punishment. Who is responsible? The more the Empress becomes a witness to that life in the shadow of the blue palace, the

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more difficult it is to disentangle her fate from the fates of others. What is more disturbing is the implicit link to her former life: here, the hinny attempts to avoid injuring the Empress, as the rider strikes him violently upon the head. This re-enacts with subtle differences the scene of the hunt, in which the Empress, changing from gazelle- to humanform, is attacked by the red falcon clawing at her head; the falcon is punished by the Emperor. The ties between the beautiful world above and the wretched world below are increasingly evident. As she and the Nurse approach the house of the Dyer (Barak) and his wife, more evidence of suffering confronts them. They observe Barak’s three brothers, once whole in body, now fragments of their former selves. One had lost his eye to an angry bailiff, one had lost his arm in an oil mill accident, and one was crippled after being trampled by a camel – a fate the Empress had just now only narrowly escaped. Their bodies are casualties of labour: The oil mill accident, in particular, points to the ever-present, dangerous working conditions for the lower class. Though these are characters in a fairy tale, contemporaneous readers might well have thought of other mutilated bodies – those of First World War veterans.39 This fictional world makes use of unsettlingly familiar images from reality. In this ugly world there is one beautiful person: The Dyer’s Wife, a woman full of pride and spite (“Hochmut” and “Bosheit”).40 She is contrasted with her husband not only in physical form – to the Empress, Barak is repulsively ugly (“abschreckend häßlich”) – but also in movement and attitude. Barak bears all the signs of his job as a dyer: his hands are stained dark blue, and he carries a great bale of scarlet red cloth he intends to use on a saddle. This he then heaves onto his back, like a camel. Against the pride and lassitude of his wife, Barak’s humility and industriousness seem almost exaggerated. The saddlecloth he carries turns him into a beast of burden. His wife, on the other hand, would fit perfectly into Bruegel’s 1557 depiction of “Desidia,” the sin of sloth. Initially sitting on the ground and staring blankly into space, she moves only once her husband has gone, ­performing her quotidian tasks with utter listlessness. But she is more than an allegorical figure of idleness and vanity. She has been placed into this position by force, not by her own will. Under the (albeit benevolent) rule of a husband old enough to be her father, she lacks the freedom and responsibilities of adulthood. Stunted in this way, she behaves with immaturity. Upon entering the married couple’s home, the Empress trips, and the Dyer’s Wife laughs out loud

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Figure 4.1  Sloth (Desidia), from the series The Seven Deadly Sins, Pieter van der Heyden’s engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1558.

like a child.41 And she is held in stasis by a dilettantish infatuation with beauty – her own, in this case – and is unable to see how her fate is entwined with others’ fates. Like the slumbering woman at the ­centre of Brueghel’s “Desidia” engraving, she is vulnerable to the demons which surround her. And there are demons. In her Mephistophelian manner, the Nurse is able to manipulate the Dyer’s Wife to relinquish her shadow – and with it the possibility of children. All seems to be going according to plan, until the Empress begins to perceive what no one else can: Seven fish, which have been thrown into a pan to fry, begin to cry out in singing tones: “Mother, mother! Let us come home / the door is locked: we cannot get in.”42 In the opera these voices are sung by children, heightening the agony and pathos in their entreaty and connecting them directly to the Dyer’s Wife’s unborn children – now, it seems, condemned to nonexistence.

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This is one of a number of intensifying moments in which the Empress’s feels overwhelmed with compassion  – the first being the encounter with the hinny. Having descended to the world of labour and toil, relegated in this moment literally to the shadows and sensing the suffering of others, the Empress allegorically embodies Hofmannsthal’s artist more than any other character in the story. Richard Alewyn summarizes Hofmannsthal’s views succinctly: “The incognito is the poet’s lifeform. Hofmannsthal leads the poet down from his ivory tower into the bustling markets and streets … Like St Alexius of legend, he lies in his beggar’s clothes, in his house, the house of time, under the stairs, there where he sees and hears all … A St Sebastian, he is bound by the law: bar no one and nothing entry into your soul.”43 Kurt J. Fickert and Peter Celms characterize the Emperor as the poet or artist figure, but given Hofmannsthal’s description in “The Poet and Our Time,” from which Alewyn draws his characterization, it is more reasonable to see the Empress in this role.44 The Empress, like the poet, must descend, disguised, from the blue palace (her ivory tower) to the markets and streets of the city. Like St Alexius, she finds herself in the house of time – a new temporal sphere, breaking from the repetition of her days – and relegated to dark corners where she sees and hears everything. No one recognizes her – not even the Nurse really knows her – and she will experience suffering, for she, now like St Sebastian, must give all things access to her soul. That suffering is brought to a crisis when the Nurse summons the demonic Efrit to place the Dyer’s Wife into a trancelike state of acquiescence and loveless desire. The Empress recognizes that this woman, at heart, does not want to enter into the alliance this way. Hofmannsthal draws his readers’ attention to the hands and the eyes, those parts of the body connected with will and power: “With both hands, the Efrit grasped the wrists of the Dyer’s Wife and forced her to look up towards him; her glances could not resist the penetration of his gaze  … the oppressive feeling of reality held everything together.”45 Like an unwilling witness to violent seizure or rape, the Empress is stunned. She cannot turn away: for not only is she a witness, she is also implicated in the crime. This gives that phrase “the oppressive feeling of reality” a new valence: everything is bound together by this nightmarishly oppressive sense of reality. But the Dyer’s Wife’s desire is intermixed with aversion – though enraptured by the Efrit, she does not fully assent to the union, and her hesitation

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affords her the opportunity to pull herself away from the demon just before Barak enters. At this moment, the Empress’s compassion unfolds and she responds, stepping in between the Dyer’s Wife and the Efrit, whose terrifying face she now boldly confronts: “Through his two unlike eyes there grinned the abysses of a region that barred trespass, a fear seized her, not for herself, but rather in the soul of the Dyer’s Wife, that the latter should lie in the arms of such a demon and let her breath blend with his … An awful feeling shot through the Empress from her spine to the soles of her feet. She hardly knew any more who she was, nor how she had come to be here.”46 In Die Frau ohne Schatten the abyss is almost always at the periphery of the story, and sometimes it is acknowledged, as in this moment. The eyes of the Efrit reveal a grinning – not a gaping – chasm which is both enticing and menacing. Like the faces of the smiling korai in “Moments in Greece,” the Efrit’s face is an abyss which would swallow any sense self. The scene is interrupted when Barak enters. Having come from the market with a variety of delicacies and children in tow, he introduces an incongruously celebratory tenor. His three brothers and the accompanying flurry of children are rambunctious and happy to feast upon such bounty. Yet despite his good intentions, Barak fails to see his wife’s suffering: alternating between feeding treats to the children and to his own wife, “He did not notice that she choked on the bits of food and grew cold and stiff under his caresses, like a corpse.”47 He treats her like a child, but also wishes for her to share in his joy and desire for children. Singing jauntily out of tune – expressing the lack of harmony in their marriage  – he then gently tosses one of the children to his wife, who responds by violently spurning the gesture, quickly standing up, and knocking down the child, who then tumbles into the open fire. Chaos ensues as the other children cry and pull their sister to safety, and the Dyer’s Wife cries out, suffering from what would seem to be a rather cliché example of “hysterics.” Hofmannsthal shows here that those fits which were attributed to “women’s issues” are an expression of deep suffering. A kind of rigor mortis sets in as she bares her teeth at her husband, like an animal. On the level of the plot, both married couples seem to be moving further away from each other as their pain becomes increasingly ­difficult to bear. Meanwhile, the aesthetic web of the story is pulling them together all the more tightly.

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T h e E m p e r o r ’ s Contrapa s so The scene shifts to the Emperor on his hunt, but in an unexpected turn of events, the hunter himself is lured into a trap. Hearing singing voices, he follows them into a cave, described as the “region of his first adventure with the beloved woman.”48 Like the medieval lovegrotto of the tragic lovers Tristan and Isolde, this cave calls forth images of sequestered romance, hidden away from society and the sense of time’s passing. The Emperor’s love for his Empress strikes at the heart of what Kierkegaard writes of in “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage”: Can so intense an experience as that first moment of love be repeated?49 What does love look like over time? Kierkegaard writes: However you turn and twist in it, you must admit that the task is to preserve love in time. … Your misfortune is to ­identify love simply and solely with these visible signs. If these are to be repeated over and over again and, let it be noted, with a morbid concern for their constantly having the reality they had by ­virtue of the accidental feature of its being their first occurrence, it is no wonder you are afraid and refer these signs and “gesticulations” to those things of which one dare not say “decies repetitia pacebunt,”50 for if it was the first time that gave them their value, then a repetition is an impossibility. But healthy love has a quite different worth; it works itself out in time, and is therefore also capable of rejuvenating itself through these outward signs … it has quite another idea of time and of the meaning of repetition.51 Numerous clues suggest that Emperor’s love for the Empress has not matured into that other “idea of time” and repetition. The singing he hears, for one, is full of despair: “To what avail is this, we shall not be born!”52 These are the voices of his unborn children, the witnesses to his failure to preserve love in time. The Emperor enters a room with a table set for two – for himself and the Empress. A child who has brought in the table settings bows to the Emperor, recalling the multiple instances of this gesture in “Moments in Greece”: “He pressed his hands together upon his breast and bowed … The boy bowed before the Emperor down to the earth and spoke no word. But he pointed with a reverential gesture towards one of the sitting places, at the upper end of the table.”53 The gesture

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of respect before one of higher rank is not only a sign of humility – although it is certainly this – for it is accompanied by a voice from behind: “It is up to him!” (“Es ist an dem!”). This is on the one hand a sign of traditional respect: Do not speak before being spoken to. But it is also an indication that the Emperor is supposed to initiate the dialogue – and indeed, their lives. In this moment, everything depends on him. But, like the medieval Parzival, he is slow to recognize his duty to ask the right question: “It took a moment for the Emperor to realize that it was up to him to speak the first word.”54 The children grow in number, and one in particular – a girl, somewhat older – deserves particular attention. Like the servant in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” she bears in her arms a work of art with religious significance, though this time it is not a pair of bronze statues but a carpet that she herself has woven. The two girls’ gaits are inversions of each other. In “The Tale,” the girl moves thus: “Though perfectly erect, she moved slowly and with ­difficulty … The dark goddesses reached from her hips to her temples and leaned their dead weight against her soft, living shoulders … However, it was not so much the goddesses’ weight and solemnity that seemed a burden to her as the beauty of her own head with its heavy jewelry of dark, vivid gold.”55 Rhythmical but heavy, her movement mimics the movement and sounds of the sentence, as discussed in detail in chapter 1. The girl in Die Frau ohne Schatten, on the other hand, glides rather than walks, and at the end of the section she starts again “as if she were moving towards him with her feet closed together,” explicitly linking her movements with those of the ghost of Plato in “Moments in Greece,” and a whole host of otherworldly beings in Hofmannsthal’s writing.56 The effect is one of elegance and grace, but it also shows ontological difference. Kneeling nearly to the floor, she presents the rolled-up carpet to the Emperor and speaks. Though unborn, she offers pictures (the carpet) and words (dialogue) to the Emperor: “pardon, she said, that I did not hear your arrival, so absorbed in my work on this carpet I was. But if by the time we eat it is to be worthy enough for you to take it – which we hope you will – and have it lie under you, then the final thread dare not be torn off; it must be looped back into the initial thread. – She brought it forth with eyes cast down; the lovely tone of her voice pressed so deeply into the Emperor that he nearly failed to catch the sense of her words.”57 This presentation and her subsequent explanation of the carpet’s manufacture – it is made by hand – link

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several important aspects of the story together. Indeed, this is the central image in the central chapter of the story. The girl’s labour on the carpet draws our attention to the demanding nature of the craft. Such careful craftsmanship is key to the work’s being “worthy”: the thread of the end must be woven together with the thread at the beginning. Compare the Gobelin tapestry described in the “Address” of 1902: “What a peculiar dream an early Gobelin is! A completely closed and bound, exceptional world! … It lives for us, it lives through us. There is something in us that responds to this world-picture.”58 The “completely closed and bound, exceptional world” is separated from the living, breathing world of growth and rot. All the elements and emblems of the Emperor’s life and personhood – the hunter, the lover, the falcon – are brought together into an orderly, symmetrical form; not a bacchanalia of tangled bodies, but an Apollonian harmony of symmetry. The circularity of uniting end and beginning is a sign of chilling perfection. As is typical of Hofmannsthal’s writing, a long and serpentine sentence winds its way through harmonious descriptions only to end abruptly, in this case breaking not the rhythm so much as the magic: “The textile was underneath his feet, flowers passed into animals, hunters and lovers unwound themselves from out of the lovely vines, all things held each other in an embrace, the one was entendrilled in the other, the whole was splendid beyond all measure, but a waft of cool air rose from it up to his hips. – How were you able to construct this with such perfection?”59 This sentence draws together seemingly disparate moods: the beauty of connectivity and the cold air emanating – unlike breath – from the perfect carpet. The visual motifs and the chill rising “up to his hips,” reflect both the content and the form of the Emperor’s life while also revealing his kinship with the merchant’s son of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” who dies after being kicked in the groin – that is, emasculated. But rather than being concerned about the spreading chill, the Emperor asks how the carpet was made, and in the child’s response we hear incantations of the Enlightenment-era author Christoph Martin Wieland’s fictitious character Theophron.60 “I separate the beautiful from the material when I weave; that which is to the senses a decoy and which rattles them to folly and corruption I leave out. When weaving, she said, I proceed as your blessed eye when looking. I see not what is, and not what is not, but rather what always is, and according to this I weave.”61

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The process of refinement through separation contrasts with the process of connection through weaving. Yet it also recalls the original separation common to many myths and religions. Ovid’s Metamorphoses opens with chaos and the separation of the elements, out of which a world is born: the first metamorphosis. The Book of Genesis tells of the separation of matter, space, and time out of the void: Tohuwabohu. The creation of the work of art – its genesis – is in miniature the creation of cosmos from chaos. Unlike “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” where things are reborn from the “chaos of Not-living” as artworks,62 the unborn children do not know chaos, nor do they know suffering; they know only an unnamed longing to move on from what Hofmannsthal calls the “Präexistenz” of this underworld. The artwork which is born out of a division of “das Schöne vom Stoff” (the beautiful from the material) is thus a product of stripping or carving away the base matter. Paradoxically, the “Stoff” (material) could equally refer to the very material out of which the carpet is made. But how can one separate the carpet from the material? In addition to this rarefied view, there is an aesthetic and ethical connection to life beyond the vestibule (whether palatial or “präexistential”). At the Emperor’s strange questions, some of the younger children must make great efforts to avoid laughing out loud, recalling the Dyer’s Wife’s uncontrollable laughter. The children of this beautiful realm of rarefied art are connected through their gestures to the adultchildren of an ugly world. Moreover, the carpet’s very creation depends not only on the weaver, but also on the Dyer.63 We have already seen in the dyers’ district the squalor and toil where the threads and cloths are made brilliant. In real works of art, below the shining surface there is the shadow of labour: colours are the brothers of pain here as in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” The Emperor’s questions all operate according to a logic of separation, division, analysis, and definition. He asks where the children live and where they are going, using binary oppositions: “Is your house nearby or far away? … Is this the beginning of a journey or the end of one?”64 But there are no simple answers. As Hofmannsthal has it in one of his notes: “wrong: seeing every work of art as something definite; always saying: he has given this up, he’s turned to this now, he sees only this; and so he means this and that / wrong the definite / wrong: all cheap antitheses like ‘art’ and ‘life,’ Aesthete and the opposite of aesthete … right: seeing production as a murky business between the individual and tortuous existence.”65 The Emperor

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must learn a new way of seeing – a “Neues Sehen”66 that includes a mature appreciation for that which is not “definite,” and for that which is beyond “all cheap antitheses.” The children, furthermore, answer in paradoxes and upset the parent-child hierarchy by highlighting the Emperor’s own naïve ignorance. They teach him humility in their gestures, bowing as they respond: “Your questions are nonsensical, O great Emperor, like those of a little child. For say to us this: when you go to table, do you do so in order to remain in your state of satiation or to free yourself from it again? And when you go on a journey, do you do so in order to stay away or to return?”67 These questions do not deter the Emperor from trying to attain his desire. Like a spoilt child he cries: “I’m used to getting what I want!” The outburst is met then with reverence, tenderness, and fear.68 The children desire to live, but cannot if the Emperor fails to mature. In a vague recognition of his parental role, the Emperor exhibits behaviours and desires similar to those of Barak: a love for his future children seizes him and, like Barak in the earlier meal scene, he wishes to feed the children with sweets, but when he tries to hold them, he catches only cold air.69 Among the Japanese Buddhist proverbs collected by Lafcadio Hearn, whose writings Hofmannsthal knew well, we find one that speaks to precisely this situation: “Ko wa Sangai no kubikse. A child is neck-shackle for the Three States of Existence.” Hearn’s footnote to this proverb offers this explanation: “That is to say, the love of parents for their child may impede their spiritual progress – not only in this world, but through all their future states of being, – just as a kubikasé, or Japanese cangue, impedes the movements of the person upon whom it is placed. Parental affection, being the strongest of earthly attachments, is particularly apt to cause those whom it enslaves to commit wrongful acts in the hope of benefitting their offspring.”70 Both Barak’s and the Emperor’s affections are a potential threat. This overabundance of affection takes the form of feeding, that is, controlling the site of the logos. What initially seems like an act of affection easily transforms into one of aggression. But these unborn children cannot be had, held, or controlled. The Emperor is in an underworld and has to do with pre-existent beings whose very corporeality is doubtful. Still, he has not overcome his desire to possess beauty. By contrast, Barak lives in a world where ugliness is part and parcel of existence. Though flawed, he is a man who affirms not only his own life, but the lives of others: for this reason, the children now bow in his

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honour. And as the Emperor asks repeatedly who Barak is, he receives this response: “Just a grain of magnanimity!”71 Envy – that sin of sight, invidia – transforms the Emperor’s affection into aggression. Anger literally seizes him: “He hated the message and the messenger and felt his heart had become stone through and through. Without a word, his hand sought the dagger in his belt in order to throw it at her, since he could not throw it at his wife; when the fingers on his right hand could not feel anything, he tried it with the left, but neither hand belonged to him any longer, the stony arms already hung, stiff, at his petrified hips, and there came no sound across his petrified lips.”72 The desire for possession easily slips into violence when any sort of resistance is encountered.73 The Emperor’s failure to possess “just a grain of ­magnanimity” translates into his failure to possess himself; his body revolts and does not heed his will – or rather, it heeds a deeper drive to petrification. The Emperor’s contrapasso is like Hearn’s kubikasé. As the children disappear and the ceiling opens up to reveal the solitary night sky, the Emperor is left silent and alone, turned to stone. Having treated the world as his object, he has himself become an object – in fact, he has become a parody of a work of art.

B e a u t y ’ s Lab o u r’s Los t Barak’s world is the inverse of the underworld and reveals with naturalistic details the grit and dirt involved in the production of real, beautiful textiles. Barak loads the dyed fabrics upon his back to take them to market; he cleans them of blood and dirt: “and so he beat out the dirt and blood from a butcher’s garment … The Dyer had laid out the garment onto clean boards and coated it anew with white. The Empress helped him. The blood-stained effluent poured out from the tipped-over tub into the gutter. The two of them worked diligently and did not look up from their labours.”74 In the process of washing, the Dyer is doing in the “real” world what the child in the underworld did in order to fashion her fantastic carpet – separating out the baser elements in order to reveal something beautiful. The dirtied run-off drains away, presumably into the yellow river the Empress and the Nurse had seen earlier upon entering the Dyers’ Quarter. That is, the waste never really goes “away.” Blood and dirt run through the city’s veins. And just as the signs of labour course through it, so the dyes adhere and stain all they come into contact with, marking the dyers, mixing with their sweat.

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Despite the physical demands of the work, Barak’s hands move with surprising delicacy to make sure that every single strand has access to air. For all the roughness of this man’s manners, he is adroit and demonstrates a level of devotion worthy of his name and an attention to his labour that contrasts sharply with the Emperor’s (initial) obliviousness. With these qualities, Barak is able to effect almost magical transformations: bloodied, dirtied clothes are made to gleam white, and yellow-green fabrics are cleaned and dyed to a brilliant blue.75 By assisting Barak, the Empress learns to appreciate his work and person. In earlier versions of the prose text, Hofmannsthal spends a great deal more time on the Empress’s reaction to this work. Even the words she uses recommend a comparison with the pageant of the underworld: “The ceremonies he performs: the paths and the combinations his blessed hands effect, the splendor of the colours and their simplicity [Bescheidenheit], all this the magical power of his nature [seines Gemütes] directs: the love he holds for his tools: the poise, composure, and the pious care with which he labours towards his goal: the deep respect [Ehrfurcht] he has for himself and for ­paving the way for something higher – … so artfully did he work. How was it you never told me how good people are?”76 The tone of this passage is perhaps too sentimental for the otherwise relatively reserved style of the prose tale. It is also too expository for a Märchen – and for an opera77 – though its explicit references to ­ceremony, magic, piety, humility, and art make a strong case for reading Barak as a consummate artist, and the Miranda-like wonder with which the Empress comes to see him speaks to the possibility of a brave new world. In an aphorism contrasting the present and the past, Nietzsche sheds light on the sociological transformations that art has already undergone in the “real” world: “Formerly, all works of art adorned the great festival road of humanity, to commemorate high and happy moments. Now one uses works of art to lure aside from the great via dolorosa of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment – a little intoxication and madness.”78 Hofmannsthal’s and Strauss’s work with the renowned theatre director Max Rheinhardt and their collective founding of the Salzburg Festival attest to Hofmannsthal’s devotion to the reinvigoration of festivals and ceremonies in this Nietzschean sense. It is not simply about pomp and circumstance and distraction. It is about

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celebrating humanity – and that means humanity’s trials, too. Both Nietzsche and Hofmannsthal see this in terms of something “higher.” In Barak’s case, labour is also ceremony and a celebration of existence. This work is described in the note by the Empress as “good” – a rejection of the Nurse’s assessment of humanity’s decrepitude. The Empress even says to the Nurse that Barak should receive his rightful due. The Nurse’s response shows how far she is from understanding what the Empress has understood: “His due? How has that elephant earned anything?”79 The Dyer’s Wife, too, sees nothing of the beauty of Barak’s work. Instead, she is enthralled by the beauty of the Efrit. Indeed, she is precisely one of “those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick,” of whom Nietzsche speaks: she even refers to herself as “krank” (sick).80 Although she knows her sickness has been reanimated by the Efrit, she still desires him for his ability to draw her away from the via dolorosa of humanity: “She was beautiful in this moment and her young blood coursed through her so that she glowed, and the old woman [i.e., the Nurse] watched her with delight. – No, no, she shouted suddenly with passionate rapture, he is handsome, pay no attention to me, you foolish woman, he is beautiful like the morning star, and his beauty, that is the barb on the nail.”81 The Efrit presents the Dyer’s Wife with an opportunity to experience a beauty she has never known. But the Efrit is merely a decoy. Though she desires to escape the prison of her marriage, she recognizes that absconding like this leaves Barak no chance to defend himself – the Nurse has slipped him a drug. But then there is also the sense that this chain is one not of bondage, but of fate. Her marriage has been arranged – by her mother.82 She thus stands in stark contrast to the Empress, who fell in love with and married the Emperor contrary to the wishes of her father, Keikobad. We cannot speak here only of a tyranny of fathers, nor of a tyranny of men. If there is supra-individual conflict, it is a generational one that involves both the father and the mother: not quite a “collective oedipal revolt,” as Carl Schorske calls it,83 nor a collective revolt à la Electra, although the text might suggest that at first glance. Schorske is right to emphasize the fact that one generation defines itself against another. But what is more interesting is the fact that Hofmannsthal’s tale is not about two conflicting generations, but about countless generations that define themselves both through and against each other. The four main characters are at the point of transitioning from being defined as

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the children of parents to being defined as the parents of children. But “parents” here is not to be taken only literally. Metaphorically, it is about the process of maturation through turning the gaze from self to other and developing one’s creative capacities. In Hofmannsthal’s ­artist, the two develop together and reinforce each other. At this moment the Empress betrays a change in appearance: she weeps, such that “her face was swimming in tears and pain, like that of a mortal woman.”84 Her compassion for both Barak and his wife stems from her recognition of her own responsibility for their fates; the pain lends her a mortal aspect and a moral compass, which, coupled with her powerful will, enable her to reanimate Barak’s body. Only half-conscious, Barak believes his children have been murdered or stolen away. He picks up a hammer and swings it, hoping to strike the culprit, all the while showing a remarkable resemblance to the Efrit in his strength and ferocity. Significantly, this raging man is calmed by the familiar, unpleasant voices of his brothers: “the trusty sounds of their voices seemed to press towards his soul.”85 At this he wakes from his rage, and, entirely overcome with shame, makes a gesture that, in this story as elsewhere in Hofmannsthal’s work, demonstrates a profound sense for humility: true to his name (“to kneel down”), Barak goes down on his knees before his wife to ask forgiveness. In contrast to the compassionate Empress, the Dyer’s Wife betrays an increasing coldness: she does not grant him her pardon. In his moment of repentance, he is sorry for having married so late, for holding the delusional hope that he would live a long life with his beautiful wife and children. It seems he is sorry for something else, too, but cannot say it; this speechlessness links him with the Emperor, who could not formulate the decisive question to the children before him.86 The emotional states do not add up. At the end of this chapter, one has the feeling that everything is out of sorts, all threads hanging loose, untied. Important gestures go unanswered or are misunderstood. And yet the play between beauty and ugliness as well as compassion and coldness is clearly guiding the narrative as well as the aesthetic arc.

T h e F a c e s o f I n n o c ence and Gui lt Beauty in its various manifestations guides the reader through the characters’ developmental states. Above all, this is inscribed upon their faces – the site of reckoning and of ethical resistance. But for Hofmannsthal, the human face is also inherently beautiful. It is the

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point of convergence of the ethical and the beautiful, a new kalokagathia87 which is not based simply on sensory pleasure, but rather results from a kind of sympathetic reverberation between two distinct but connected beings. Hofmannsthal’s presentation of beauty in the face of the other is inspired by his understanding of the effects of aesthetic beauty – specifically, of art. And so it is with a vision of beauty that the Dyer’s Wife’s resolve begins to waver. When wandering through the poorest part of town, she remarks in a manner most strange, even poetic: “A small child is filthy, and they have to give it to the pet dog to lick clean; and yet it is beautiful like the rising sun; and such did we have a mind to sacrifice. – It was a strange, almost singing tone in which she said these things.”88 This is a portrayal of utter destitution: there is not even clean water to wash away the dirt. But the dog has a particular ­significance for Hofmannsthal. In “The Poet and Our Time,” Hofmannsthal describes the poet as having been sent to the dogs.89 In a quite literal sense, this is precisely what would happen to the dirty child, linking the child (if only vaguely) to the poet. But the association becomes clearer with the word “schön” and the simile of the sunrise with its suggestion of newness, hope, and light. A dirty child is beautiful like this: striking, natural, and bright, made clean by its proximity to abjection. We might even go further and interpret the singing tone in which the Dyer’s Wife makes this remark as her having come under the influence of the unborn children, who are associated with singing. But singing might equally be a palliative measure; the Dyer’s Wife seems here to see the tragedy her actions would lead to, and she must somehow make the decision less painful. The image and act turn in on themselves: sacrifice becomes a euphemism for murder. As if crowded in by both future generations and past ones, the Dyer’s Wife finds herself having wandered to her mother’s grave. She sinks onto her knees, but as she arises, her movement is not that of a devout or divinely inspired woman: instead, she is pure dynamism, having thrown off the yoke of “an old law.”90 She springs into flight, like a fleet-footed creature. But the tinnitus of conscience is persistent. No matter how hard she runs, the Dyer’s Wife cannot escape the voice of her mother, who calls after Barak.91 Barak, meanwhile, sits in the midst of chaos – a complete inversion of the orderly, attentive world he had cultivated before. Having lost his mind, he imagines he is speaking to his “diligent children” with their “clean little hands.”92 Showing them the dyeing process, he

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reveals the fantastical sacrifices involved: “We take the colours from out of the flowers and fix them to the cloths, and so too we take colours from the worms, and from birds’ breasts, there where their feathers glow and are exposed.”93 Though there have been a number of meditations on the process of art production so far in the story,94 none has been so explicit as this. The depiction of Barak speaking to his imagined children is full of pathos, in part because he clearly wants to pass on his art to the next generation. In other words, this is the moment when the motivic thread of art production crosses the thread of reproduction. Passing on the craft of dyeing ensures the survival of beauty, while integrating the next generation into the social fabric. Barak’s motives unite aesthetic and ethical considerations; he embodies the artist as described by the philosopher Jacques Maritain: “Hence the tyrannical and absorbing power of Art, and also its astonishing power of soothing; it delivers one from the human; it establishes the artifex – artist or artisan – in a world apart, closed, limited, absolute, in which he puts the energy and intelligence of his manhood at the service of a thing which he makes. This is true of all art; the ennui of living and willing, ceases at the door of every workshop.”95 The Dyer’s Wife’s sacrifice of their children is a twofold blow to Barak. In her ennui and vanity, she will not have her beauty passed on in time and life, but wishes to retain it for herself: in other words, to possess it eternally and exclusively: “They, who are supposed to come to greet me one day, shudder before the eternal softness of these cheeks and these breasts that shall not wither.”96 But she is shown to be less decisive than she would have herself to be: just as she is about to fulfil the deed, ritualistically tossing seven fish over her shoulder, Barak takes a step towards her, and her conviction shrivels: “Her lips moved and she muttered the words, but it was as if she were unaware; she raised her hand with the fish above her shoulder and cast, but as if in a slumber; she did what was required, but she did it as if she were not doing it: her eyes were riveted to the Dyer and her lips became distorted like those of a child about to cry … She took a few indecisive steps, saw help nowhere, pressed her lips together and stood still.”97 At the moment of metaphorical petrification, Hofmannsthal uses syntactical repetition with variation that gives his prose a sense of ritualistic fulfillment. And he does so with irony. The ritual itself is already compromised, and, as we shall see later, is ultimately invalid – due in part, it might be argued, to her very hesitation. The subjunctive mood and the as-if comparisons (the “unreal”) come to have more

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weight than the indicative statements (the “real”). The ritual, which seems embedded in the language itself, is a false sacrament. Paradoxically, this act does not free her. It seems rather to entrap her by drawing Barak’s anger nearer. Those that come to her aid, ironically, are Barak’s brothers – the hideous creatures who remind us of a suffering we would rather forget. They wish only that their brother not become a murderer – murder is an act that could not be undone – and manage to move the Dyer’s Wife for a moment out of reach of her husband. They then bid her farewell, wishing upon her “a bitch’s fate.”98 Given Hofmannsthal’s penchant for canine symbolism, the curse is oddly fortuitous. It suggests that the Dyer’s Wife might suffer, but she might also be capable of finding beauty in this world of suffering. The description that then follows is from the perspective of the Nurse, who has been studying the struggling, flickering shadows and in the meantime lost sight of the Empress. She then sees that a female figure is lying at the Dyer’s feet, “her face pressed to the earth, with unspeakable humility she stretched out her arms without lifting her face till her hands reached the Dyer’s feet and grasped them. The Dyer seemed not to notice her … And now the one lying there pushed herself closer and she pressed her chin onto the Dyer’s feet. Her lips murmured a word heard by no one. Then she lay in this position as if dead.”99 The woman lying at Barak’s feet, it would seem, is the Dyer’s Wife, who has just run in the direction of her husband. Her humble prostration suggests an appeal for forgiveness, which, in the light of her wavering actions, is certainly plausible. But to the Nurse’s amazement, a “Lebendes” (contrasting with the figure outstretched “as if dead”) appears near her, stretches forth both her hands, and reveals herself to be the Dyer’s Wife. The Nurse is shocked when she realizes that the woman lying at Barak’s feet is the Empress. This confusion is calculated: it is the moment when the Empress and the Dyer’s Wife share a sense of ethical responsibility and it is a moment of profound equality. The Dyer’s Wife appropriately takes on a beauty more typical of that of the Empress: “a wonderful and innocent beauty … the tremendous fear did not disfigure her, it rather transfigured her.”100 Like the Empress-as-gazelle, the Dyer’s Wife possesses a beauty that reflects both fear and innocence, but it is also one of intense bravery, for she stretches both hands out towards her husband (like the Empress had done in her prostration), as if to ­welcome death. Indeed, she is described as having a face ready for death: “todbereite[s] Gesicht.”101

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This moment is also typical of what Karl Heinz Bohrer refers to as the suddenness (Plötzlichkeit) of the Augenblick. Barak reflects the gaze of his wife and realizes for the first time the impotence of his earlier unwanted embraces; and in this he sees the impenetrable otherness of his wife’s being, the abyss of her difference and the span of her ages: She is a young and innocent girl and a mature woman in one. At this sight – much as in the aesthetic encounter – he is rendered powerless and his fists begin to shake. He wavers, just as his wife had earlier done. And in this instant a weight is lifted and he is as if reborn: “in the greatness of his powerful body he seemed a child on the verge of tears.”102 He thus shares with his wife the beauty of innocence, but this beauty only comes as a result of having seen the abyss of the other person.103 The moment in Die Frau ohne Schatten thus draws on both the aesthetic encounter and the ethical moment when one recognizes the fully other (“das ganz Andere”) as other, à la Bohrer. In refraining, Barak acknowledges the power of the moment of encounter before the embrace. In another work of short fiction, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen” (Paths and encounters) Hofmannsthal imagines the erotic as a tension, at the heart of which is a respect for distance. There is something of the innocence of animals in this: “Methinks it is not the embrace but rather the encounter which is the truly decisive erotic gesture. In no other moment is the sensible so soul-like, the soul-like so sensible … Here is a striving towards one another still without desire, a naïve mix of trust and reserve. Here there is that element of the deer, of the bird, of animal muteness, of angelic purity, of the divine. A greeting is something without bounds.”104 The encounter is a greeting and an invitation to communication. Communication in turn is an idealized moment: the Dyer’s Wife’s un-kissed kisses are described as “sparkling” (perlend), like tears might be, and she enters into an “embrace without entwinement and a kiss in which lips neither touched nor parted.”105 Recalling the strange paradoxes of the unborn children, this encounter is one that defies logic and exists as that unsubstantial rainbow that spans the “inexorable plunge of existence.”106 At this climax, the shadow frees itself from the Dyer’s Wife and flees to the water. In the moment the shadow has been freed from its rightful owner, the Empress too is transfigured. Whereas the face of the Dyer’s Wife radiates an innocent beauty, the Empress’s face now betrays mortality: she knows and displays her own guilt.

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S o u n d , C o l o u r , and Moti on With responsibility comes freedom. Having been magically transported away from the scene, the Empress now finds herself utterly alone – the Nurse, now a kind of Virgil to the Empress’s Dante, is unable to accompany the Empress along her new journey, and disappears into the woods. As the Dyer’s Wife had earlier called to her mother, so now the Empress calls to her father, evoking one of the most chilling arias of the more familiar opera Elektra: “Allein, weh ganz allein.” Both Elektra and the Empress call to their absent fathers. In Elektra’s case, the patriarchal Agamemnon is dead, but his memory and unavenged spirit wield power over the living Elektra. The first few lines of the aria, except for the name “Agamemnon,” might equally have been sung or cried by the Empress: Alone! Woe, utterly alone. The father gone, cast away into his cold chasms below Agamemnon! Agamemnon! Where are you, father? Have you not the strength to drag your face up here to me? It is the hour! Our hour it is!107 In an almost exact quotation, the Empress “called … ardently: Father, where are you? The word echoed.”108 That echo is a variation of Elektra’s repeated call: “Agamemnon! Agamemnon!” It also establishes a stark contrast with the Nurse’s cry from a paragraph earlier: “She [the Nurse] shrilly called out the name of her child, with no response, not even an echo.”109 Furthermore, as it was for Elektra, so this is “the hour” for the Empress. The decisive hour – the moment of Kairos – is upon her. For every parallel move, there is also a divergence. Unlike Elektra, who wishes to sacrifice others to the memory of her father and the accomplishment of vengeance, the Empress will sacrifice herself and her own happiness for the sake of others, to make up for her own crime. She has realized that she is no longer an innocent child. It is also telling that, whereas Agamemnon is an absent ghost for Elektra, Keikobad is more an insubstantial presence for the Empress: “In his unapproachability she felt him, his reflected splendour shined upon her brow.”110 This indirect presence – the shining light upon her forehead – is a precursor to the colour to come, and heralds a lifeaffirming intergenerational relationship, rather than a tragic one.

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The description of inaccessibility recalls the statues in “Moments in Greece,” but Hofmannsthal does not linger here, for good reason: the focus must be on the new generation, not the old one. Hofmannsthal thus channels Oswald Spengler’s art historical interpretations: “The statue is rooted to the ground, music – and the western portrait is music, soul woven from colour tones – permeates the boundless space. The fresco is bound up with the wall, grown with it; the oil painting, as panel painting, is free from the barriers of a place. The Apollonian language of forms reveals something that has been; the Faustian – above all – reveals something in the process of becoming.”111 The statue is bound, whereas the portrait (music composed of “colour tones”) is unbound, floating. It is in a process of becoming, where the statue is static. But the connection to Spengler’s theory goes further: this kind of portraiture allows for what the ­philosopher ­considered to be one of the greatest achievements of “western art,” namely the child and family portraits. For Spengler, the child is a bridge between past and future. These aesthetic and metaphysical reflections are present in Hofmannsthal’s text as well. The Empress is awakened to the nearness of unborn children first by the sound of water. She turns around, as if turning from the past generation – that of her father – to the future generation, to see a tall boy standing before her. From his appearance, he seems to be one of the unborn sons of Barak and his wife. It is as if this unborn son is both child and family portrait in one. Like the unborn children in the underworld seen by the Emperor, this boy too is like an impossibly clarified work of art: “He wore a robe of wondrous blue, not as though one had taken a white fabric and laid it in a dying vat, where the intensity of the indigo and the woad mixed, but rather as if the blue of the bottom of the sea itself had been pulled forth and draped across his body.”112 As with “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” so here the colour is the centre of focus, but behind this are the words of the Dyer, who, in his state of madness, explained to his imagined unborn children how colour was lifted out from the plumage of birds, from flowers, and from worms.113 What is more, these colours have the capacity to change; their iridescence suggests the visual dance of colour one sees in a bird’s feathers, or in the washing of fabrics. The colour changes from the blues of the ocean floor to a nocturnal “blackblue, before the first rays of the sun illuminate the sky.”114 Even the simile is telling: in the previous section,

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the Dyer’s Wife described dirty children as “beautiful like the rising sun.”115 Here we have the moment just before sunrise, just before birth, figured in the colours. Another child appears with equally strange aesthetic features, “resembling the Dyer’s Wife, from the delicate waxlike feet to the dark hair that shone like copper,” and glides “upon the green ground as if it were glass, with feet pressed together, and no other manner of movement could have suited the delicacy of the limbs and the glistening colours.”116 Like a wax figure, the child is lovely, but not alive; the feet are still bound. This is the plastic translation of the dark blue colour just before sunrise. These children are at the threshold of existence, but do not yet walk in the sun. As more children arrive, the Empress asks whether they bring a message, but the response is mysterious: “The colour seemed to come to him from eternity, so too the answer, which slowly rose up in him and reached the edge of his lips with hesitation. – We have no commission, we have no message. That we show ourselves, Lady, is all that is vouchsafed to us.”117 If art could speak, this would be its answer. They can only show themselves. But even this is qualified, for when the Empress asks where one of the children has disappeared to, the response she receives is simply that she is: “There, and not there, Lady, as it shall please you! … and his robe was like blood which turned into gold; all the trees received from him the confirmation that they were living, as from the first ray of the rising sun.”118 Blood red turns into life-giving gold water. The confirmation of life is reminiscent of the existential guarantee afforded by the walnut tree – only here it is the tree that receives confirmation – and later the colours in the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” In their transience, the colours change once more, sinking from red into violet “like a cloud in the evening sky, as one of the boys says to the Empress, reminding her of the importance of the hour at hand: “You are not being presented to, Lady, rather you are being presented, and this is the hour.”119 As in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the one ostensibly in power – to gaze, to judge – is revealed to be the one gazed upon and judged. This hour of judgment is the moment of encounter between the Empress and her unborn children. The trial and judgment are rendered verbally and aesthetically, by the play of colours: “Dark was his robe, like the starless night sky.” The Empress’s thoughts, likewise, are dark: “I have committed a serious offence … She lowered her eyes and then looked to him again.”120 These words and the gesture of her eyes are

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so effective that he seemed to caress the words – an image of embrace without holding on that recalls the idealized embrace of Barak and his wife. And his response is to the point: “Everyone who sets one foot in front of the other must say that. For that reason, we go with locked feet.”121 The link between mobility and moral culpability recalls Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment motto: “Enlightenment is the human being’s stepping out of their self-inflicted immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s reason without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-inflicted when the cause lies not in a lack of reason, but rather a lack of resolution and courage to help oneself without guidance from another. Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own reason! This, therefore, is the motto of Enlightenment.”122 The twist is in the focus: The Empress’s guilt – her self-inflicted immaturity – affects not only herself, but others as well. This is partly aesthetic: the simple dismissal of the ugly world below is a kind of immaturity; but it is also social: the lower, poverty-stricken realms are not to be treated as mere tools for the achievement of some goal. The Empress has realized this – and it is why she can stand before this aesthetic and ethical otherness, one of the unborn sons of the people whose lives she wishes not to destroy, and “her reverence for him, who spoke with her thus, was no less than his for her.”123 I would suggest this reverence is learned – perhaps from Barak, whose reverence and piety in labour the Empress so admired. Two more children enter the scene to explain to the Empress the distinction between her actions and those of their mother (the Dyer’s Wife). The difference is a matter of time, and of seizing the decisive moment of opportunity. The actions of their mother happen in the passage of time as Chronos and are thus revokable, but for the Empress, another law is at work: “Everything lies in the moment: counsel and deed!”124 The Empress’s first step was one of transgression: she threatened the lives of others. Her second was Kantian egression: she steps out of her life of self-inflicted immaturity and recognizes her own culpability; her third step will be a Kierkegaardian leap.

N e w L ife: A M e t aph o r a n d a Metamorphosi s The parallel stories of ethics and aesthetics cross in a kind of nonEuclidean narrative geometry, forming a Gordian knot. The ethical story serves as a comment on the aesthetic story and vice-versa. In this

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section of the final chapter of the story, there is a rebirth not only of soul, but also of senses: the ethical rebirth occurs in tandem with an aesthetic rebirth, and both are brought about by a recognition of and response to human frailty and human strength. This recognition takes place, as it did in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” and even more explicitly in “Moments in Greece,” at the moment of seeing the irreducible difference of others. The curious phrase from The Letters – “dies ineinanderschlagende Du” – is imagined here as a new and clarified kind of embrace or union at-a-distance, like the embrace of Barak and his wife. As noted earlier, Hofmannsthal’s dreamer in “Die Wege und die Begegnungen” (Paths and encounters) esteems the encounter above the embrace, noting: “A greeting is something without bounds.” The dreamer then follows with an invocation of Dante’s Vita Nuova and the power of sound emanating from that which is different from the self: “Dante dates his ‘New Life’ to a greeting that was given him. Wondrous is the cry of the great bird, the strange, solitary, premundane sound at dawn, issuing from the tallest fir, listened to somewhere by a hen. This ‘somewhere’ – this unspecified and yet passionate desire, this cry of the stranger to the stranger, is what is tremendous.”125 In Die Frau ohne Schatten, there is a similar cry of one stranger to another, and it will be answered by an embrace that is informed by a respect for unreachable otherness. The “new life” is new both ethically and aesthetically, as is made clear when the Empress sees the unborn children of the couple whose lives she has stained. The fluctuating colours of the children’s garments as well as their disappearance before her eyes have left her sense of sight bewildered; it seems appropriate, even a relief, that she should then be led into a dark cave. But in the dark cave the senses are again activated to such a pitch that her whole trajectory seems to be an aesthetic one: the high room is like a temple, lit by a single torch which emits a pleasing fragrance, and it is also like a bath, but lovelier even than those of her own palace. In the presence of such atmospheric beauty, the Empress seems in danger of losing herself – on both ethical and aesthetic grounds. The atmosphere begins to ring – literally – with tension. The tension is even erotic: she feels the presence of her husband and releases one of the most recognizable sounds of desire: “Ach! came over her lips, ashamed and full of yearning at the same time, and the breath-becomesound from her own mouth made her glow from top to bottom.”126 Hofmannsthal’s paraphrasis is important: her “Ach” is a breath – a

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sign of life – that has become sound. The phrase’s structure recalls the description of art as “arbitrary-will-become-form” (Form gewordene Willkür) from the “Address.” Like the bells at elevation during a celebration of mass, this sound serves a liturgical function. Indeed, the water – the sound of which had awakened her to the presence of the unborn children – does rise. And at a certain elevation, light from a torch strikes a column, which then gives “a resounding clang, which with its sweet sound nearly split the Empress’s heart in two.”127 The reverberations of climactic tension occur at the moment the Emperor appears, caught between life and death: “he seemed heavy like a bronze grave stone built in the middle of a pond.” Bereft of weapons and leg braces, the statue has been rendered utterly vulnerable: only the light hunting armour was left, and everything else was like marble. The metal and marble invoke the myths of both Midas and Pygmalion, but there is something else at work: the statue is both dark and light, black and white, but devoid of colour. Thus robbed of protection, life, and colour, he stands there “unspeakably beautiful … yet unspeakably strange.”128 The Emperor displays a colourless, lifeless beauty. The Empress’s response is an inarticulate cry (in the opera, the singer screams), accompanied by a gesture that draws her into the familiar mythologies of metamorphosis: “she threw herself into the golden, gently undulating pool; like a swan with its wings outstretched she swooped to her lover.”129 Like many a fairy-tale swan maiden, she is married to a mortal man and has lost her metamorphic ability. But the Empress’s swan transformation is purely one of simile: she is like a swan.130 The Empress’s former metamorphic abilities have themselves been transformed into metaphoric power; but then this is the stuff of poetry. The statue’s effect on her is above all troubling, because it shows her something that eludes understanding: death. In “Moments in Greece,” the korai have a similar effect: they are both beautiful and foreign, displaying their strange unspeakable smiles. Just the like the ancient Greek statues, there is something utterly inaccessible in the petrified Emperor that shocks and terrifies the Empress. The aesthetic takes form in the ethical decision the Empress must confront: As their gazes meet, she sees in his eyes a fear that makes his visage hideous: The German term “gräßlich” is used in multiple other places in the text: to describe the flight of the injured falcon; human faces in the Empress’s dream; the words of the curse; the expression

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on the Nurse’s face when the Empress realizes she has been withholding her knowledge all this time; the many mouths of real people she encounters in the crowded streets of the city; her own face, when full of fear and disquiet; and the vanishing of the unborn children into thin air.131 All of these instances are associated with powerlessness. As if to highlight the helplessness of the situation, the golden light shifts, following the Emperor’s gaze to a wall upon which the shadow of the statue falls. The Empress, however, still casts no shadow. The statue is “gräßlich” and uncanny because it is an embodiment (or entombment) of the human: the statue can move a little, but it cannot leave its spot; its face responds, but it is not alive. The demand issued by this work of art is united with the demand of the ethical relationship. And so, the foreign shadow appears to her, offering her a bowl of golden water, more than humbly: “it was the gesture of a slave surrendering completely, to the death.” And here again the senses are explicitly brought to the fore: “She felt how she would lose her senses and drink.”132 Losing the ability to see, feel, hear, touch, and taste, but also losing her mind and consciousness, she would act fully anaesthetized. Drinking the water and appropriating the shadow of another would be a senseless act in all senses of the word, on some level not even willed (mirroring the Dyer’s Wife as she threw the seven fish over her shoulder). Without the will, this act would be divorced from ethics: or the will would be a negative one, an abnegation of the aesthetic and ethical senses. But before she drinks, one of the unborn children – resembling Barak – appears and presents an alternative possibility: The Empress’s actions do not have to be unconscious and senseless. Of particular importance here is the description around this moment of decision. Like a priestess, the Empress holds in her hands the bowl of water – a potential libation. Her conscience, however, is intimately linked to the sounds of reality: Hideous and strange, as from the breast of one sleeping deeply, the curse emanated from her own breast and struck her ear … – she listened inwardly as her own heart beat, slow and heavy. She saw with one glance, as if she were hovering outside herself, how she stood there, and at her feet the shadow of the other woman, who had fallen slave to her, and over there the statue. The terrible feeling of reality held everything together with iron chains. The cold wafted towards her and to her core and

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­ aralyzed her. She could not take a single step, neither forwards p nor backwards, she could do nothing but this: drink, and win the shadow, or pour out the bowl.133 The auditory admonition experienced by the Dyer’s Wife earlier is reproduced here, though it is the curse of the father Keikobad rather than the curse of the mother. The body’s response is to dissociate: a common enough idea in psychology and literature of the early twentieth century.134 But it is not just the psychological dissociation that is at play here; it also has characteristics of that ecstasis that occurs in mystical moments,135 and in the aesthetic encounter, especially as presented in “Moments in Greece.” The turn in Die Frau ohne Schatten occurs with the evocation of reality, which holds everything together with iron chains (the negative image of the aurea catena homeri). In the unreal world of art, there is the alchemical potential to transform these iron chains into gold. This is part of the imagined vita nuova, and it is suggested in this passage, ironically, in a complete reversal of the opera’s handling of the scene. In the opera, the music begins pianissimo, and with the slow crescendo and the gongs, it begins to swell and reaches such a height that the Empress’s singing transforms into a terrified scream. The orchestral accompaniment abruptly ceases, leaving the Empress’s voice alone: but she does not sing. She speaks the formula of renunciation, as if breaking from the fairy-tale world of opera into the spoken, discursive world of “reality.” She speaks, with a heavy pause before and after each word: I will not.136 In the prose tale, Hofmannsthal reverses the change, but again, only metaphorically: the words rise from the depths of her being and leave her mouth: “as if they were sung, far away in the distance; she just had to repeat them. She repeated them without hesitation. – I owe you, Barak! She spoke … and poured out the bowl before the feet of the veiled figure. The golden water burst into flames, the bowl in her hands vanished into thin air.”137 The golden water possesses the power of metamorphosis; the Empress, of metaphor. But metaphor, in this moment, becomes metamorphosis. The libation makes this transformation possible. Hofmannsthal shares with Walter Benjamin an appreciation for the ancient Greek ritual: libation is a way of g­ iving something back to the earth and the gods.138 The notion of the symbol as gift in “Moments in Greece” is adapted here as libation, as giving back.

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This gesture of response makes transformation possible. And so the water rises, carrying both the Empress and the heavy statue upwards as they embrace, as if weightless, till “she felt herself pulled into the bottomless deep.”139 The abyss is the place of birth and death, like Derrida’s khôra. It is here too that the symbolic sacrifice takes place: in “The Conversation about Poems,” the symbol is born when the priestlike man dies for a moment with the animal he sacrifices. Here, the Empress is the priestess and the offering at once, and this is once again accompanied by a disturbance in the senses: “Incomprehensible torment shattered her senses. She felt death creep over her heart, but at the same time she felt the statue in her arms move and come alive. In an incomprehensible state, she surrendered herself, and, shaking, was now there only in the intimation of life which the other had received from her. Into him, or into her, there pressed the sensation of a darkness clearing, of a place receiving, of a breath of new life. They took it in with senses newly born: hands, which carried them, a stone gate, which closed behind them, swaying trees, smooth firm ground, upon which the bodies lay resting, the bright sky’s expanse.”140 The Empress, in pain, feels death and comes very near to it herself, perhaps she does die in this moment, like the sacrificial animal and the man in “The Conversation about Poems.” And perhaps her life transmigrates into the stony limbs of the Emperor, imbuing him with life. The text switches for a brief time to free indirect speech, marking the dissolution of self – precisely when both Emperor and Empress feel the same thing. The narration is uncertain and even stylistically fragmentary, as if conveying fleeting thoughts: “Into her, or into him there pressed the sensation of a darkness clearing.” Like infants, whose sight is undeveloped, they are reborn and cross the threshold into existence, into the light, as the entrance to the cave closes behind them, and the Empress senses the trees, the ground, the sky. There is something cinematic in this passage. Like a film shot from the first person of view, we follow her, then their, impressions. As the Empress looks into the sky, a transfer of perspective takes places. The perspective narrows momentarily and then broadens again as the narrative lens pans out in order to encompass the Empress and the Emperor in the landscape more objectively: “In the distance, the river glistened, behind a hill the sun was rising, and its first rays struck the Emperor’s face, who lay at the feet of his wife, curled up like a child.” With this broadening perspective, the intricacy of relations becomes clearer: The once powerful Emperor is now like a child, and

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as the Empress rises, she – finally – casts a shadow over him, tracing a bridge between them. The Emperor awakens at the Empress’s cry of delight over having caught sight of her own shadow, and they wordlessly embrace: “their shadows combined into one.”141 A parallel shadow bridge forms between the Dyer and his wife, and, like the transition from stasis to motion that takes place in the Emperor, so too does the Dyer’s Wife undergo a visual transformation: from the wan colourlessness of fear to the brilliant colour of life. The Dyer pair are reunited in the same landscape, not far from the Emperor and Empress. The Dyer’s Wife carries a great basket containing a sword and a blood-dyed carpet, where colours are concentrated and then explode, covering and imbuing the Dyer’s Wife with new life. It is important here that the colours do not just adorn her; they permeate and enliven her. Colours here do the work of the artist, and the Dyer’s Wife becomes like a work of art given life – for with these colours, she also regains her shadow. We might go so far as to say that Hofmannsthal is representing here his own idea of the poetic act: within the imagined “reality” of the story, the Dyer’s Wife and the Emperor, as well as the Empress and the Dyer, have been given a new life. Renewed life correlates to renewed aesthetic sensations: those who are catatonic are animated, while pale faces are given the colour of life and the shadow of humanity. All of these transformations are, of course, enveloped by an aesthetic frame itself – the tale. Although the characters are given a kind of life, it is ultimately no Promethean act. It is humbler than that, since it is just a story, but does not lack for boldness: paradoxes, contradictions, and reversals are possible and even demanded. The shadow bridge that forms between the Dyer and his wife is a visual echo of the colourful arc which the soul makes when spanning the abyss: “Like the rainbow, unsubstantial, our soul spans across the inexorable plunge of existence.”142 The colours of the rainbow are in the Dyer’s Wife herself. The gesture of art is a bold one in its attempt to undo wrongs committed, and to unite what is disparate.143 But for Hofmannsthal there is no artistic act without humility; hence the reciprocal prostrations of the married couples: “He pressed his hands upon his breast and bowed before her. Like a stone, she fell down before him, her brow, her lips touched his feet”; “as the Dyer’s Wife had thrown herself at the feet of her husband, so too the Emperor threw himself before his wife and buried his convulsing face in her knees. She knelt down beside

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him; to her, too, weeping was new and sweet.”144 The gesture of humility is the common denominator for all of the characters, men and women, the royal pair and the dyer pair.145 The end of the prose tale, as Harry Seelig has emphasized in “Musical Substance and Literary Shadow,” does not review the fates of the characters simultaneously. Rather, each individual character is given individual attention. The dyer pair are awarded a future full of the wonder of prosperity – they have been magically lifted out of their destitution and given a perfect fairy-tale ending. A figure full of colour, the Dyer’s Wife sits upon stacked carpets in their fairy-tale boat, while Barak sings “as no one had heard him sing before,”146 essentially reversing the earlier portrayal of him singing out of tune.147 The new singing corresponds to a new ethical understanding and relation with his wife: theirs is now a harmonious marriage. For the Empress and the Emperor, the end is similarly one of reconciliation and hope. Having sunk to his knees, the Emperor gazes into the sky at his falcon returning, while the Empress hears a song from the heavens: “Soft words and quiet tones found their way inexplicably from the heights down to her.”148 This song is the only instance in the prose text given as it is in the libretto: it is kept in verse, separated from the rest of the text by its genre and its difference. Like Goethe’s Chorus Mysticus at the end of Faust II, the singing voices celebrate the paradox of life and the mystical union of host and guest: “If ever there were such a feast, would we secretly be both the hosts and the guests?”149 The talisman has the last word: the curse is now a blessing, celebrating the connection of all things to all things.

T h e M ä r c h e n : “ A s L o v ely as a Persi an Car p e t ,   a n d a s Unreal” Die Frau ohne Schatten – both the opera and the novella – is one of the most representative cases for Hofmannsthal’s fascination with the relation between what we consider to be “real” and “unreal.”150 The central motif of the carpet raises the question in the form of an image: the carpet is shown both in its real and its ideal (unreal) production; it is ascribed magical properties, and it is a symbol of perfection and cosmic interconnectedness. Aesthetics and ethics are figured here as the warp and weft of the carpet: they are never the same, but without either, the fabric of human existence would come undone. Hofmannsthal’s strange mix of the

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real and the unreal – like the realistic detail and ideal images and riddles that defy logic – is a response to this double-drive, as well as an attempt to depict the drama of life. We see it in his use of colours, for instance, which (as in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”) change in response to each other and even exhibit what Sabine Schneider identifies as the essence of the dramatic, namely the counterplay of forces. Schneider goes on to say that Hofmannsthal’s understanding of colour is a somewhat forced interpretation of Goethe’s view that colours are the silent language of nature and are part of a harmonious totality.151 It is true that Hofmannsthal tends to highlight the dramatic (and agonistic) display of forces at play in colours, but he also depicts colours as mutually reinforcing one another, allowing for a potentially harmonious depiction of the interconnectedness of things, as is made clear in the motif of the carpet, and in the (controlled) explosion of colour at the end of the story. Fickert and Celms repeat the anti-aestheticist formula: “Significantly, in the opera, the character named die Kaiserin [the Empress] acquires a shadow and the ability to bear children after she has put the insubstantial world of the cult of beauty as expressed in art behind her.”152 This assertion is based on an analogy with the figure of Claudio in Der Tor und der Tod (Death and the Fool), whom the noted British translator Michael Hamburger once called “the man without a shadow, the potential man incapable of crossing the threshold into reality.”153 While the opera and the prose tale bear a certain thematic resemblance to Death and the Fool, the Empress never expresses a rejection of art – in either the opera or the prose tale – and in fact art (song, the carpet, even the Emperor-as-statue) plays a significant role in her and the other characters’ transformation. In Die Frau ohne Schatten art too experiences a kind of baptism in the (albeit fictional) world of “reality,” to use Hamburger’s term. The broader issue at stake is that the kind of resolution between aesthetics and ethics is only ever imagined through art (especially as a comedic Märchen). Die Frau ohne Schatten is an aesthetic theodicy, where all characters and all plot points, all suffering and all paradoxes have their justification in the aesthetic whole. The carpet is a portrait of this theodicy, but its unreal status puts into question a real ethical expression of this aesthetic success. This ambivalent attitude is evident in Hofmannsthal’s own comments. In a letter from 27 May 1918 to the countess Ottonie Degenfeld, he wrote: “In these dreadful weeks I have written perhaps the most

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beautiful chapter of the Märchen: how the Emperor comes to the unborn children … Eberhard said to me a few months ago how little these dreamt up harmonies have to do with life – how they have nothing to do with it – and yet how felicitous it would be, that they should exist and that more such things should ever come to be.”154 The dreadful reality contrasts all too much with the dreamt-up harmonies, and yet these harmonies are perhaps even more necessary because of the horrors of reality – in this case, the First World War. Richard Strauss, too, makes this explicit (even in his off-putting patriotism) in a letter to Hofmannsthal from 8 October 1914: “In the midst of all this unpleasant news, which this war brings – with the exception of the magnificent deeds of our army – diligent work is the only salvation. Otherwise, one would die from frustration at the inaction of our ­diplomats, our press, the Emperor’s apologetic telegram to Wilson.”155 Such diligent work in the sphere of art has intrinsic value for Strauss, and indeed seems necessary for survival. But this is no easy task. The negotiations between the necessities of creating beauty and the ethical questions of the time (is art a luxury in war?) result in a tale that imagines – must imagine – the impossible. Art and war have something in common: they are situations in extremis. And war, too – as with the Futurists and, to a certain degree, the author and Imperial German soldier Ernst Jünger – can be experienced aesthetically. With Hofmannsthal though, one always has the sense that the aesthetic could very possibly send the subject to the brink of existence. There at the world’s edge one finds a rickety bridge, or perhaps it is that unsubstantial rainbow, crossing in a blur the unfathomable chasm between art and life, the imaginary and the real. Those are two poles of existence. The fact remains that one cannot cross the bridge, for it would not hold real weight. Instead, one experiences the paradoxical reality of the unreal in the aesthetic encounter, in its effect of strangely persistent presence as it withdraws from one’s grasp. For Hofmannsthal, art invents an imaginary language for this, and is itself the invention.

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5 Violence and Art in Andreas

Not every work of Hofmannsthal’s depicts a successful aesthetic encounter; that is, not every encounter with artworks is characterized by that feeling of timelessness, connection, the sensation of being “called,” or the pious sense of duty and responsibility that arises in recognition of what is beautiful. The works discussed in the previous four chapters all depict elevated moments (“erhöhte Augenblicke,” to use Pestalozzi’s phrase) in the aesthetic encounter; and these tend to occur when one is confronted by a work of art. The novel-fragment Andreas is different. The characteristics of the aesthetic encounter are not concentrated in the work of art. They are dispersed. In fact, while a painting does feature in the text, it is precisely not the site of the aesthetic encounter. It is, one might say, a failure. If Die Frau ohne Schatten is an aesthetic “success” in the sense that it has a clear beginning, a sense of progression, and a resolution, then Andreas is its counterpart: obsessively circular in its story, unfinished, and fragmented.

A ppr o a c h in g Andreas Documentation of Hofmannsthal’s work on Andreas1 spans twenty years, from 1907 until about two years before the author’s death.2 Scholarly opinion is markedly divided in its evaluation of this fragmentary collection: while many see it as a failed Bildungsroman or an act of self-censorship on the part of the author, others see in the novel’s fragmentation one of the high points of literary modernism.3 The former arguments carry weight insofar as Hofmannsthal never ­published any of the novel, even though he had previously published

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other unfinished works in instalments and with varying lengths of time between sections (as with “Moments in Greece” and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”). One would think Andreas simply never turned into anything cohesive enough to be published and was in this sense a failed project. But those who champion the work’s achievements find support in Hofmannsthal’s own estimation of the “fragment” as a genre and a work of art. In his 1911 essay “Wilhelm Meister in der Urform” (Wilhelm Meister it its original form) Hofmannsthal writes: “Here, the torso is truncated. What a work! … What an abundance of figures, what wonderful richness in juxtaposition!”4 In a similar tone, the 2017 symposium on Hofmannsthal’s comedy of failures (“Hofmannsthals Komödie des Scheiterns”) featured a dramatic reading called “Menschliches Gebiet” (Human territory), borrowing the title from Hofmannsthal’s a­ phorism: “The half, the fragmentary, is truly human territory.”5 Whether this is also a form of excuse for not finishing a work is debatable. Hofmannsthal often returned to literary material, even after it had been published, in order to rework it, to find a new angle, even a new genre. Die Frau ohne Schatten – first opera, then prose tale – is a case in point. It is not clear, however, whether or when Hofmannsthal ever planned to publish Andreas. If nothing else, the novel fragment can be read as a place for experimentation, a kind of sketchbook that accompanies, tracks, and comments on Hofmannsthal’s other writings. If one were to outline the “plot” it might look something like this: Andreas, a young and inexperienced man, is sent out on a journey of maturation. He wanders first through rural Austria, where he meets the ironically named Gotthelff (“God-help”), a devilish figure who forces his way into Andreas’s service. They travel together through Carinthia and stay at the farm of the noble Finazzer family. There, Andreas falls in love with the daughter, Romana. Gotthelff, however, ruins the idyllic sojourn by seducing (a charitable reading) a maid, tying her to a bed and starting a fire in the room, killing the family dog, and stealing Andreas’s horse and much of his money. Laden with guilt at having brought such a man into their world, Andreas leaves the Finazzer farm, and as he travels through the mountain passes and the distance grows, he senses that Romana will always be by his side. He plans to return and marry her one day, once he has redeemed himself – a violent but plausible beginning to a typical Bildungsroman.

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Upon arriving in the labyrinthine city of Venice, Andreas finds himself drawn into a twisted and confusing world: he stays with (another) noble family, though this family is struggling financially and has decided to set up a “lottery” with their youngest daughter, Zustina, as the prize. The elder daughter, Nina, is seen by everyone to be model of moral perfection: appropriately, she lives outside the house, removed from the mess, like a work of art. The painter Zorzi, whose room Andreas takes, serves as the young man’s guide during his first few days in the city, and introduces him to a number of people, including the mysterious Sacramozo (also called Sagredo), who will later be a kind of (flawed) mentor to Andreas. While on his way to meet Nina (and guided by Zorzi), Andreas is left alone briefly and wanders into a church. Out of nowhere a woman appears, praying. In fact, she seems to direct her supplication towards Andreas rather than towards the altar, before she sinks down again. He decides to leave the church, and as he is about to exit, he turns around briefly and a different woman appears in the same spot. (This is Maria/Mariquita – a woman who seems to be experiencing split personality. The many notes to Andreas sketch a growing relationship with “both women”). Andreas leaves the church and walks back towards Nina’s apartment, but cannot find the right door and wanders into the wrong building. In the building’s courtyard, he sees the woman from the church again, this time from below: she is balanced strangely above the latticework and gazes down on Andreas “with unending sympathy, nay, love,” as blood drips from her fingertips onto Andreas’s forehead, before she disappears again over a wall.6 It is as if she has anointed and incriminated him simultaneously. After these strange encounters, Andreas returns to the street, where he finds Zorzi once again, who leads him to Nina’s apartment. There he is asked to comment on her portrait (painted by Zorzi). Left alone with Nina, Andreas senses an erotic tension. The main fragment ends with Zorzi and Andreas’s departure from Nina’s apartment, but the notes continue to outline the relationships with Maria/Mariquita, Romana, and Nina, as well as a number of other characters. Sacramozo/Sagredo plays an increasingly important role as mentor. More so than Hofmannsthal’s other works, Andreas presents numerous interpretive problems. Even if the main fragment7 – those thirty-seven contiguous pages in the Kritische Ausgabe – is read

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without extensive reference to the copious notes (an approach taken by Katrin Scheffer and Waltraud Wiethölter, for example), the story itself is labyrinthine, full of changes in perspective, tone, and place. To complicate matters, it is not clear which, if any, versions of certain passages Hofmannsthal considered finished. Achim Aurnhammer observes that there are many places where different versions of the story are picked up and expanded; it becomes impossible to tell if Hofmannsthal favoured one version over another.8 It is possible that Andreas has an intentionally, radically “open” form; as such, it is difficult to offer a thoroughgoing interpretation of the whole work, because the “whole” work emphatically would not exist. And yet, as Scheffer has pointed out, this openness contributes to the kind of reader-response criticism in the classic sense articulated by Wolfgang Iser,9 and to the creative reception that Hofmannsthal strove after.10 Scheffer’s emphasis on communication, specifically as expressed in “Moments in Greece,” also resonates well: “They are here and are unattainable. So, too, am I. By this we communicate.”11 “Communication” here does not emphasize the content or the transmission of a particular, premeditated message. Rather, it is an exchange born out of a mutual (communal) recognition of difference. It is a communality born out of separation. The author cannot determine what the reader will “understand” or “feel” – the author can only create the form and space for a potential encounter. That form must be defined enough to have form at all, but it must be open enough to allow the Erlebnis of the aesthetic ­encounter to take place. For Hofmannsthal, holding the form open is the “primary social obligation” (“oberste gesellige Pflicht”) to others. Those who write books have a social obligation to the reader: they must allow readers to co-create through the use of the imaginative faculty, “for a gift cannot be presented without thinking of the recipient beforehand.”12 This is a reformulation of the notion of beauty developed in the “Address”: beauty is the word that binds (“verpflichtet”) most deeply. The “primary social obligation” of an author is to give a space for the reader to co-create (“mitzuschaffen”). From the depths (“am tiefsten”) to the heights (“die oberste”), there is this duty or obligation to others, where art is involved. In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” too, the idea of co-creation is present in the encounter with the paintings of Van Gogh. The “social obligation” is realized by both creator (Van Gogh) and viewer: together, they create the space for all those objects to be reborn aesthetically and phenomenologically.13

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But the rebirth of the subject’s relation to the world is not always successful. To continue the analogy, the encounter might not lead to co-creation; artists and viewers can fail to fulfil their duties to each other and to the objects they encounter and create. As in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” there is a prominent moment in Andreas wherein the titular character finds himself before a painting.14 But the encounter is far different – we might even speak of a non-encounter. The focal points of this chapter then are the conditions contributing to this ‘failed’ encounter and the meta-aesthetic commentary on Hofmannsthal’s artistic project. As with the other texts explored in this book, certain motifs and events prepare for this moment and should therefore be considered in relation to the ekphrastic passages. In particular, the depiction of ­suffering and identification with others, power structures between subject and object, and perceptions of reality will contribute to the analysis of this ‘failed’ aesthetic encounter.

T h e P a inti ng In the first note (N1), which sketches the initial narrative trajectory of Andreas’s travels, Hofmannsthal wrote: “Reasons for the educational journey [Bildungsreise]. Painters. Famous names. Palaces. Salon customs. Introductory conversations leading to an entrée into society. Seeming. Pleasing.”15 The goal of this educational journey is to teach the young man the ways of society – a society not unlike that portrayed in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.”16 It is puffed up and ­hollow – Andreas specifically feels that this journey is about “representation and reputation.”17 Representation can also refer to art, and painters are mentioned, inviting comparisons with Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian Journey), which describes, among other things, a number of outstanding examples of artworks in Italy. But the prospect of this kind of cultural Bildung is immediately compromised when, in this same first note, the word “painter” appears again, referring this time to a specific painter: the shady figure called Zorzi (and occasionally Galli).18 The first depiction of this painter – which is taken up in the main fragment – is telling: “Once again upstairs to the painter: he shows me a picture of a beautiful person (for dalla Torre). Promises to take me to her. Along the way, tells me the story of the two pictures of Count Camposagrado … how the brothers send their own to him, he laughs immoderately and displays

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a sum of money, so that they can send him the Goya and copy the Tintorettos. The painter promises to present me to the duke, etc.”19 In this brief sketch, there is enough indirect characterization to surmise that, for Zorzi, paintings are about money. Of course, this is not uncommon for the era portrayed. Andreas arrives in Venice on 12 September 1778, a time when artists lived from commissions; producing artworks was a breadwinning craft, and art for art’s sake was a rare luxury. Indeed, that very rareness of opportunity raises questions about the conditions of creativity both in the artist and in the society. In Andreas, just as in Die Frau ohne Schatten, the regard for art and beauty tracks the regard for people. Like Zorzi’s art, Andreas’ hosts’ young daughter Zustina is to be sold to the highest bidder in order to rescue the family from financial struggles.20 The immoderate laugh he lets forth while flashing his money to Andreas betrays this as well. Themes of commodification and possession are amplified and personalized throughout the text: Money is necessary for sustaining a certain lifestyle; Zustina’s family is noble but impoverished, and their poverty induces them to “sell” their daughter. Zustina even accepts this as the best solution because money sustains the family’s way of life. But Zorzi’s example shows that money is not simply a means to survive. Money has taken the place of art insofar as art exists to be sold, and insofar as the principle of art for art’s sake has been replaced with that of money for money’s sake. This fact and Zorzi’s unpleasant character throw into relief one of the deep problems of a decadent, sinking Venice: Just as family relations and art are in some sense ­corrupted, so too are the elements that help establish the relation between aesthetics and ethics. The experiences of suffering and empathic identification in the aesthetic encounter are the first to be compromised – even parodied. In the next note, the “Painter Galli” (i.e., Zorzi) is mentioned again: “has the stone he uses for crushing pigments placed on his stomach to help with stomach pains.”21 It is not clear what the origin of these stomach pains is, but the situation also appears in the larger fragment, where it becomes clear that this is a regular occurrence for the painter, and is not indicative of a serious health issue. According to Zustina, “he’s supposedly lying up there with his stomach-ache. At that, it was decided that the men should go up there in order to remove the useless person.”22 If the artist suffers for his art, this is an unusually comical depiction of that suffering. And yet this awkward moment plays into Hofmannsthal’s (perhaps self-parodic) depictions of the artist’s

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empathic ability to experience the suffering of others. Here, the painter Zorzi is experiencing his own (physical) pain, while Andreas (more typically artist-like) experiences pangs of sympathy for the man who is to be kicked out of a room so that he, Andreas, might have a place to sleep – but he does not feel badly enough to decline the room. There is a kind of base pragmatism at the foundation of things, which makes for unsure footing.23 In response to the nausea brought on by the consumerist society as presented in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Van Gogh’s paintings offered a different world (one might go so far as to speak of a Heideggerian “world-creating” moment), dramatizing the (re)birth pangs of objects from the terrible non-existence they suffered in a “reality” that had begun to consume itself, unable to escape its own confined system of empty circulation. This new world was conceived of as an “Antwort” – a response. Zorzi’s paintings are different: they attempt to replicate a world motivated by economic gain, and in turn act as that world’s mirror. Rather than “creating” the world, the paintings act as a narcissistic reflection of the world as it is. But if Zorzi, like Gotthelff, is a Mephistophelean character, then there is also, perhaps, an unintentionally creative side-effect produced by his world-ridding (and “reality”-asserting) paintings. One could entertain the idea of a productive failure in the case of Zorzi’s artwork. Why stage an aesthetic failure? What does the underwhelming moment of seeing an uninspired (and uninspiring) painting contribute to the fragmented text? The scene with the painting, short though it is, provides an opportunity for reflection on the circumstances of artistic creation; further, it is a commentary on the violence one sees in the protagonist, the painter, and the society; and finally, it illustrates both literally and figuratively the paradox of Hofmannsthal’s productive, perhaps even his (un-)beautiful failure. The reader has been prepared for an aesthetic encounter by the many instances of confusion between dream, imagination, memory, and the reality of the present. Even the meeting with Nina is described using the technique of ekphrasis. Nina looks like a work of art: “They found Nina on a sofa in a relaxed and handsome position: everything about her was tinged with light and had a lovely delicate roundness: her hair was light blond like faded gold and she wore it unpowdered: three things, which were fetchingly curvilinear and seemed of a piece: her eyebrows her mouth and her hand, which had an expression of serene curiosity and great kindness, were raised towards the guests

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as they entered. A picture without a frame was leaning, turned around, against the wall: through the canvas ran an incision, as if it had been slashed with a knife.”24 The irony is that the character Nina is more like an artwork than the painting turned to the wall. She is in a “­handsome position” (“hübschen Stellung”) as if she has been deliberately placed here, and her features are strikingly balanced, soft, and charming. The description itself is rather uninflected: all the sentences have standard, predictable syntax, and while the adjectives are descriptive, they are not particularly evocative. In fact, one might say the passage is almost naturalistic in its attempt to objectively depict the “reality.” It is worth considering for a moment, by way of contrast, the aestheticized description of the servant girl in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” The two instances mirror each other in a number of respects. In both cases, living people (both female) are juxtaposed to artworks. In “The Tale,” the older servant girl is framed by the two bronze deities she is carrying. She herself looks like work of art, practically immobile, while the dark gold ornamentation in her hair looks alive and moves against her temples in rhythm with the girl’s breath. This dark gold hair jewellery contrasts with Nina’s unpowdered, unadorned, light blonde hair. The passages also differ in one other striking way: the encounter in “The Tale” slips into free indirect speech (erlebte Rede), affirming the experiential quality of the moment (Erlebnis). For the duration of a sentence, the narrator speaks the mind of the observing merchant’s son: “Eigentlich aber,” the narrator says. It reads like a passing thought uttered unreflectively, as in English one might say: “But really.”25 The passage in “The Tale” stands out for its lyricism and sonority, the repeated sibilants tracing in language the curve of the jewellery, the long vowels weighing down the sentences like the  heavy adornment. The  sensuous language is exemplary for Hofmannsthal’s usual ekphrastic approach. And despite the Medusan evocations, the merchant’s son does not desire the servant in a sexual way. He looks at her like he would a work of art (and reminds the reader that works of art can be threatening in their allure). The highly wrought passage in “The Tale” could not be further from the plain, uninflected description in Andreas. In “The Tale,” the twisted language belies a fear inspired by the aesthetic, and the lack of a sexual desire; in Andreas, the ostensibly sober, objective tone belies an uncertainty in the face of the erotic.

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The two scenes resonate with each other through their difference because they both signal the de-centring of the protagonists. In “The Tale,” this takes the form of an uncanny aesthetic encounter, resulting from the impression that lifeless things are animate while living beings are inanimate. In Andreas, the very much alive woman attracts the young man. The narrator, in a kind of suppressed free indirect speech, does in fact take on the voice of Andreas, and it is one that attempts to counterfeit objectivity by taking inventory of what can be seen. But the realistic tone rings false. And indeed, this cool, objective approach towards representation is about to come under critique: “The picture was roughly similar: the features were Nina’s, but cold, crude. Her lightly upwardly curving brows were so fetching precisely because they were in a face that was almost too soft; a harsher critic might have found her neck somewhat wanting in slenderness – but something in the way her head was balanced upon it lent a charming je ne sais quoi of feminine helplessness … This was one of those embarrassing portraits about which one can say: it contains an inventory of the subject’s face, but betrays the soul of the painter.”26 The painting is imitative, not imaginative, but it is a misrepresentation in its imitation. The “inventory” of the face has no “soul” or life of its own, as is made clear by the oxymoronic descriptions: the narrator goes onto describe the fire in the painted subject’s eyes as cold; the definition of the eyebrows is common. Every potential point at which the dialogical aesthetic moment – that call to the other – might occur is quashed. There is neither humility nor artistic daring in this ­painting. It is a lifeless representation, and the beautiful imperfections of the living Nina are replaced with the meretricious strokes of hollow opulence. If Zorzi’s approach inflicts metaphorical violence on art and reality, then the slash through the canvas brings this metaphorical assault into the narrative “real” world. Nina even comments: “Get it out of my sight … it reminds me only of anger and brutality.”27 It is not entirely clear what anger and brutality are being referenced here: it could be something to do with the infamous violence of Nina’s “Protector,” Camposagrado. A page earlier, Zorzi alludes to Camposagrado’s temper: “in a fit of rage and jealousy, he bit off the head of a live rare bird – sent a day before by her Jewish admirer, Mr dalla Torre.”28 It is likely that Camposagrado, in his rage, also slashed the painting (probably commissioned by dalla Torre, as N1 suggests).

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But Zorzi, too, seems to be a culprit here in the sense that his painting does not move beyond mirroring his own soul, and only his own soul. That is perhaps why the painting is also a striking image of vanity in both senses of the word: it is the emptiness and futility of a narcissistic mirroring that is trapped in its self-­referentiality, unsuited to the dialogical aesthetic moment. One might counter that, in other texts, Hofmannsthal uses similar language: the soul of the painter is present, for instance, in Van Gogh’s paintings. Similarly, in the 1902 essay “Diese Rundschau” (This review), Hofmannsthal writes: “Correct: viewing the work of art as a continuous emanation of a personality, as happening now, illuminations which cast a soul into the world … We all, every one of us, can dissolve what we have made. To make it unending again. We do not keep silent.”29 But the soul in the portrait of Nina is not thrust into the world, it is self-centred (like Zorzi). Zorzi’s painting is not beautiful because, although the portrait resembles Nina (who is beautiful), it does not resonate with the viewer; it does not challenge or provoke Andreas, nor does it send him on a journey so that he might return to himself. It is ugly not because it is unpleasant, but because it is lifeless, in spite of being lifelike: the product of an all too tight grip on reality, the self,30 and profit. The otherness that is necessary for a work of art to stand on its own is absent here; so too is the “world” which the artwork needs.31 There is no “other” in the painting to call or command; in short, it is not beautiful. And Andreas says as much when asked his opinion: “I find it very like the subject, and very ugly.”32

D o g s a n d O t h e r A b j ect Creatures As a work of art, the painting is hollow, but as a literary symbol, it is a powerful recapitulation of a cycle of violence directed at both art and life. It depicts just how pervasive and indiscriminate violence can be, ignoring boundaries of person or fate. Camposagrado’s violence recalls Gotthelff’s, but Andreas himself is part of this triumvirate, and functions as “the locus of foreign fates.”33 Both notes and fragment suggest that Andreas’s past is besmirched with episodes of sadism, coupled with an identification with his victims.34 For Andreas, the sadistic acts he recalls are a source of shame – even when he is not quite sure he committed these acts in actuality. His capacity to imagine committing them is enough to make him feel culpable. Tied to this is a repetition compulsion: he desires

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to relive these events in order that he might once again sense that feeling of endlessness achieved in the moment of identification (with the victims). The secondary literature and Hofmannsthal’s own notes on the text make quite clear that Gotthelff is, among other things, a part of Andreas, expressing and performing those destructive and violent desires that the young man does not wish to act upon himself. Gotthelff represents one – or perhaps many – of Andreas’s fragments: the seducer, the arsonist, and the animal abuser. The dog, for Hofmannsthal, unites in one image the condition of the artist and the demands of ethics.35 In the case of Andreas, those demands become inescapable. The fate of the Finazzer-family dog, it turns out, reimagines a scene from Andreas’s adolescence. While walking one day, a dog crosses the youth’s path. Andreas is immediately struck: “The humility with which it looked at its master from their first encounter onwards was incomprehensible.”36 As discussed in chapter 3, humility before the incomprehensible and unattainable is a key component for Hofmannsthal’s understanding of art; but where the viewer (and the artist) must approach people and things with humility, here it is the dog approaching Andreas with humility. But the humility is not reciprocal in this instance, and when one day the twelve-year-old Andreas discovers that “his” dog does not exhibit this submissive behaviour to Andreas alone, but behaves the same before another (dominant) dog, the boy’s rage and jealousy become uncontainable – and that incomprehensible humility becomes a site of contact with the eternal: The fury rose up in him, he called the little dog over. At ten paces, the dog was already aware of his master’s ­wrathful mien and came crawling towards him, his trembling gaze riveted on Andres’s face. He scorned the dog, calling him a low and corruptible creature, and under the scorn the dog crept nearer and nearer: it seemed to him that he raised his foot and struck the spine from above with the heel of his shoe. It seemed to him – the little dog gave a short cry of pain and crumpled, but he wagged his tail at him. He turned suddenly and left, the little dog crept behind him, his back was broken, in spite of that he slid after his master, like a snake. Finally, he stopped, the little dog gazed up at him, and died, fawning. He was not sure whether he had done it or not; but it emanates from him. In this way, the infinite touches him.37

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The event is all the more disturbing for the calm and objective tone with which it is described. Yet throughout the entire passage there is a tension between this objective quality and how the event unfolds. The contrast between master and dog could not be clearer: high and low, fury and fear, authority and obedience, perpetrator and victim. And all of this is set up in a structure of call and response that comes from an overflow of energy: he calls the dog to him, to where the fury rises up in him, and upon seeing his master’s face the dog lowers himself, “crawling.” Almost every sentence begins with a focus on Andreas’s action and then depicts the dog’s response. Only the sentence that begins “At ten paces” focuses first on the dog; and this is still a response to the preceding sentence, “he called the little dog over to him.” This call/response structure increases in tension as the distance between Andreas and the dog closes, while the discrepancy between submission and domination grows. Fear and humility pull the dog down, while the boy’s wrath – like fire – burns upwards. The dog approaches humbly, while the boy reviles and humiliates his dog. They match each other in intensity; but at the moment of contact, marked by the colon, the vision becomes muddied. One can only see with the aid of distance. And here, Hofmannsthal’s use of converging perspectives signals the encounter: neither narrator nor Andreas really knows what happened. Two sentences, both introduced by the hesitant phrase “it seemed to him,” and both marked by their use of the subjunctive mood, express the unspeakable nature of the event. While the call and response structure of the passage imitates dialogue, the content of what happened resists direct, indicative discourse. Analogous to the aesthetic encounter, this encounter with the infinite defies objective description. And perhaps because the scene is so terrible, it must be dampened through a kind of dissociation or forgetting. As trauma victims sometimes cannot recall the moment of trauma in words or images, so Andreas cannot clearly recall what happened in that moment. It seemed to him that he raised his foot and trampled the dog’s spine under his heel. According to Robert Boehringer, the editor of the 1938 edition of Hofmannsthal’s and George’s correspondence, the real break between the two poets occurred when the seventeen-year-old Hofmannsthal witnessed George violently kick a stray dog, yelling at it as it whimpered and ran away.38 The situation that Andreas recalls is made more complex by the proliferation of what seem to be mixed signals: in spite of the pain, the dog “wedelte.” The verb “wedeln” typically refers to a gesture of

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excitement: in English, tail wagging or fawning. This might suggest a masochistic tendency, the deep-rooted character of happy submission: The dog did cry out, but he wagged his tail and followed his master despite the injury. The dog is also a kind of Philoctetes, or Oedipus: an image of suffering, walking, on the verge of death. The moment of contact between high and low is announced not with a bang, but a whimper. That this contact occurs at the level of the feet is significant. Andreas did not strike the dog with his hand or a stick. He trampled the dog’s back under the heel of his shoe.39 But feet have another significance in Andreas: They are associated with women Andreas has been romantically attracted to. Like Anton Reiser and Wilhelm Meister before him, Andreas loved the theatre as boy on the cusp of pubescence. Its allure for him was concentrated into a single fetishized object: The floor of the stage was uneven: the curtain was too short in some places, riding boots came and went … between the bridge of a contrabass and the head of a musician, one could see the feet of a lion, or – once – a bespangled sky-blue shoe. This sky-blue shoe was more wondrous than anything else – later there stood a creature who had this shoe on, it belonged to her, was one with her blue and silver robe: she was a princess, dangers surrounded her, dark figures, torches, a magical forest … all of that was lovely but it was not that double-edged sword of most delicate delight and profane desire that went through the soul, unto tears, when the blue shoe was there alone beneath the curtain.40 W.G. Sebald remarked that this passage exemplifies the connection between the forbidden delights of art and fetishism.41 Repressed art returns in strange ways: here it is the “forbidden” theatre (of which Andreas’s parents did not approve) – and the dangerous delights associated with it. Romana re-awakens this image at various instances, as when she suggestively touches the bedframe with the tips of her toes, just before she and Andreas kiss. Andreas later imagines her bare feet pulled up under her gown.42 But in a dream, a heavy left foot prevents him from reaching her, as she runs barefoot in the Viennese Spiegelgasse – with its suggestion of psychological mirroring. In this dream, the image of the dog and its broken spine return, but now as a cat: “It was the cat whose spine he had once struck with a carriage

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shaft and which would not die: and so she still was not dead, after so many years! … It’s no use, he must pass her, with unspeakable anguish he lifted his heavy left foot above the animal whose spine moved incessantly in serpentine fashion up and down, and the cat twisted its head and fixed its gaze on him, the roundness of the cat’s head with its simultaneously feline and canine face, filled with voluptuousness and agony in a grisly confusion – he wants to scream, at which point there is a scream inside, in the room.”43 As is not uncommon with Hofmannsthal, a symbol used often turns in on itself, like the cat’s twisted head, hinting at that great span that exists between and connects eros and thanatos: from desire to transcendence to violence. The violence of contact goes deeper. It is also figured in a dreammemory that suggests that Andreas was molested as a child: “A gaze which the boy dreaded more than any other, the gaze of his first ­catechist, shot through him and the dreaded little plump hand seized him, the repulsive face of a boy, who in the evening twilit hour on the back stairs told him what he did not wish to hear, pressed against his cheek, and how he struggled to push it away, there lay before the door, through which he had to pass in order to follow Romana, a creature and began to move towards him: it was the cat.”44 The cat, a symbol of eros and thanatos, blocks the door, just as Gotthelff’s foot earlier had blocked Andreas from closing his door. Andreas seems to be both a victim and a perpetrator of violence.45 From a psychoanalytic point of view, this helps to explain Andreas’s cruelty towards animals, as well as the erotic undertone in that violence. Andreas re-enacts the trauma, but he takes on the dominant role of agent (or master). It is a kind of lex talionis that has undergone transference: survivors of cruelty deal the blows of “justice” too late, and not on the original perpetrators, but on those who come after. The logic of trauma in Andreas operates the same way; the victim perpetuates the violence on an object perceived to be a threat to the subject’s authority, such as young Andreas’s little dog, which showed fealty to another dog, casting doubt on Andreas’s authority. But, as Hofmannsthal wrote in “Moments in Greece,” quoting the classicist Gilbert Murray: there is vengeance in heaven for an injured dog (εἰδὶ καὶ κυνῶν ἐρινύες). “The Conversation about Poems” offers an analog to the experience and perpetration of violence, namely in the moment of identification between the sacrificial victim and the person performing the ritual. Just as readers and audience members are “co-creators” of works of art, so too may victims of violence become co-producers of violence;

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this is the awful rite into which Andreas was initiated as a boy; this was his catechism. And it has indeed been given an aura of the “sacred” – that is, it is set apart. These events aspire towards eternity, towards being set outside of time and apart from the “real” life experienced in its chronic linearity. The trauma becomes, in a sense, unreal, because it was not experienced as happening in time; this is why its narration occurs in the contexts of memories and dreams. Elaine Scarry refers to this as “world-ridding”: “It is in part this world-­ ridding, path-clearing logic that explains the obsessive presence of pain in the rituals of large, widely shared religions … [and] why, though it occurs in widely different contexts and cultures, the metaphysical is insistently coupled with the physical with the equally insistent exclusion of the middle term, world.”46 Such world-ridding aspiration to eternity is relived in the moment the boy Andreas senses the rift from the real world in that violence which emanated from him: “He was not sure whether he had done it or not; but it emanates from him. In this way, the infinite touches him.”47 That moment of freedom from the temporal world is one of the hallmarks of the aesthetic, and heightened sensitivity to stimuli is the hallmark of the aesthete. To sense the touch of the infinite requires just such a heightened sensitivity. The downside is that undesired stimuli can seem louder and harsher, too. In the Finazzer home, before falling asleep, Andreas hears Romana’s mother and father in the room next door, as well as their dog, and recalls his childhood: “His senses were sharpened and he could hear that the farmer’s wife was braiding her hair while they conversed, and that the dog was gnawing away at something. Who feeds a dog at this hour of the night, the thought occurred to him, and at the same moment he felt pressed, as if he had to return to his childhood, when he still had the small room next to his parents and would overhear them through the recessed wardrobe whether he wanted to or not. He did not want to hear now either, and yet he heard.”48 The artist is indeed supposed to have a heightened sensibility, and this is also what allows the artist to feel the suffering of others. After this reminiscence and fantasizing about a happy future with Romana, he sees the dog in the courtyard: “The dog stood in the centre of the light, held his head strangely at an angle, turned in circles: it was as if he were enduring a great suffering, perhaps he was old and near death. Andres [sic] was beset with a dull sadness, he was tremendously ­distressed by the sufferings of the creature – when he was just now so

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happy – as if in this vision he were reminded of his father’s approaching death. He stepped away from the window, now he could think of his Romana.”49 For Andreas, empathy is an affliction. Not yet able to handle these overwhelming feelings for the suffering of the “creature,” he turns away from it. The circles traced by the dog suggest that Andreas, too, might well be turning in circles, only to confront again (or again avoid) traumatic events.50 Andreas’s experience of suffering either replicates itself on the abject, or is displaced into dreams, which then begin to dissolve the edges of reality. Writing about torture, Elaine Scarry says: “The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of ‘incontestable reality’ on that power that has brought it into being. It is of course precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used.”51 Andreas’s desire for his lack of agency (the experience of being touched against his will) to be unreal is reaffirmed in the desire for the agency to be real in that moment of perpetrating violence; but it is, ironically, only destruction. This circle is a vicious one. Although Andreas’s hypersensitivity is felt as an affliction, it does present a chance to transcend the repetition of violence: pain has the capacity to awaken a sense of shame and humility. The site of this awakening is, appropriately, the feet, which in turn are connected to Hofmannsthal’s definition of beauty. The polysemy of the foot becomes apparent when one considers the differences between Andreas and his mentor, Sacramozo. In N60 Sacramozo recounts two dreams he has had, the first of which features bare feet: “I. he resided in the palace. The tolling of a bell. The cock’s crow, A second one. He stands up barefoot. He feels through the soles of his feet everything all the way down into the mountain.”52 The elemental connection to the earth occurs at the contact point between the bare foot and the ground’s surface. That connection reaches – paradoxically – “down” into the mountain. This is a thing of beauty, combining humility and boldness, the depths and the heights. The word “schön” even appears at the end of this first dream: “On the other side, silvered ancestors step from out of the mountain wall, an image so beautiful that he cried out in his dream: ‘I am dreaming!’”53 The passage evokes the aesthetic imperative as it is described in the “Address”: “This demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected

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powers of the mysterious line of ancestors within us.”54 The second dream, however, speaks to Sacramozo’s sense of guilt and his desire to escape it: Sacramozo flies through (“durchfliegt”) the landscape, brooks, and cemeteries, echoing Andreas’s early aimless springing, leaping, and bounding through the landscape at the Finazzer farmyard: “finally he [Andreas] sprang from himself as if from a prison, he leapt in bounds and knew nothing of himself but the moment.”55 The attempt to avoid the command of the earth’s pull is either achieved in dream (as in Sacramozo’s flight) or in dissociation. Neither flight lasts. In seeking to escape the present and himself, Andreas finds himself at the grave of the dog Gotthelff had killed; and Sacramozo, in his second dream, breaks that connection to the earth (like the apparition of Plato gliding above the ground in “Moments in Greece”). But his flight suffers: “his flight already dull … now the cock crows. He knows it is the third time and Knows [sic] that he has betrayed his saviour.”56 The aesthetic exemplified in the beautiful image of ancestors before the barefooted Sacramozo, and the holiness that he denounced, come together again in several related notes concerning Andreas: N148: What kind of light is this. Clear transparent: the life of branches in this light: the distance as an exhilarating feeling. He disrobes and bathes in the river. A frightful moment, as he loses the ground beneath his feet. N149: while stepping into the water, naked, he believes he sees Romana doing the same He gives himself a fright. In the meantime, she is gone. He renounces her, so sure is he of her. He lived through one of the happiest days of his life and he did not know it. N150: After bathing and after losing consciousness: “He ­carried shoe and stockings in his hands and walked with ­bleeding feet across the meadow.”57 These three notes show how the elements of the aesthetic moment (such as the “exhilarating feeling” and “frightful moment” in N148) suffuse an event that has its nexus at the feet. The fear – even the loss of consciousness – that comes from losing one’s footing occurs in the aesthetic moment, as has been made clear in previous texts. This moment is not an encounter with a work of art, but it is an aesthetically informed way of encountering and experiencing the world. This is why Andreas can now perceive the life of the branches in the trees.

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The final words relating to the event speak to the asymptotic movement of aesthetics and ethics as they near each other: Andreas “walked with bleeding feet across the meadow.” Whatever Hofmannsthal might have been planning to do with this episode, it ends with a reference to pain, suffering, and humility: those qualities of the aesthetic that can never be erased from the work of art, but about which it can give no specific commentary – it can only bear witness. As is typical for Hofmannsthal, that moment of suffering is connected to piety. Sacramozo’s renunciation of the connection to the earth has been countered by Andreas’s bleeding feet. Like the Discalced Carmelites, whose bare feet are a sign of a life dedicated to poverty, Andreas accepts the pain of earth’s pull as he lifts his bare feet one at a time and sets them on the ground, again and again.

A B e a u t if u l F ai lure In a letter to Gershom Scholem from 1938, Benjamin characterized Kafka’s “failure” thus: “To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual ­failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.”58 Hofmannsthal, too, was keenly aware of his failure with Andreas. He knew that art in and of itself cannot make us ethical, and that aesthetics cannot be a handmaiden to ethics, nor vice versa. But his writings hold out a hope that the aesthetic encounter can still be an Erlebnis: A lived experience that destabilizes audiences and readers, and demands that they take steps to respond with a recognition of their shared human condition – that is, stepping out of their selfinflicted immaturity and self-absorption. At its best, Hofmannsthal’s work is not prescriptive; rather, it is experiential. It is suffused with unnamed ethical concerns that cannot be shaken off, and these are almost always linked to or encased in the question of the effect of the aesthetic on human beings. In another author’s hands, Andreas might have depicted the Bildung of its protagonist. But Hofmannsthal never completed a Bildungsroman. The failure adequately to depict a marriage of aesthetics and ethics in an imagined “real life” is a beautiful failure: beautiful in the sense that Hofmannsthal intended when he wrote of beautiful works of art: “For

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such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’ There is no word loftier, no word more dangerous. It is the word which binds most deeply.”59 It is a beautiful failure that recognizes the aesthetic responsibility of letting oneself go and providing instead a space for art; and it is a beautiful failure because, to use the language of ethics, it provokes its readers into engaging with it as something totally other. Beautiful is that failure which cannot help but try to imagine the impossible. Art is insistently “other.” And in this otherness of art, there is space for an ethical moment in the encounter, which cannot be translated or realized, but must be acknowledged. That is the aporia. But it is also why Hofmannsthal writes: “We feel the plunge of existence. We assume nothing. From ourselves we spin out the thread that carries us across the abyss, and sometimes we are blissful as wisps of cloud in the evening sky. We create our language in tandem with others, each quickening the other. We carry within us a vision, an affliction, a face, a tone … We do not keep silent.”60 Art speaks, as long as people are prepared to hear.

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Notes

I nt r o d uc t i o n   1 When citing Hofmannsthal’s work, I refer most often to the recently ­completed critical edition of the collected works: Sämtliche Werke (Kritische Ausgabe). When referring to an entire volume, rather than a ­specific work printed in the volume, I use the abbreviation ka followed by the volume number, a colon, and a short title of the volume (e.g., ka  40: Bibliothek). Volume titles are listed in full in the bibliography. In cases where I did not have access to the more recently published volumes of the critical edition, I cite two older but widely available editions, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden and Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben.   2 Payne and Barbera, A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, 16.   3 Schwarz, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Rainer Maria Rilke,” 165. Some recent translations include: Alexander Stillmark’s Hugo Von Hofmannsthal: Select Narrative Prose, from 2020; my own Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Writings on Art / Schriften zur Kunst, from 2017; David S. Luft’s Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–27, from 2011; and J.D. McClatchy’s The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, from 2008. With forty volumes of material, there is still very much left to translate.   4 By 1914, Hofmannsthal’s poetry had already entered the canon, even by international standards, as evidenced by the series “The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English,” edited by German-American educator Kuno Francke. Four years later, in 1918, the American author Charles Wharton Stork published an almost complete translation of Hofmannsthal’s Gesammelte Gedichte under the title The Lyrical Poems of Hofmannsthal, comprising his lyric poetry until 1907.

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  5 Hofmannsthal, “Sunt animae rerum,” 25.   6 “Drum flieh aus deinem Selbst, dem starren, kalten, / Des Weltalls Seele dafür einzutauschen, / Lass dir des Lebens wogende Gewalten, / Genuss und Qualen, durch die Seele rauschen, / Und kannst du eine Melodie erlauschen, / So strebe, ihren Nachhall festzuhalten!” Ibid.   7 Thomas Kovach’s Hofmannsthal and Symbolism: Art and Life in the Work of a Modern Poet and Robert Vilain’s The Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism treat this topic at length.   8 For more on this characterization, see Douglas A. Joyce’s contribution, “Hofmannsthal Reception in the Twentieth Century” in A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal.   9 Allan Janik’s representation of Hofmannsthal’s work in Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited exemplifies this view: “The cultural manifestation of this flight from society … typified the works of Hofmannsthal from his early world-weary lyricism to his later fairy-tale plays of social regeneration after the war, which would create a refuge from the real world for the alienated aesthete.” Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited, 39. Janik does not provide textual evidence for this assertion, and his allusion to Hofmannsthal’s “fairy-tale plays” is a misnomer. Hofmannsthal’s ­fairy-tale opera, on the other hand, calls up disturbing events that veterans of the First World War would have recognized. Janik’s comments adopt a narrative initially disseminated by Hofmannsthal’s contemporary, the critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936). 10 “Die sämtlichen merkwürdigen Bücher von d’Annunzio hatten ihr Befremdliches, ja wenn man will ihr Entsetzliches und Grauenhaftes darin, daß sie von einem geschrieben waren, der nicht im Leben stand. Der sie geschrieben hatte, wußte alle Zeichen des Lebens: wundervoll wußte er sie alle, und doch glaube ich heute, er war bis jetzt kein großer Dichter, überhaupt kein Dichter. Aber er war von der ersten Zeile an ein ­außerordentlicher Künstler.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 233. 11 Although the term “object-oriented” is suggestive of more recent posthumanist, objected-oriented ontologies, the moment discussed here has a distinct genealogy. Adorno summarizes the fascination with objects (“things”) well: “Instead of things yielding as symbols of subjectivity, ­subjectivity yields as the symbol of things, prepares itself to rigidify ­ultimately into the thing which society has in any case made of it.” (Anstatt daß die Dinge als Symbol der Subjektivität nachgäben, gibt Subjektivität nach als Symbol der Dinge, bereit, in sich selber schließlich zu dem Ding zu erstarren, zu dem sie von der Gesellschaft ohnehin

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gemacht wird.) Adorno, “The George-Hofmannsthal Correspondence,” 223; “George und Hofmannsthal,” 234. Though not specified by Adorno, for Hofmannsthal the relationship is more reciprocal: just as the thing ­animates the subject (viewer), so the viewer animates the thing. In the ­aesthetic experience, the two are mutually dependent and mutually distinct. 12 Committed art is not to be equated with propaganda: “Even if politically motivated, commitment in itself remains politically polyvalent so long as it is not reduced to propaganda, whose pliancy mocks any commitments by the subject.” (Engagement als solches, sei’s auch politisch gemeint, ­bleibt politisch vieldeutig, solange es nicht auf eine Propaganda sich reduziert, deren willfährige Gestalt alles Engagement des Subjekts ­verhöhnt.) Adorno, “Commitment,” 3; “Engagement,” 410. 13 In Kierkegaard’s various depictions of the demonic, there is always a clear temporal marker: suddenness. Suddenness represents the solipsistic ­opposite of continuity (associated with community). In the Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard writes “the demonic is the sudden” – but this is only one ­attribute of many that Kierkegaard posits, and it is difficult to understand without its counterpart notion, “reserve”: “Reserve shuts itself off ever more from communication. But communication is in turn the expression of continuity, and the negation of continuity is the sudden.” Kierkgeaard, Concept of Anxiety, 154, 156. Suddenness is “reserve” understood ­temporally. Language, on the other hand, is not about “reservedness,” but rather communication. For this reason, it is “subject to ethical ­categories.” Music, by contrast, has “the erotic sensual genius” as its object: “In other words, music is the demonic.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 75. 14 See the section “Für immer stolz und glücklich, diesem Volk anzugehören” in the program to Österreichs Antwort (exhibition concept by Katja Kaluga). Hofmannsthal’s initial enthusiasm for the war waned with time, and by 1917 he was thoroughly disillusioned. In a letter to the countess Ottonie Degenfeld from 1923, he writes: “With horror, I see now from the ­memoirs of Paléologue, together with those of Tirpitz, and now those of Conrad, that we – Berlin and Vienna – are completely to blame for the outbreak of this war.” (Mit Grausen sehe ich aus den Memoiren von Paléologue, zusammengehalten mit denen von Tirpitz, jetzt mit denen von Conrad, daß die ganze Schuld am eigentlichen Ausbruch bei uns liegt, Berlin u. Wien). This letter is quoted in the Epilogue of Österreichs Antwort. 15 Hofmannsthal finds an unlikely ally in the thought of Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse: “The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension. Its relation to praxis is inexorably indirect, mediated, and frustrating. The more immediately political the work of art, the more

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it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical transcendent goals of change.” The German reads slightly differently: “Nur in ihr selbst liegt ihr politisches Potential. Ihre Beziehung zur verändernden Praxis ist ­unentrinnbar ‘indirekt,’ vermittelt, frustrierend. Je unmittelbarer, direkter, expliziter politisch ein Werk sein will, desto weniger wird es revolutionär, subversiv sein.” Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, 70; Die Permanenz der Kunst, 9. Hofmannsthal’s relation to the Frankfurt School and critical theory is an unexplored, but promising topic, especially given Hofmannsthal’s ­correspondence with and early championing of Walter Benjamin. 16 “Politik ist Menschenkunde, Kunst des Umgangs auf einer höheren Stufe. Ein irrationales Element spielt hier mit … wer verborgenen Kräfte anzureden weiss, dem gehorchen sie. So offenbart sich der grosse ­politische Mensch. Vom Dichter ist es genug, wenn er die Mächte ahnt und mit untrüglichem Gefühl auf sie hinweist.” Hofmannsthal, “Grillparzers Politisches Vermächtnis,” 406. The above translation is my own. The entire essay can be found in English in David Luft’s Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea, 73–8. 17 Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 12. 18 See Anderson, “1963: Love as Fascism,” 882. This assessment rests uneasy with the fact that Hofmannsthal wrote and published drama and essays consistently throughout his writing career, even before his l­yrical output tapered off. The argument hinges on one’s definition of “socially engaged,” but Anderson does not go into specifics. 19 Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 114. 20 Kovach, A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 4. 21 The “call” in art and literature has a long history, and in the context of Aestheticism, the ethical relevance of this call gains traction. Elaine Scarry notes that many ancient and medieval writers (Homer, Plato, and Dante, among many others) considered beauty to be a kind of greeting or call. See Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 25, 126. Hofmannsthal’s prose tale “Die Wege und die Begegnungen” (Paths and Encounters) presents a ­similar idea: “A greeting is something boundless. Dante dates his ‘Vita Nuova’ to a greeting.” (Ein Gruß ist etwas Grenzenloses. Dante datiert sein ‘Neues Leben’ von einem Gruß.) Hofmannsthal, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 160. 22 “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” Rilke, “Archäischer Torso Apollos,” 557. 23 “Es führt kein direkter Weg ins Leben, aus dem Leben keiner in die Poesie. Das Wort als Träger eines Lebensinhaltes und das traumhafte Bruderwort,

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welches in einem Gedicht stehen kann, streben auseinander und schweben wie fremd aneinander vorüber, wie die beiden Eimer eines Brunnens. Kein äußerliches Gesetz verbannt aus der Kunst alles Vernünfteln, alles Hadern mit dem Leben, jeden unmittelbaren Bezug auf das Leben und jede direkte Nachahmung des Lebens, sondern die einfache Unmöglichkeit: diese schweren Dinge können dort ebensowenig leben als eine Kuh in den Wipfeln der Bäume.” Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 16. 24 “Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureuse / S’élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins; / Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes, / Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor, / – Qui plane sur la vie, et ­comprend sans effort / Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!” Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 17; Les Fleurs du mal, 12. 25 “Wie zeug ich dich aber im heiligtume / – So fragt ich wenn ich es sinnend durchmaß / In kühnen gespinsten der sorge vergaß – / Dunkle große schwarze blume?” George, Hymnen, Pilgerfahrten, Algabal, 96. 26 For the important role of forgetting and not being able to forget, see Matussek, “Tod und Transzendenz.” Similarly, Mayer notes that, in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos), the titular character cannot forget. Mayer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 103. Another opera, Die ägyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helen) also engages with the conflicting desires to forget and to remember. Moreover, memory has an ethical import for Hofmannsthal: see his annotation to Freud’s Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (Psychopathology of Everyday Life): “Forgetfulness from disregard for the other.” (Vergesslichkeit aus Geringschätzung des Andern.) Hofmannsthal, KA 40: Bibliothek, 214; *fdh 1308. The marker *fdh refers to the catalogue number in the Freies deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt. 27 “Schön ist mein Garten mit den goldnen Bäumen.” Hofmannsthal, “Mein Garten,” 20. 28 Tellingly, one of the earlier titles of the poem is “Midas’ Garten.” See Hofmannsthal, ka 1: Gedichte I, 135. The motif of gold will be ­discussed in the subsequent chapters. 29 Throughout his book, Schorske characterizes art at the turn of the century as a site of avoidance. Consider his comments on Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: “This psychological posture is classic for the weakened ego finding in f­ antasy a substitute for power over reality: wish is king; encounter is avoided.” Describing the aesthetic experience, he writes: “It gives form to the feelings arising out of experience, but not to the experience itself. By the very fact of standing for life, art separates us from it.” Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 258, 311. Schorske is charitable towards

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Hofmannsthal, whom he characterizes as having “sought to return art to ethics, aesthetic culture to society, and his cultivated class to fruitful participation in the body social.” Ibid. On the one hand, Hofmannsthal “returned to revitalize a traditional morality of personal responsibility; on the other, he thrust forward toward depth psychology and the ­affirmation of instinct … Hofmannsthal had rescued the function of art from the hedonistic isolation into which his class had carried it and had tried to redeem society through art’s reconciling power. But the rifts in the body social had proceeded too far. Society could tolerate tragedy or comedy, but not redemption through aesthetic harmonization.” Ibid., 313, 318. I am not entirely convinced Hofmannsthal was as consistently ­optimistic about art’s potential as Schorske makes him out to be. For more on Hofmannsthal’s doubts, see my discussion of Andreas in ­chapter 5 of this book. 30 Cf. Katherine Arens’s portrayal: “Hofmannsthal is by no means simply looking backwards (as critics like Michael Steinberg argue), but rather continuing a long-term project begun at the start of his career: the ­renovation of western traditions for a new generation … these essays [the late essays] document Hofmannsthal’s hopes for a cosmopolitan art that was not elitist or nationalist – an art that mediates rather than excludes because it grows from the historical experience of the group, not just from an elite.” Arens, “Hofmannsthal’s Essays,” 182. Egon Schwarz, with his expansive comparative work from 1962, Hofmannsthal und Calderon, makes a similar point about Hofmannsthal’s use of literary traditions. 31 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 45.

C hapt e r O n e   1 Carsten Strathausen posits that the gaze and its reversal is one of the ­central themes in fin-de-siècle literature. “The look of things,” he ­summarizes, “refers to the – possibly deceptive – visual appearance of external objects, but also evokes the power of everything to look back at us once we have learned to look at it.” Strathausen, The Look of Things, 27. Strathausen’s primary example is Rilke, though Hofmannsthal’s work would serve his purposes equally well. Strathausen does discuss Hofmannsthal in the context of the relation between speech and silence.   2 Quotes in English are from Heim’s translation in McClatchy’s The Whole Difference, unless otherwise stated. For brevity, I use the shortened title, “The Tale.”

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  3 The merchant’s son contrasts with other figures in Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre who are witness to, or objects of, degradation: Gianino in the lyrical drama Der Tod des Tizian (The Death of Titian) and the Empress in both opera and prose versions of Die Frau ohne Schatten are humanized and strengthened by their encounters with grime, ugliness, and poverty.   4 Charles Hammond’s sensitive readings of Hofmannsthal’s relation to Aestheticism and Decadence offer strong support for a moral ending: the merchant’s son’s Aestheticism, Hammond argues, “ultimately ­provokes society into exacting its own revenge against him.” Hammond, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Das Märchen,” 447. This is a valid reading, supported by the structure of the tale. That provocation, moreover, can come from within the individual: the antagonistic forces, for instance, include chance, which, according to Hofmannsthal’s views at the time, is motivated from within the self (not society). Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Richard Beer-Hofmann from 15 May 1895: “The fall of the cards … is something that one forces from the inside out; that is the deep, great truth of which Poldy’s story is meant to be a sign, and my Tale a childlike and crude allegory.” (Das Fallen der Karten … erzwingt man von innen her; das ist das tiefe grosse wahre wovon dem Poldy seine Geschichte ein ­hilfloses und mein Märchen ein kindlich rohes allegorisches Zeichen sein soll.) Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann, Briefwechsel, 48. Hofmannsthal refers in this letter to Leopold von Andrian’s novella, Der Garten der Erkenntnis (The Garden of Knowledge).   5 This is exemplified in the writings of Ernst Mach. The importance of Mach’s views was announced by Hermann Bahr in his 1903 essay, “Das unrettbare Ich” (The Unsalvageable Ego). Judith Ryan has treated the topic of impressionistic psychology at length in The Vanishing Subject.   6 Claudia Bamberg refers in this regard to the theatrum mundi of things. Bamberg, Hofmannsthal, 233.   7 Wolfgang Huemer argues that Husserl’s phenomenological reduction was inspired by a creative misunderstanding of Hofmannsthal’s ­portrayal of the ­aesthetic experience. Husserl would later understand the ­phenomenological reduction to lead only “to a solipsistic point of view that cannot provide a foundation to explain intersubjectivity.” Huemer, “Phenomenological Reduction,” 124. While I do not entirely agree with Huemer’s reading of Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter – a text critical to his argument – as an expression of a language crisis, I accept the g­ eneral direction of his article, and, in particular, the ­importance placed on the problem of intersubjectivity, which also ­occupied Hofmannsthal.

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  8 See Wallenstein, “Phenomenology.”   9 “Epoche der Freundschaft mit Poldy (‘Kaufmannssohn’ ‘Garten der Erkenntnis’): das Hauptproblem dieser sehr merkwürdigen Epoche liegt darin, daß Poldy vollständig (ich weniger vollständig, sondern ausweichend, indem ich eine Art Doppelleben führte) das Reale übersah: er suchte das Wesen der Dinge zu spüren – das andere Gesicht der Dinge beachtete er nicht, er wollte es absichtlich nicht beachten, für nichts ansehen.” Hofmannsthal, Ad me ipsum, 244. 10 This is also the criticism Hofmannsthal levies against Oscar Wilde, whose works he nevertheless valued for their aesthetic brilliance. See his essay “Sebastian Melmoth.” For a thorough study of Hofmannsthal’s early views on Wilde’s aesthetics, see the dissertation by Charles H. Hammond, Jr, Blind Alleys. 11 “Das Leben … läßt seiner nicht spotten. Verstoßen wird es böse und ­rachsüchtig.” Aleweyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 175. For a brief overview of the literature related to “The Tale,” see Meyer, “Erzählter Körper.” Meyer’s focus on the creation of an artificial world reformulates Alewyn’s thesis. 12 “Ein junger Kaufmannssohn, der sehr schön war und weder Vater noch Mutter hatte, wurde bald nach seinem fünfundzwanzigsten Jahre der Geselligkeit und des gastlichen Lebens überdrüssig.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 39; “Das Märchen,” 15. 13 Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 39–40; “Das Märchen,” 15. 14 Cf. Rasch, Die literarische Décadence, particularly the sections on “Welthaß und Willensschwäche,” “Ästhetizismus,” and “Lebensferne und Isolierung.” Hermann Bahr offers a similar view: “The decadence of Montesquiou and Wilde is a flight of dilettantes, who have a correct feeling for art but who lack the creative power of the artist” (Die Décadence der Montesquiou und Wilde ist eine Ausflucht von Dilettanten, die ein rechtes Gefühl der Kunst, aber die schöpferische Kraft der Künstler nicht haben.) Bahr, “Décadence,” 172. 15 “Die Idiosynkrasie des lyrischen Geistes gegen die Übergewalt der Dinge ist eine Reaktionsform auf die Verdinglichung der Welt, der Herrschaft von Waren über Menschen.” Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 40; “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,” 52. 16 The tension between the commercial and the aesthetic is central to “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (translated and published in English as “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”), discussed in chapter 2. 17 In contrast, Hinrich Seeba argues that “Hofmannsthal and many of his contemporaries, who considered themselves members of the cultural elite,

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if not the ruling class, seemed to live in denial of the alarming signs of what was in store for them.” Seeba, “Hofmannsthal and Wiener Moderne,” 33. Yet even an early passage like this one in “The Tale” ­indicates otherwise: Hofmannsthal was more self-reflective (and perhaps self-parodic) than scholars like Seeba have given him credit for. 18 Cf. Alewyn, who writes of the character Claudio in Der Tor und der Tod (Death and the Fool): “Unable to experience anything, be it a thing or a familiar person [ein Du], unable to act, unable even to enjoy, he lives out his life without a world, without a fate, in the dungeon of his ego [sein Ich]. The beautiful life is transformed from blessing to curse.” (Unfähig, etwas zu erleben, weder ein Ding noch ein Du, unfähig zu handeln, unfähig auch nur zu genießen, lebt er ohne Welt und ohne Schicksal in dem Kerker seines Ichs dahin. Das schöne Leben verkehrt sich aus einem Segen in einen Fluch.) Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 68. The absence of a “you” – “du” in German, the ­second person singular ­pronoun of familiarity – will be of greater ­concern in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” and the later works. 19 “Ja, die Schönheit der Teppiche und Gewebe und Seiden, der geschnitzten und getäfelten Wände, der Leuchter und Becken aus Metall, der gläsernen und irdenen Gefäße wurde ihm so bedeutungsvoll, wie er es nie geahnt hatte. Allmählich wurde er sehend dafür, wie alle Formen und Farben der Welt in seinen Geräten lebten. Er erkannte in den Ornamenten, die sich verschlingen, ein verzaubertes Bild der ­verschlungenen Wunder der Welt … Er war für lange Zeit trunken von dieser großen, tiefsinnigen Schönheit, die ihm gehörte, und alle seine Tage bewegten sich schöner und minder leer unter diesen Geräten, die nichts Totes und Niedriges mehr waren, sondern ein großes Erbe, das göttliche Werk aller Geschlechter.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 39–40; “Das Märchen,” 15–16. 20 “Modern sind alte Möbel und junge Nervositäten.” Hofmannsthal, “Gabriele d’Annunzio (I),” 176. 21 “Doch er fühlte ebenso die Nichtigkeit aller dieser Dinge wie ihre Schönheit; nie verließ ihn auf lange der Gedanke an den Tod und oft befiel er ihn unter lachenden und lärmenden Menschen, oft in der Nacht, oft beim Essen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 40; “Das Märchen,” 16. 22 Similar baroque themes abound in Hofmannsthal’s earlier works, like Der Tor und der Tod (Death and The Fool) and Der Tod des Tizian (The Death of Titian). The 1911 play Jedermann (Everyman), performed annually at the Salzburg Festival, and the late tragedy Der Turm (The Tower) can also be read as meditations on ars moriendi/ars vivendi.

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23 “Er sagte: ‘Wo du sterben sollst, dahin tragen dich deine Füße,’ und sah sich schön, wie ein auf der Jagd verirrter König, in einem unbekannten Wald unter seltsamen Bäumen einem fremden wunderbaren Geschick ­entgegengehen. Er sagte: ‘Wenn das Haus fertig ist, kommt der Tod,’ und sah jenen langsam heraufkommen über die von geflügelten Löwen getragene Brücke des Palastes, des fertigen Hauses, angefüllt mit der ­wundervollen Beute des Lebens.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 40; “Das Märchen,” 16. In his 1901 novel Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann puts the latter saying (ostensibly a Turkish adage) into the mouth of Thomas Buddenbrooks, who, having finished his own house, senses imminent decline. The deeper connections between decline, fulfilment, and ­bourgeois establishment ­cannot be addressed here, but certainly deserve further exploration. 24 “mit einer unbestimmten, ihn quälenden Forderung, die der Kleineren mit einer ungeduldigen, dann wieder höhnischen Aufmerksamkeit, die ihn noch mehr quälte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44; “Das Märchen,” 19. 25 See Hammond, “Das Märchen,” 454. 26 “ihm war, sie sahen sein ganzes Leben an, sein tiefstes Wesen, seine geheimnisvolle menschliche Unzulänglichkeit … daß sie ihn zwangen, in einer unfruchtbaren und so ermüdenden Weise an sich selbst zu denken.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44; “Das Märchen,” 19. 27 See, e.g., Wunberg, Der frühe Hofmannsthal, 57–8. 28 McGowan’s translation. The original, which is printed alongside the ­translation, reads: “La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; / L’homme y passe à travers de forêts de symbols / Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.” Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 18–19. 29 See Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 210. 30 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s notes for an essay entitled “Diese Rundschau” (This review): “false: to regard every work of art as definitive; always to say: he gave that up, he’s turned to this, he sees only that; he thinks, ­therefore, this and that; false, the definitive / false: all simple antitheses like ‘art’ und ‘life,’ Aesthete and its opposite.” (falsch: jedes Kunstwerk als ­definitiv anzusehen; immer zu sagen: er hat das aufgegeben, er wendet sich jenem zu, er sieht nur das; er meint also das und das; falsch das ­definitive / falsch: alle billigen Antithesen wie ‘Kunst’ und ‘Leben,’ Aesthet und Gegentheil von Aesthet.) Hofmannsthal, “Diese Rundschau,” 234. 31 “Sie trug in jedem Arme eine schwere hagere indische Gottheit aus dunkler Bronze. Die verzierten Füße der Figuren hielt sie in der hohlen Hand, von der Hüfte bis an die Schläfe reichten ihr die dunklen Göttinnen

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und lehnten mit ihrer toten Schwere an den lebendigen zarten Schultern; die dunklen Köpfe aber mit dem bösen Mund von Schlangen, drei wilden Augen in der Stirn und unheimlichem Schmuck in den kalten, harten Haaren, bewegten sich neben den atmenden Wangen und streiften die schönen Schläfen im Takt der langsamen Schritte. Eigentlich aber schien sie nicht an den Göttinnen schwer und feierlich zu tragen, sondern an der Schönheit ihres eigenen Hauptes mit dem schweren Schmuck aus ­lebendigem, dunklem Gold, zwei großen gewölbten Schnecken zu beiden Seiten der lichten Stirn, wie eine Königin im Kriege.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44–5; “Das Märchen,” 20. 32 See Hofmannsthal’s own comments on narration: the narrator “least of all finds the courage to disentangle the weave of motifs; after all, he has just spent a great deal of energy tying together the external and internal content, thread by thread, leaving not a single one of these threads loose that someone might pull at.” (findet am wenigsten den Mut, das Gewebe der Motive aufzulösen; er hat ja gerade alle Mühe darangestellt, das Außen mit dem Innen, Faden um Faden zu verknüpfen und nirgends den Faden hängen zu lassen, den man herausziehen könnte.) Hofmannsthal, “Die ägyptische Helene,” 216. 33 “In the afternoon, before the sun fell, he would sit in his garden, ­spending most of the time with a book that recorded the wars of a very great king of the past.” (Am Nachmittag, bis die Sonne hinter den Bergen hinunterfiel, saß er in seinem Garten und las meist in einem Buch, in welchem die Kriege eines sehr großen Königs der Vergangenheit ­aufgezeichnet waren). Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 42–3; “Das Märchen,” 18. This is a reversal of the notion that art imitates life; here, life imitates art. 34 “Er wurde ergriffen von ihrer großen Schönheit, aber gleichzeitig wußte er deutlich, daß es ihm nichts bedeuten würde, sie in seinen Armen zu halten. Er wußte es überhaupt, daß die Schönheit seiner Dienerin ihn mit Sehnsucht, aber nicht mit Verlangen erfüllte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 45; “Das Märchen,” 20. 35 Gumbrecht, “Epiphanien,” 206. 36 Hair is frequently a symbol of danger and attraction in literature. See for instance Hammer-Purgstall’s poem “Kraftlosigkeit der Talismane” (The powerlessness of talismans), especially verses 7–12: “who can save me from these enchanted chains which locks of hair have placed me in?” (Wer aber kann mich retten / Vor jenen Zauberketten, / Die mir die Locken legen an?) Purgstall, Duftkörner, 137. 37 Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” 197.

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38 Meyer-Sickendieck, Affektpoetik, 316. 39 “den süßen Reiz zu ruhigem Besitz … welcher in der Schönheit seiner Dienerin lag, die ihn verwirrte und beunruhigte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 45; “Das Märchen,” 20. 40 “In den Stielen der Nelken, die sich wiegten, im Duft des reifen Kornes erregtest du meine Sehnsucht; aber als ich dich fand, warst du es nicht, die ich gesucht hatte, sondern die Schwester deiner Seele.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 45; “Das Märchen,” 20–1. 41 In “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”), Hofmannsthal characterizes the material of poetry as “a weightless weave of words” (ein gewichtloses Gewebe aus Worten). Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 15. 42 Much later, Hofmannsthal will compile a series of poetological reflections on his own writing. In one observation, he notes that, following the fall from totality (also called pre-existence, and understood as the condition of fatelessness, analogous to the fall from grace), there is a subsequent search for some equivalent. Human beings want to get back to the Garden. Hofmannsthal, Ad me ipsum, 217. See also the passage ­concerning Des Esseintes’s pursuit of scent in the tenth chapter of Huysmans’s novel of decadence, À rebours (Against the Grain): “Fatigued by the tenacity of this imaginary scent, he resolves to bury himself in real perfumes.” (Fatigué par la ténacité de cet imaginaire arôme, il résolut de se plonger dans des parfums véritables.) Huysmans, À rebours, 216. 43 Impressed by the story, Arthur Schnitzler questioned Hofmannsthal’s motivation for the title. In a letter written on 26 November 1895, Schnitzler suggests the story resembles a dream more than a fairy tale or “Märchen.” Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, Briefwechsel, 63–4. 44 Grundmann, Mein Leben, 11. 45 Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 79. 46 See, for example, Waltraud Wiethölther’s monograph, Geometrie des Subjekts, and Dorrit Cohn’s article, “Als Traum erzählt.” 47 Ursula Renner in “Pavillons, Glashäuser und Seitenwege” and Alexej Žerebin in “Der unheimliche Garten” have noted the anticipatory ­character of the first section, particularly with respect to the garden. The merchant’s son sits contentedly in his garden at home, until he senses his servants watching him. In the second garden (after the fall, as it were), the gaze takes on a malevolent character. For other examples of the use of the garden in fin-de-siècle literature, see Thomas Koebner, “Der Garten” and Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 265–303. 48 Žerebin explores the merchant’s son’s desire to control his surroundings, playing a sort of aesthete-king in his garden. But the accompanying

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feeling of anxiety that comes with the desire for possession and “Erkenntnis” remains unexplained: this anxiety permeates ­practically all of Hofmannsthal’s loci amoeni. Even in the poem “Der Kaiser von China spricht:” (The Emperor of China speaks:) the ambiguous last two lines (40–1) threaten to reverse the ­subject-object hierarchy of ­perspective: “unto the sea, the last wall, / ­surrounding my kingdom and myself.” (Bis ans Meer, die letzte Mauer, / Die mein Reich und mich umgibt.) Hofmannsthal, “Der Kaiser von China spricht:” 72. 49 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note from 1894: “The garden of dilettantes in the feuilltonistic spirit … Fleetingly, the intimation of latent harmonies drifts towards them.” (Der Dilettantengarten in feuilletonistischem Geist … Flüchtig weht sie die Ahnung latenter Harmonien an.) Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen aus dem Nachlaß,” 381. 50 “Der Kaufmannssohn … trat ein und fand eine solche Fülle seltener und merkwürdiger Narzissen und Anemonen und so seltsames, ihm völlig unbekanntes Blattwerk, daß er sich lange nicht sattsehen konnte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 49; “Das Märchen,” 24. 51 Cf. Book 3, lines 334–50 in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 109: “Liriope gave birth to a child, already adorable, / called Narcissus. In course of time she consulted the seer; / ‘Tell me,’ she asked, ‘will my baby live to a ripe old age?’ / ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘so long as he never knows himself’ – / empty words, as they long appeared, but the prophet was proved right. / In the event, Narcissus died of a curious passion.” 52 “Denn das Kind, das ihn regungslos und böse ansah, glich in einer ­unbegreiflichen Weise dem fünfzehnjährigen Mädchen, das er in seinem Hause hatte. Alles war gleich, die lichten Augenbrauen, die feinen ­bebenden Nasenflügel, die dünnen Lippen; wie die andere zog auch das Kind eine der Schultern etwas in die Höhe. Alles war gleich, nur daß in dem Kind das alles einen Ausdruck gab, der ihm Entsetzen verursachte. Er wußte nicht, wovor er so namenlose Furcht empfand. Er wußte nur, daß er es nicht ertragen werde, sich umzudrehen und zu wissen, daß ­dieses Gesicht hinter ihm durch die Scheiben starrte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 49; “Das Märchen,” 24–5. 53 “Wir sind fast alle in der einen oder anderen Weise in eine durch das Medium der Künste angeschaute stilisierte Vergangenheit verliebt. Es ist dies sozusagen unsere Art, in ideales, wenigstens in idealisiertes Leben ­verliebt zu sein.” Hofmannsthal, “Walter Pater,” 204. 54 “mit einem dumpfen Gefühle, wie Haß gegen die Sinnlosigkeit dieser Qualen, ging er.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 52; “Das Märchen,” 27.

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55 “Mit einer kindischen Sehnsucht erinnerte er sich an die Schönheit seines eigenen breiten Bettes, und auch die Betten fielen ihm ein, die der große König der Vergangenheit für sich und seine Gefährten errichtet hatte, als sie Hochzeit hielten mit den Töchtern der unterworfenen Könige, für sich ein Bett von Gold, für die anderen von Silber; getragen von Greifen und geflügelten Stieren.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 52; “Das Märchen,” 27. 56 “Er sagte: ‘Wenn das Haus fertig ist, kommt der Tod,’ und sah jenen langsam heraufkommen über die von geflügelten Löwen getragene Brücke des Palastes, des fertigen Hauses, angefüllt mit der wundervollen Beute des Lebens.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 40; “Das Märchen,” 16. 57 The bridge, another important motif in Hofmannsthal’s work, features in Das kleine Welttheater (The Little Theatre of the World), “Reitergeschichte” (“A Tale of the Cavalry”), “Das Erlebnis des Marschalls von Bassompierre” (“An Episode in the Life of the Marshal de Bassompierre”), Die Frau ohne Schatten, as well as in the l­ittle-known poem, “Wir gingen einen Weg mit vielen Brücken” (We went along a path with many bridges) and even as a pun on the name of the Doctor and the popular card game in Der Schwierige (The Difficult Man). It also appears in another place here in “The Tale” as a counter-image to the bridge of the merchant’s son’s imagination. In order to leave the garden, the ­merchant’s son must cross a kind of makeshift bridge above an abyss. Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 51; “Das Märchen,” 26. 58 Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 50; “Das Märchen,” 25. 59 “Er haßte seinen vorzeitigen Tod so sehr, daß er sein Leben haßte, weil es ihn dahin geführt hatte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 55; “Das Märchen,” 30. 60 Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann, Briefwechsel, 48. 61 Hofmannsthal anticipates Levinas’s critique of Western philosophy’s ­privileging of totality (resulting in totalitarian thinking) as developed in Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity). The crucial difference between the two thinkers is that Levinas, in this book and indeed throughout most of his philosophical journey, maintained a highly sceptical stance towards art (see his most virulent attack: “La réalité et son ombre,” translated in English as “Reality and its Shadow”). Though he came to adjust these views later in life (as Reinhold Esterbauer points out in “Das Bild als Antlitz”), Levinas for many years saw the aesthetic experience as a way of avoiding responsibility and as an ultimately distracting enterprise. Hofmannsthal comes to a different conclusion, as will become clearer in the next chapters.

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62 “eine Lust … und eine Leidenschaft, eine bewußte empfangene Gabe, eine angeborene Kunst vielleicht wie Flötenspielen oder Tanzen, eine ­zerrüttende und stumme innere Orgie.” Hofmannsthal, “Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen,” 111; “Shakespeares Könige und große Männer,” 77. 63 See Streim, Das “Leben” in der Kunst, 88–90; and Grundmann, Mein Leben, 158. 64 Hofmannsthal’s critique of society’s failure to appreciate the role of the artist is most explicit in “Der Dichter und diese Zeit” (“The Poet and Our Time”), given first as a lecture in 1906 and published in 1907. 65 Mayer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 126. 66 Karl Pestalozzi wonders whether Hofmannsthal’s literary depictions have a biographical origin, or if rather his lived experiences have a literary inspiration. The latter represents the aestheticist notion popularized by Wilde in The Decay of Lying: namely, that life imitates art. We see with Hofmannsthal a tantalizing ambiguity – one, it seems, he wishes to ­preserve. See Pestalozzi, “Wandlungen,” 133. 67 “Alles was mich umgibt, ist häßlicher als Du denken kannst. Alles ist häßlich, elend und schmutzig, die Menschen, die Pferde, die Hunde, auch die Kinder.” Hofmannsthal and Andrian, Briefwechsel, 63. 68 “Gestern bin ich abends über einen alten Bettler, der im Halbdunkel auf allen vieren in mein Zimmer gekrochen ist und mir die Füße geküßt hat, so erschrocken, daß ich nachher ermüdet und verbittert war, wie nach einer vergeblichen großen Gefahr … Ich begreife nicht, wie alle diese Dinge eine solche Gewalt über mich haben können.” Ibid., 63–4. 69 “Solche Zustände sind eigentlich ängstliche. Aber sie sind auch wieder ganz gut … sie erweitern den innern Sinn, sie bringen vieles wieder, was wie vergraben war. Ich glaube, das schöne Leben verarmt einen. Wenn man immer so leben könnte, wie man will, würde man alle Kraft ­verlieren.” Ibid., 64. 70 “Wenn ich hier in der Nacht aufwache, bin ich so stark bei mir selbst, wie schon sehr lange nicht. Ich komme so zu mir zurück, wie einer der fortwährend Theater gespielt hat, zwar eine Rolle die diesem Wesen geheimnisvoll nachgeahmt ist, aber doch eine Rolle.” Ibid., 64. 71 “[A]nstößig ist aber alles wahrhaft Produktive.” Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 49. (*fdh 1756: 76). The marker *fd h refers to the ­catalogue number in the Freies deutsches Hochstift – which holds much of what remains of Hofmannsthal’s library – and the second number refers to the page in that edition.

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72 “Ich habe die Schönheit des Hereinkommens und Abgehens aller Personen gespürt, die Schönheit des Beisammenstehens von zweien oder dreien, und die Schönheit aller ihrer Reden und Gegenreden. Ich glaube, das ist etwas ungeheuer seltenes und damit es geschehen konnte, haben alle diese besonderen Umstände da sein müssen, das tagelange Alleinsein, die schlechten Nächte, und der Anblick so vieler elender Menschen, ja ihr Geruch und ihre Stimmen.” Hofmannsthal and Andrian, Briefwechsel, 64–5. 73 “Ich habe eine Stunde lang so geliebt, wie der Dichter es geliebt hat.” Ibid., 64. 74 “Wunderschön ist es auch, in einem Kunstwerk die Schwäche des Künstlers zu fühlen, die Stellen, wo er aus Unzulänglichkeit und Sehnsucht nach der Schönheit sonderbar und gewaltsam wird.” Ibid., 65. 75 As early as 1891 in “Das Tagebuch eines Willenskranken” (The diary of an invalid of the will), Hofmannsthal depicts the role of willful ­productivity in artistic creation. 76 “Nur das Tuen entbindet die Kraft und die Schönheit. Deswegen schicken wir dem Kind Herakles Schlangen in die Wiege und lassen ihn lächelnd mit den kleinen Händen sie erwürgen, weil nur so seine Kraft und Schönheit an den Tag kommt. Deswegen muß Odysseus hin und her geworfen werden von der trüglichen Salzflut, damit jene ungeheure Heimkehr entstehen könne, in Kleidern des Bettlers, von niemandem erkannt als dem Hund. Viele Wege muß einer gegangen sein und nie müßig, damit wir über ihn weinen können.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 237. 77 “Nur mit dem Gehen der Wege des Lebens, mit den Müdigkeiten ihrer Abgründe und den Müdigkeiten ihrer Gipfel wird das Verstehen der ­geistigen Kunst erkauft.” Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 19. 78 Cf. Novalis in a letter to his brother Karl von Hardenberg (end of March 1800): “Indeed: No imitation of nature. Poetry is thoroughly the opposite. At most, the imitation of nature, of reality, can be used now and then, but only allegorically, or in contrast, or for tragic or comic effects. / Everything must be poetic.” (Ja keine Nachahmung der Natur. Die Poësie ist durchaus das Gegentheil. Höchstens kann die Nachahmung der Natur, der Wircklichkeit nur allegorisch, oder im Gegensatz, oder des tragischen und lustigen Effects wegen hin und wieder gebraucht werden. / Alles muß poëtisch seyn.) Novalis, Tagebücher, Briefwechsel 4:327. 79 Holz, “Die Kunst,” 111. 80 “Sie wundern sich über mich. Sie sind enttäuscht und finden, daß ich das Leben aus der Poesie vertreibe.” Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 18.

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81 “Ich weiß, was das Leben mit der Kunst zu schaffen hat. Ich liebe das Leben, vielmehr ich liebe nichts als das Leben.” Ibid., 18. 82 “Es kann einer hier sein doch nicht im Leben sein: völlig ein Mysterium ist es, was ihn auf einmal umwirft und zu einem solchen macht, der nun erst schuldig und unschuldig werden kann, nun erst Kraft haben und Schönheit. Denn vorher konnte er weder gut noch böse Kraft haben und gar keine Schönheit; dazu war er viel zu nichtig, da doch Schönheit erst entsteht, wo eine Kraft und eine Bescheidenheit ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 235. 83 “Denn es ist mir oft erschienen, dass Musik eine solche Gewalt hat, schöne Gebilde leben zu machen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 46; “Ansprache,” 7. 84 I will be referring to the edited version as given in the Kritische Ausgabe. Hofmannsthal revised the address before having it published. See Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 251–2. 85 “Sie sind wie die Schatten, die den Odysseus umlagern und alle vom Blut trinken wollen, lautlos, gierig aneinander gedrängt, ihren dunklen hohlen Blick auf den Lebenden geheftet. Sie wollen ihren Antheil haben am Leben. Ja sie scheinen von einer eigenen verhaltenen Energie zu erglühen und zu erzittern, wenn man sie nicht beachtet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 46; “Ansprache,” 7. 86 “Und so vermag ein hangendes, ein hingebreitetes Gewebe für einen Augenblick gleichsam seinen Geist auszuhauchen: während es einer unterm Reden, unterm Schweigen starr ansieht, wird sich ihm auf einmal offenbaren, dass da Geknüpftes ist, von Menschenfingern in endlosen Stunden zu Tausenden von Knoten Zusammengeknüpftes, und einen Augenblick wird dies tausendfach Geknüpfte aufleuchten und die erstarrte Lebendigkeit, die Form gewordene Willkür der zusammentretenden Farben und Schattirungen erkennen lassen, wie eine nächtliche Landschaft unter einem grossen Blitz die Verknüpfung der Strassen und das Zusammentreten der Hügel für einen Augenblick erkennen und dann ­wieder ins Dunkel zusammensinken lässt.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 7–8. 87 “Sie wird den vielen nie und nie durch rede / Sie wird den seltnen selten im gebilde” (lines 15–16). This might be translated as: “Never to the many and never through speech / seldom to the select will it take on form.” George, Teppich des Lebens, 40. 88 “Und keiner ahnt das rätsel der verstrickten … / Da eines abends wird das werk lebendig.” George, Teppich des Lebens, 40. 89 “Dabei kann es [unser Inneres] sich in seltenem Grade zart empfänglich, ernst, mächtig, innig, gut erweisen und vielleicht selbst reicher als das

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Innere anderer Völker sein: aber als Ganzes bleibt es schwach, weil alle die schönen Fasern nicht in einen kräftigen Knoten geschlungen sind: so daß die sichtbare That nicht die Gesammtthat und Selbstoffenbarung ­dieses Inneren ist, sondern nur ein schwächlicher oder roher Versuch irgend einer Faser, zum Schein einmal für das Ganze gelten zu wollen.” Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 81; Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 272. 90 The idea that inanimate things take on a strong life is echoed by Rilke ­several times in his Sonnette an Orpheus from 1922. 91 “Es gibt Momente, und sie sind fast beängstigend, wo Alles rings um uns sein ganzes starkes Leben annehmen will. Wo wir sie alle, die stummen schönen Dinge, neben uns leben fühlen und unser Leben mehr in ihnen ist als in uns selber.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8. 92 The fascination with the limitations of language harks back to the Romantics (especiaally Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel) and is renewed in the work of the Symbolists and in philosophers of language of the time. A key name in this connection is Fritz Mauthner, with whose Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a critique of language) Hofmannsthal was familiar. Mauthner and Hofmannsthal corresponded during this time, acknowledging their shared interests. Both anticipate developments in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. See Nethersole, “The Limits of Language,” 652–8. 93 “Jeder von uns, auch wenn er dieses Haus nie betreten hat, wird hier ­herumgehen wie in der Heimat seiner Träume. Denn unsere Existenzen sind mit den Existenzen dieser Gebilde durchwachsen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8. 94 Cf. the similar disposition of the boy in “Dämmerung und nächtliches Gewitter” (“Dusk and Nocturnal Thunderstorms”): “He was at the edge of such despair and doubt, that it seemed to him a mother’s-hand-­ murderer’s-hand grasped at him, when in fact it was grasping at another being near him – and he could not distinguish between the two.” (Er war am Rand einer solchen Verzweiflung gewesen, daß ihm geschienen war, es greife eine Mutterhand-Mörderhand nach ihm, die doch nach einem Wesen neben ihm griff – und er vermöchte es nicht zu sondern.) Hofmannsthal, “Dämmerung und nächtliches Gewitter,” 440. 95 The editorial notes to the “Ansprache” in the critical edition suggest that Hofmannsthal was interested in the therapeutic effects of art in the sense described in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria. See Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 253. 96 “wie sie da stehen, umwebt vom Geheimniss der ungeheuren ­hinabgesunkenen Zeit, sie fassen uns dämonisch an: und jedes ist eine Welt,

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und alle sind aus einer Welt, die uns durch sie anrührt und ­anschauert bis ins Mark.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8–9.   97 “Es lebt für uns, es lebt durch uns. Es ist etwas in uns, das diesem Weltbild antwortet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 9.   98 “höchsterreichbare Ekstase, wahrscheinlich sein [human-kind’s] ­höchsterreichbarer Lebenswert überhaupt, und da eben dem Künstler diese Voll-Identifikation mit seinem Objekt zur Aufgabe, ja zur ­moralischen Aufgabe gestellt ist, hat sein Werk ihr Ausdruck, ihr Bild, ihr Symbol zu sein, wird es selber ekstasierend und gewinnt hierdurch jene spezifisch kunstwerkliche Qualität, für die das Wort schön geprägt worden ist.” Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time, 119; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 153.   99 “Diese Ohnmacht erzeugt daher leicht das Gefühl, von einem Unbekannten, Unbegreiflichen bedroht zu sein, das dem Individuum ebenso rätselfhaft ist, als gewöhnlich seine eigene Psyche auch.” Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie,” 204. 100 “Und nun die endlose Welt der Gemälde: sie hängen da, und immerfort ergiesst sich aus ihnen in uns, wie in ein geräumiges Becken, ein Längstvergangenes als Gegenwärtiges.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 52; “Ansprache,” 9. 101 “Ja, geformt haben Tausende, haben die Einzelnen und die Völker, und was sie zur Form emportreiben konnten, das lebt ewig: Kunstwerk, Symbol, Mythos, Religion.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 54; “Ansprache,” 10. 102 Hofmannsthal’s imperative anticipates Rilke’s famous line from the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” – “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” (“you must change your life”) – by about six years. Claims, such as Jahraus’s, that Rilke’s imperative initiates a revolution in lyrical, literary, aesthetic, and ­cultural paradigms are hasty because they read Rilke w ­ ithout reference to earlier and contemporary iterations of the same “­revolution.” See Jahraus, “Die Provokation der Wahrnehmung,” 123. In fact, the ­sociologist Georg Simmel is an even earlier “revolutionary” in this respect. He writes, for instance, of the “the ability of a tangible s­ ymbol to awaken in us … the ­feeling of obligation not to remain ­indifferent to great events, but to respond to them.” (Die Bedeutung irgend eines ­körperlichen Symbols, uns zu religiösen Gefühlen zu ­erregen … die ­pflichtartige Empfindung, grossen Ereignissen gegenüber nicht ­gleichgültig zu bleiben, sondern unsere Innerlichkeit auf sie reagieren zu lassen.) Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 71; Philosophie des Geldes, 9. Rilke’s and Hofmannsthal’s imperatives are part of a larger shift in the aesthetic discourse.

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103 “Denn wenn es uns versagt ist, den Geist der Zeiten betrachtend zu ­erkennen, so ist uns dafür gegeben, ihn zu fühlen, wenn er fordernd uns überfällt, mit dem Anhauch des Andersseins uns verlockend und quälend, beklemmend und bezaubernd.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 54; “Ansprache,” 10. 104 Broch, too, was aware of this impossibility and quickly qualifies his idea of full identification, while expounding on the unfinishable task at hand: “At stake here is not a static object but one that fluctuates to an ­uncommon degree; and not a single act of identification but an entire chain is required, an entire chain of symbolic constructions, symbol ­symbolizations which in their initial links may exhibit a certain ­similarity to primitive metaphor construction, but then reach way beyond that in order to provide by means of an ever closer rapport with reality at least the idea of a total symbol of the world from within the slice of reality it represents – tat twam asi of art.” (Statt mit einem statischen Objekt hat man es also mit einem ungemein flukturierenden zu tun, und statt eines einzigen Identifikationsaktes ist eine ganze Kette hievon erforderlich, eine ganze Kette von Symbolgebungen, von ­Symbol-Symbolisierungen, die in ihren ersten Gliedern noch eine gewisse Ähnlichkeit mit der primitiven Metapherkonstruktion aufweisen mögen, dann aber weit darüber h ­ inausreichen, um vermittels ständig enger ­werdender Anschmiegung an die Realität schließlich, wenigstens der Idee nach, im dargestellten Realitätsausschnitt ein Totalsymbol der Welt zu liefern, das tat twam asi der Kunst.) Broch, Hofmannthal and His Time, 120; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 153. What Broch calls the “tat twam asi of art” would have been familiar to his audience, and ­f­in-de-siècle discourse generally. The phrase is borrowed from the Hindu tradition and is sometimes translated as “thou art that,” referring to the unity of the absolute and the i­ndividual. The relevance of this concept to aesthetics has yet to be fully explored in the secondary literature and would offer insight into the m ­ etaphysical and cultural questions of the time. 105 “Und so tritt eine unendliche Forderung an uns heran, dem inneren Gleichgewicht höchst bedrohlich: die Forderung, mit tausendfachen Phantomen der Vergangenheit uns abzufinden, die von uns genährt sein wollen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 106 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen. Es gibt kein stolzeres, kein gefährlicheres Wort. Es ist das Wort, das am tiefsten verpflichtet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11.

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107 “Indem wir dieses Wort aussprechen, sagen wir, dass etwas in uns durch das Kunstgebilde erregt wird, wie nur Gleiches durch Gleiches erregt werden kann.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 108 “Und indem unser Mund es wieder und wieder auszusprechen von einer tiefen Magie gezwungen wird, nehmen wir an dem ungeheuren Reich der Kunst einen so ungeheuren Antheil, als wären es tausende Seelen in uns, die sich im Acte des ästhetischen Geniessens regen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 109 “Aber beruhigen wir uns: die Forderung, welche die Welt der Schönheit an uns stellt, jenes dämonische Aus-uns-heraus-locken ganzer Welten des Fühlens, diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos gross ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns, die übereinander gethürmten Schichten der aufgestapelten überindividuellen Erinnerung.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 110 “Hier scheinen wir etwa in Gefahr, uns selbst zu verlieren: großer Irrthum! Hier werden wir erst geweckt, uns selber zu besitzen: denn wir schaffen ja den unsterblichen Inhalt dieser Gebilde, indem wir sie lebendig ­nachfühlen.” Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 255. 111 “Denn ‘die Kunst,’ sagt Goethe, ‘lässt sich ohne Enthusiasmus weder ­fassen noch begreifen. Wer nicht mit Erstaunen und Bewunderung ­anfangen will, der findet nicht den Zugang in das innere Heiligthum. Und der Kopf allein fasst kein Kunstprodukt, als nur in Gesellschaft mit dem Herzen.’” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. The quote attributed to Goethe seems to be a redacted version of a statement Goethe made to Friedrich Schiller in a letter from 19 November 1796: “Unfortunately, I have again seen some of the most deplorable examples of passive interest, and it is always the same refrain: I can’t wrap my head around it! Of course, the head cannot grasp any product of art; it can only do so in the company of the heart.” (Von den passiven Teilnahmen habe ich leider schon die betrübtesten wieder erlebt, und es ist nur immer eine Wiederholung des Refrains: ich kanns zu Kopf nicht bringen! Freilich faßt der Kopf kein Kunstprodukt als nur in Gesellschaft mit dem Herzen.) Goethe, Briefe der Jahre 1786–1805, 245. 112 “Nicht als ob das Leiden aus dem Dasein auszuschneiden wäre: nein es ist der eigentliche Inhalt unseres Daseins und auch was wir das Schöne nennen, ist ohne das Leiden nicht denkbar – ja es ist die Blüthe die aus dem Leiden hervorwächst aber es ist ein Anderes ob wir leiden müssen und wovor keine Schutzwehr uns bewahren kann, oder ob Du Dich in ein unnotwendiges Leiden halb spielend halb begehrlich verstrickst.

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Hier ängstet mich nun die Verantwortung dass ich Dich so außerhalb der Convention leben lasse, die eben die natürlichen Schutzmauern der Existenz sind.” Quoted in Weinzierl, Hofmannsthal, 216.

C hapt e r T w o   1 For the history of its composition, see Hofmannsthal, KA 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 416–23; and Ellen Ritter, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten.”   2 Alice Bolterauer’s study, Zu den Dingen, offers a brief overview of turnof-the-century authors – including Hofmannsthal – whose works portray epiphanic moments catalyzed by an experience of “things.” See also Walter Jens, “Der Mensch und die Dinge.”   3 Hofmannsthal’s marriage of the aesthetic and ethical spheres occurs – ­significantly – not in a novel, but in a later fairy-tale: Die Frau ohne Schatten.   4 Ursula Renner in Zauberschrift der Bilder uses the designation Kaufmann, the German word for merchant. Renner’s designation is appropriate because it establishes a thematic (and contrastive) link to the merchant’s son (Kaufmannssohn) of the “Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.”   5 This is essentially Brian Coghlan’s argument. See Coghlan, “The Whole Man Must Move at Once.”   6 “Und nun sehe ich seit vier Monaten in die Gesichter der Wirklichen: nicht als ob sie seelenlos wären, gar nicht selten bricht ein Licht der Seele hervor, aber es huscht wieder weg, aber es ist ein ewiges Kommen und Wegfliegen wie in einem Taubenschlag.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 74; “Die Briefe,” 159.   7 “die Krise eines inneren Übelbefinden; dessen frühere Anwandlungen freilich waren so unscheinbar gewesen, wie nur möglich.” “The Letters,” 88; “Die Briefe,” 165.   8 “oder diesen Brief zerreißen und das weitere für immer ungesagt lassen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 88; “Die Briefe,” 166.   9 “Zuweilen kam es des Morgens, in diesen deutschen Hotelzimmern, daß mir der Krug und das Waschbecken – oder eine Ecke des Zimmers mit dem Tisch und dem Kleiderständer so nicht-wirklich vorkamen, trotz ihrer unbeschreiblichen Gewöhnlichkeit so ganz und gar nicht wirklich, gewissermaßen gespenstisch, und zugleich provisorisch, wartend, ­sozusagen vorläufig die Stelle des wirklichen Kruges, des wirklichen mit Wasser gefüllten Waschbeckens einnehmend.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 88; “Die Briefe,” 166.

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10 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 80. Hofmannsthal, “Die Briefe,” 162. 11 “In den andern Ländern drüben, selbst in meinen elendesten Zeiten, war der Krug oder der Eimer mit dem mehr oder minder frischen Wasser des Morgens etwas Selbstverständliches und zugleich Lebendiges: ein Freund. Hier war er, kann man sagen: ein Gespenst.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 90; “Die Briefe,” 166. 12 Metaphysically ambiguous houses that “are no longer” can be found as well in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge: “es waren Häuser, die nicht mehr da waren.” See Rilke, Malte, 749–51. Unlike Hofmannsthal, who emphasizes the ordinariness of the houses, Rilke highlights the gloom and delapidation, eventually focusing in on one of the remaining walls. Interestingly, Hofmannsthal in his notes to “The Letters” had at one point intended to allude to a similar moment in Robert Musil’s 1906 Bildungsroman, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless): “lonely times: the secret about which he brooded: the doubleness, that had to unite itself. (The sight of the wall in the novel Törless).” (einsame Zeit: das Geheimniss über dem er brütet: das Doppelte, das sich vereinigen muss. (Der Anblick der Mauer in dem Roman Törless)). Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 426. 13 In the first letter, the merchant mentions he will return to Gebhartsstetten, Austria, where he is sure to see again the scenes of his childhood: a fountain, and an old, crooked walnut tree that “will, in all its crookedness and age, somehow give a sign that it recognizes me, and that I am there again, and that it is there, as always.” (der wird in all seiner Schiefheit und ­seinem Alter irgendwie ein Zeichen geben, daß er mich erkennt und daß ich nun wieder da bin und er da ist, wie immer.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 66; “Die Briefe,” 155. 14 “It was the most delicate redolence of an entire existence, the German existence.” (Es war der zarteste Duft eines ganzen Daseins, des deutschen Daseins.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 66; “Die Briefe,” 155. 15 “und zugleich zitterte etwas durch mich hin, etwas, das mir die Brust ­entzweiteilte wie ein Hauch, ein so unbeschreibliches Anwehen des ­ewigen Nichts, des ewigen Nirgends, ein Atem nicht des Todes, sondern des Nicht-Lebens, unbeschreiblich.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 90; “Die Briefe,” 166. 16 By way of contrast, the landscape in “Moments in Greece” (discussed in chapter 3) has a physiognomy described as familiar and even charitable. In Tania and James Stern’s translation: “The mountains called to one another; the clefts were more alive than a face; each little fold on the ­distant flank of a hill lived; all this was as near to me as the palm of my

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hand. It was something that I shall never see again. It was the guest gift of all the lonely wanderers who had crossed our path.” (Die Berge riefen einander an; das Geklüftete war lebendiger als ein Gesicht; jedes Fältchen an der fernen Flanke eines Hügels lebte: dies alles war mir nahe wie die Wurzel meiner Hand. Es war, was ich nie mehr sehen werde. Es war das Gastgeschenk aller der einsamen Wanderer, die uns begegnet waren.) Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. Compare also the landscape in Andreas: “Yon mountain, which rose before him and buttressed the heavens, was a brother to him, and more than a brother … and as he looked across he realized that the mountain was his prayer. An ineffable sense of certainty befell him: it was the happiest moment of his life.” (Jener Berg, der vor ihm aufstieg und dem Himmel entgegen pfeilerte, war ihm ein Bruder und mehr als ein Bruder … und wie er hinübersah war er gewahr daß der Berg nichts anderes war als sein Gebet. Eine unsagbare Sicherheit fiel ihn an: es war der glücklichste Augenblick seines Lebens.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 76. 17 “das nahm ein Gesicht an, eine eigene zweideutige Miene so voll innerer Unsicherheit, bösartiger Unwirklichkeit: so nichtig lag es da – so ­gespensthaft nichtig.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 90; “Die Briefe,” 167. 18 “einem das Leben schöner, reicher und lieber macht … [und welches] durch den gefährlichen Anhauch der poetischen Vision von sich weg, aus dem Leben weg in die Traumwelt hinüber zu treiben [könnte].” Hofmannsthal and Thun-Salm, Briefwechsel, 170. 19 “sehr notwendig für mein Leben, für das Leben meiner Phantasie oder meiner Gedanken.” Hofmannsthal and Nostitz, Briefwechsel, 37. 20 Schuster, “Kunstleben,” 37. 21 “dies Europa könnte mich mir selber wegstehlen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 60; “Die Briefe,” 152. 22 “in der europäischen Luft für den bereitzuliegen scheint, der von weither zurückkommt, nachdem er sehr lange, vielleicht zu lange, fort war.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 167. 23 “zweistimmiges Selbstgespräch.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 466. 24 Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 177. 25 “Ich kann heute nicht in klare Worte bringen, was wirbelnd durch mein ganzes Ich ging: aber daß mein Geschäft und mein eigenes erworbenes Geld mich ekeln mußten … ich hatte zwanzigtausend Beispiele in mich hineingeschluckt: wie sie das Leben selber vergessen über dem, was nichts sein sollte als Mittel zum Leben und für nichts gelten dürfte als für ein Werkzeug.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 167–8.

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26 “Um mich war seit Monaten eine Sintflut von Gesichtern, die von nichts geritten wurden als von dem Geld, das sie hatten, oder von dem Geld, das andere hatten. Ihre Häuser, ihre Monumente, ihre Straßen, das war für mich in diesem etwas visionären Augenblick nichts als die tausendfach gespiegelte Fratze ihrer gespenstigen Nicht-Existenz.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 168. 27 “Je mehr das Leben der Gesellschaft ein geldwirtschaftliches wird, desto wirksamer und deutlicher prägt sich in dem bewußten Leben der ­relativistische Charakter des Seins aus, da das Geld nichts anderes ist, als die in einem Sondergebilde verkörperte Relativität der wirtschaftlichen Gegenstände, die ihren Wert bedeutet.” Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 555–6; Philosophie des Geldes, 716. Hofmannsthal was reading Simmel while working on “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” For Simmel’s influence on Hofmannsthal, see Lorenz Jäger’s study “Zwischen Soziologie und Mythos.” 28 The idea of “money for money’s sake” (l’argent pour l’argent, rather than l’art pour l’art) is also important for Andreas and the characterization of Zorzi (discussed in chapter 5). 29 Hofmannsthal’s merchant is like the later, weary Baudelaire who no ­longer enjoys the city streets as a flaneur, but feels jostled and lost. Benjamin traces Baudelaire’s development meticulously in the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” 30 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 94; “Die Briefe,” 168. 31 “schienen mir in den ersten Augenblicken grell und unruhig, ganz roh, ganz sonderbar, ich mußte mich erst zurechtfinden, um überhaupt die ersten als Bild, als Einheit zu sehen – dann aber, dann sah ich, dann sah ich sie alle so, jedes einzelne, und alle zusammen, und die Natur in ihnen, und die menschliche Seelenkraft, die hier die Natur geformt hatte, und Baum und Strauch und Acker und Abhang die da gemalt waren, und noch das andre, das, was hinter dem Gemalten war, das Eigentliche, das unbeschreiblich Schicksalhafte – das alles sah ich so, daß ich das Gefühl meiner selbst an diese Bilder verlor, und mächtig wieder zurückbekam, und wieder verlor! Wie aber könnte ich etwas so Unfaßliches in Worte bringen, etwas so Plötzliches, so Starkes, so Unzerlegbares!” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 94; “Die Briefe,” 169. 32 “Unser Publikum setzt sich vor einem Bild zu allen möglichen Nebensächlichkeiten des Kunstwerkes in Beziehung, nur nicht zur Hauptsache, zum eigentlich Malerischen; es interssiert sich für die Anekdote, für kleine Mätzchen und Kunststückchen, für alles, nur nicht für das eine Notwendige: ob hier eine künstlerische Individualität die freie

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Kraft gehabt hat, eine neue, aus lebendigen Augen erschaute Perzeption des Weltbildes in einer Weise darzustellen, die sich der Seele des Betrachters zu übertragen geeignet ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Painting in Vienna,” 20; “Die Malerei in Wien,” 526–7. 33 “von Menschenfingern in endlosen Stunden zu Tausenden von Knoten Zusammengeknüpftes.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 7. 34 “Tanzen heisst sich ganz und rein hingeben können. Nun ist dies. Dies ist Frömmigkeit. So waren unsere Mütter, Darum blieb der Fluss in seinen Grenzen Darum trug der Ölbaum. Darum gab der Brunnen.” Hofmannsthal, “Furcht,” 388. Emphasis as in original. 35 In “Das Gespräch über Gedichte” (“The Conversation about Poems”), the act of sacrifice is used to explain the moment of simultaneity and the traversion of difference which give rise to the symbol. With “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” sacrifice involves giving oneself over by extending oneself beyond the quotidian limits of subjectivity. This is taken up again with greater consequence in “Moments in Greece” (as discussed in chapter 3), and made explicitly ethical in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Cf. also Goethe’s definition of piety as “not an end, but a means to reach highest culture through the purest composure.” (Frömmigkeit ist kein Zweck, sondern ein Mittel um durch die reinste Gemüthsruhe zur ­höchsten Cultur zu gelangen.) Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, 815. 36 Cf. The merchant’s use of the English phrase “The whole man must move at once.” The ­merchant purports to have glimpsed the realization of this ideal in other places and cultures, from the exotic to the ­traditional, and even to the very centre of modern commerce, in the US, where the keen b ­ usinessman is characterized by “this almost insane, wild and at the same time cool and collected way they’ll ‘go in for’ ­something.” (dieses fast wahnwitzig wilde und zugleich fast kühl ­besonnene ‘Hineingehen’ für eine Sache.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 62; “Die Briefe,” 153. 37 “und der Glaube an die Gin-Flasche kann noch eine Art von Glaube sein. Aber hier, unter den gebildeten und besitzenden Deutschen, hier kann mir nicht wohl werden.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 76; “Die Briefe,” 161. 38 As Derrida has shown in Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie (Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money), it is nearly impossible to think of the gift outside of economic circulation, thereby rendering the “pure” gift ­impossible. This is a failure, for there is no opportunity for a moment of reciprocity (for instance, in the form of an answer) or exchange without the moment of giving, and without space. See also the role of space as khôra in chapter 3.

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39 Cf. one of the earlier versions of the “Ansprache”: “Here it would seem we are in danger of losing ourselves: a major error! / Here we are first awakened to possess ourselves.” (Hier scheinen wir etwa in Gefahr, uns selber zu verlieren: großer Irrthum! / Hier werden wir erst geweckt, uns selber zu besitzen.) Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 255. 40 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s essay “Die Bühne als Traumbild” (“The Stage as a Dream Image”), which also contains a depiction of suffering from ­phenomenological uncertainty: “Whoever wishes to erect a stage must have lived and suffered through the eyes. He must have sworn to himself a thousand times, that the visible alone exists, and a thousand times he must have asked himself with a shudder, whether this visible, above all, does not exist. The sight of the familiar tree, which transforms the full moon, raises it above its peers and crowns it king, must have shaken him … De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire are his favourite books. He measures the power and the intensitiy of colour against their enduring frightful ­solemn dreams.” (Wer die Bühne aufbauen wird, muß durchs Auge gelebt und gelitten haben. Tausendmal muß er sich geschworen haben, daß das Sichtbare allein existiert, und tausendmal muß er schaudernd sich gefragt haben, ob denn das Sichtbare nicht, vor allen Dingen, nicht existiert. Der Anblick des wohlbekannten Baumes, den der Vollmond verwandelt, zum König über seinesgleichen erhebt, muß ihn erschüttert haben. … De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire sind seine Lieblingsbücher. An ihren dauernden furchtbaren feierlichen Träumen mißt er die Macht und die Farbentiefe seiner eigenen Träume.) Hofmannsthal, “Die Bühne,” 42. Like the ­merchant, the artist measures not reality against imagination, but his dreams against his art. The stage – because it is constructed after one has suffered and doubted reality – is in this instance the standard. 41 “lebt in kontinuierlicher Selbstentäußerung aus jedem gegebenen Punkt heraus und bildet so den Gegenpol und die direkte Verneinung jedes Fürsichseins.” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 554; Philosophie des Geldes, 714. 42 “Von diesen Intuitionen aus führt kein regelmäßiger Weg in das Land der gespenstischen Schemata, der Abstraktionen: für sie ist das Wort nicht gemacht, der Mensch verstummt, wenn er sie sieht, oder redet in lauter verbotenen Metaphern und unerhörten Begriffsfügungen, um wenigstens durch das Zertrümmern und Verhöhnen der alten Begriffsschranken dem Eindrucke der mächtigen gegenwärtigen Intuition schöpferisch zu ­entsprechen.” Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie,” 39; Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge, 887. Ursual Renner remarks that imagery serves as an expression for intuitive creative ability. Renner, Zauberschrift, 158.

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43 Renner and Braegger both quote the following note from Hofmannsthal’s literary estate: “Scientists do everything they can to find out what can be calculated – artists are familiar with absolute variability and have the ­spiritual strength to strive towards expression, metaphorical expression … Art(-)Experience makes it possible to sense the essence of things: Scientists as victims of a mechanical use of their terminology: in contrast, Goethe’s treatment of colour theory.” (Wissenschaftlern ist alles darum zu thun, das ausrechenbare zu finden – Künstler ist sich des absolut variablen klar und hat Seelenstärke genug doch zum Ausdruck zu streben und zwar ein bildlicher … Kunst(-)Erfahrung gibt Möglichkeit sich dem Wesen der Dinge anzufühlen: Wissenschaftler Opfer des mechanischen Gebrauchs ihrer Termini: dagegen Behandlung der Farbenlehre durch Goethe.) Renner, “Der Augen Blick,” 140; Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 36. 44 As Carlpeter Braegger has shown, the importance of visual art for Hofmannsthal’s literary practice was established early on. Braegger’s study includes a reading of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” that is compatible with my own: Braegger suggests that part of Hofmannsthal’s cultural critique was catalyzed by what he (Hofmannsthal) saw as the ­relative dearth of art in Germany before and at the turn of the century. Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 95. 45 Rilke, for whom an excellent work of art must be completed in a ­trance-like, wholly sub-conscious state of mind, was disappointed by Van Gogh’s meticulousness and his ability to speak coherently about his own work. Rilke writes: “Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights … That Van Gogh’s letters are so readable, that they are so rich, basically argues against him, just as it argues against a painter (holding up Cézanne for comparison) that he wanted or knew or experienced this and that; that blue called for orange and green for red.” (Daß man Van Gogh’s Briefe so gut lesen kann, daß sie so viel enthalten, spricht im Grunde gegen ihn, wie es ja auch gegen den Maler spricht (Cézanne daneben gehalten), daß er das und das wollte, wußte, erfuhr; daß das Blau Orange aufrief und das Grün Rot.) Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 66–7; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 628. Hofmannsthal did not share this opinion. On the other hand, Rilke learned much from Van Gogh’s writings and adopted many of his literary strategies in the Cézanne letters. See Büssgen, “Bildende Kunst,” 143. 46 For an insightful history on the relation between painting (and colour in particular) and writing, see Le Rider’s Les couleurs et les mots. In this

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book, and in the chapter “Du musée des images à la couleur pure” of his Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Le Rider briefly treats Hofmannsthal and Rilke as part of a history of writers’ fascination with colour. 47 “Da ist ein unglaubliches, stärkstes Blau, das kommt immer wieder, ein Grün wie von geschmolzenen Smaragden, ein Gelb bis zum Orange.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 169. This echoes Van Gogh’s 22 May 1888 letter to Emil Bernard: “It’s thus a variation of blues enlivened by a series of yellows ranging all the way to orange.” On 21 August 1888, Van Gogh writes again to Emil Bernard of the ­intensitiy of the colours in a painting of sunflowers: “A decoration in which harsh or broken yellows will burst against various blue ­backgrounds, from the palest Veronese to royal blue, framed with thin laths painted in orange lead. Sorts of effects of stained-glass windows of a Gothic church.” Jansen, Luijten and Bakker, Vincent van Gogh, Letter 612; Letter 665. 48 “Aber was sind Farben, wofern nicht das innerste Leben der Gegenstände in ihnen hervorbricht! Und dieses innerste Leben war da, Baum und Stein und Mauer und Hohlweg gaben ihr Innerstes vor sich, gleichsam entgegen warfen sie es mir, aber nicht die Wollust und Harmonie ihres schönen stummen Lebens, wie sie mir vor Zeiten manchmal aus alten Bildern wie eine zauberische Atmosphäre entgegenfloß: nein, nur die Wucht ihres Daseins, das wütende, von Unglaublichkeit umstarrte Wunder ihres Daseins fiel meine Seele an.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 169. 49 Schneider likens this to a performative drama of the Four Last Things (death, judgement, heaven, and hell) and notes that several elements of classical rhetoric (the figurae sententiae) are present in the text. Schneider, Verheißung der Bilder, 223. 50 For a similar reading of the Chandos Letter, see Schuster, “Kunstleben,” 152. 51 “ein Wesen jeder Baum, jeder Streif gelben oder grünlichen Feldes, jeder Zaun, jeder in den Steinhügel gerissene Hohlweg, ein Wesen der zinnerne Krug, die irdene Schüssel, der Tisch, der plumpe Sessel – sich mir wie neugeboren aus dem furchtbaren Chaos des Nichtlebens, aus dem Abgrund der Wesenlosigkeit entgegenhob, daß ich fühlte, nein, daß ich wußte, wie jedes dieser Dinge, dieser Geschöpfe aus einem fürchterlichen Zweifel an der Welt herausgeboren war und nun mit seinem Dasein einen gräßlichen Schlund, gähnendes Nichts, für immer verdeckte!” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 52 “ein Gewoge, ein Chaos, ein Ungeborenes.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 66; “Die Briefe,” 155.

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53 “wo wir nie waren. Es sei denn, indem wir litten … Aber hier hat das Namenlose seinen Namen bekommen, das Stumme seine Sprache und das Gestaltlose seine Form. Hier haben Schöpferhände der Finsternis ein Gesicht gegeben und aus dem Alpdruck etwas gebaut und gebildet. Und wir erkennen die dumpfen Tiefen schwerer Stunden wieder.” Hofmannsthal, “Der Begrabene Gott,” 69–70. 54 “Und noch ein Wort: Groß, groß, groß. Und noch eins: Ehrfurcht.” Ibid., 71. 55 Cf. Rilke who, in a remarkably similar fashion, writes: “After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity … Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it, – : that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life says a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, as mere ­neecessity, as reality, as existence.” (Kunstdinge sind ja immer Ergebnisse des in Gefahrgewesen-Seins, des in einer Erfahrung bis ans EndeGegangenseins, bis wo kein Mensch mehr weiterkann. Je weiter man geht, desto eigener, desto persönlicher, desto einziger wird ja ein Erlebnis und das Kunstding endlich ist die notwendige, ununterdrückbare, möglichst endgültige Aussprache dieser Einzigkeit … Darin liegt die ungeheure Hülfe des Kunstdings für das Leben dessen, der es machen muß, – : daß es seine Zusammenfassung ist; der Knoten im Rosenkranz, bei dem sein Leben ein Gebet spricht, der immer wiederkehrende, für ihn selbst gegebene Beweis seiner Einheit und Wahrhaftigkeit, der doch nur ihm selber sich zukehrt und nach außen anonym wirkt, namenlos, als Notwendigkeit nur, als Wirklichkeit, als Dasein.) Rilke, Letters On Cézanne, 4; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 594. The motif of the return (here the “ever-returning proof”) is likewise present in both writers’ descriptions. 56 Simmel too emphasizes the clarifying process things undergo when they are represented artistically: “The work of art interprets the meaning of the phenomenon itself, whether it is embedded in the shaping of space or in the relations of colours or in the spirituality that exists, as it were, both in and beneath the visible … the artistic process is completed as soon as it has succeeded in presenting the object in its unique significance … The slogan ‘l’art pour l’art’ characterizes perfectly the self-sufficiency of

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the purely artistic tendency.” (Das Kunstwerk deutet uns doch gerade den Sinn der Erscheinung selbst, liege ihm dieser nun in der Gestaltung der Räumlichkeit oder in den Beziehungen der Farben oder in der Seelenhaftigkeit, die so in wie hinter dem Sichtbaren lebt … der artistische Prozeß ist abgeschlossen, sobald er den Gegenstand zu dessen eigenster Bedeutung entwickelt hat … das Stichwort des l’art pour l’art bezeichnet treffend die Selbstgenügsamkeit der rein künstlerischen Tendenz.) Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 485; Philosophie des Geldes, 618–19. 57 Cf. Goethe’s comment: “The colours are the deeds of light, the deeds and the suffering.” (Die Farben sind Taten des Lichts, Taten und Leiden). Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, 9. For more on Hofmannsthal’s ­reception of Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours), see Schneider, “Farbe. Farbe,” 83. 58 “wie eine[r], der nach ungemessenem Taumel festen Boden unter den Füßen fühlt und um den ein Sturm rast, in dessen Rasen hinein er j­auchzen möchte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 59 “was wirbelnd durch mein ganzes Ich ging.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 167. 60 “gebaren sich mir zu liebe diese Bäume, mit den Wurzeln starrend in der Erde, mit den Zweigen starrend gegen die Wolken, in einem Sturm gaben diese Erdenrisse, diese Täler zwischen Hügeln sich preis, noch im Wuchten der Felsblöcke war erstarrter Sturm.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 61 “unbekannte Seele von unfaßbarer Stärke.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 62 “hat gesprochen. In der Nähe des Werkes sind wir jäh anderswo gewesen, als wir gewöhnlich zu sein pflegen.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 15; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 21. 63 Heidegger’s comments on Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes ­resemble Hofmannsthal’s primarily with respect to the idea of revelation of truth-as-event. “What is happening here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, in truth is” (Was geschieht hier? Was ist im Werk am Werk? Van Goghs Gemälde ist die Eröffnung dessen, was das Zeug, das Paar Bauernschuhe, in Wahrheit ist.) Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 16; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 21. In order to w ­ itness the event (­disclosure) of truth, the subject must be shaken out of everyday habits of thought when confronting the aesthetic, according to Heidegger: “What really matters is that we open our eyes to the fact that the workliness of the work, the equipmentality of equipment, and the thingliness of the thing

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come nearer to us only when we think the being of beings. A c­ ondition of this is that the limits imposed by s­ elf-­evidence first fall away and that current pseudo-concepts be set aside.” (Worauf es ankommt, ist eine erste Öffnung des Blickes dafür, daß das Werkhafte des Werkes, das Zeughafte des Zeuges, das Dinghafte des Dinges uns erst näher kommen, wenn wir das Sein des Seienden d ­ enken.) Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 18;  “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 25. 64 “Und nun konnte ich … ein Etwas fühlen … konnte das Untereinander, das Miteinander der Gebilde fühlen, wie ihr innerstes Leben in der Farbe vorbrach und wie die Farben eine um der anderen willen lebten und wie eine, geheimnisvoll mächtig, die andern alle trug, und konnte in dem allem ein Herz spüren, die Seele dessen, der das gemacht hatte, der mit dieser Vision sich selbst antwortete auf den Sturrkrampf der fürchterlichsten Zweifel, konnte fühlen, konnte wissen, konnte durchblicken, konnte genießen Abgründe und Gipfel, Außen und Innen, eins und alles im zehntausendsten Teil der Zeit, als ich da die Worte hinschriebe, und war wie doppelt, war Herr über mein Leben zugleich, Herr über meine Kräfte, meinen Verstand, fühlte die Zeit vergehen, wußte, nun bleiben nur noch zwanzig Minuten, noch zehn, noch fünf, und stand draußen, rief einen Wagen, fuhr hin.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170, my emphasis. 65 “darum trug der Ölbaum.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 388. Cf. Rilke’s description of the colours in the Cézanne paintings: “There’s something else I wanted to say about Cézanne: that no one before him ever demonstrated so clearly the extent to which ­painting is something that takes place among the colors, and how one has to leave them completely alone, so that they can come to terms among themselves. Their mutual intercourse: this is the whole of painting.” (Ich wollte aber eigentlich noch von Cézanne sagen: daß es niemals noch so aufgezeigt worden ist, wie sehr das Malen unter den Farben vor sich geht, wie man sie ganz allein lassen muß, damit sie sich gegenseitig ­auseinandersetzen. Ihr Verkehr untereinander: das ist die ganze Malerei.) Rilke sees in the colours of Cézanne’s paintings a sacrificial component as well: “weaker local colors abandon themselves with reflecting the ­dominant ones. In this hither and back of mutual and manifold influence, the ­interior of the ­picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself, and does not have a single unmoving part.” (schwächere Lokalfarben geben sich ganz auf und ­begnügen sich damit, die stärkste vorhandene zu spiegeln. In diesem Hin und Wider von gegenseitigem vielartigen Einfluß schwingt das Bildinnere, steigt und fällt in sich selbst zurück und hat nicht eine

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s­ tehende Stelle.) Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 66, 72; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 627–8, 631. 66 “Werksein heißt: eine Welt aufstellen.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 22; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 31. 67 Heidegger sees this as justified: “So we must move in a circle. This is ­neither ad hoc nor deficient. To enter upon this path is the strength, and to remain on it the feast of thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art, like the step from art to work, a circle, but every individual step that we attempt circles within this ­circle.” (So müssen wir den Kreisgang vollziehen. Das ist kein Notbehelf und kein Mangel. Diesen Weg zu betreten, ist die Stärke, und auf diesem Weg zu bleiben, ist das Fest des Denkens, gesetzt, daß das Denken ein Handwerk ist. Nicht nur der Hauptschritt vom Werk zur Kunst ist als der Schritt von der Kunst zum Werk ein Zirkel, sondern jeder einzelne der Schritte, die wir versuchen, kreist in diesem Kreise.) Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 2; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 3. 68 Art reception for Hofmannsthal involves something of an artistic ­productivity as well, if not expressed, then at least in the imagination. Cf. “The Poet and Our Time”: “For he [the poet] suffers all things, and insofar as he suffers all things, he enjoys them.” (Denn er [der Dichter] leidet an allen Dingen und indem er an ihnen leidet, genießt er sie). Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 138. This notion has a ­predecessor in Goethe’s poem “An Suleika.” Suleika’s perfume can please only because thousands of roses have been sacrificed in the process. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 66. Katrin Scheffer has also noted the ­connection between suffering (“Leiden”) and enjoyment or pleasure (“Genuss” or “Genießen”). Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 297. 69 Split personality and schizophrenia are familiar themes in Hofmannsthal’s work, and especially in Andreas. Here we have the positive correlative, a multifaceted nature of the soul: others, including ancestral others, are present within the self. Depending on the circumstances and perspective, this can have the effect of empowerment or it can be overpowering. 70 Wellbery, “Die Opfer-Vorstellung,” 287. 71 Ten years later in his notes to “Über die europäische Idee” (On the European idea) Hofmannsthal asks this very question. Hofmannsthal, ka  34: Reden und Aufsätze 3, 325. 72 “Ich möchte in mir selber blühn, und dies Europa könnte mich mir selber wegstehlen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 60; “Die Briefe,” 152. 73 “ein europäisch-deutsches Gefühl.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 72; “Die Briefe,” 158.

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74 “Konferenzen von der Art, wo die Größe der Ziffern an die Phantasie appelliert und das Vielerlei, das Auseinander der Kräfte, die ins Spiel ­kommen, eine Gabe des Zusammensehens fordert, entscheidet nicht die Intelligenz, sondern es entscheidet sie eine geheimnisvolle Kraft.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 170. 75 Cf. Maren A. Joachimsen’s dissertation: Die Poetisierung der Ökonomie. 76 “Ich konnte für meine Gesellschaft mehr erreichen, als das Direktorium mir für den denkbar günstigsten Fall aufgelegt hatte, und ich erreichte es, wie man im Traum von einer kahlen Mauer Blumen abpflückt.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171. 77 Hofmannsthal would later make the connection explicit with his 1921 essay “Der Ersatz für die Träume” (“The Dream Replacement”). There he writes that city-dwellers, particularly those who have been sacrificed to the modern industrial way of life, have become machines, a tool among tools (“Werkzeug unter Werkzeugen”) in a world where only numbers speak. Unable to dream, people “wish to fill their fantasies with images, strong images, in which the essence of life is condensed.” (wollen ihre Phantasie mit Bildern füllen, starken Bildern, in denen sich Lebensessenz zusammenfaßt.) Be it a canvas or a movie screen, people flee “from cypher to dream vision” (von der Ziffer zur Vision). Hofmannsthal, “Der Ersatz für die Träume,” 141, 144. 78 “Sie bringt sie uns einerseits näher, zu ihrem eigentlichen und innersten Sinn setzt sie uns in ein unmittelbares Verhältnis, hinter der kühlen Fremdheit der Außenwelt verrät sie uns die Beseeltheit des Seins, durch die es uns verwandt und verständlich ist. Daneben aber stiftet jede Kunst eine Entfernung von der Unmittelbarkeit der Dinge, sie läßt die Konkretheit der Reize zurücktreten und spannt einen Schleier zwischen uns und sie, gleich dem feinen bläulichen Duft, der sich um ferne Berge legt.” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 513; Philosophie des Geldes, 658–9. 79 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s remark on poetic distance: “What we hold to be the transfiguring power of distance … is the poetic power in us, the poetic capability, the synthetic power: the begger, when he looks through the windows of the wealthy, is poetic.” (Was wir für die verklärende Macht der Entfernung halten … ist die poetische Macht in uns, das poetische Vermögen, die synthetische Kraft: der Bettler insofern er ins Fenster des Reichen hineinblickt, ist poetisch). Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 324. 80 “Die Gesichter der Herren, mit denen ich verhandelte, kamen mir ­merkwürdig nahe.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171.

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81 “Es ist etwas in mir, das mich zwingt zu glauben, er wäre von meiner Generation, wenig älter als ich selbst.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171. 82 “but no sooner did Gauguin, the comrade he’d longed for, the kindred spirit, arrive than he had to cut off his ear in despair, after they had both determined to hate one another and at the first opportunity to get rid of each other for good.” (kaum war Gauguin da, der ersehnte Genosse, der Gleichgesinnte – ; da mußte er sich schon aus Verzweiflung die Ohren abschneiden). Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 5–6; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 595. 83 Zilcosky, Uncanny Encounters, 211. 84 “Ich weiß nicht, ob ich vor diese Bilder ein zweites Mal hintreten werde, doch werde ich vermutlich eines davon kaufen, aber es nicht an mich nehmen, sondern dem Kunsthändler zur Bewahrung übergeben.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171. 85 “Feil! alles feil! die Ehre selber feil! / […] / Und meiner Verse Schar, so tändelnd schal, / Auf diesem Freibrief grenzenloser Qual, / Sie schienen mir wie Bildwerk und Gezweig / Auf einer Klinge tödtlich blankem Stahl.” Hofmannsthal, “Verse, auf eine Banknote geschrieben,” 29. 86 “Es ist nicht Geld, sondern Freiheit.” Hofmannsthal and Burckhardt, Briefwechsel, 36. 87 “Deinen Dich innigst umarmenden Sohn Hugo –Dichter und Handelsmann.” Quoted in Weinzierl, Hofmannsthal, 77. Weinzierl devotes an entire chapter to the biographical importance of art and money: “Von Kunst und Geld und vornehmer Natur.” 88 Hofmannsthal marked the following passage in his copy of Philosophie des Geldes with two daggers, “selbst für feinere und der Sache lebende Menschen kann in dem Gelingen der Leistung nach der ökonomischen Seite hin ein Trost, Ersatz, Rettung für die gefühlte Unzulänglichkeit nach der Seite des Haupterfolges hin liegen; zum mindesten etwa wie ein Ausruhen und eine momentane Verpflanzung des Interesses, die der Hauptsache schlieſslich gewachsene Kräfte zuführt.” *fd h 1910: 313; Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, 345. The English translation reads: “but also, for more sensitive and idealistic people, the material success of the performance may be a consolation, a substitute, a salvation for the ­insufficiency that is felt with regard to the primary goal. At the very least, it will be something like a respite and a momentary shift of interest which will finally channel new strength into the main objective.” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 336. 89 Renner, “Nachwort,” 408.

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90 Van Gogh himself had at one point planned to be an art dealer, like his brother Théodorus, and his uncle. Furthermore, it was his brother the art dealer who introduced him to the revolutionary new way of painting. See Margarete Mauthner’s introduction to Van Gogh’s Briefe; *fdh 5050: 1–2. 91 Gottschlich-Kempf, Identitätsbalance, 302. 92 Scharnowski, “Funktionen der Krise,” 59. 93 The notion that works of art lose presence is particularly evident in “Moments in Greece” (“Augenblicke in Griechenland”). Heidegger speaks of the Greek temples thus: “World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be reversed. The works are no longer what they were. The works themselves, it is true, are what we encounter; yet they themselves are what has been. As what has been they confront us within the realm of tradition and conservation. Henceforth, they remain nothing but objects of this kind.” (Weltentzug und Weltzerfall sind nie mehr ­rückgängig zu machen. Die Werke sind nicht mehr die, die sie waren. Sie selbst sind es zwar, die uns da begegnen, aber sie selbst sind die Gewesenen. Als die Gewesenen stehen sie uns im Bereich der Überlieferung und Aufbewahrung entgegen. Fortan bleiben sie nur solche Gegenstände.) Heiddegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 20; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 26–7. “Moments in Greece,” however, presents a chance at having a profound aesthetic encounter with such works of art, even if they are already “gewesen.” See my discussion in chapter 3. 94 “Was ich dir schrieb, wirst du kaum verstehen können, am wenigsten, wie mich diese Bilder so bewegen konnten.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 100; “Die Briefe,” 171. 95 “Es wird dir wie eine Schrulle vorkommen, wie ein Vereinzeltes, wie eine Sonderbarkeit, und doch – wenn man es nur hinstellen könnte, wenn man es nur aus sich herausreißen könnte und ins Licht bringen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 100; “Die Briefe,” 171. 96 “Er malte seine Bilder nicht, er stiess sie aus. Er fühlte sich nicht dabei, war eins mit dem Element, das er darstellte, malte sich selbst in den lodernden Wolken.” Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 136. 97 This recalls Albrecht Dürer’s aesthetic philosophy, according to which beauty is to be pulled out of nature. By referencing Dürer, Hofmannsthal is making a connection to the merchant’s childhood: in the third letter, the merchant recalls his affinity for Dürer’s copperplate engravings. See Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 103. 98 See also Riley, Color Codes, 50. 99 Simmel links this colourlessness to monetary transactions: “This ­colourlessness becomes, as it were, the colour of work activity at the

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high points of money transaction.” (An den Höhenpunkten des Geldverkehrs wird diese Farblosigkeit sozusagen zur Farbe von Berufsinhalten). Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 514; Philosophie des Geldes, 596. 100 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 169. 101 “Die Woge, die den Schiffbrüchigen schreckt, beschreibt eine göttliche Kurve, und selbst das entsetzte Gesicht des Unglücklichen, der sich an die Planke klammert, wirkt harmonisch in diesem Taumel der Wasser. So ordnen sich in den Bildern Van Goghs, die ein Paroxysmus der Naturerfassung entstehen liess.” Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 136. This passage was marked by Hofmannsthal in *fd h 1696: 136. 102 “das grenzenlos relative der Farbe: jede Farbe existiert nur durch ihre Nachbarschaft.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 437. 103 Jansen, Luijten and Bakker, Vincent van Gogh, Letter 622. 104 “nichts als diese zwei Farben gegeneinander, dies ewige Unnennbare, drang in diesem Augenblick in seine Seele und löste, was verbunden war, und verband, was gelöst war.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 102; “Die Briefe,” 172. 105 “Sagte ich nicht, die Farben der Dinge haben zu seltsamen Stunden einen Gewalt über mich? Doch bin’s nicht ich vielmehr, der die Macht bekommt über sie, die ganze, volle Macht für irgendeine Spanne Zeit, ihnen ihr wortloses, abgrundtiefes Geheimnis zu entreißen, ist sie nicht in meiner Brust als ein Schwellen, eine Fülle, eine Fremde, erhabene, entzückende Gegenwart, bei mir, in mir, an der Stelle, wo das Blut kommt und geht?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 102; “Die Briefe,” 173. 106 Büssgen, “Bildende Kunst,” 521. 107 Ibid., 534. 108 Renner, Zauberschrift, 389. While the experience is not brought about by personal memories, these nevertheless play a great role in preparation for the encounter with the work of art. The merchant, by remembering the ambiguous feelings of his child-self when contemplating the Dürer prints, is in effect preparing himself in a way that combines external ­reception and personal memory. See also Hoffmann, “Kunsterfahrung als Icherschließung,” 291, and Schuster, “Kunstleben,” 569. 109 “Aber wenn alles in mir war, warum konnte ich nicht die Augen schließen und stumm und blind eines unnennbaren Gefühles meiner selbst genießen, warum mußte ich mich auf Deck erhalten und schauen, vor mich hinschauen?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 102; “Die Briefe,” 173.

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110 “dies heilige Genießen meiner selbst und zugleich der Welt, die sich mir auftat, als wäre die Brust ihr aufgegangen, warum war dies Doppelte, dies Verschlungene, dies Außen und Innen, dies ineinanderschlagende Du an mein Schaun geknüpft?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 104; “Die Briefe,” 173. 111 Ursula Renner comes closest to offering an interpreation by highlighting the dialogical aspect with an “unknown ‘You’” (“unbekannten ‘Du’”). Renner, Zauberschrift, 412. 112 “hier ist ein Überwinden aller Hemmungen ein fast wüthendes Du.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 438. 113 “Novalis: Wir sollen alles in ein Du, ein zweites Ich verwandeln; nur dadurch erheben wir uns selbst zum großen Ich.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 324. 114 “diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu ­entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos gross ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns, die übereinander gethürmten Schichten der aufgestapelten überindividuellen Erinnerung.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 115 In his 1898 lecture “Moderne Lyrik” (Modern lyric poetry), which in ­several respects resembles Hofmannsthal’s 1896 lecture “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”), Rilke too invokes what Torsten Hoffmann calls a “dialogical aesthetic” between human and thing. He describes the striving of an individual to come to an understanding with all things through a constant “Zwiegespräch” or dialogue that brings one to the source of all life. Hoffmann, “Kunsterfahrung als Icherschließung,” ­294–5. For Rilke, as for Hofmannsthal, the intimacy of this dialogue finds expression in beauty. Rilke’s dialogical aesthetics thus bears a ­striking resemblance to Hofmannsthal’s; the key difference is that Rilke spends less time exploring the external world, the “Du,” and more time examining the inward experience. Hofmannsthal’s exploration takes the opposite course. 116 “Eines Freundes Da-sein gibt Maß. Müller-Hofmann. Man verbreitet durch ihn die Erlebnisbasis. Es ist immer das ganze Du, uns daran zu erproben.” Hofmannsthal, “Brief an einen Gleichaltrigen,” 214. Hofmannsthal refers here to the Austrian painter and graphic designer Wilhelm Müller-Hofmann, a friend of his from 1913 onward. 117 This affinity between Buber and Hofmannsthal has yet to be fully explored in the secondary literature. 118 “alle Kunst von ihrem Ursprung her [ist] wesenhaft dialogisch … daß alle Musik einem Ohr ruft, das nicht das eigne des Musikers, alle Bildnerei

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einem Auge, das nicht das eigne des Bildners ist … und daß sie alle dem sie Empfangenden etwas nur eben in dieser einen Sprache Sagbares sagen (nicht ein ‘Gefühl,’ sondern ein wahrgenommenes Geheimnis).” Buber, Zwiesprache, 176. 119 “Farbe. Farbe. Mir ist das Wort jetzt armselig. Ich fürchte, ich habe mich dir nicht erklärt, wie ich möchte. Und ich möchte nichts in mir stärken, was mich von den Menschen absondert.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 106; “Die Briefe,” 174. 120 “wenn das sich auftut und wie in einer Welle der Liebe mich mit sich s­ elber in eines schlingt. Und bin ich dann nicht im Innern der Dinge so sehr ein Mensch, so sehr ich selber wie nur je, namenlos, einsam, aber nicht erstarrt im Alleinsein, sondern als flösse von mir in Wellen die Kraft, die mich zum auserlesenen Genossen macht der starken stummen Mächte, die rungsum wie auf Thronen schweigend sitzen? Und ist dies nicht wohin du auf dunklen Wegen immer gelangst, wenn du tätig und leidend lebst unter den Lebenden?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 106; “Die Briefe,” 174. 121 The notion of Schuld, which can be translated as guilt, blame, debt, ­culpability, etc., has long been acknowledged as a condition for entering into “Existence” or life, in the Hofmannsthalian paradigm. See Walther Brecht, “Grundlinien,” 173. 122 “Und warum sollten nicht die Farben Brüder der Schmerzen sein, da diese wie jene uns ins Ewige ziehen?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 106; “Die Briefe,” 174. 123 In I and Thou, Buber will make a similar assertion, namely that the act or deed (“Tat”) consists of sacrifice and risk: “The deed involves a ­sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice: infinite possibility is surrendered on the altar of the form; all that but a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated. The risk: the basic word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits himself may not hold back part of himself … if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me.” (Die Tat umfasst ein Opfer und ein Wagnis. Das Opfer: Die unendliche Möglichkeit, die auf dem Altar der Gestalt dargebracht wird; alles, was eben noch spielend die Perspektive durchzog, muss ­ausgetilgt werden … Das Wagnis: Das Grundwort kann nur mit dem ­ganzen Wesen gesprochen werden; wer sich drangibt, darf von sich nichts vorenthalten … diene ich ihm nicht recht, so zerbricht es, oder es zerbricht mich.) Buber, I and Thou, 60–1; Ich und Du, 16–17. In his discussion of Hofmannsthal’s Chandos Letter, Wellbery notes that the fascination of revelatory moments is indebted to their evocation of sacrifice. Wellbery, “Opfer-Vorstellung,” 298.

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124 “Es ist, als habe ein Einziger den Vorwurf gegen den Egoismus unserer ganzen Epoche gefühlt und sich hingegeben, ganz wie einer jener grossen Märtyrer, deren Geschicke uns aus fernen Zeiten überliefert wurden.” Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 143. 125 Cf. Rilke’s comments: “weaker local colors abandon themselves with reflecting the dominant ones. In this hither and back of mutual and ­manifold influence, the interior of the picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself, and does not have a single unmoving part.” (schwächere Lokalfarben geben sich ganz auf und begnügen sich damit, die stärkste vorhandene zu spiegeln. In diesem Hin und Wider von gegenseitigem ­vielartigen Einfluß schwingt das Bildinnere, steigt und fällt in sich selbst zurück und hat nicht eine stehende Stelle.) Rilke, Letters on Cézanne 72; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 631. 126 “Diese Umformung, die sie [die Wirklichkeit] auf dem Wege in unser Bewußtsein erleidet, ist zwar eine Schranke zwischen uns und ihrem unmittelbaren Sein, aber zugleich die Bedingung, sie vorzustellen und ­darzustellen.” Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 559; Die Philosophie des Geldes, 659. 127 Jansen, Luijten, and Bakker, Letter 698. 128 Cf. Hermann Broch: “he recognized the dangers of pan-aestheticism: the idea of a work of art whose universality would by means of symbolic wealth produce an ultimate total knowledge appeared to him condemned in the end to a leap into a void, because the beautiful, even when ­surrounded with the nimbus of religiosity, can never be elevated to the absolute and must therefore remain mute in the transmission of knowledge.” (er erkannte die Gefahren des Pan-Ästhetizismus: die Idee von einem Kunstwerk, dessen Universalität infolge Symbolreichtums schließlich All-Erkenntnis vermitteln sollte, zeigte sich ihm als verurteilt, am Ende ins Leere zu stoßen, weil das Schöne, auch wenn man es mit dem Nimbus der Religiosität umgibt, nie und nimmer zu einem Absolutum erhebbar ist und daher erkenntnisstumm bleiben muß). Broch, Hofmannsthal and his Time, 121; Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 154. 129 “Die Maler sind da, uns mit der Erscheinung auszusöhnen, der Erscheinung ihr Pathos zurückzugeben. Aber vielleicht gilt auch von ihnen wie von den Dichtern das Wort: wir sind nicht die Ärzte wir sind der Schmerz.” See Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 438. 130 Bamberg quotes Celan in reference to the Chandos Letter, but the phrase is perhaps even more appropriate in the context of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” See Bamberg, Hofmannsthal, 262. Celan writes

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in his reception speech for the Bremen Literary Prize: “The poem is not timeless. True, it asserts a claim to infinity, it seeks to grasp through time – through it, not over and above it … It is the efforts of one who, overflown by the stars … approaches language with his being, wounded by reality, and seeking reality.” (Das Gedicht ist nicht zeitlos. Gewiß, es erhebt einen Unendlichkeitsanspruch, es sucht, durch die Zeit ­hindurchzugreifen – durch sie hindurch, nicht über sie hinweg … Es sind die Bemühungen dessen, der, überflogen von Sternen … mit seinem Dasein zur Sprache geht, wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend). Celan, “Ansprache,” 129. Celan’s vision overturns the idea of poetic ­elevation expressed by Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du mal. Incidentally, the manuscript of Celan’s acceptance speech for the Büchner Prize ­mentions Hofmannsthal several times. See the index (“Personenregister”) in Celan’s Der Meridian (The Meridian). For more on Celan’s ­reception of Hofmannsthal’s work, see Robert Vilain’s article, “Celan and Hofmannsthal.” 131 “ein bloßes Empfindungsgewühl, sage ich, ist ja nicht ein absolutes Nichts, es ist nur nichts, was eine dingliche Welt in sich konstituiert. Warum muß aber eine Welt existieren? Ich sehe in der Tat nicht ein, daß sie das müßte. Das betrifft die Welt im weitesten Sinn, einschließlich das Ich als Persönlichkeit und andere Ich … So kommen wir auf die Möglichkeit phänomenologischen Gewühls als einziges und letztes Sein, aber eines so sinnlosen Gewühls, daß es kein Ich gibt und kein Du gibt und daß es keine physiche Welt gibt.” Husserl, Thing and Space, 249–50; Vorlesungen über die Bedeutungslehre, 288. 132 “Offenbar wäre auch nicht ausgeschlossen, daß allmählich Regelmäßigkeit in Regellosigkeit überginge und sich die angesetzten Dingeinheiten wieder auflösten: in eine schöne Erinnerung und Phantasie, die sich nicht ­festhalten ließe.” Husserl, Thing and Space, 250; Vorlesungen über die Bedeutungslehre, 289.

C h apt e r T h re e    1 Hofmannsthal began working on his prose rendition of the events in 1908, and the first section, “Ritt durch Phokis” (“Ride through Phokis”) as it was previously called, was published the same year in Morgen (19 June 1908). For the German citations, I take the final (1923) version of the text, which includes all three sections (in ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe). Unless otherwise specified, the English citations refer to Tania and James Stern’s translation, printed in McClatchy’s The Whole Difference.

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  2 For a representative psychoanalytical approach, see Bärbel Götz, who interprets the encounter with the statues as a renewed experience of the mother-child unity that exists before birth, as well as a moment of the self’s sense of omnipotence. Götz, Erinnerung, 98. Erwin Kobel and ­Hans-Jürgen Schings highlight the mystical elements in the text, above all in Hofmannsthal’s presentation of universal connectivity. Schings in ­particular links Hofmannsthal’s text to the theological and mystical ­writings of Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, and Martin Buber. Friedmar Apel and Ernst-Otto Gerke are particularly interested in the text’s form; Gerke refers to Hofmannsthal’s composition as a “Gestaltungsakt” or “act of formation.” Gerke, Der Essay, 160.   3 “die Bilder des Lebens folgen ohne inneren Zusammenhang aufeinander und ermangeln gänzlich der effektvollen Komposition.” Hofmannsthal, Südfranzösische Eindrücke, 77.   4 Hofmannsthal will take up this travel experience yet again in his ­introduction to Hanns Holdt’s book of photography, Griechenland: Baukunst, Landschaft, Volksleben, published in 1923.   5 Christopher Meid explores in greater depth how Hofmannsthal refuses to offer even a semblance of objectivity. Both Hans-Jürgen Schings and Daria Santini, like Meid, identify the style of “Moments in Greece” as sui generis, something Hofmannsthal strove for in the context of c­ ontemporary travel writing, particularly about Greece. Gerhart Hauptmann’s very ­different Griechischer Frühling (Greek Spring), for instance, had been ­published shortly before Hofmannsthal’s “Moments in Greece.”   6 Cf. Gisbertz, “Zu einer Stimmungspoetik”; Wellbery, “Die OpferVorstellung”; and Heumann, “Stunde, Luft und Ort.”   7 In the last few decades Stimmung has become a keyword in philosophy and literary studies: Gernot Böhme, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and David Wellbery have all devoted several essays and books to the topic. Because Hofmannsthal often evokes different aspects of Stimmung in his writings, I keep the German term rather than choosing one or several of the English translations.   8 “Gesamtheit der augenblicklichen Vorstellungen, ist relatives Bewußtsein der Welt: je nach der Stimmung denken wir über das Geringste und Höchste anders, es gibt überhaupt keinen Vorstellungsinhalt, der nicht durch die Stimmung beeinflußt, vergrößert, verwischt, verzerrt, verklärt, begehrenswert, gleichgiltig, drohend, lind, dunkel, licht, weich, glatt, etc. etc. gemalt wird.” Hofmannsthal, ka 34: Reden und Aufsätze 3, 325.   9 Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. In a letter to Hofmannsthal (18 July 1908), Harry Kessler suggested striking

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this sentence because it was enigmatic, and because he thought the ­preceding sentence provided a more satisfying conclusion to the passage. See Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 703. Hofmannsthal did not follow Kessler’s advice. The penultimate sentence – “That was how this dialogue sounded” (So klang dieses Zwiegespräch) – must therefore be read in context of the concluding sentence. 10 I have slightly modified Tania and James Stern’s translation, which has: “We had been riding that day from nine to ten hours.” (Wir waren an ­diesem Tag neun oder zehn Stunden geritten). Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 80; “Augenblicke,” 180. 11 “So wirkte Natur auf mich und hier war etwas gemaltes. Hier war eine menschliche Sprache. In einem Blitz habe ich Function des Künstlers geahnt.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 438. 12 “und man schaute hinab und hinüber wie von einem Altan.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 81; “Augenblicke,” 181. 13 “In der Mauer zur Linken war eine kleine offene Tür; in der Tür lehnte ein Mönch.“ Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 81; “Augenblicke,” 181. 14 “Das schwarze lange Gewand, die schwarze hohe Kopfbedeckung, das ­lässige Dastehen mit dem Blick auf die Ankommenden, in dieser ­paradiesischen Einsamkeit, das alles hatte etwas vom Magier an sich.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 81–2; “Augenblicke,” 181. 15 E.g., the poem “Ein Traum von großer Magie” (A dream of great magic) and the character called “der Malteser” (which can be translated as “the man from Malta,” or the “Knight Hospitaller”) in the novel fragment Andreas. Robert Stockhammer observes that Hofmannsthal’s magicians are usually caught in a self-reflective and closed circle. Stockhammer, Zaubertexte, 129. 16 “Er war jung, hatte einen langen rötlich blonden Bart, von einem Schnitt, der an byzantinische Bildnisse erinnerte, eine Adlernase, ein unruhiges, fast zudringliches blaues Auge. Er begrüßte uns mit einer Neigung und einem Ausbreiten beider Arme, darin etwas Gewolltes war.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 82; “Augenblicke,” 181. 17 “gleich weit von Hast und von Langsamkeit … gleich weit von Klage und von Lust, etwas Feierliches, das von Ewigkeit her und weit in die Ewigkeit so forttönen mochte.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 83; “Augenblicke,” 181. 18 Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 181. 19 “Das Echohafte, das völlig Getreue jenem feierlichen, kaum noch menschlichen Klang, das Willenlose, fast Bewußtlose schien nicht aus der Brust einer Frau zu kommen. Es schien, als sänge dort das Geheimnis selber, ein Wesensloses.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 83; “Augenblicke,” 182.

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20 In his 14 November 1891 letter to Hermann Bahr, Hofmannsthal suggests Goethe’s Mignon represents a third gender, a stylized union of that which is good and beautiful in both male and female. Hugo und Gerty von Hofmannsthal and Hermann Bahr, Briefwechsel, 2:39. 21 Cf. Gregory Nagy’s definitions of myth and ritual: “Ritual is doing things and saying things in a way that is considered sacred. Myth is saying things in a way that is also considered sacred. So ritual frames myth.” Nagy, Ancient Greek Hero, 5. 22 Hofmannsthal, “Augenblicke,” 184. 23 On the relation between presence and Stimmung see Gumbrecht, Stimmung lesen, 7–34. 24 “Dies Zwiegespräch ist klein zwischen dem Priester und dem dienenden Mann. Aber der Ton war aus den Zeiten der Patriarchen … dies Unscheinbare, diese wenigen Worte, gewechselt in der Nacht, dies hat einen Rhythmus in sich, der von Ewigkeit her ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 184. 25 Hofmannsthal thus stands in a long tradition of what the nineteenth-­ century art historian Sulpiz Boisserée called, in referring to the brothers Grimm, the “Andacht zum Unbedeutenden” (devotion to the ­insignificant). Boisserée, Briefwechsel, 72. Such an appreciation for the importance of details and small things takes on a particular emphasis in the second half of the nineteenth century for people like Walter Pater; by the twentieth century, it becomes an indispensable point of orientation for Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Cf. Assmann, “Hofmannsthals Chandos-Brief,” 276. 26 “So klang dieses Zwiegespräch.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 185. 27 “Aus der Kirche drang mit den dunklen, weichen, tremulierenden Männerstimmen ein gemischter Duft von Wachs, Honig und Weihrauch, der wie der Geruch dieses Gesanges war.” (Together with the dark, soft, tremulous voices of the men, there came from the church a blended scent of wax, honey, and incense, like the redolence of song – my translation). Hofmannsthal, “Augenblicke,” 182. 28 “Stunde, Luft und Ort machen alles.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. 29 “Augen der Poesie, die jedes Ding jedesmal zum erstenmal sieht.” Hofmannsthal, “Gespräch,” 79. There is also a sense in which uniqueness functions as a life-changing moment; in the play Die Frau am Fenster (The Woman at the Window), this is implied as the moment of a ­maltreated woman’s self-assertion in the matters of love. Dianora loves

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a man other than her violent husband and defends herself before the latter by claiming she betrayed him only once – it was a unique incident. Hofmannsthal, Die Frau am Fenster, 112. The importance of singularity in repetition is a motif evoked throughout “Moments in Greece.” 30 “genug, es ist nahe.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 185. 31 “einer der seltsamsten und schönsten Gespräche, dessen ich mich ­entsinnen kann.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. 32 “Unsere Freunde erschienen uns, und indem sie sich selber brachten, brachten sie das Reinste unseres Daseins herangetragen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 33 “ernst und von einer fast beängstigenden Klarheit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 34 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 76. 35 “Gestalt auf Gestalt kommt heran, sättigt uns mit ihrem Anblick, begleitet uns, verfließt wieder.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 36 “andere, anklingend, haben schon gewartet, nehmen die leere Stelle ein, beglänzen einen Umkreis gelebten Lebens, bleiben dann gleichsam am Wege zurück, indessen wir gehen und gehen, als hinge von diesem Gehen die Fortdauer des Zaubers ab.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 37 “Indem sie vor uns lebten und uns anblickten, waren die kleinsten Umstände und Dinge gegenwärtig.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 38 “scheinbar unbedeutende kleine Sätze.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186. 39 “und ihre Gesichter sind mehr als Gesichter: das gleiche wie im Ton jener abgebrochenen Sätze steigt in ihnen auf, kommt näher und näher gegen uns heran, scheint in ihren Zügen, im Unsagbaren ihres Ausdrucks ­aufgefangen und darinnen befestigt, aber nicht beruhigt. Es ist ein endloses Wollen, Möglichkeiten, Bereitsein, Gelittenes, zu Leidendes. Jedes dieser Gesichter ist ein Geschick, etwas Einziges, das Einzelnste, was es gibt, und dabei ein Unendliches, ein Auf-der-Reise-sein nach einem unsagbar fernen Ziel. Es scheint nur zu leben, indem es uns anblickt: als wäre es unser Gegenblick, um dessenwillen es lebe.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186. 40 While Friedrich Schopenhauer’s notion of suffering is omnipresent for the fin-de-siècle, Georg Büchner’s (purported) views on the subject were closer to Hofmannsthal’s. These are the words attributed to Büchner on his

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death-bed: “We do not have too many pains, we have too few, for through pain we reach God! We are death, dust, ash, how should we complain?” (Wir haben der Schmerzen nicht zu viel, wir haben ihrer zu wenig, denn durch den Schmerz gehen wir zu Gott ein! Wir sind Tod, Staub, Asche, wie dürften wir da klagen?) These words can be found in several places in Hofmannsthal’s notes. See Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 327. 41 “geometrischer Ort der inneren Persönlichkeit, so weit sie anschaubar ist.” Simmel, “Die ästhetische Bedeutung des Gesichts,” 39. See also DangelPelloquin, “Ah, das Gesicht!” 54. 42 Heraclitus, Fragments, 69. 43 “Wir sind wie zwei Geister, die sich zärtlich erinnern, an den Mahlzeiten der sterblichen Menschen teilgenommen zu haben.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186–7. 44 A re-evaluation of Hofmannsthal’s writings on the themes of propriety, tact, and custom (Sitte, Gebräuche, Taktgefühl) would benefit from a look into his understanding of the ancient Greek themis. 45 Gadamer, Die Aktualität des Schönen, 41; The Relevance of the Beautiful, 31. 46 Gadamer, Die Aktualität des Schönen, 42; The Relevance of the Beautiful, 31. 47 “der am unsäglichsten gelitten hat … Er ist arm und leidet, aber wer dürfte wagen, ihm helfen zu wollen, maßlos einsam.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 187. 48 “gegen den eigenen Dämon um ein Ungeheures … ein nicht zu Nennendes.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 187. 49 “er will steil hinab, ohne Weg, schnell. Unsagbare Auflehnung, Trotz dem Tod bis ins Weiße des Augs, den Mund vor Qual verzogen und zu klagen verachtend.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 187. 50 Wellbery, “Die Opfer-Vorstellung,” 301. 51 “Fast drohend blickte die Morgensonne auf die fremde ernste Gegend … Fremde Schicksale, sonst unsichtbare Ströme, schlugen in uns auf Festes und offenbarten sich.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 188. 52 “Stunde, Luft und Ort machen alles.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. 53 Schings, “Hier oder nirgends,” 377. 54 Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 110. 55 The dog in Andreas is another example of Hofmannsthal’s interest in the final equality of all beings and the consequences of failing to acknowledge that equality. In that novel-fragment, the dog is the object of twelve-yearold Andreas’s sadistic brutality (itself a manifestation of possessive

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jealousy). The boy’s actions come back to haunt him later in life, both in his desire to return to that time, when “das Unendliche” (the infinite) touched him, and in his desire for a canine companion, which he knows he could never again have. Notably for the context of “Moments in Greece,” the dog approaches Andreas with an incomprehensible humility. This is different from Kafka’s image of the dog as an animal laden with shame: in The Trial, K.’s final words describe his own death: “‘Like a dog!’ he said, and it was as if the shame should outlive him” (“‘Wie ein Hund!’ sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.”) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 70; Kafka, Der Process, 1.11: 25. There are other examples in Hofmannsthal’s work of inflicted suffering or sacrifice associated with extraordinary sensation. One particularly disturbing image is that of the crucified sparrow-hawk in the opening of “Dämmerung und nächtliches Gewitter” (“Dusk and Nocturnal Thunderstorms”). Wellbery argues convincingly that the sacrifice is part of what lends such fascination to those special moments in Hofmannsthal’s work. Wellbery, “Opfer-Vorstellung,” 298. The artist is, like the dog or the sparrow-hawk, a victim of intense suffering; but in that suffering there is also pleasure: “For he [the poet] suffers from all things and insofar as he suffers from them, he enjoys them” (Denn er [der Dichter] leidet an allen Dingen und indem er an ihnen leidet, genießt er sie). Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 138. In general, it might be argued that Hofmannsthal’s images of sacrifice move from sacrifice of the other to ­sacrifice of the self; yet in all of these, there is a tangling of existences. This is why it is such a powerful trope for the symbol in “The Conversation about Poems.” See also Renate Böschenstein’s “Tiere als Elemente von Hofmannsthals Zeichensprache” and Kári Driscoll’s “Die Wurzel aller Poesie: Hofmannsthals Zoopoetik.” 56 Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 90; “Augenblicke,” 188. 57 The term (“der Schiffbrüchige” in German) conjures the image of someone who has escaped from a sinking ship. It recalls the “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” in which the merchant has exchanged his place at sea for a nauseous life on land. Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 92; “Augenblicke,” 190. The word also evokes Rimbaud’s famous verse poem of the sinking (or “drunken”) boat, “Le Bateau ivre.” 58 “Sonderbar unwirklich dies, wie er so mit Schweigen auf seinen Tod ­zuging.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 191. 59 “mit Anstand und Ehrerbietung.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 92; “Augenblicke,” 189. 60 Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 109–10.

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61 Katrin Scheffer notes that this image of water in its capacity to join ­disparate things is present early on in the travel essay “Sommerreise” (“Summer Trip”). Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 263. 62 “Sein Gesicht blickte mich an, wie früher jene Gesichter mich angeblickt hatten; ich verlor mich fast an sein Gesicht, und wie um mich zu retten vor seiner Umklammerung, sagte ich mir: ‘Wer ist dieser? Ein fremder Mensch!’ Da waren neben diesem Gesicht die anderen, die mich ansahen und ihre Macht an mir übten und viele mehr.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 92–3; “Augenblicke,” 190. 63 Cf. Murray, again referring to that quality the ancient Greeks called αἰδοῖος: (aidoîos) “It was an emotion, the keener because it was merely instinctive and was felt by a peculiarly sensitive people; an emotion of shame and awe, and perhaps something like guilt, in meeting the eyes of the oppressed of the earth; a feeling that a wrong done to these men is like no other wrong; that what these men report of you ultimately in the ear of Zeus will outweigh all the acute comments of the world and the gratifying reports of your official superiors.” Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 110. 64 “und war wie doppelt, war Herr über mein Leben zugleich, Herr über meine Kräfte, meinen Verstand, fühlte die Zeit vergehen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 170. 65 “Ein Knabe, an dem Gesichter von Soldaten vorüberziehen, Kompagnie auf Kompagnie, unzählig viele, ermüdete, verstaubte Gesichter, immer zu vieren, jeder doch ein Einzelner und keiner, dessen Gesicht der Knabe nicht in sich hineingerissen hätte, immer stumm von einem zum andern tastend, jeden berührend, innerlich zählend: ‘Dieser! Dieser! Dieser!’ indes die Tränen ihm in den Hals stiegen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 66 “Wer ist dieser? … Ein fremder Mensch!”; “Wer bin ich?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 190, 191. 67 “Wir sehen uns umgeben von schönen Formen und Farben. Genießen auf den ersten Blick vielfaches Gebilde der Natur und der Menschenhand … ‘Kunstfreund’ ein gefährliches Wort, nicht ohne dämonischen Inhalt. Hier scheinen wir etwa in Gefahr, uns selber zu verlieren: großer Irrthum! Hier werden wir erst geweckt, uns selber zu besitzen: denn wir schaffen ja den unsterblichen Inhalt dieser Gebilde, indem wir sie lebendig ­nachfühlen.” Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 255. 68 As the editors Konrad Heumann and Ellen Ritter have pointed out in their commentary to the critical edition, Hofmannsthal had at the time been assimilating into his own work the hypothesis raised by Freud and Breuer in Studies on Hysteria, namely that memory is organized as a structure

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of stratified layers. Hofmannsthal uses this image then to explain how an encounter with a work of art can have a – necessarily limited – (self-) revelatory effect on the viewer. Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 253. 69 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note from 4 January 1894, inspired by Ernst Mach: “We are no closer to our ‘I’ of ten years ago … Eternal physical continuity” (Wir sind unserem Ich von Vor-zehn-Jahren nicht näher … Ewige physische Kontinuität). Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen und Tagebücher, 107. 70 “Da, im Augenblick des bangsten Staunens, kam ich mir wieder, der Knabe sank in mich hinein, das Wasser floß unter meinem Gesicht hinweg und bespülte die eine Wange, die aufgestützten Arme hielten den Leib, ich hob mich, und es war nichts weiter als das Aufstehen eines, der an ­fließendem Wasser mit angelegten Lippen einen langen Zug getan hatte.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 71 In Die Frau ohne Schatten, for instance, the golden water is referred to as “the water of life” (das Wasser des Lebens.) See also Çakmur, Hofmannsthals Erzählung, 206. 72 Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 73 “Das Gedächtnis gehört nur dem Körper: er reproduziert scheinbar das Vergangene, d.h. er erzeugt ein ähnliches Neues in der Stimmung. Mein Ich von gestern geht mich so wenig an wie das Ich Napoleons oder Goethes.” Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen und Tagebücher, 93. 74 Cf. the “Address,” where Hofmannsthal asks with reference to the works of art: “Who amongst us can say: ‘Of what concern are they to me?’ Who could carve them out from his feeling and thought any more easily than a piece of flesh from his body?” (Wer ist unter uns, der sagen könnte: ‘Was gehen sie mich an?’ Wer könnte sie aus seinem Fühlen und Denken leichter herausschneiden als ein Stück Fleisch aus seinem Körper?) Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8. 75 “Verwandtschaft der schönen Dinge in der Zeit, und tiefer Sinn davon: die Bilderbücher von Crane Verwandtschaft derer von verschiedenen Zeiten … So umschweben uns die parallelen Gebärden der Unzähligen, unzählige Gesichter beugen sich mit uns Wasser [zu] trinken.” Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen aus dem Nachlass, 391–2. 76 “Jedes dieser Gesichter ist ein Geschick, etwas Einziges, das Einzelnste, was es gibt, und dabei ein Unendliches, ein Auf-der-Reise-sein nach einem unsagbar fernen Ziel.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186. 77 “Da, im Augenblick des bangsten Staunens … und es war nichts weiter als das Aufstehen eines, der an fließendem Wasser mit angelegten Lippen einen langen Zug getan hat.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191.

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78 “Die Berge riefen einander an; das Geklüftete war lebendiger als ein Gesicht; jedes Fältchen an der fernen Flanke eines Hügels lebte: dies alles war mir nahe wie die Wurzel meiner Hand. Es war, was ich nie mehr sehen werde. Es war das Gastgeschenk aller der einsamen Wanderer, die uns begegnet waren.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 79 “genug, es ist nahe.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 185. 80 “Einmal offenbart sich jedes Lebende, einmal jede Landschaft, und völlig: aber nur einem erschütterten Herzen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 81 “Gastgeschenk aller der einsamen Wanderer” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 82 “Aber mich verlangte nicht, noch weiter daran zu denken. ‘Gewesen,’ sagte ich unwillkürlich und hob den Fuß über die Trümer, die zu Hunderten hier umherlagen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 191. 83 “vom Alter verwesten [sic]” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. 84 “mit meinem Atemzug fühlte ich auch ihren Kontur sich heben und ­senken … Ohne mein Zutun wählte mein Blick.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. 85 Ending as a fragment, the poem (Sappho 31) links physical dissociation with poverty. In the translation by Anne Carson: “and cold sweat holds me and shaking / grips me all, greener than grass / I am and dead – or almost / I seem to me. / But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty.” Sappho, If Not, Winter, 63. 86 “Aber auch um sie spielte in dem Abendlicht, das klarer war als ­aufgelöstes Gold, der verzehrende Hauch der Vergänglichkeit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. 87 The most well-known expression of this is the play Jedermann (Everyman), which is performed every year at the Salzburg Festival. The play is based on the medieval tale of a rich man whose love of wealth has led to a sinful life. In Hofmannsthal’s version, responsibility towards ­others becomes an equally important theme. 88 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note: “The poet a reverse Midas: all lifeless things he touches he brings to life” (Dichter ein umgekehrter Midas: was er Erstarrtes berührt, erweckt er zum Leben.) Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen und Tagebücher, 93. For a detailed treatment and ­contextualization of this relation, see Mayer, “Midas statt Pygmalion,” 302–3. 89 With reference to the 1896 poem “Manche freilich,” (“Some, indeed,”) Judith Ryan states quite perceptively: “poetic utterance and what Pater

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called the ‘hard gem-like flame’ of passionate engagement in the present moment are not at all sufficient. The poet’s privileged position does not permit him to forget the problem of social class, illustrated at the ­beginning of the poem by the image of an ancient galley in which the free enjoy the vast perspectives of life above deck while the slaves toil away to their death below.” Ryan, Vanishing Subject, 122. “De cet égout immonde, l’or pur s’écoule. C’est là que l’esprit humain se perfectionne et s’abrutit, que la civilisation produit ses merveilles et que l’homme civilisé redevient presque sauvage.” De Tocqueville, Journeys, 107–8; “Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande,” 504. Morris, “The Socialist Ideal,” 257–8. “Ich wollte hinübergehen zu ihr; es trieb mich, um sie herumzugehen. Ihr Schatten strömte zu ihren Füßen auf den Boden hin; die abgewandte Seite, dorthin, gegen den Untergang der Sonne, diese schien mir das eigentliche Leben zu enthalten.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Der um Geld zu ringen meinte, um Geld, um Geld, und gegen den eigenen Dämon um ein Ungeheures ringt, ein nicht zu Nennendes.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 187. “Diese Griechen, fragte ich in mir, wo sind sie? Ich versuchte mich zu ­erinnern, aber ich erinnerte mich nur an Erinnerungen. Namen schwebten herbei, Gestalten; sie gingen ineinander über, als löste ich sie auf in einem grünlichen Rauch, darin sie verzerrten.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Form gewordene Willkür.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 8. Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Daß sie längst dahin waren, darum haßte ich sie, und daß sie so rasch dahingegangen waren.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Er haßte seinen vorzeitigen Tod so sehr, daß er sein Leben haßte, weil es ihn dahin geführt hatte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 55; “Das Märchen,” 30. “Schon war ja alles nicht, indem es zu sein glaubte! Und darüber ­schwebend die ewige Fata Morgana ihrer Poesie; und ihre Götter selber, welche unsicheren vorüberhastenden Phantome … Götter, ewige? Milesische Märchen, eine Dekoration an die Wand gemalt im Hause einer Buhlerin.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95; “Augenblicke,” 192–3. “da traf mich ein Blick; tief und zweideutig wie von einem Vorübergehenden. Er ging und war mir schon halb abgewandt, ­verachtungsvoll auch dieser Stadt, seiner Vaterstadt. Sein Blick ­enthüllte mir mich selbst und ihn: es war Platon. Um die Lippen des Mythenerfinders, des Verächters der Götter, spielten der Hochmut und

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geisterhafte Träume. In einem prunkvollen, unbefleckten Gewand, das ­lässig den Boden streifte, ging er hin, der Unbürger, der Königlicher; er schwebte vorüber, wie Geister, die mit geschlossenen Füßen gehen. Verachtend streifte er die Zeit und den Ort, er schien vom Osten ­herzukommen und nach dem Westen zu entschwinden.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95–6; “Augenblicke,” 193. 101 Hofmannsthal, “Einem, der vorübergeht,” 60. 102 Baudelaire, Die Blumen des Bösen, 137. 103 “Dichten ist ein Übermut, / Niemand schelte mich!” The lines come from the poem “Derb und tüchtig.” Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 16. 104 Cf. lines 4185–8 in Goethe’s Faust: “Sie schiebt sich langsam nur vom Ort, / Sie scheint mit geschloßnen Füßen zu gehen. / Ich muß bekennen, daß mir deucht, / Daß sie dem guten Gretchen gleicht.” (How slowly she moves now, / As if her feet were fastened somehow! / And as I look, it seems to me, / It’s poor dear Gretchen that I see!) Goethe, Faust, 131; Faust Part One, 132. 105 “Habe doch Mitleiden mit deinem Fusse! Speie lieber auf das Stadtthor und – kehre um!”; “‘wo man nicht mehr lieben kann, da soll man – ­vorübergehen! –’ … Also sprach Zarathustra und gieng an dem Narren und der grossen Stadt vorüber.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 176, 178; Also sprach Zarathustra, 221. 106 “Verachtend streifte er die Zeit und den Ort, er schien vom Osten ­herzukommen und nach dem Westen zu entschwinden … und meine Schuld lag am Tage. Es ist deine eigene Schwäche, rief ich mich an, du bist nicht fähig, dies zu beleben. Du selbst zitterst vor Vergänglichkeit, alles um dich tauchst du ins fürchterliche Bad der Zeit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 96; “Augenblicke,” 193. 107 See in particular Hofmannsthal’s essay “Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen”: “And now he, the reader, is nothing but an instrument: now the book plays on him.” (Und nun ist er, der Leser, nur ein Instrument: nun spielt das Buch auf ihm.) The reader must adopt the receptive attitude of the artist. Like Keats’ “negative capability,” Hofmannsthal’s poetic receptivity undermines the subject-object hierarchy. Hofmannsthal, “Shakespeare’s Kings,” 115; “Shakespeare’s Könige,” 81. 108 Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 109. 109 “‘Gewesen,’ sagte ich unwillkürlich und hob den Fuß über die Trümer, die zu Hunderten hier umherlagen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 193. 110 In André Gide’s 1898 play Philoctète, the protagonist is portrayed as a writer. Little has been written on Hofmannsthal and Gide, but Chryssoula

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Kambas mentions Gide’s acquaintance with Hofmannsthal (through Harry Kessler) around 1900. Kambas “Walter Benjamin,” 135. 111 “ohne Philoctetes selber die Stadt nicht fallen kann.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 96; “Augenblicke,” 194. 112 Like Gide’s character, the poet in Hofmannsthal’s essay “Der Dichter und diese Zeit” (“The Poet and Our Time”) is a figure whose presence is not desired; domiciled under the stair of his own house, he experiences suffering and pleasure, yet his presence remains unobserved. Hofmannsthal, “The Poet,” 41; “Der Dichter,” 137. 113 “Hier, wo ich es mit Händen zu greifen dachte, hier ist es dahin, hier erst recht.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 114 “Ich hob den Fuß, um die gespenstische Stätte des Nichtvorhandenen zu räumen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 115 “Kostbarkeiten … die aus dem Schutt der Gräber kommen: sie haben der Gewalt der Zeit widerstanden, für den Augenblick wenigstens, sie sprechen nur sich aus und sind von vollkommener Schönheit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 116 “Was die Dinge auszeichnet, dieses Ganz-mit-sich-Beschäftigtsein, das war es, was einer Plastik ihre Ruhe gab; sie durfte nichts von außen verlangen oder erwarten, sich auf nichts beziehen, was draußen lag, nichts sehen, was nicht in ihr war.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 42; Sämtliche Werke, 5:159. 117 Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1902 bis 1906, 112. 118 Cf. Mallarmé’s influential distinction: “To name an object is to ­suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which is intended to be divined bit by bit: to suggest it, there’s the dream. It is the perfect usage of this mystery which constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object, little by little, in order to reveal a state of the soul, or, conversely, to choose an object and to release from it a state of soul through a process of ­decryption.” (Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite de deviner peu à peu : le suggérer, voilà le rêve. C’est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le ­symbole : évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d’âme, ou, ­inversement, choisir un objet et en dégager un état d’âme, par une série de déchiffrements.) Mallarmé, Sur l’évolution ­littéraire, 700. 119 “Ein Becher gleicht der Rundung der Brüste oder der Schulter einer Göttin. Eine goldene Schlange, die einen Arm umwand, ruft diesen Arm herauf.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 120 “Sie trug den Becher in der Hand – / Ihr Kinn und Mund glich seinem Rand.” Hofmannsthal, “The Both of the Them,” 28; “Die Beiden,” 50.

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121 “die dunklen Köpfe aber mit dem bösen Mund von Schlangen, drei wilden Augen in der Stirn und unheimlichem Schmuck in den kalten, harten Haaren, bewegten sich neben den atmenden Wangen und streiften die schönen Schläfen im Takt der langsamen Schritte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44–5; “Das Märchen,” 20. 122 The gaze of Medusa works both ways: in the merchant’s son’s case, the snakes are part of the hair of the servant girl, fixing the viewer in their presence; on the other hand, the image of the Medusa-stare is “fixed” by “The Tale” itself, and thus by the reader’s aesthetic “gaze.” In the final section of “Moments in Greece,” a similar double gaze will be an ­important part of the aesthetic moment. 123 Schopenhauer makes a similar remark in identifying seemingly ordinary things as potential sites for the aesthetic experience. Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1:298. 124 “In diesem Augenblick geschah mir etwas: ein namenloses Erschrecken: es kam nicht von außen, sondern irgendwoher aus unmeßbaren Fernen eines inneren Abgrundes: es war wie ein Blitz: den Raum, wie er war, viereckig mit den getünchten Wänden und den Statuen, die dastanden, erfüllte im Augenblicke ein völlig anderes Licht, als wirklich da war: die Augen der Statuen waren plötzlich auf mich gerichtet, und in ihren Gesichtern vollzog sich ein völlig unsägliches Lächeln.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97–8; “Augenblicke,” 195. 125 “die Form gewordene Willkür der zusammentretenden Farben und Schattirungen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 7–8. 126 Plato, Timaeus, 1254–5. 127 Cf. Gregor Streim, Das Leben in der Kunst, 208–9, and Grundmann, Mein Leben, 117. 128 “Socrate n’est pas khôra mais il lui ressemblait beaucoup si elle était quelqu’un ou quelque chose … Cette place introuvable, Socrate n’occupe pas mais c’est elle depuis laquelle, dans le Timée et ailleurs, il répond à son nom. Car il faut toujours, comme khôra, ‘l’appeler de la même façon.’” Derrida, “Khōra,” 111; Khôra, 281. 129 “Deprived of a real referent, that which in effect resembles a proper name finds itself called an X which has as its property (as its physis and as its dynamis, Plato’s text will say) that it has nothing as its own and that it remains unformed, formless (amorphon). This very singular impropriety, which precisely is nothing, is just what khōra must, if you like, keep; it is just what must be kept for it, what we must keep for it.” (Privé de référent réel, ce qui en effet ressemble à un nom propre se trouve aussi appeler un X qui a pour propriété, pour physis et pour dynamis dira le texte,

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de n’avoir rien en propre et de rester informe (amorphon). Cette très ­singulière impropriété, qui justement n’est rien, voilà ce que chôra doit, si l’on peut dire, garder, voilà ce qu’il faut lui garder ce qu’il nous faut lui garder.) Derrida, “Khōra,” 97; Khôra, 271. 130 “den Raum … erfüllte … ein völlig anderes Licht, als wirklich da war.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 195. 131 Cf. Roberta Ascarelli, who in exploring the performative qualities of this “scene” in the museum notes how Hofmannsthal sets the statues in motion in a kind of auratic theatre. Ascarelli, “La danza,” 64. 132 Braegger notes the connection to the “Address” as well and traces this back to Lafcadio Hearn’s 1896 Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, which Hofmannsthal had read in 1901. Later, he wrote the introduction to the German translation. Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 118–21. See also Freny Mistry, “On the Notion of ‘Präexistenz’ in Hofmannsthal.” 133 “C’est à cette profondeur que nous ferait trembler la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas.” Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 82; “Violence et métaphysique,” 122. 134 “L’œuvre ne réussit pas – est mauvaise – lorsque elle n’a pas cette ­aspiration à la vie qui a emu Pygmalion. Mais ce n’est qu’une aspiration. L’artiste a donné à la statue une vie sans vie. Une vie dérisoire qui n’est pas maitresse d’elle-même, une caricature de vie. Une présence qui ne se ­recouvre pas elle-même et qui se déborde de tous côtés, qui ne tient pas en mains les fils de la marionnette qu’elle est.” Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 138; “La réalité et son ombre,” 182. 135 “Ne parlez pas, ne réfléchissez pas, admirez en silence et en paix – tels sont les conseils de la sagesse satisfaite devant le beau … qui ont des bouches, mais qui ne parlent plus.” Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 141. “La réalité et son ombre,” 787. 136 “L’infini se présente comme visage dans la résistance éthique qui paralyse mes pouvoirs et se lève dure et absolue du fond des yeux sans défense dans sa nudité et sa misère … Parler à moi c’est surmonter à tout moment, ce qu’il y a de nécessairement plastique dans la manifestation. Se manifester comme visage, c’est s’imposer par-delà la forme, manifestée et purement phénoménale … Dans le Désir se confondent les mouvements qui vont vers la Hauteur et l’Humilité de l’Autrui.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 200–1; Totalité et Infini, 174. 137 “Zugleich wußte ich: ich sehe dies nicht zum erstenmal.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 138 Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 193; Breier, “Zwischen Gewesenem und Gegenwärtigem,” 15.

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139 For the importance of the face and physiognomy in Hofmannsthal’s texts (especially as a reception of the work of Rudolf Kassner and Georg Simmel), see Dangel-Pelloquin’s article, “Ah, das Gesicht!” While DangelPelloquin’s study focuses on the faces of people, “Moments in Greece” demonstrates that Hofmannsthal’s interest in physiognomy extends to the inanimate (memories, landscapes, and art). 140 Pater, The Renaissance, 67, 79. 141 “in irgendwelcher Welt bin ich vor diesen gestanden, habe ich mit diesen irgendwelche Gemeinschaft gepflogen und seitdem habe alles in mir auf einen solchen Schrecken gewartet, und so furchtbar mußte ich mich in mir berühren, um wieder zu werden, der ich war.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 142 “In diesem Augenblick geschah mir etwas”; “es kam nicht von außen, sondern irgendwoher”; “in irgendwelcher Welt”; “irgendwelche Gemeinschaft.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97–8; “Augenblicke,” 195. Emphasis mine. 143 For extended discussions of Hofmannsthal’s use of the term “präexistenz,” see Freny Mistry’s “On the Notion of ‘Präexistenz’” and Walter Jens’s chapter on Hofmannsthal’s Ad me ipsum in Hofmannsthal und die Griechen. 144 “Irgendwo geschah eine Feierlichkeit, eine Schlacht, eine glorreiche Opferung: das bedeutete dieser Tumult in der Luft, das Weiter- und Engerwerden des Raumes – das in mir dieser unsagbare Aufschwung, diese überschwellende Geselligkeit, wechselnd mit diesem rätselhaften Erbangen und Verzagen: denn ich bin der Priester der die Zeremonie vollziehen wird – ich vielleicht auch das Opfer, das dargebracht wird: das alles drängt zur Entscheidung, es endet mit dem Überschreiten einer Schwelle, mit einem Gelandetsein.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 145 Claudia Bamberg notes that both the third “Augenblick” and Rilke’s poem “Wendung” (“Turn”), written in June of 1914, treat in similar ­fashion the question of “Schauen” (seeing). I would add here another point of ­commonality – that of sacrifice (Opfer). Printed above Rilke’s poem and below the title is a quote attributed to Rudolf Kassner: “Der Weg von der Innigkeit zur Größe geht durch das Opfer” (The way from interiority to greatness leads through sacrifice). Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, 2:82. 146 “Dichter und Priester waren im Anfang eins.” Novalis, Blüthenstaub, 441. 147 “Von jeher und zu allen Zeiten sind die Empfindungen, Gemütsbewegungen und Leidenschaften der Menschen auf ihre Religionsbegriffe gepfropfet, ein Mensch ohne alle Religion hat gar keine Empfindung (weh ihm!), ein Mensch mit schiefer Religion schiefe

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Empfindungen und ein Dichter, der die Religion seines Volks nicht ­gegründet hat, ist weniger als ein Meßmusikant.” Lenz, “Remarks,” 72; “Anmerkungen,” 35. 148 “Da verlischt schon dies in ihre versteinernden Gesichter hinein … nichts bleibt zurück, als eine totbehauchte Verzagtheit. Statuen sind um mich, fünf, jetzt erst wird mir ihre Zahl bewußt, fremd stehen sie vor mir, schwer und steinern, mit schiefgestellten Augen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195 149 Cf. Charles Baudelaire’s preface to the works of Edgar Allan Poe: “This primitive, irresistible force is the natural perversity that causes man to be simultaneously homicidal and suicidal, murderer and executioner, ­constantly” (Cette force primitive, irrésistible, est la Perversité naturelle, qui fait que l’homme est sans cesse et à la fois homicide et suicide, assassin et bourreau). Baudelaire, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe,” v. 150 “Stehe ich nicht vor dem Fremdesten vom Fremden? Blickt nicht hier aus fünf jungfräulichen Mienen das ewige Grausen des Chaos?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 151 “Aber, mein Gott, wie wirklich sind sie. Sie haben eine atemberaubende sinnliche Gegenwart.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 152 “Ihre Feierlichkeit hat nichts von Masken: das Gesicht empfängt seinen Sinn durch den Körper.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 153 Pater, The Renaissance, 128, 129. 154 “Sie nehmen an Dingen teil, die über jede gemeine Ahnung sind”; “Wie schön sie sind!” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 155 In older versions of the text, the narrator contemplates gazing upon the urns and goblets of the past which suggest but also subdue the power of eternity, resulting in the calm enjoyment of beauty without the disturbing, sublime element: “The meander with which they are ornamented brings the motif of the infinite before the soul, but so subjugated that (1) our ­disquiet is not awakened (2) / it does not threaten (1) us (2) our interiority / . In the delight of the eye (1) the senses satisfy themselves (2) the senses are contented (3) the senses content themselves / and their striving towards infinity (1) lulled to sleep (2) drops off. (Der Mäander, mit dem sie verziert sind, bringt das Motiv der Unendlichkeit vor die Seele, aber so unterjocht, dass (1) unsere Unruhe nicht erwacht (2) / es (1) uns (2) unser Inneres / nicht gefährdet / . In der Ergötzung des Auges (1) befriedigen sich die Sinne (2) sind die Sinne befriedigt (3) geben sich die Sinne zufrieden / und ihr Streben nach Unendlichkeit (1) eingeschläfert (2) schläft ein /). Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 674.

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156 “Ihre Körper sind mir überzeugender als mein eigener … Ich habe nie zuvor etwas gesehen, wie diese Masse und diese Oberfläche. War nicht für ein Wimperzucken das Universum mir offen?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 157 “Indem man von der Wirklichkeit irgend etwas Zusammenfassendes ­aussagt, nähert man sie schon dem Traum, vielmehr der Poesie.” Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, 45. 158 “es ist das Geheimnis der Unendlichkeit in diesen Gewändern.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 159 The idea of formal adequacy is developed in Hegel’s introduction to Aesthetics. 160 “Wer diesen wahrhaft gewachsen wäre, müßte sich anders ihnen nahen als durchs Auge, ehrfürchtiger zugleich und kühner. Und doch müßte ihm sein Auge dies gebieten, schauend, schauend, dann aber sinkend, brechend wie beim Überwältigten.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 161 “Mein Auge sank nicht, doch sank eine Gestalt über die Knie der einen Priesterin hin, jemand ruhte mit der Stirn auf dem Fuß einer Statue. Ich wußte nicht, ob ich dies dachte, oder ob dies geschah.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 162 “Willst du sicher gehn, so mußt du wissen / Schlangengift und Theriak zu sondern.” Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 22. 163 “Schlangengift und Theriak muß / Ihm das eine wie das andre scheinen.” Ibid. 164 “da doch Schönheit erst entsteht, wo eine Kraft und eine Bescheidenheit ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 235. 165 “Wenn das Unerreichliche sich speist aus meinem Innern und das Ewige aus mir seine Ewigkeit sich aufbaut, was wäre dann noch zwischen der Gottheit und mir?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 100; “Augenblicke,” 196. 166 Breier, “Zwischen Gewesenem und Gegenwärtigem,”16; Schings, “Hier oder nirgends,” 388. 167 “Vielleicht erfassen wir eine ganze Gestalt, die in Marmor vor uns aufsteht, noch immer mit einem romantischen Blick. Vielleicht leihen wir ihr zuviel von unserer Bewußtheit, von unserer ‘Seele.’” Holdt, Griechenland, viii. See also Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 110. 168 “Die Forderung, welche die Welt des Schönen an uns stellt, jenes dämonische Aus-uns-heraus-locken ganzer Welten des Fühlens, diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos gross ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns, die übereinander gethürmten Schichten der

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aufgestapelten überindividuellen Erinnerung.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 169 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 170 Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time, 119; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 153. 171 “Man muss das Tiefe verstecken. Wo? An der Oberfläche!” Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, 47; “From the Book of Friends,” 148. 172 “Es wäre ja undenkbar, sich an ihre Oberfläche anschmiegen zu wollen. Diese Oberfläche ist ja gar nicht da – sie entsteht durch ein beständiges Kommen aus unerschöpflichen Tiefen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 173 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis from 11 May 1908: “This journey has given me for the first time in my life that feeling of really travelling. The foreign, the absolutely foreign, foreign light, ­foreign air, as when one strays from the path, foreign people – I am very happy to have finally become acquainted with this. This is the only spot in Europe where one still can.” (Diese Reise gibt mir zum erstenmal im Leben das Gefühl, wirklich zu reisen. Das Fremde, das absolut Fremde, fremdes Licht, fremde Luft, sowie man von der Straße abweicht, fremde Menschen – ich bin sehr glücklich, dies endlich einmal kennengelerntzuhaben. Dies ist wohl der einzige Fleck in Europa, wo man es noch kann). Hofmannsthal, Briefe 1900–1909, 321–2. 174 “Sie sind da und sind unerreichlich. So bin auch ich. Dadurch kommunizieren wir.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 175 “Auf die Gegenständlichkeit geprüft, ist die Gestalt gar nicht ‘da’; aber was wäre gegenwärtiger als sie? Und wirkliche Beziehung ist es, darin ich zu ihr stehe: sie wirkt an mir wie ich an ihr wirke.” Buber, I and Thou, 61; Ich und Du, 17. 176 “Das Plastische entsteht nicht durch Schauen, sondern durch Identifikation.” Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, 73.

C hapt e r F o u r    1 “ihre eigene kritische Instanz.” Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time, 154; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 154.    2 Ellen Ritter has explored this most comprehensively. See Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 270–82.   3 See Konrad, Studien, 148–9.

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  4 See Mann, Die Opern, 153.   5 See Werbeck, Richard Strauss-Handbuch, 211.  6 Mann, Die Opern, 169.   7 “es stecken sechs Jahre Arbeit in dem Buch, alle guten reinen Momente, die ich diesen finsteren Jahren entreißen konnte, und eine unsägliche Bemühung.” Quoted in Hofmannsthal, KA 28: Erzählungen I, 424.   8 Harry Seelig succinctly argues for the aesthetic improvements achieved in the prose version of the story: “by boldly going beyond the operatic substance of the original, Hofmannsthal succeeds not only in finding for the original a more satisfying aesthetic-ethical shadow, but also in jumping over his own.” Seelig, “Musical Substance,” 70.   9 See Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 181; and Schwarz, Orient – Okzident, 175–88. Ellen Ritter further notes the contrastive fates of the merchant’s son in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Ritter, “Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” 77. 10 “Das Leben, so meint es Hofmannsthal, läßt seiner nicht spotten. Verstoßen – wird es böse und rachsüchtig.” Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 175. 11 Ibid., 181. 12 The flawed narrative of Hofmannsthal’s sudden interest in social concerns persists in Hofmannsthal studies. See, for instance, the 2014 dissertation of Teona Djibouti. As I have shown, ethical and social concerns were ­central to Hofmannsthal’s writing from the beginning. 13 “Nach einem unglücklichen Krieg müssen Komödien geschrieben werden.” Hofmannsthal, “Die Ironie der Dinge,” 138. 14 “But true comedy places individuals into an intricately knotted relationship to the world, it puts everything in relation to everything else, and thus it sets everything in a relationship of irony. In just such a manner proceeds the war, which affects all of us, and from which we still have not extirpated ourselves, and perhaps will not for another twenty years.” (Aber die wirkliche Komödie setzt ihre Individuen in ein tausendfach verhäkeltes Verhältnis zur Welt, sie setzt alles in ein Verhältnis zu allem und damit alles in ein Verhältnis der Ironie. Ganz so verfährt der Krieg, der über uns alle gekommen ist, und dem wir bis heute nicht entkommen sind, ja ­vielleicht noch zwanzig Jahre nicht entkommen werden). Ibid.   15 “gewinnt einen klaren Geist und kommt hinter die Dinge, beinahe wie ein Gestorbener.” Ibid., 140. 16 The trope is a familiar one in fairy tales. Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story) by Adalbert von

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Chamisso (1781–1838) is probably the most familiar example of a ­character selling his shadow for personal gain. 17 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 109. 18 Cf. Pannwitz’s description of the “Reich der Zeugung” (The Realm of Conception) – the so-called “underworld” of the unborn children: “The closest kinship is with Plato’s world of ideas. Except that this is not actually a transcendence, but rather it is contained by the earthly realm. But it is indeed also a μέσον, a μεταξὺ, a unique in-between-world. What is tremendous and novel about it, is that this in-between-world, which is ­presented with such ineffable delicacy, inwardness, and sanctity, as only the world of the dead, the underworld, is presented, is in fact the world of life, the world of the original being-becoming, of pre-childhood and eternal youth, indeed, that it is not the counterworld, but the world itself, the world of conception.” (Die nächste Verwandtschaft ist die mit Platons Welt der Ideen. Nur, daß es keine eigentliche Transzendenz ist, sondern ganz dem Erdenreiche einbegriffen. Wohl aber ist’s auch ein μέσον, eine μεταξὺ, eine eigentümliche Zwischen Welt. Das Ungeheure und Neugeartete ist, daß diese Zwischenwelt, die mit solcher namenlosen Zartheit, Innigkeit, Heiligkeit, wie sonst nur die Welt des Todes, die Unterwelt dargestellt ist, die Welt des Lebens, des Urseiend-Werdenden, der Vorkindheit und ewigen Jugend ist, ja daß sie nicht die Gegenwelt, sondern die Welt selbst der Zeugung ist). Pannwitz, “Hofmannsthals Erzählung,” 377. 19 Kobel rightly argues that the Emperor prevents the Empress from growing into her adult role, but fails to see that Empress is equally complicit in the Emperor’s failure to grow into his; as much as he prevents her from becoming a mother, she has not made him a father. She wishes to hold on to the “Flitterwochen” just as much as the Emperor does, as becomes evident in her nostalgic rehearsal of the moment of their meeting. See Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 272. 20 Hofmannsthal used the metaphor in a letter to Strauss from 2 January 1914: “And I believe too that your path for composing these three acts will be exactly like Dante’s: out of hell, through purgatory, to heaven in the third scene.” (Ich glaube auch, daß Ihr Weg bei der Komposition ­dieser drei Akte genau der des Dante sein wird: aus der Hölle durchs Fegefeuer in den Himmel des dritten Aufzuges). Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, 256. 21 “Weh spricht: Vergeh! Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit – , will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!” The verse is found in the “Mitternachtslied” in Thus Spake Zarathustra and features in Gustav Mahler’s third symphony, which ­premiered in 1902.

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22 “Der Kaiser trat leichten Fußes über den Leib der Amme hinweg, die ihr Gesicht an den Boden drückte. Er achtete ihrer so wenig, als läge hier nur ein Stück Teppich.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 110. 23 The Emperor’s explicit failure of visual and ethical recognition distinguishes him from the merchant’s son of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” 24 Schwarz, Orient – Okzident, 184. Helen Frink concludes that the “hunt almost always symbolizes a sexual relationship which is not a fulfilling one. The hunt depicts the initial encounter between the two partners, or shows that their acquaintance has not produced true intimacy and union.” Frink, “The Hunting Motif,” 691. We might extend this argument: In Die Frau ohne Schatten, both hunter (the Emperor) and hunted (the “Feentochter” before she becomes the Empress) are caught up in their active and passive roles respectively, but are both ultimately hindered by this repetition. Only later will they switch roles, such that the Emperor is rendered passive and the Empress becomes the agent. 25 “die Geschichte jener Jagd und ersten Liebesstunde kannte sie [die Amme] genau genug: dies alles war wie mit einem glühenden Griffel ihrer Seele eingebrannt.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 113. 26 “Warum sind Menschengesichter so wild und häßlich, und Tiergesichter so redlich und schön?” Ibid. 27 “Gesicht – Hieroglyphe. Es giebt keine hässlichen Menschen.” Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch und die Geschichte,” 56. 28 Pater, The Renaissance, 6. 29 “Ich will die Frist nicht wissen, vielleicht läuft sie in dieser Stunde ab, und ich könnte erstarren, wenn ich es wüßte … Hier und nicht anderswo wird der Weg angetreten, heute und nicht morgen, in dieser Stunde und nicht bis die Sonne höher steht … mir brennen die Sekunden auf dem Herzen.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 115–16. 30 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 147. 31 “trug große Flecken von dunkler Farbe dahin, die sich aus dem Viertel der Färber, das oberhalb der Brücke lag.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 118. 32 “C’est le Styx de ce nouvel enfer.” De Tocqueville, Journeys, 107; “Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande,” 503. 33 “Das Fürchterliche in den Gesichtern der Menschen traf sie aus solcher Nähe, wie noch nie. Mutig wollte sie hart an ihnen vorbei, ihre Füße ­vermochten es, ihr Herz nicht. Jede Hand, die sich regte, schien nach ihr zu greifen, gräßlich waren so viele Münder in solcher Nähe. Die

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e­ rbarmungslosen, gierigen, und dabei, wie ihr vorkam, angstvollen Blicke aus so vielen Gesichtern vereinigten sich in ihrer Brust.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 118. 34 “Sie sind wie die Schatten, die den Odysseus umlagern und alle vom Blut trinken wollen, lautlos, gierig aneinander gedrängt, ihren dunklen hohlen Blick auf den Lebenden geheftet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 46; “Ansprache,” 7. 35 “Sie fassen uns dämonisch an: und jedes ist eine Welt, und alle sind aus einer Welt, die uns durch sie anrührt und anschauert bis ins Mark.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8–9. 36 “[Die Kaiserin] ging fast unter in einem Knäuel von Menschen, auf ­einmal war sie vor den Hufen eines großen Maulesels, der wissende, sanfte Blick des Tieres traf sie, sie erholte sich an ihm. Der Reiter schlug den Esel, der zögerte, die zitternde Frau nicht zu treten, mit dem Stock über dem Kopf. – Ist es an dem, daß ich mich in ein Tier verwandeln und mich den grausamen Händen der Menschen preisgeben muß? ging es durch ihre Seele und sie schauderte, dabei vergaß sie sich einen Augenblick und fand sich, vom Strome geschoben, am Ende der Brücke, sie wußte nicht wie.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 118–19. 37 See Hofmannsthal’s note from 15 August 1913 for Andreas: “True poetry is the arcanum that unites us with life, severs us from life. The severance – only through severance do we begin to live … but just as severance is imperative, so too is the union, the aurea catena homeri.” (Die wahre Poesie ist das arcanum, das uns mit dem Leben vereinigt, uns vom Leben absondert. Das Sondern – durch Sondern erst leben wir … aber wie das Sondern, so ist auch das Vereinigen unerlässlich, die aurea catena Homeri). Hofmannsthal, KA 30: Andreas, 107. 38 This also bears a strong resemblance to the aforementioned epigraph in “Moments in Greece”: εἰδὶ καὶ κυνῶν ἐρινύες (there is vengeance in heaven for an injured dog). 39 Referring to Freud’s The Uncanny, John Zilcosky notes: “No European reader would, in 1919, have related these disjointed, severed, shaking bodies solely with fairy tales.” Zilcosky, Language of Trauma, 153. Christina Fossaluzza makes the argument that the story had great contemporary relevance and offered subtle reflections on the war and the social mission of art in that era of transition. Fossaluzza, “Zwischen Leben und Geist,” 106–7. 40 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 120. 41 She is also later described as behaving like an “unwilliges Kind” – a stubborn child. Ibid., 123.

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42 “Mutter, Mutter, laß uns nach Haus / Die Tür ist verriegelt: wir finden nicht hinein.” Ibid., 125. 43 “Jeder hat am Dichterischen teil, der Dichter an Jedem. Das Inkognito ist seine Lebensform. Hofmannsthal geleitet den Dichter herab von seinem Elfenbeinturm in das Gewimmel der Märkte und der Gassen … Wie der heilige Alexius der Legende liegt er im Bettlergewand in seinem Hause, dem Hause der Zeit, unter der Stiege, dort wo er alle sieht und alle hört … Ein Heiliger Sebastian steht er unter dem unerbittlichen Gesetz: keinen Ding den Eintritt in seine Seele zu wehren.” Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 8–9. 44 Fickert and Celms, “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” 37. 45 “Der Efrit ergriff mit beiden Händen die Handgelenke der Färberin und zwang sie, zu ihm aufzusehen; ihre Blicke konnten sich des Eindringens der seinigen nicht erwehren … das beklemmende Gefühl der Wirklichkeit hielt alles zusammen.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 134. 46 “Durch seine zwei ungleichen Augen grinsten die Abgründe des nie zu Betretenden herein, ein Grausen faßte sie, nicht für sich selber, sondern in der Seele der Färberin, daß diese in den Armen eines solchen Dämons liegen und ihren Atem mit dem seinen vermischen sollte … Ein ungeheures Gefühl durchfuhr die Kaiserin vom Wirbel bis zur Sohle. Sie wußte kaum mehr, wer sie war, nicht, wie sie hierhergekommen war.” Ibid., 136. 47 “Er bemerkte es nicht, daß sie an den Bissen würgte und unter seinen Liebkosungen starr blieb wie eine Tote.” Ibid., 137. 48 “Bereich seines ersten Abenteuers mit der geliebten Frau.” Ibid., 144. 49 This is a variation on one of the central questions in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”: Can the intensity of the first aesthetic encounter be repeated? 50 The quote is from Horace’s Ars poetica: “As is painting, so is poetry: some pieces will strike you more if you stand near, and some, if you are at a greater distance: one loves the dark; another, which is not afraid of the critic’s subtle judgment, chooses to be seen in the light; the one has pleased once the other will give pleasure if ten times repeated.” The quote can be read in context at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hor.% 20Ars%20381. Kierkegaard’s relation of love to aesthetics is a useful model for understanding the relationship between the Emperor and the Empress. 51 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 465. 52 “Was fruchtet dies, wir werden nicht geboren!” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 144. 53 “Er drückte die Hände über die Brust zusammen und verneigte sich … Der Knabe neigte sich vor dem Kaiser bis gegen die Erde und sprach kein

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Wort. Aber er wies mit einer ehrfurchtsvollen Gebärde auf den einen Sitz am oberen Ende der Tafel.” Ibid., 145. 54 “Es dauerte einen Augenblick, bis sich der Kaiser besann, daß es in jedem Fall an ihm wäre, die ersten Worte zu sprechen.” Ibid., 145. 55 “Sie ging langsam und mit Anstrengung, aber ganz aufrecht … von der Hüfte bis an die Schläfe reichten ihr die dunklen Göttinnen und lehnten mit ihrer toten Schwere an den lebendigen zarten Schultern … Eigentlich aber schien sie nicht an den Göttinnen schwer und feierlich zu tragen, sondern an der Schönheit ihres eigenen Hauptes mit dem schweren Schmuck aus lebendigem, dunklem Gold. ” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44–5; “Das Märchen,” 20. 56 “sie glitt mehr als sie ging auf den Kaiser zu … als ob sie mit geschlossenen Füßen auf ihn zugehe.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 145; 157. Mathias Mayer traces the image, which occurs in a number of Hofmannsthal’s texts. In the context of Die Frau ohne Schatten, it is used to depict the step into life (“Schritt ins Leben”) as well as the step into death (“Schritt in den Tod”). The Emperor, once petrified, has his feet in a sense bound together like those of the unborn children, but he does not move. Punning on the situation, Mayer notes that it is the Empress who takes the courageous step of sacrifice. Mayer, “Geschlossene Füße,” 59. See also Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 288–94. For Hofmannsthal, the challenges faced by ethical love have a counterpart in aesthetics, which he gestures towards in Ad me ipsum: “The danger, that the ego might unlearn love: in aesthetic terms, that the forms become rigid” (Gefahr, daß das Ego die Liebe verlerne: ästhetisch gesprochen, daß die Forme erstarren). Hofmannsthal, Ad me ipsum, 240–1. 57 “vergib, sagte sie, daß ich dein Kommen überhören konnte, vertieft in die Arbeit an diesem Teppich. Sollte er aber würdig werden bei der Mahlzeit, mit der wir dich vorlieb zu nehmen bitten, unter dir zu liegen, so durfte der Faden des Endes nicht abgerissen, sondern er mußte zurückgeschlungen werden in den Faden des Anfanges. – Sie brachte alles mit niedergeschlagenen Augen vor; der schöne Ton ihrer Stimme drückte sich dem Kaiser so tief ein, daß er den Sinn der Worte fast überhörte.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 145. 58 “Was für ein sonderbarer Traum ist ein früher Gobelin! Welche ganz gebundene, besondere Welt! … Es lebt für uns, es lebt durch uns. Es ist etwas in uns, das diesem Weltbild antwortet.” Hofmannthal, “Address,” 52; “Ansprache,” 9. 59 “Das Gewebe war unter seinen Füßen, Blumen gingen in Tiere über, aus den schönen Ranken wanden sich Jäger und Liebende los, Falken

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schwebten darüber hin wie fliegende Blumen, alles hielt einander umschlungen, eines war ins andere verrankt, das Ganze war maßlos ­herrlich, eine Kühle stieg aber davon auf, die ihm bis an die Hüften ging. – Wie hast du es zustande gebracht, dies zu entwerfen in solcher Vollkommenheit?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 147. 60 See the explanatory notes to Die Frau ohne Schatten in Hofmannsthal, KA  28: Erzählungen I, 431–2. The Pythagorean Theophron, a character in Wieland’s philosophical verse narrative Musarion, names beauty as the subject of love and proceeds to describe “the great art” as an act of ­stripping away the base material from the beautiful: “Die große Kunst”: “vom Stoff es [das Schöne] abzuschneiden.” Wieland, Musarion, 34. 61 “Ich scheide das Schöne vom Stoff, wenn ich webe; das was den Sinnen ein Köder ist und sie zur Torheit und zum Verderben klirrt, lass ich weg … Beim Weben verfahre ich, sagte sie, wie dein gesegnetes Auge beim Schauen. Ich sehe nicht was ist, und nicht was nicht ist, sondern was immer ist, und danach webe ich.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 147. 62 “Chaos des Nichtlebens.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 63 As pointed out by Hans-Günther Schwarz, Orient – Okzident, 186. 64 “Ist das Haus nahe oder fern? … Ist das das Ende einer Reise oder der Anfang?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 148. 65 “falsch: jedes Kunstwerk als definitiv anzusehen; immer zu sagen: er hat das aufgegeben, er wendet sich jenem zu, er sieht nur das; er meint also das und das; / falsch das definitive / falsch: alle billigen Antithesen wie ‘Kunst’ und ‘Leben’, Aesthet und Gegentheil von Aesthet … / richtig: die Production als eine dunkle Angelegenheit zwischen dem Einzelnen und dem verworrenen Dasein anzusehen.” Hofmannsthal, “Diese Rundschau,” 234. 66 “New seeing” occupied writers and visual artists from Cézanne in ­painting to Rilke and Hofmannsthal in literature and August Endell in architecture. Ursula Renner summarizes the concept of “Neues Sehen” as a view that wants to see new things, as in the sciences, but above all it is about seeing things anew. Renner, Die Zauberschrift, 13. 67 “Deine Fragen sind ungereimt, o großer Kaiser, wie eines kleinen Kindes. Denn sage uns dieses: wenn du zu Tische gehst, geschieht es, um in der Sättigung zu verharren oder dich wieder von ihr zu lösen? Und wenn du auf Reisen gehst, ist es, um fortzubleiben oder um zurückzukehren?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 148. See also Hofmannsthal, Der Schwierige, 129.

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68 “Ich bin gewohnt, zu erreichen, was ich begehre!” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 149. 69 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 151. 70 Hearn, In Ghostly Japan, 182. 71 “Nur ein Gran von Großmut!” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 156–7. 72 “Er haßte die Botschaft und die Botin und fühlte sein Herz völlig Stein geworden in sich. Ohne ein Wort suchte seine Hand nach dem Dolch in ­seinem Gürtel, um ihn nach dieser da zu werfen, da er ihn nicht nach seiner Frau werfen konnte; als die Finger der Rechten ihn nicht zu fühlen vermochten, wollten ihr die der Linken zur Hilfe kommen, aber beide Hände gehorchten nicht mehr, schon lagen die steinernen Arme starr an den versteinten Hüften und über die versteinten Lippen kam kein Laut.” Ibid., 157. 73 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note, where he has the children ask the Emperor: “do you not surrender yourself to the hunt, and when you see a beautiful woman, do you not desire to penetrate her middle like a murderous arrow?” (gibst du dich beim Jagen nicht hin und wenn du ein schönes Weib siehst, willst du nicht mitten in sie hinein wie der mörderische Pfeil?) Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 333. 74 “walkte er den Schmutz und das Blut aus dem Gewand eines Schlachters … Der Färber hatte das ausgetretene Gewand auf reine Bretter ausgebreitet und strich es aufs neue mit weißem Ton an. Die Kaiserin half ihm dabei. Das blutig gefärbte Abwasser rann aus dem umgestürzten Schaff in die Gosse. Die beiden arbeiteten eifrig und sahen nicht herüber.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 159–60. 75 One prominent production of the opera eliminates this element from Barak’s character entirely. In Claus Guth’s 2012 production for La Scala and Covent Garden, Barak is robbed of his defining work and made instead a tanner in order to highlight the misogynist undertones of the story. This alteration severely changes the character and the audience’s perception of the relationships portrayed in the opera. Losing his artist’s/ alchemist’s capacity for transforming matter (dying fabrics, infusing them with brilliance and new life), Barak is portrayed “stripping and gutting a gazelle that, in the person of the Empress, represents the feminine ‘other’ of which he remains oblivious.” Quantrill, “An elegantly staged subversion,” s.p. The ‘subversion’ here is forced and results from a depiction of the character that goes against both prose text and libretto. It also jars with the Empress’s positive assessment of Barak. 76 “Die Ceremonien die er macht … die Wege und die Vereinigungen, die seine gesegneten Hände bewirken, die Herrlichkeit der Farben und

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ihre Bescheidenheit, geleitet die Zauberkraft seines Gemütes: die Liebe zu seinen Werkzeugen: die Gelassenheit mit der er arbeitet und die fromme Sorgfalt auf ein Ziel: die Ehrfurcht vor sich selber und die Weg­ bereitung für ein Höheres … so künstlich arbeitet er. Wie hast Du mir nicht gesagt, dass die Menschen so gut sind?” Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 364. 77 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Strauss form 13 June 1913: “I dare not go beyond a certain boundary in concentrating the material, otherwise I’ll impoverish it, the characters will lose their appeal (which lies in their ­psychologically broken contours), they will become too schematic and the whole thing will be trivially operatic.” (Ich darf im Konzentrieren nicht über eine gewisse Grenze herausgehen, sonst verarme ich den Stoff, die Figuren verlieren ihren Reiz (der im psychologischen gebrochenen Konturen liegt), sie werden schematisch und das ganze trivial-opernhaft). Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, 233. 78 “Ehemals waren alle Kunstwerke an der grossen Feststrasse der Menschheit aufgestellt, als Erinnerungszeichen und Denkmäler hoher und seliger Momente. Jetzt will man mit den Kunstwerken die armen Erschöpften und Kranken von der grossen Leidensstrasse der Menschheit bei Seite locken, für ein lüsternes Augenblickchen; man bietet ihnen einen kleinen Rausch und Wahnsinn an.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 144; Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 122. 79 “Lohn? … Womit hätte der Elefant sich Lohn verdient?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 162. 80 Ibid., 159. 81 “Sie war schön in diesem Augenblick und von ihrem jungen Blut ­durchströmt, daß sie glühte, und die Alte betrachtete sie mit Lust. – Nein, nein, rief sie plötzlich mit leidenschaftlichem Entzücken, er ist schön, achte doch nicht auf mich, du Närrin, er ist schön wie der Morgenstern, und seine Schönheit, das ist das Widerhaken an der Angel.” Ibid., 161. 82 At the beginning of the next chapter, the Dyer’s Wife cries: “O my mother … what powers you assumed I had when you gave me to him, whom you brought to me, to love forever! And why did you not give me those same powers along with him?” (O meine Mutter … welche Kräfte hast du mir zugemutet, da du mir auferlegtest, den, welchen du mir ­zugeführt hast, auf immer lieben zu können! und wo hättest du ­dergleichen Kräfte mir mitgegeben?) Ibid., 167. 83 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, xviii. 84 “ihr Gesicht in Schmerz und Tränen schwamm, wie das einer sterblichen Frau.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 163.

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85 “der vertraute Laut ihrer Stimmen schien ihm an die Seele zu dringen.” Ibid., 165. 86 Ibid., 166. 87 The term was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to refer to “the epitome of all that makes humans morally and aesthetically superior to animals.” Curran, “Die schöne Seele,” 77. 88 “Schmutzig ist ein kleines Kind, und sie müssen es dem Haushund ­darreichen, um es rein zu lecken; und dennoch ist es schön wie die ­aufgehende Sonne; und solche sind wir zu opfern gesonnen. – Es war ein ganz seltsamer, fast singender Ton, in dem sie es sagte.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 168. 89 Hofmannsthal, “The Poet and Our Time,” 41; “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 137. 90 “ein … alte[s] Gesetz,” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 168. 91 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 168–9. 92 “Fleißige Kinder”; “reinliche kleine Hände,” Ibid., 170. 93 “Wir nehmen die Farben aus den Blumen heraus und heften sie auf die Tücher, so auch aus den Würmern, und von den Brüsten der Vögel dort, wo ihre Federn leuchtend und unbedeckt sind.” Ibid. This evokes the West-Östlicher Divan poem “An Suleika.” Suleika’s perfume exists because of the sacrifice of thousands of roses. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 61. 94 In chapter 4 of the story, the unborn child speaks about how she weaves; in chapter 5, Barak works with the Empress, cleaning and dyeing fabrics. 95 Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, chapter 3. 96 “es ist die Zartheit der Wangen auf immer, und die unverwelklichen Brüste, vor denen sie zittern, die da kommen sollen, mich zu begrüßen.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 171. 97 “Ihre Lippen bewegten sich, und sie murmelte die Worte, aber es war, als wüßte sie es nicht; sie hob die Hand mit den Fischen über die Schulter und warf, aber wie im Schlaf; sie tat das Bedungene, aber so als täte sie es nicht: ihre Augen hefteten auf dem Färber und ihre Lippen verzogen sich wie eines Kindes, das schreien will … Sie tat ein paar unschlüssige Schritte, nirgend sah sie Hilfe und sie preßte den Mund zusammen und blieb stehen.” Ibid., 172. 98 “einer Hündin Geschick.” Ibid., 173. 99 “sie hatte das Gesicht an den Boden gedrückt, mit unsäglicher Demut reckte sie den Arm aus, ohne ihr Gesicht zu heben, bis sie mit der Hand die Füße des Färbers erreichte, und umfaßte sie. Der Färber schien sie nicht zu beachten … Jetzt schob sich die Liegende auf den Händen näher

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heran und ihr Kinn drückte sich auf die Füße des Färbers. Ihre Lippen murmelte ein Wort, das niemand hörte. Dann lag sie in dieser Stelle wie tot.” Ibid., 174. “eine wunderbare und dabei unschuldige Schönheit … die ungeheure Angst verzerrte sie nicht, sondern verklärte sie.” Ibid. Cf. the description in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” of ancient warriors. There, they are admired for their “steadfastness in the face of death” (“Todesfestigkeit,” in German). Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 78; “Die Briefe,” 162. Self-sacrifice and acceptance of mortality is by no means restricted to the female sex. Sigismund in Der Turm (The Tower), for instance, bears a striking resemblance to the Empress. Equally, the theme of sacrifice pervades and elevates even the mundane – as when the Marschallin in the opera Rosenkavalier gives up her dalliance with the young Octavian so that he might grow and find love. “in der Größe seines gewaltigen Leibes glich er einem Kinde, dem das Weinen nahe ist.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 174. Cf. Kobel, who writes of Barak’s encounter with his wife in a Heideggerian vein: Barak sees her for the first time not as something ­present-at-hand (“das Vorhandene”) or ready-to-hand (“das Zuhandene”), but rather in her ungraspable being. Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 277. “Mich dünkt, es ist nicht die Umarmung, sondern die Begegnung die eigentliche entscheidende erotische Pantomime. Es ist in keinem Augenblick das Sinnliche so seelenhaft, das Seelenhafte so sinnlich, als in der Begegnung … Hier ist ein Zueinandertrachten noch ohne Begierde, eine naive Beimischung von Zutraulichkeit und Scheu. Hier ist das Rehhafte, das Vogelhafte, das Tierischdumpfe, das Engelsreine, das Göttliche. Ein Gruß ist etwas Grenzenloses.” Hofmannsthal, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 155, 160. “Umarmung ohne Umschlingungen und einem Kusse, indem die Lippen sich weder berührten noch trennten.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 175. Hofmannsthal’s fictional dialogue “The Conversation about Poems” ­portrays the encounter this way: “Like the rainbow, unsubstantial, our soul spans across the inexorable plunge of existence … Enough, something returns. And there is an encounter within us. We are nothing more than a dovecote.” (Wie der wesenlose Regenbogen spannt sich unsere Seele über den unaufhaltsamen Sturz des Daseins … Genug, etwas kehrt wieder. Und etwas begegnet sich in uns mit anderem. Wir sind nicht mehr als ein Taubenschlag). Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 76.

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107 “Allein! Weh, ganz allein. Der Vater fort, / hinabgescheucht in seine kalten Klüfte. / Agamemnon! Agamemnon! / Wo bist du, Vater? Hast du nicht die Kraft, / dein Angesicht herauf zu mir zu schleppen? / Es ist die Stunde, unsre Stunde ist’s!” Hofmannsthal, Elektra, 117. 108 “rief … sehnlich, Vater, wo bist du? Das Wort verhallte.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 183. 109 “Sie rief gellend den Namen ihres Kindes, nichts antwortete, nicht einmal ein Widerhall.” Ibid. 110 “In seiner Unnahbarkeit fühlte sie ihn, auf ihrer Stirne leuchtete ein Abglanz von ihm.” Ibid., 184. 111 “Die Statue wurzelt im Boden, die Musik – und das abendländische Porträt ist Musik, aus Farbentönen gewebte Seele – durchdringt den ­grenzenlosen Raum. Das Freskogemälde ist mit der Wand verbunden, ­verwachsen; das Ölgemälde, als Tafelbild, ist frei von den Schranken eines Ortes. Die apollinische Formensprache offenbart ein Gewordenes, die faustische vor allem auch ein Werden.” Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 340–1. Emphasis in original. 112 “er trug ein Gewand von wunderbar blauer Farbe, nicht so, als hätte man ein weißes Gewebe in die Küpe gelegt, darin sich die Stärke des Indigo und des Waid vermischten, sondern so, als wäre die Bläue des Meeresgrundes selbst hervorgerissen und um seinen Leib gelegt worden.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 184. 113 Ibid., 170. In a later description, the allusion is even more direct: “a dress in splendid colours, as if they had been taken from the breast feathers of a bird of paradise.” ([E]in Kleid in herrlichen Farben, als wären sie von den Brustfedern eines Paradiesvogels genommen.) Ibid., 186. This also recalls Albrecht Dürer’s idea, discussed in chapter 2, that beauty is pulled out of nature. 114 “Schwarzblau, bevor die ersten Strahlen der Sonne den Himmel erhellen.” Ibid., 184. 115 Ibid., 168. 116 “von den zierlichen wie aus Wachs geformten Füßen bis zu dem dunklen wie Kupfer schimmernden Haar glich es der Färberin … auf dem grünen Grund heran wie auf Glas, mit geschlossenen Füßen, und keine Art sich zu bewegen hätte besser zu der Zartheit seiner Glieder und zu den Farben, in denen es glänzte, passen können.” Ibid. The children’s ­movement recalls the earlier description of one of the other unborn ­children before the Emperor: “as if she were moving towards him with her feet closed together” (als ob sie mit geschlossenen Füßen auf ihn zugehe). Ibid., 157.

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117 “Die Farbe schien aus der Ewigkeit her zu ihm zu kommen, so auch die Antworten, die langsam in ihm aufstiegen und zögernd den Rand seiner Lippen erreichten. – Wir bestellen nichts, wir verkünden nichts. Daß wir uns zeigen, Frau, ist alles, was uns gewährt ist.” Ibid., 185. 118 “Da und nicht da, Frau, wie es dir belieben wird! … und sein Gewand war wie Blut, das sich in Gold verwandelt; alle Bäume empfingen von ihm die Bestätigung ihres Lebens, wie vom ersten Glanz der aufgehenden Sonne.” Ibid. 119 “gleich einer Wolke am dunklen Abendhimmel … Nicht dir werden sie vorgeführt werden, Frau, sondern du wirst vorgeführt werden, und dies ist die Stunde.” Ibid. 120 “Dunkel war sein Gewand, wie der nächtliche Himmel ohne Sterne”; “Ich hab mich vergangen … Sie senkte die Augen und richtete sie gleich wieder auf ihn.” Ibid. 121 “Das muß jeder sagen, der einen Fuß vor den andern setzt. Darum gehen wir mit geschlossenen Füßen.” Ibid., 186. 122 “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Muthes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Sapere aude! Habe Muth, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.” Kant, Was ist Aufklärung, 20. 123 “ihre Ehrfurcht vor ihm, der so mit ihr sprach, war nicht geringer als die seine vor ihr.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 186. 124 “Im Augenblick ist alles, der Rat und die Tat!” Ibid. 125 “Ein Gruß ist etwas Grenzenloses … Dante datiert sein ‘Neues Leben’ von einem Gruß, der ihm zuteil geworden. Wunderbar ist der Schrei des großen Vogels, der seltsame, einsame, vorweltliche Laut im Morgengrauen von der höchsten Tanne, dem irgendwo die Henne lauscht. Dies Irgendwo, dies Unbestimmte und doch leidenschaftliche Begehrende, dies Schreien des Fremden nach der Fremden ist das Gewaltige.” Hofmannsthal, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 155, 160. 126 “Ach! kam über ihre Lippen, schamhaft und sehnsüchtig zugleich, und der klanggewordene Hauch aus ihrem eigenen Mund machte, daß sie erglühte von oben bis unten.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 188. 127 “die Säule gab, wie das Licht der Fackel sie berührte, einen schwellenden Klang, der ihr vor Süßigkeit fast das Herz spaltete.” Ibid., 189.

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128 “er schien lastend wie ein mitten in den Teich gebautes Grabmal aus Erz … unsäglich schön … aber unsäglich fremd.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 189. 129 “sie warf sich hinein in das goldene leise wogende Becken; wie ein Schwan mit gehobenen Flügeln rauschte sie auf den Geliebten zu.” Ibid. 130 The swan-maiden stories are listed in Antti Aarne’s tale type index under the general rubric no. 400, Supernatural or Magical Husbands and Wives. 131 The referenced instances appear in Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 176, 178, 187. 132 “es war die Gebärde des Sklaven, der sich völlig dahingibt, auf Leben und Tod … Sie fühlte, wie sie die Sinne verlieren und trinken würde.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 190. 133 “gräßlich und fremd wie aus der Brust eines Tiefschlafenden schlug aus der Tiefe ihrer eigenen Brust der Fluch an ihr Ohr … sie hörte innen ihr eigenes Herz schwer und langsam pochen, als wäre es ein fremdes. Sie sah mit einem Blick, als schwebe sie außerhalb, sich selber dastehen, zu ihren Füßen den Schatten des fremden Weibes, der ihr verfallen war, drüben die Statue. Das furchtbare Gefühl der Wirklichkeit hielt alles zusammen mit eisernen Banden. Die Kälte wehte zu ihr herüber bis ins Innerste und ­lähmte sie. Sie konnte keinen Schritt tun, nicht vor- noch rückwärts. Sie konnte nichts als dies: trinken und den Schatten gewinnen oder die Schale ausgießen.” Ibid. 134 Hofmannsthal’s interest in the dissociation of personality – especially his reception of Morton Prince’s 1906 study The Dissociation of a Personality – is well documented. See Ritter, “Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” 71. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) offer two other striking examples of ecstatic moments linked to pain, fear, and powerlessness. In Joyce’s text, Stephen Dedalus has just undergone the punishment of “pandying” – having his palms struck with a pandybat. The pain is excruciating, and Stephen briefly dissociates himself from the pain: “To think of them beaten and swollen with pain all in a moment made him feel so sorry for them as if they were not his own but someone else’s that he felt sorry for.” Joyce, Portrait, 51. Rilke, likewise, reflects on the uncanniness of hands: while drawing a knight, the young Malte drops his red pencil, which rolls under a desk. He creeps underneath in search of the pencil and observes his own hand: “I recognized in particular my own hand, with fingers outstretched … I remember clearly that I was watching it almost with curiosity; it seemed to me as if it was capable of things that I had never taught it, groping around down there independently with

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135 136 137

138

139 140

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movements that I had never seen it perform before.” (Ich erkannte vor allem meine eigene, ausgespreizte Hand … Ich sah ihr, weiß ich noch, fast neugierig zu; es kam mir vor, als könnte sie Dinge, die ich sie nicht gelehrt hatte, wie sie da unten so eigenmächtig herumtastete mit Bewegungen, die ich nie an ihr beobachtet hatte.) Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 54–5; Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 78. See Martin Buber’s description of “das Phänomen Projektion” in Ekstatische Konfessionen, xxxi. “Ich will nicht!” Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 587–8. “so als würden sie gesungen in großer Ferne; sie hatte sie nur nachzusprechen. Sie sprach sie nach, ohne Zögern. – Dir Barak bin ich mich schuldig! sprach sie … und goß die Schale aus vor die Füße der verhüllten Gestalt. Das goldene Wasser flammte in die Luft, die Schale in ihrer Hand verging zu nichts.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 191. “From the earliest customs of nations it seems to come to us as a warning that in accepting what nature so bountifully provides we should eschew the gesture of greed. For there is nothing of our own that we are able to give back. It is fitting, therefore, that we should show reverence in the ­taking by restoring to nature a portion of every single thing we receive before taking possession of it as our own. Such reverence finds expression in the ancient custom of libation.” (Aus den ältesten Gebräuchen der Völker scheint es wie eine Warnung an uns zu ergehen, im Entgegennehmen dessen, was wir von der Natur so reich empfangen, uns vor der Geste der Habgier zu hüten. Denn wir vermögen nichts der Muttererde aus Eigenem zu schenken. Daher gebührt es sich, Ehrfurcht im Nehmen zu zeigen, indem von allem, was wir je und je empfangen, wir einen Teil an sie zurückerstatten, noch ehe wir des Unseren uns bemächtigen. Diese Ehrfurcht spricht aus dem alten Brauch der libatio.) Benjamin, One-Way Street, 64–5; Einbahnstrasse, 37–8. “sie fühlte sich hinabgerissen ins Bodenlose.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 192. “Vor unbegreiflicher Qual zerrüteten sich ihr die Sinne. Sie fühlte den Tod ihr eigenes Herz überkriechen, aber zugleich die Statue in ihren Armen sich regen und lebendig werden. In einem unbegreiflichen Zustand gab sie sich selbst dahin und war zitternd nur mehr da in der Ahnung des Lebens, das der andere von ihr empfing. In ihn oder in sie drang das Gefühl einer Finsternis, die sich lichtete, eines Ortes, der aufnahm, eines Hauches von neuem Leben. Mit neugeborenen Sinnen nahmen sie es in sich: Hände, die sie trugen, ein Felsentor, das sich hinter ihnen schloß,

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141

142 143

144

145

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wehende Bäume, sanften festen Grund, auf dem die Leiber gebettet lagen, Weite des strahlenden Himmels.” Ibid. “In der Ferne glänzte der Fluß, hinter einem Hügel ging die Sonne herauf, und ihre ersten Strahlen trafen das Gesicht des Kaisers, der zu den Füßen seiner Frau lag, an ihre Knie geschmiegt wie ein Kind … ihre Schatten ­flossen in eins.” Ibid. “Wie der wesenlose Regenbogen spannt sich unsere Seele über den unaufhaltsamen Sturz des Daseins.” Ibid., “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 76. Cf. n68 to Andreas, wherein Hofmannsthal identifies love as both ­universal binding agent and universal solvent: Solve et coagula. Hofmannsthal, ka 30: Andreas, 102. “Er drückte die Hände vor der Brust zusammen und neigte sich vor ihr. Wie ein Stein schlug sie vor ihm hin, ihre Stirne, ihre Lippen berührten seine Füße … wie dort die Färberin vor ihrem Mann warf er [der Kaiser] sich vor seiner Frau und verbarg sein zuckendes Antlitz an ihren Knien. Sie kniete zu ihm nieder, auch ihr war zu weinen neu und süß.” Ibid., Die Frau ohne Schatten, 194. Hofmannsthal’s continued insistence on mutual humility and respect from both men and women is usually ignored in readings that assume the work is misogynistic. Pia Janke writes, for instance, that at the end of the story, the women are bound up in a hierarchical masculine cosmos. According to Janke, the Empress and the Dyer’s Wife have near-death experiences so that they might fulfil their biopolitical destinies as ­mothers. Janke, “Schattenlose Frauen,” 267. This reading does not take into account the near-death experience of the Emperor, nor the madness of the Dyer, both of whom must become fathers. It also ignores the emphasis on mutuality in relationships: Janke mentions, for instance, that the Dyer’s Wife bows to her husband as a sign of female submission to the male, but does not seem to notice that the Dyer bowed to his wife first, or that the Emperor bows to the Empress. Similarly, Marlies Janz emphasizes the “Tortur der Frau” (torture of women) but ignores the ­terror of being ­buried alive (experienced by the Emperor). Janz likewise attributes to Hofmannsthal a certain pleasure in describing in detail in the Empress’s suffering. Janz, Marmorbilder, 188. Aside from the ­dubiousness of reading a particular emotion into the author, Janz does not back up the statement with evidence. On the contrary, the ­descriptions of the Empress’s suffering are vague, universalistic in ­portrayal, and correspond to the sufferings of poets, as Hofmannsthal elsewhere portrays them (in both male and female figures).

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146 “wie ihn niemand hatte singen hören.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 195. 147 Ibid., 135. 148 “Unbegreiflich fanden zarte Worte, leise Töne den Weg aus dieser Höhe zu [ihr].” The Kritische Ausgabe seems to have an error here. The last phrases read: “aus dieser Höhe zu dir.” Ibid., 196, my emphasis. 149 “Wäre denn je ein Fest, / Wären wir insgeheim / Wir die Geladenen, / Wir auch die Wirte?” Ibid. 150 The phrase in the title of this section is taken from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wotton comments, “I should like to write a novel certainly; a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.” Wilde, Dorian Gray, 45. 151 Schneider, Verheißung der Bilder, 222. 152 Fickert and Celms, “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” 37. Somewhat confusingly, Fickert und Celms end their article on a more conciliatory note: “Confronting a world on the brink of destroying itself in a senseless war (a redundant phrase) over the maintenance of a mordant status quo, the creators of the opera The Woman without a Shadow turned Nietzsche’s plea for the revitalizing of all mankind into a somewhat bewildering but hopeful vision of a mythical world in which a union of the good and ­merciful (the province of morality) and the beautiful (the province of art) could prevail.” Ibid., 42. 153 Qtd. in Fickert and Celms, “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” 37. 154 “In diesen gräßlichen Wochen habe ich vielleicht das schönste Capital von dem Märchen geschrieben: wie der Kaiser zu den ungeborenen Kindern kommt … Eberhard sagte mir vor ein paar Monaten, wie wenig, wie nichts diese erträumten Harmonien doch mit dem Leben zu tun hätten, und wie über alles beglückend es doch wäre, daß sie da wären und immer welche entstünden.” Qtd. in Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 421. 155 “Inmitten all des Unerfreulichen, das – ausgenommen die glänzenden Taten unsrer Armee – dieser Krieg bringt, ist fleißiges Arbeiten die einzige Rettung. Sonst käme man um vor Ärger über die Tatenlosigkeit unserer Diplomatie, unserer Presse, des Kaisers Entschuldigungstelegramm an Wilson.” Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, 289.

C hapt e r F i ve    1 Although the accepted spelling of the novel fragment is “Andreas,” the notes and the fragment often use the spelling “Andres” (without the second “a,” an anagram of the word for anders, which means “other, different”).

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  2 Ellen Ritter gives slightly different dates: 1906 until his death in 1929. Ritter, “Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” 65.   3 Representatives of these views are summarized in Mayer and Werlitz, Hofmannsthal-Handbuch, 299–303.   4 “Hier bricht der Torso ab. Welch ein Werk! … Welche Fülle von Gestalten, welch wunderbarer Reichtum der Gegenüberstellung!” Hofmannsthal, “Wilhelm Meister in der Urform,” 33. See also Mayer and Werlitz, Hofmannsthal-Handbuch, 301.   5 “Das Halbe, Fragmentarische aber, ist eigentlich menschliches Gebiet.” See also Joachim Seng, “Das Halbe, Fragmentarische.”   6 “mit einer unendlichen Teilnahme, ja Liebe.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 90–1.   7 I use the term “fragment” to refer to the main section of the Andreas; when not referring to this larger text, I will use the term “Note” or the designation “N” followed by the note number.   8 Aurnhammer, “Hofmannsthals ‘Andreas,’” 278.   9 See Wolfgang Iser’s comments on the appeal of serial novels, in which he underscores the importance of gaps: “In view of the temporary ­withholding of information, the suggestive effect produced by details will increase, thus again mobilizing a new army of possible solutions. Such a technique arouses definite expectations which, if the novel is to have any real value, must never be completely fulfilled … this is clear evidence of the importance of indeterminacy in the text-reader relationship. Furthermore, it reveals the requisite degree of freedom which must be guaranteed to the reader in the communication act, so that the message can be adequately received and processed.” Iser, “Indeterminacy,” 16–17. 10 Scheffer refers to Mark W. Rien’s translation of Susan Sontag’s essay “On Style,” which uses a vocabulary strikingly similar to what I propose was Hofmannsthal’s understanding of the aesthetic encounter: “A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.” Sontag, “On Style,” 30. Qtd. in Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 22. 11 “Sie sind da und sind unerreichlich. So bin auch ich. Dadurch kommunizieren wir.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 12 “So sind wir denn beim Leser angelangt, den in seiner Einbildungskraft mitzuschaffen die oberste gesellige Pflicht dessen ist, der ein Buch macht. Denn eine Gabe kann nicht dargereicht werden, ohne dass zum voraus des Empfängers gedacht werde.” Hofmannsthal, “Deutsches Lesebuch,” 174.

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13 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 170. 14 The two texts have a complicated and connected genesis. See Hofmannsthal, KA 30: Andreas, 303–6. 15 “Gründe der Bildungsreise. Maler. Große Namen. Paläste. Sitten im Salon. entréegespräche. S c h e i n e n . G e f a l l e n .” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 7. Expanded spacing as in original. 16 In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” the merchant gives a list of contrasting character types, culminating in a judgment that things are not quite right in society: “There are the people of high rank and the people of low rank, the arrogant and the humble, the learned and those who live from yesterday’s gazette; some who pummel others, and others who cower, some who regard themselves as something, and others who are bashful: but all of that gives not a pure sound.” (Es gibt Vornehme und es gibt Subalterne, es gibt Anmaßende und es gibt Demütige, es gibt Gelehrte und es gibt, die vom gestrigen Zeitungsblatt leben; und die einen Puffen, die andern ducken sich, die einen dünken sich was, die andern genieren sich: aber es gibt alles keinen reinen Klang.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 78; “Die Briefe,” 161. In Andreas: “the faces of acquaintances and ­relatives rose before him, among them were sardonic faces, bloated, ­indifferent and also friendly faces, but not one of them could have opened his heart.” (Die Gesichter der Bekannten und Verwandten tauchten vor ihm auf, es waren hämische und aufgeblasene darunter, gleichgiltige und auch freundliche, aber nicht eines bei dem ihm die Brust weiter geworden wäre.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 69. 17 “die Repräsentation und das Ansehen.” Ibid. 18 Waltraut Wiethölter gives a convincing portrait of Zorzi, saying that he belongs to that group of dangerous bringers-of-light which one might term fallen angels. Wiethölter, Hofmannsthal oder die Geometrie des Subjekts, 170. 19 “Nochmals hinauf zum Maler: Er zeigt mir Bild einer schönen Person (für dalla Torre). Verspricht mich zu ihr zu führen. Erzählt auf dem Weg die Geschichte der 2 Bilder des Herzogs Camposagrado … Wie die Brüder ihm das ihrige schicken lacht er unmäßig und weist seine Summe Geld an, damit sie ihm den Goya schicken die Tintorettos c­ opieren. Maler verspricht, mich dem Herzog vorzustellen etc.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 8. 20 This is also one of the main plot points in Hofmannsthal’s opera libretto Arabella and its prose precursor, Lucidor. Figuren zu einer ungeschriebenen Komödie (Lucidor. Figures for an unwritten comedy). Further, as discussed with reference to “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal likewise found himself in the position of having to sell a

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number of his works of art when in a position of financial precarity. This was treated in the exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin entitled “Rodin – Rilke – Hofmannsthal: Der Mensch und sein Genius” (17 November 2017 to 18 March 2018). 21 “lässt sich gegen Magenschmerzen den Stein zum Farbenzerdrücken auf den Magen lagen.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 9. 22 “er liege oben und habe seinen Magenkrampf. Darauf hieß es, die Herren sollten nur hinaufgehen, den unnützen Menschen aus dem Zimmer zu ­entfernen.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 43. 23 In N85, another reason for the journey comes to light: “Reason to send him on the journey. Difficult, slow convalescence after an emotional ­crisis. Hints of anhedonia – of a loss of a sense of worth. Confusion of ­perceptions.” (Grund, ihn auf der Reise zu schicken. Schwierige ­schleppende Reconvaleszenz nach einer seelischen Krise. Spuren von Anhedonia – von Verlust des Wertgefühls. Verwirrung der Begriffe). Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 115. This bears a remarkable resemblance to the illness depicted in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” 24 “Sie fanden Fräulein Nina auf einem Sopha in einer sehr bequemen und hübschen Stellung: Alles an ihr war hell und von einer allerliebsten zarten Rundheit: ihr Haar war hellblond wie verblichenes Gold und sie trug es ungepudert: drei Dinge die in reizender Weise gekrümmt waren und ganz zu einander gehörten: ihre Augenbrauen ihr Mund und ihre Hand hoben sich mit dem Ausdruck von gelassener Neugierde u. großer Liebenswürdigkeit dem eintretenden Gast entgegen. Ein Bild ohne Rahmen lehnte verkehrt an der Wand: durch die Leinwand lief ein Schnitt wie von einem Messer.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 93. 25 Hofmannsthal, “Das Märchen,” 20. 26 “Das Bild war was ein grobes Auge sprechend ähnlich finden mochte: es waren Ninas Züge aber kalt, gemein. Ihre leicht nach oben gekrümmten Brauen waren darum so reizend, weil sie in einem fast zu weichen Gesichtchen saßen; ihre Hals hätte ein strenger Beurteiler zu wenig ­schlank finden können – aber wie der Kopf auf ihm saß gab es ein ­bezauberndes Ich weiß nicht was von frauenhafter Hilflosigkeit … Es war eines von jenen peinlichen Porträts von denen man sagen kann daß sie das Inventarium eines Gesichtes enthalten, aber die Seele des Malers verraten.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 93. 27 “Räum es mir aus den Augen … es erinnerte mich nur an Ärger und Brutalität.” Ibid. 28 “in einem Anfall von Wut und Eifersucht [hat Camposagrado] einen ­seltenen Vogel den ihr der jüdische Verehrer Herr dalla Torre tags zuvor

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geschickt hatte lebendig in den Mund gesteckt den Kopf ­abgebissen.” Ibid., 92. 29 “richtig: das Kunstwerk als fortlaufende Emanation einer Persönlichkeit anzusehen, als ‘heures,’ Beleuchtungen, die eine Seele auf die Welt wirft … Jeder einzelne vermag das, was er gemacht hat, wieder aufzulösen. Es ­wieder unendlich zu machen. Wir sind die, deren Mund nicht stumm ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Diese Rundschau,” 236. T.S. Eliot offers a contrasting view: “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 59. 30 Cf. N59, which sketches a conversation between Nina and Andreas: “On the fact that the man makes all portraits to resemble himself.” (Darüber daß der Mensch alle Porträts ihm selber ähnlich macht.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 37. The man (“der Mensch”) referred to is Zorzi. 31 N91 suggests that the aesthetic encounter is not out of Andreas’s reach. Sacramozo gives Andreas a copy of Ariosto’s work “for the wonderful ‘world’ therein … He understands the Maltese man’s comment, that ­nothing is past. Everything that exists is present, born in the moment. (The feeling when hearing Bach’s music).” (um der wunderbaren ‘welt’ welche darin ist … Er versteht die Bemerkung des Maltesers, dass es nichts Vergangenes gäbe. Alles was existiert, ist gegenwärtig, ja wird im Augenblick geboren. (Gefühl beim Anhören Bach’schen Musik).) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 116. 32 “Ich finde es recht ähnlich und recht häßlich.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 93. 33 N68 reads: “der geometrische Ort fremder Geschicke.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 102. 34 Cf. “The Conversation about Poems,” in which the genesis of the symbol is represented by a moment of identification between the sacrificial victim and the person making the sacrifice. 35 One of the titles Hofmannsthal considered for the main fragment was “Die Dame mit dem Hündchen” (The lady with the dog), evocative of Anton Chekhov’s short story of the same name, which ends famously without a resolution, but rather by indicating that the difficulties are just beginning. 36 “Die Demuth mit der es in ihm von ersten Begegnung an seinen Herrn erblickte, war unbegreiflich.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 70.

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37 “Die Wut stieg ihm auf, er rief das Hündlein zu sich. Schon auf zehn Schritte wurde es seine zornige Miene gewahr es kam kriechend heran, den zitternden Blick auf Andres [sic] Gesicht geheftet. Er schmähte es eine niedrige und feile Creatur unter der Schmähung kam es näher und näher: ihm war da habe er den Fuß gehoben und traf das Rückgrat von oben mit dem Schuhabsatz. Ihm war – das Hündlein gab einen kurzen Schmerzenslaut und knickte zusammen, aber es wedelte ihm zu. Er drehte sich jäh um und ging weg, das Hündlein kroch ihm nach, das Kreuz war gebrochen, trotzdem schob es sich seinem Herrn nach wie eine Schlange. Er blieb endlich stehen da heftete das Hündlein einen Blick auf ihn und verschied wedelnd. Ihm war unsicher ob ers gethan hatte oder nicht; aber es kommt aus ihm. So rührt ihn das Unendliche an.” Ibid., 71. 38 Cited in Adorno, “George und Hofmannsthal,” 206; and Norton, Secret Germany, 102. 39 Trampling the dog, who then creeps like a snake on the ground, evokes Biblical images of power, e.g., Psalm 91: “You will tread on the lion and the cobra; you will trample the great lion and the serpent”; and Luke 10:19: “I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.” Andreas’s bid for power, however, is in vain. 40 “Der Bühnenboden war uneben: der Vorhang an einigen Stellen zu kurz, Ritterstiefel kamen und gingen … zwischen dem Steg einer Baßgeige und dem Kopf eines Musikanten sah man die Füße eines Löwen, einmal einen himmelblauen Schuh mit Flitter bestickt. Der himmelblaue Schuh war wunderbarerer als alles – Später stand ein Wesen da, das diesen Schuh anhatte, er gehörte zu ihr, war eins mit ihrem blau und silber Gewand: sie war eine Prinzessin, Gefahren umgaben sie, dunkle Gestalten, Fackeln, ein Zauberwald … alles das war schön aber es war nicht das zweischneidige Schwert von zartester Wohllust und unseglicher Sehnsucht das durch die Seele ging bis zum Weinen, wenn der blaue Schuh allein unter dem Vorhang da war.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 46. 41 Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 76. 42 Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 59–60. 43 “es war die Katze der er einmal mit einer Wagendeichsel das Rückgrat abgeschlagen hat und die so lange nicht hatte sterben können: So war sie noch nicht gestorben nach so viel Jahren! … Es hilft nichts er muß über sie weg, den schweren linken Fuß hebte er mit unsäglicher Qual uber das Tier dessen Rücken in Windungen unaufhörlich auf und nieder geht, da trifft ihn der Blick des verdrehten Katzenkopfes von unten, die Rundheit des Katzenkopfes aus einem zugleich katzenhaften und hündischen Gesicht,

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erfüllt mit Wollust und Todesqual in gräßlicher Vermischung – er will ­schreien, indem schreit es auch drinnen im Zimmer.” Ibid., 64–5. 44 “Ein Blick den er als Knabe gefürchtet hatte wie keinen zweiten, der Blick seines ersten Katecheten, schoß durch ihn hindurch und die gefürchtete kleine feiste Hand faßte ihn an, das widerwärtige Gesicht eines Knaben der ihm in dämmernder Abendstunde auf der Hintertreppe erzählt hatte was er nicht hören wollte preßte sich gegen seine Wange und wie er diese mit Anstrengung zur Seite schob lag vor der Tür durch er jetzt Romana nach mußte ein Wesen und setze sich gegen ihn in Bewegung: es war die Katze.” Ibid., 64. 45 This confusion of experience is repeated in the confusion of persons, where dream-Romana takes on the abusive personality of Gotthelff: “What kind of a [woman] are you he yelled at her, astonished. This kind, she says and h o l d s her mouth up to him. No, this kind, she y e l l s as he is about to embrace her and s t r i k e s him with the rake. She hit him on the forehead there was a sharp bright chime, as against a glass pane. He started and was awake.” (Was bist den Du für eine rief er ihr staunend entgegen. So eine halt sagt sie und h ä l t ihm den Mund hin. Nein so eine – r u f t sie wie er sie umfassen will und s c h l ä g t mit dem Rechen nach ihm. Sie traf ihn an der Stirn es gab einen scharfen hellen Schlag, wie gegen eine Glasscheibe. Er fuhr auf und war wach.) Ibid., 73. Expanded spacing in original. 46 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 34. 47 “Ihm war unsicher, ob er es getan hatte oder nicht; – aber es kommt aus ihm. So rührt ihn das Unendliche an.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 71. 48 “Seine Sinne waren geschärft er konnte hören daß die Bäuerin unterm Reden ihr Haar flocht und zugleich wie unten der Hofhund tierig an etwas fraß. Wer füttert jetzt in der Nacht einen Hund dachte es in ihm und zugleich war ihm gepreßt zumut als müsse er nochmals zurück in seine Knabenzeit als er noch das kleine Zimmer neben den Eltern hatte und sie durch den in die Wand eingelassenen Kleiderschrank mußte abends reden hören er mochte wollen oder nicht. Er wollte auch jetzt nicht horchen und hörte doch.” Ibid., 60–1. 49 “der Hund stand mitten im Licht, hielt den Kopf sonderbar ganz schief, drehte sich in dieser Stellung immerfort um sich selber: es war als erduldete das Tier ein großes Leiden vielleicht war er alt und dem Tode nahe. Andres fiel eine dumpfe Traurigkeit an, ihm war unmäßig betrübt zu Mut über das Leiden der Creatur, wo er doch so glücklich war als werde er in diesem Anblick an den nahe bevorstehenden Tod seines Vaters gemahnt. Er trat vom Fenster Weg, nun konnte er an seine Romana denken.” Ibid., 62–3.

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253

50 The circular principle seems also to have been important for one of the ­discussions of poetry in Andreas. In N80, Sacramozo alludes to the idea of poetic circularity, and Hofmannsthal quotes the French writer Jacques Rivière: “And in effect, in a beautiful poem, there is no progression; the end is always on the same level as the beginning … everything is direct … The verses form a circle; they are turned towards each other, they regard each other, they lock us in their circle … The poetic emotion is a kind of eddy, through which a pool of eternity is formed in us, in the very midst of the flight of things.” (Et en effet, dans un beau poème, il n’y a jamais de progression; la fin est toujours au même niveau que le commencement … tout est de plain-pied … Les vers forment un cercle; ils sont tournés les uns vers les autres, ils se regardent, ils nous enferment dans leur ronde. … L’émotion poétique est une sorte de tournoiement par lequel se reforme en nous, au milieu même de la fuite des choses, une flaque d’éternité.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 111. The quote comes from Rivière’s 1913 text Le Roman d’aventure. Tropes of circularity, immediacy, the force of things, and even the pool of eternity with its connotations of Narcissus consumed by his own reflection present variations on the theme of “ideal art.” 51 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 27. 52 “I. er wohnte im Schloss. Ein Läuten. Hahnenschrei, Ein zweiter. Er steht auf blossfüßig. Er fühlt durch die Fussohlen [sic] alles bis hinunter in den Berg.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 103. Spacing as in original. 53 “Gegenüber aus der Bergwand treten silberne Ahnen, so schön dass er träumend ausruft: ich träume.” Ibid. 54 “diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu ­entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos groß ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 55 “endlich war er [Andreas] sich selber entsprungen wie einem Gefängnis, er stürmte in Sprüngen dahin, er wußte nichts von sich als den Augenblick.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 71. 56 “schon matten Fluges … Nun kräht der Hahn. Er weiss es ist zum dritten Mal und Weiss, er hat seinen Heiland verrathen.” Ibid., 103. 57 N148: “Was ist dies für ein Licht. Das klare durchsichtige: das Leben der Zweige in diesem Licht: die Ferne als ein beglückendes Gefühl. Er entledigt sich seiner Kleider und badet im Fluss. Ein ängstlicher Moment da er Boden unter den Füssen verliert.” N149: “er glaubt nackt ins Wasser steigend, Romana ebenso zu sehen Er erschrickt über sich. Indessen ist sie fort. Er verzichtet auf sie, so sicher ist er ihrer. / Er durchlebete einen der glücklichsten Tage seines Lebens u. er wusste es nicht.” N150: “Nach dem

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Bad und der Ohnmacht. ‘Er trug Schuh u. Strümpfe in den Händen und gieng mit blutenden Füssen über die Wiesen.’” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 136. 58 “Um Kafkas Figur in ihrer Reinheit und in ihrer eigentümlichen Schönheit gerecht zu werden, darf man das Eine nie aus dem Auge lassen: es ist d ­ ie von einem Gescheiterten. Die Umstände dieses Scheiterns sind mannigfache. Man moöchte sagen: war er des endlichen Mißlingens erst einmal sicher, so gelang ihm die Inbrunst, mit der Kafka sein Scheitern unterstrichen hat.” Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka,” 144–5; Gesammelte Briefe, 114. 59 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen. Es gibt kein stolzeres, kein gefährlicheres Wort. Es ist das Wort, das am tiefsten verpflichtet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 60 “Wir fühlen den Sturz des Daseins. Wir setzen nichts voraus. Wir spinnen aus uns selber den Faden der uns über den Abgrund trägt, und zuweilen sind wir selig wie Wölkchen am Abendhimmel. Wir schaffen uns einer am Andern unsere Sprache, beleben einer den andern. Wir tragen in uns einen Blick, ein Leiden, ein Gesicht, einen Ton … Wir sind die, deren Mund nicht stumm ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 236.

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Index

abjection, 82, 134, 161–8 Adorno, Theodor W., 16, ­172–3n11, 178n15, 251n38; ­theory of engagement, 7, 173n12 aesthetic imperative, 7, 12, 21, 38–41, 166–7; blindness to, 117; and Martin Buber, 67–8; and the ethical demand, 144; and Rainer Maria Rilke, 9, 189n102 alienation. See labour Andrian, Leopold von, 15, 26, 31, 177n4 animals. See dogs anxiety, 18, 31–2, 104, 119, 182–3n48 Augenblick, 99–110, 137, 242n124, 250n31, 253n55 Bahr, Hermann, 3, 5–6, 177n5, 178n14, 214n20 Baudelaire, Charles, 120, 149, 195n29, 197n40, 227n149; Les Fleurs du mal, 10–11, 18–19, 25, 94, 211n130 Benjamin, Walter, 145, 174n15, 195n29, 214n25, 244n138; ­failure, 168, 254n58

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Bildung, 44, 155, 168 Bildungsroman, 44, 114, 151–2, 168 boldness, 109, 147 boredom. See ennui Broch, Hermann, 38, 110, 112, 190n104, 210n128 Büchner, Georg, 79, 98, 215n40 carpet, 23, 29, 34–7, 126–30, ­147–9. See also textiles colours, 54–8, 64–9, 128–31, ­139–42, 147, 149 communion, 40, 58–9, 80, 84, 104, 109–10 daimonic, 38, 40, 109, 120. See also demonic deities, bronze, 19–23, 31, 158 demonic, 7, 84, 95, 173n13. See also daimonic Derrida, Jacques, 100–1, 146, 196n38. See also khôra dialogical, 38, 58, 66–8, 111, 113, 159–60 dialogue, 5, 40, 64, 73, 77–8, 111, 113, 126 dilettante, 16, 29–30, 34, 178n14

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280 Index

dissociation, 48, 59, 100, 110–11, 145, 167, 220n85 dogs: and justice, 81–2, 216–17n55; and Odysseus, 33; as a symbol, 134, 161–7, 251n39 ekphrasis, 4, 9–10, 21, 98, 155, 157–8 Eliot, T.S., 12, 250n29 ennui, 15–60, 135 Erlebnis, 10, 22, 154, 158, 168 Erlebte Rede, 22, 158. See also free indirect speech face, 27–9, 78–87, 117–19, 133–7, 169; of the korai, 107; and Levinas, 101–3; of the petrified Emperor, 144–7; of Zorzi’s painting, 159 failure, 44, 151, 157, 168–9 feet, 17, 31, 136; and beauty, 19, 163, 166; locked or bound, 94–5, 126, 140–1; as a site of suffering, 96, 166–8 First World War, 8, 62, 173n14; and Die Frau ohne Schatten, 121, 150, 172n9 foreignness, 66, 68, 72, 106, 110, 160. See also other fragment, 6, 43–4, 146, 151–3 fragmentation, internal, 45, 161 free indirect speech, 21–2, 83, 146, 158–9 Freud, Sigmund, 68–9, 176n26, 188n95, 218–19n68 garden: in Algabal and “Mein Garten,” 11; as literary motif, 26–8, 86; as locus amoenus, 23, 181n33, 182n42, 182n47

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gaze: aesthetic, 14, 21–2, 36, 87–93; hierarchy of, 123, 164, 182n47; mutual, 133, 137, 143; phenomenological, 51; reversal of, 18, 35, 75–7, 83, 94, 101–2, 111, 120, 161 genre. See Märchen; Bildungsroman George, Stefan, 11, 26, 34, 36–7, 94–5; association with Hofmannsthal, 6, 95, 162 ghost, 47–9, 94–5, 126, 138 ghostly, 46–8, 50, 53, 97 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 33, 41, 108–9, 196n35; and poetry, 222n103, 228n162; ­sacrifice for beauty, 203n68, 239n93; theory of colours, 198n43, 201n57 gold, 89–92, 98–9, 140–5 guest, 87–8, 148. See also symbol guilt, 14, 34, 69, 84, 96, 137–41, 152, 209n121 Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis Hearn, Lafcadio, 129–30, 225n132 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 29, 107 Heidegger, Martin, 57–8, 63, 100, 157, 240n103 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, other works of: Ad me ipsum, 14, 16, 104, 182n42, 235n56; Ein Brief, 7, 9, 46, 177n7, 199n50, 209n123, 210n130; Buch der Freunde, 107, 110, 228n157, 229n171, 229n176; “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 123, 134, 185n64, 203n68, 217n55,

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Index

223n112; “Diese Rundschau,” 160, 180n30, 250n29; “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 25, 67, 77, 105, 146, 164, 196n35, 217n55, 240n106, 250n34; “Mein Garten,” 11, 26; “Der neue Roman von d’Annunzio.” 33–5, 109; “Poesie und Leben,” 10, 33; “Sunt animae rerum,” 5–6, 9; “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 137, 142, 174n21 hospitality, 80, 87. See also guest hubris, 40, 82, 95, 101–2 humility, 34–5, 37, 121, 133, 136, 148, 166, 245n145; in art and beauty, 18, 34, 37, 101–5, 109, 129–33, 147–8, 159, 168; and dogs, 161–2, 217n55 Husserl, Edmund, 14, 22, 70–1 innocence, 34, 69, 133–8. See also guilt justice, 96–7, 140, 164 Kant, 21, 23, 141 katabasis, 97, 110 Keats, John, 17, 19, 59, 222n107 khôra, 100, 146, 196n38 Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 125 korai, 99, 102–4, 124, 143 Kraus, Karl, 3, 172n9 labour, 52, 121, 123; and craft, 127–30; and devotion, 131–2, 141 landscape, 48, 75, 77–8, 87–9, 193–4n16 lists, 47, 51, 54, 248n16

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281

Mach, Ernst, 177n5, 219n69 magician, 75, 77 Mann, Thomas, 61, 76, 180n23 Märchen, 112–16, 148–50 Medusa, 21, 98, 102, 224n122 memory, 40, 67, 78, 80–9, 92, 109, 164, 175n26, 207n108 Midas, 89–90, 92, 98, 143 money, 45, 50, 53, 61–3, 71, 90, 156 Murray, Gilbert, 81–2, 96, 164 music, 7, 35, 76–7, 139, 145. See also opera; song Musil, Robert, 60, 193n12 Naturalism, 3, 34, 101, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 37, 53, 131–2 Novalis, 59, 67, 105, 114 obligation, 154, 189n102. See also aesthetic imperative Odysseus, 33, 35, 96–7, 119 Oedipus, 78, 82, 96 opera, 112–16, 122, 131, 138, 143–5, 149, 237n75 other, 7, 32, 38, 40–1, 59, 73–4, 82–4, 102, 111, ­134–7, ­159–60, 169. See also foreignness painting, 51–77, 139, 156–60 Pater, Walter, 27–8, 86, 103–7, 118, 220–1n89 Philoctetes, 96, 163, 222–3n110 piety, 52–8, 62, 69, 131, 141. See also reverence Plato, 7, 80, 92–6, 100–2 poverty, 29, 88–92, 99, 141, 156, 168

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282 Index

pre-existence, 104, 110, 128–9, 182n42 presence, 17–18, 46–7, 59, 66, 75–7, 88–92, 97–9 pride, 40, 95, 108, 121. See also hubris Pygmalion, 89–90, 101, 143 rebirth, 65, 128, 137, 142, 146, 154–5 repetition, 76–7, 116–18, ­123–5, 160, 166 reverence, 16, 82, 108–9, 129, 141, 244n138. See also piety Rilke, Rainer Maria, 9–10, 30–1, 54, 61, 97, 189n102 Rimbaud, Arthur, 80–2, 90, 92, 99, 217n57 rite, 105, 118, 165 ritual, 76–7, 104, 106–7, 116, 135–6, 145 river, 23–4, 34, 86–7, 119, 130, 146, 167. See also water rug. See carpet sacrifice, 25, 39, 54–9, 69–70, 104–5, 115, 134–5, 146 shame, 50, 83, 133, 142, 160, 166, 217n55, 218n633. See also guilt shoe, 161, 163, 167, 201n63

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Simmel, Georg, 50, 53, 60, 62, 69, 71, 79, 189n102 smile, 99–104, 143 song, 5, 75–6, 122, 124, 125, 134, 145, 148 Spengler, Oswald, 64–5, 139 statue, 99–111, 126, 139, 143–4, 149. See also deities, bronze Stimmung, 74–8, 81, 85 Strauss, Richard, 112–13, 131, 150 sublime, 22, 66, 74, 104 suddenness, 137, 173n13 symbol, 16, 25–6, 47, 52, 80, 87, 98, 105–6, 145–6 symbolism, 6, 8, 11, 98 textiles, 127, 130. See also carpet. theatre, 100–1, 163, 225n31 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 90, 119 trees, 47, 51–4, 58, 140 Van Gogh, Vincent, 54, 56–70, 157, 160 violence, 8, 88, 130, 152, 157, 159–66 water, 84–5 Wilde, Oscar, 93, 178n10, 178n14, 185n66, 246n150 wound, 55, 70, 96

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A e s t h e t ic Di lemmas

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Aesthetic Dilemmas Encounters with Art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Literary Modernism

Mar l o A l e x a n dr a B u r k s

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2023 ISBN 978-0-2280-1665-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-1795-0 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-2280-1796-7 (eP U B) Legal deposit second quarter 2023 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Aesthetic dilemmas: encounters with art in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ­literary modernism / Marlo Alexandra Burks. Names: Burks, Marlo A., 1986- author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2023013260X | Canadiana (ebook) 20230132685 | ISBN 9780228016656 (cloth) | IS BN 9780228017950 (paper) | ISBN 9780228017967 (eP DF ) Subjects: LCSH : Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1874-1929—Criticism and interpretation. | LCSH : Art in literature. Classification: LCC P T 2617.O47 Z 527 2023 | DD C 831/.912—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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... greener than grass I am and dead – or almost I seem to me. But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho

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Contents

Figures ix

A Note on Languages and Titles  xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Aestheticism  3

  1 Aestheticism in “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” (“The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two”) and the 1902 “Ansprache” (“Address”) 13   2 Art and Society in “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (“The Letters of the Man Who Returned”)  43   3 Art and History in “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”) 72   4 Aesthetic Transfiguration in Die Frau ohne Schatten 112   5 Violence and Art in Andreas 151 Notes 171 Bibliography 255 Index 279

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Figures

1.1

1.2

2.1

2.2

3.1

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4.1

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Illustrated cover of the 1905 Wiener Verlag edition of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen. Photo by Marlo Alexandra Burks.  20 Dining room with tapestries in the Palais Lanckoroński in Vienna. Archiv Bezirksmuseum Landstraße, accessed through Wikimedia Commons.  36 Still Life with Blue Enamel Coffeepot, Earthenware and Fruit, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Accessed through WikiArt. 56 Wheatfield with Crows, by Vincent van Gogh, Auvers, June 1890. Van Gogh Museum, f _779 j h _2117, accessed through Wikimedia Commons.  66 Column at Delphi. Image from Hanns Holdt’s book Griechenland. Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth A.G., 1923).  91 Phrasikleia Kore, Ariston of Paros, 550–40 b c, exhibited at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Photo by Zdeněk Kratochvíl, accessed through Wikimedia Commons. 103 Sloth (Desidia), from the series The Seven Deadly Sins, Pieter van der Heyden’s engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 26.72.34.  122

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A Note on Language and Titles

In the case of German and French, translations are mine unless ­otherwise stated. When quoting from a published English translation, I refer additionally to an edition in the original language for comparison. Longer passages appear in the original language in the endnotes. There are numerous isolated translations of Hofmannsthal’s shorter works, some of which are out of print or difficult to access. Although I have tried to mention all the English translations of which I am aware, I have undoubtedly missed a few. Titles are given initially in both English and the original language in one of two ways: 1 For works that have been published in translation, I capitalize the English title headline-style: “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”); Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). 2 For works not published in translation (to my knowledge), I capitalize the English title sentence-style: “Verse, auf eine Banknote geschrieben” (Verses written onto a banknote). When discussing an English translation extensively, I use the English title primarily. An exception is Die Frau ohne Schatten, which is already well known in the English-speaking world by its German title.

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Acknowledgments

Gratitude is better expressed through action than in words, but this is a book, so a few of the latter are in order. Hans-Günther Schwarz at Dalhousie University encouraged my early interest in Hofmannsthal’s work. Working with him and Norman Diffey on Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Writings on Art/Schriften zur Kunst was one of the most intellectually gratifying experiences I’ve had over the last ten years, and it helped pave the way for the introduction to this book. Without my Heidelberg community, this book would not exist. Franz Wassermann and Lina Girdziute provided two essential things during its composition: music and hospitality. Andreea Miri-Wolf and Eva Lasch added coffee, wine, and conversations about art to the mix. Silvia Richter introduced me to the work of Emmanuel Levinas. My Berlin “family” – Michael Benson, Maureen Gallagher, Biz and Max Nijdam, Noelle Rettig, and Christy Wahl – helped in unexpected and subtle ways while I was writing the final chapter. I am also grateful to Karin Goihl – a renaissance woman if I ever met one – who made my postdoctoral stay in Berlin much less complicated than it could have been. John Zilcosky, my dissertation advisor, deserves special mention. He warned me once over lunch at the Joseph-Roth Diele not to let perfection be the enemy of the good. I know I have not fully internalized that lesson, but the fact that this book exists is proof I am trying. Similarly, Christine Lehleiter cautioned me early on against taking on too big a topic and developing too enthusiastic a style. She knew before I did that my eyes were bigger than my stomach.

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xiv Acknowledgments

Willi Goetschel, whose philosophical acumen was (and is) a constant inspiration, helped me keep my eyes open to unexpected affinities. Who else in Toronto would have talked with me about Georg Simmel and Fritz Mauthner and Sprachphilosophie? I am also grateful to Sepp Gumbrecht, whose insight and enthusiasm convinced me to take my rambling dissertation and give it new life and a sense of purpose. I’m not sure I got rid of all the rambling, though. This book would not have been possible without support from the Jackman Humanities Institute, the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, and the Hofmannsthal Gesellschaft. Thanks especially to Katja Kaluga and Konrad Heumann, who answered some very niggling questions. Those little interactions mean more than we know. In the same vein, I want to thank Richard Ratzlaff and McGillQueen’s University Press for acquiring the book. “Acquiring” – that single word entails so much. I (and by extension these 300 or so pages) have benefited from Richard’s talent, kindness, and impeccable email etiquette. Every single note he wrote brought a smile to my face and renewed conviction I should publish my research. Thank you also to my copy-editor, Kathryn Simpson, who caught a number of infelicitous and awkward formulations. I’m happy we were able to get those out of the book before print! The anonymous readers of the manuscript provided thoughtful, constructive, and in some cases downright ­brilliant feedback. I wish I could thank them in person. I would also like to express my appreciation to the University of Wisconsin Press for granting me permission to reproduce sections of my 2017 article for Monatshefte, “From Song to the Smiles of Stone: Aesthetic and Ethical Encounters in Hofmannsthal’s Augenblicke in Griechenland.” My family deserve a tome of thanks, but they already know that. Thank you to Andrew for bringing so much beauty into my life; to Nathaniel for all the humour, patience, and growth; to Phyllis for her unshakeable support; and to Enkidu for reminding me about the important things in life: walks, affection, and peanut butter.

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intr oduct ion Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Aestheticism

When a dramatis personae includes too many star actors, it can be difficult to know where, or with whom, to begin a story. Such is the case with Vienna around 1900. The imperial city’s many luminaries shared an historical moment on the stage of the Great Theatre of the World: Painters like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka offered new ways of seeing, while theorists like Sigmund Freud, Ernst Mach, and Fritz Mauthner showed how we might interpret those visions. In music, Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and only a little later the Second Viennese School conjured drastically different and novel auditory experiences, while in the literary sphere, a proliferation of writers appeared on the scene and in the cafés: Peter Altenberg, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Felix Salten, Karl Kraus (who later criticized his contemporaries in his satire Die demolirte Literatur [Demolished Literature]), Hermann Bahr, and Arthur Schnitzler were a few of the prominent writers in town and part of the leading literary circle known as Young Vienna or Jung-Wien. One of the youngest and most multifaceted of those writers was Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929).1 Deeply versed in the literary debates of his time, especially the anti-naturalist styles of symbolism and impressionism, Hofmannsthal was well-placed to consider the various roles played by art and aesthetics in society. His body of work – forty volumes in the critical edition, completed in 2022 – ­represents a sustained engagement with aesthetic debates over the first three decades of the twentieth century. Taking cues from his contemporaries in physics, psychology, sociology, and the arts (including music), he explored the connections between perceived reality, artistic representation, poetic language, and cultural developments. The

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combination of breadth, nuance, and variety in Hofmannsthal’s writings gives readers an uncommonly kaleidoscopic view of the shifting values of his era while posing core questions about the human condition. More to the point: This book considers how and why suffering, ecstasy, and the encounter with otherness became defining aspects of Hofmannsthal’s modernist aesthetics. A few words about words are necessary. I use the term “aesthetics” in the sense given in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, namely: the “reflection on art and beauty.”2 To a greater extent than other authors of his generation, Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics involved cultivating an ekphrastic literary style: portraying art works from other media, including paintings, carpets, statues, music, and even dance. According to this approach, any encounter with a work of art involves reflecting upon it in terms not intrinsic to the work of art itself. The reflection on art and beauty, therefore, requires both ­distance and translation. Hofmannsthal is certainly not the only writer to have employed ekphrasis at the turn of the century. Many of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems, such as “Archaïscher Torso Apollos” (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”), employed the technique to great effect. But Hofmannsthal’s use of ekphrasis was systematic, extensive, and ever evolving in response to the ideas and societal shifts of his time: scholars and s­ tudents of early twentieth-century Viennese and European culture have an unusually consistent object of study. But Hofmannsthal’s writing is relevant to a broader audience as well. Anyone invested in understanding how art and beauty affects our lives will find in his essays, libretti, stories, and dramatic works numerous points of interest. Yet Hofmannsthal is much less familiar to English-speaking audiences than some of his literary contemporaries, such as Rilke and Franz Kafka. While opera enthusiasts may recognize Hofmannsthal as Richard Strauss’s artistic collaborator and the author of some of the most sophisticated opera libretti in the repertoire, his reputation as a culturally conservative writer with an enigmatic and precious style has certainly helped to obscure his work from an Englishspeaking readership. The challenges of translation have not helped either. Egon Schwarz, an American literary scholar born in Austria, put it well when he contrasted Rilke’s (relatively translatable) poetry – especially the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies), whose “oracular atmosphere” appealed to poets and scholars – with Hofmannsthal’s more harmonious tones and culturally inflected subtilty.3

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Introduction 5

Hofmannsthal was widely appreciated in his lifetime, both at home and, to some extent, abroad,4 even at an early age. At sixteen, he began publishing poems (under various pseudonyms) notable for their ­sobriety and tinged with the world-weariness of a man reflecting upon a life already lived. Right from the beginning, Hofmannsthal’s writings displayed a preoccupation with ephemerality, the urge to escape an eremitic existence, and the importance of lived experience. An early Petrarchan sonnet from 1890, “Sunt animae rerum,”5 captures precisely that celebration of involvement in life. The poem’s octave reads like an extended meditation on Joseph von Eichendorff’s famous 1835 quatrain, “Wünschelrute” (“Wishing-Wand”), which tells of an omnipresent song that can be heard if one hits upon the magic word. Such is the power and purview of poetry. But instead of proclaiming a song in all things, Hofmannsthal’s sonnet speaks of the beating hearts within inanimate objects (“Herzen, die in toten Dingen schlagen”). Moreover, there is no magic word to be discovered – rather, one must pose the proper question, in the right way (“recht zu fragen”). Only then might the “silent mouth” reveal something (“aus stummen Munde”). Even in 1890, dialogue is at the heart of the ­aesthetic encounter for Hofmannsthal. It is the solicitation, not the proclamation, that fascinates him. True to form, the first line of the sestet marks the volta. With the word “Drum” (“Therefore”), the poem calls upon its readers to escape the confines of a solipsistic existence in favour of a life that welcomes joy as well as pain. This is made explicit in lines 9–14: Therefore flee thy self, cold and stiff, And change it for the cosmic soul unbound, And let the heaving forces of this life, Sough through thy soul with joy and woe profound, And if perchance a melody does sound, Then hold its echo fast: Thus shouldst thou strive!6 Hofmannsthal’s poetic sensibility for intertextuality, perfection of form, and maturity of subject matter impressed readers and writers alike. Hermann Bahr, spokesman for the Young Vienna literary circle, was surprised when he met (the very young indeed) Hofmannsthal. Bahr had expected to greet a mature gentleman who had lived abroad in Paris for some years – that, at least, would have explained why Bahr had never heard the name “Loris” (one of Hofmannsthal’s pseudonyms).

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The fact that the young poet took great inspiration from French Symbolism no doubt played a role in Bahr’s expectations.7 Hofmannsthal’s immediate success and his early association with the elitist and eminently talented Stefan George (1868–1933) contributed to the impression that the young writer was an acolyte of this slightly older German poet and snobbish aesthete whose ivory-tower existence resulted in a solipsistic, if sophisticated, kind of art.8 Most readers of Hofmannsthal’s later essays would agree that political and social themes are more explicitly prominent than they were in his earlier essays and lyric poetry, but Hofmannsthal’s writing, from the very beginning, rejected solipsism and pointed to broader ethical and social questions. Even that youthful poem “Sunt animae rerum” expresses an impulse to engage with the world. The rhetorically powerful assertion that Hofmannsthal (and other writers of the time who were associated with Aestheticism) “fled” reality into the world of art is an exaggeration that, unfortunately, does little to further discussion of their work.9 Hofmannsthal himself endorses quite the opposite view in his essayistic writings, an early example of which is his 1896 review, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio” (“D’Annunzio’s New Novel”): “All those curious books of d’Annunzio’s had something disconcerting about them, indeed, there was something dreadful and horrific, if you like, because they were written by a man who did not know life. He who wrote them knew all the signs of life: he knew them wonderfully, and yet now I believe he was up until this time no great poet, no poet at all. But he was, from the first line, an extraordinary artiste.”10 Life – that is, lived experience – is not equated with poetry, but it is what makes poetry possible. Aware of this fact, Hofmannsthal repeatedly attempts to identify and create within the aesthetic experience an ethical moment that is world-oriented, even object-oriented (as opposed to purely subject-oriented).11 That is not to say that all or even most of Hofmannsthal’s work is tendentious. Hofmannsthal usually explores ethical, social, and cultural themes indirectly; they arise from the story, and often result in more than one outcome. Der Turm (The Tower), for instance, has multiple alternative endings – the first two, utopian; the third, dystopian – while the novel fragment Andreas (discussed in chapter 5 of this book) splinters into so many possible trajectories that it is impossible to say which version the author might have favoured. Hofmannsthal explores various possibilities of reception and transformation in the audience as well. Ideally, the work of art evokes a

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Introduction 7

response in the viewer or reader, and that response is deeply connected with responsibility. Similarly, the audience or reader may undergo a transformation brought on by that sense of responsibility. The recognition and acceptance of responsibility is what constitutes the ethical moment, which appears in art like a shock, without instructions. That shock is at the heart of art’s troubling nature. My inquiry is guided by those writings of Hofmannsthal’s that feature what we commonly acknowledge to be works of art. Hofmannsthal did believe other objects could awaken aesthetic moments – the canonical 1902 fictional letter Ein Brief (The Letter to Lord Chandos) is the most prominent example – but I am interested in the status of those things that we consider artworks because they are already charged with ambiguity (e.g., they provoke us or they leave us unaffected), and because there is so much debate around the usefulness and the dangers of art – its “barbarity,” even, to invoke Adorno’s dictum about postAuschwitz lyric poetry and, by extension, all art that is not “engagiert,” or “committed,” as the English translations have it.12 In Hofmannsthal’s writings, the aesthetic carries its ethical other along with it. I understand “ethical” here to refer to that aspect of the human experience that responds to a sense of duty and recognizes social bonds and responsibilities. The aesthetic encounter opposes the perceiver’s expectations and desires whenever art displays a life of its own while calling to mind a shared experience of suffering. The aesthetic encounter demands a response to this suffering, but it can neither enforce that demand nor prescribe its fulfillment. This is not an everyday experience of the world and the things in it. A glass, considered simply as a glass and not as an aesthetic object, generally poses no threat – we tend not to escape into the world of the glass, and it does not usually attract us or distract us with its beauty or sublimity; we use it unthinkingly; we have no duty to it. From the aesthetic lens however, things have challenged us with their ambiguous status since Plato’s warnings of art’s power to manipulate and distract us from reality, and Aristotle’s counterclaim that art serves a cathartic function. Søren Kierkegaard even posits a connection between the demonic and art, especially music.13 For the fin-de-siècle world of disenchantment, on the other hand, art served as a secular alter deus and provided a house for homeless piety, ritual, and passion. In this sense, Aestheticism threatens to devolve into a religion that reintroduces all the problems that the worship of gods presents us, including the risk of sacrificing our participation in the “real” world

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of suffering in order to dwell in a world of fantasy – whether it be art or the afterlife. For this reason Aestheticism is often criticized. The social and ethical complications of art are also apparent in the risk of misappropriation. Art can be a tool of manipulation. Although Hofmannsthal wrote propaganda during the First World War, he later acknowledged that this was not truly artistic work.14 Art can r­ eference political themes, but it loses something when it adopts a moralizing tone. 15 In his essay “Grillparzers Politisches Vermächtnis” (“Grillparzer’s Political Legacy”) from 1915, Hofmannsthal underscores the artist’s duty: “Politics is the study of human beings, the art of socializing on a higher level. There is an irrational element here … whoever knows how to conjure up hidden powers, commands ­obedience. Thus, the great politician is revealed. For the poet, it is enough to sense these powers and, with an infallible instinct, gesture towards them.”16 Art may hold us hostage with its powers of distraction and manipulation, but art can also be held hostage. When art is violently destroyed (through its misappropriation for propaganda, or through iconoclasm, violence, or terrorism – e.g., the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan or the Nazi book burnings), it is often done so in effort to demoralize and repress a people and their culture. The “life” and existence of art, in these cases, is tied to the life and existence of a people. —*— Hofmannsthal’s work portrays the deeper conflicts of his culture and the importance of art to that culture. In one of the early post-SecondWorld-War treatments of Hofmannsthal’s work, the literary critic and scholar Richard Alewyn wrote poignantly that in Hofmannsthal’s poetic development the natural life cycle was oddly reversed, beginning with perfection and ending in darkness and chaos. According to Alewyn, so long as we find ourselves on a path towards darkness and chaos, Hofmannsthal is our contemporary.17 The standard narrative of Hofmannsthal’s trajectory as an artist relates that, after his early success as a consummate poet in the ­symbolist manner, he turned away from verse poetry around 1902 in order to devote himself instead to the more “socially engaged” art forms – primarily those of theatre and opera.18 While Hofmannsthal did for the most part cease publishing new poems (he did not cease writing them), the reasons given by scholars present a caricature of an

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Introduction 9

artist who rejected the solitary world of the “lyrical-I” of poetry for the popular world of the people. If we take the statement at face value, we risk artificially dividing Hofmannsthal’s works into two distinct phases – the lyrical and the social  – marked by a language crisis. In their influential book Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin claim that Hofmannsthal experienced “a crisis that compelled him to reject all that had gone before.” They take the 1902 fictional work, Letter to Lord Chandos, as autobiographical evidence.19 If, in 1902, Hofmannsthal did in fact reject “all that had gone before,” then why did he publish a collection of his lyric poetry, Gesammelte Gedichte, in 1907? Yet this myth has been powerful. Despite overwhelming textual evidence that there was no such “rejection,” Teona Djibouti’s 2014 dissertation, Aufnehmen und Verwandeln, repeats the narrative. Thomas A. Kovach takes a less drastic view in his account: “Having recognized and criticized the alienation from life characterizing the Aestheticism that constituted the milieu of his earlier life and work, he was concerned henceforth to find what he called a ‘Weg zum Sozialen’ in his writing.”20 But even a summary like Kovach’s does not take into account the fact that Hofmannsthal’s early work (like the 1890 sonnet “Sunt animae rerum”) very frequently and clearly articulates a desire to resist any alienation from life. The narrative of crisis and rejection offers an attractively simple framework, but it is false. Moreover, it obscures the much more compelling shades of ambivalence and ambiguity in Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the a­ esthetic, at all stages in his literary career. It bears repeating: Hofmannsthal was, even in his early lyrical poetry, always concerned with questions of the broader and deeper connections between people and the world, including the things in it, and the responsibilities that both constitute and grow out of those connections. His medium of choice was primarily literary, and even his essays and speeches – the most “engaged” or “committed” of his writings – abound in extravagant metaphors and lyricism. His love for the arabesque turn of a phrase might seem precious to an audience schooled in the style of Strunk and White, but those literary choices enact a deeper, unsettled relationship between aesthetics and ethics that can awaken in readers a critical impulse. This is the “call”21 – or the demand – that we find repeatedly in his work. A more famous instance of the call is Rilke’s 1908 sonnet “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” mentioned above, in which the ekphrastic impulse to induce an ethical

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response is made explicit in the two concluding lines: “For there is no place / which does not see you. You must change your life.”22 When it comes to literary representations of the aesthetic experience, political and ethical counsels are absent: art is, in other words, still in some sense “autonomous,” as Aestheticism would have it. For Hofmannsthal, aesthetics and ethics are in constant tension with one another, but they are bound together by that tension. If art can be the catalyst for an epiphanic lived experience along the lines of that ­suggested in Rilke’s poem – an “Erlebnis” as it is called in German – then it would seem to have some deep, non-imitative connection to life (“Leben”). The notion of Erlebnis juxtaposes two domains: the domain of ethics, which considers action in lived life; and the domain of ­aesthetics, which considers art and active perception. Hofmannsthal’s 1896 lecture “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”) imagines this dynamic in the metaphor of two pails in a well: “There is no direct path that leads from poetry to life, or from life to poetry. The word as carrier of life’s content, and the dreamlike brother-word, which can be found in a poem, diverge and drift by each other, foreign, like the two pails of a well. There is no extrinsic law which bans from art all the rationalizing, all the struggle and railing against life, every immediate relation to life and every direct imitation of life; rather, it is this simple impossibility: such heavy things can live in poetry about as easily as a cow can live in the treetops.”23 During his entire literary career, from about 1890 till his death in 1929, Hofmannsthal for the most part adhered to the rule of l’art pour l’art – the idea that art is valuable apart from any didactic or moral purpose. Even the aesthetic cultivation of the self was not destructive per se, but it did require more than mere self-stylization. Art, in turn, required more of an engagement of the self with the world than a divine-like ironic distance or a flight of fancy could afford. Like the pails in the well, art and life run parallel courses. The image of parallel worlds held in tension marks a departure from an early iteration of Aestheticism which sees art as something s­uspended above life. Consider Baudelaire’s poem “Élévation” in Les Fleurs du mal, here in lines 15–21 of James McGowan’s translation: Happy the strong-winged man, who makes the great Leap upward to the bright and peaceful fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, take to their wings Each morning, freely speeding through the air,

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Introduction 11

 – Who soars above this life, interpreter Of flowers’ speech, the voice of silent things!24 The title evokes an image of the poet performing, in his poetic-priestly act, the raising (known as “elevation”) of the consecrated and transformed host – in this case, the words of the poem. But in the poem, it is also the poet who flies up above the mundane world to an elevation that affords perspective and understanding. Stefan George’s translation and transmission of Baudelaire helped introduce a petrified world of glorified art to German-language literature. In the post-Baudelaire context, as with George, who stylized himself as a priestly and prophetic poet, the troubling undercurrent below the crystallized surface began to rumble. The question at the end of the garden poem in George’s Algabal (from 1892) throws doubt onto the entire project of the poeta alter deus and the religion of art. George, the poet-priest par excellence, has gone so far as to inscribe this doubt into lines 16–20 of his own poem: How did I conceive you in this holy bower – So I asked myself as I walked in thought and forgot, in daring weaves distraught – dark great black flower?25 Just a year before Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, George gives poetic expression to the idea of the return of the repressed within the realm of art. For Hofmannsthal, whose work often lays stress on the pain of remembering,26 the crystallized world is set up against the world of growth and rot, and the speaker in his 1891 symbolist poem “Mein Garten” (“My Garden”) finds himself remembering longingly – and perhaps attempting to resist this longing – the world of organic, breathing life fated to decay. The speaker can assert: “Lovely is my garden with the golden trees,”27 but the repeated use of ellipses (four times in a poem of fourteen lines) points to what cannot be said. This symbolist penchant for suggestion rather than proclamation induces a mood of reminiscence: the poet desires to be in that other, living garden, “where I was before” (“wo ich früher war”). Rather than longing for an imagined Golden Age (as the Romantics might have done), Hofmannsthal’s speaker yearns for that which lives and breathes and dies.28

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—*— Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics engage with long-standing, persistent assumptions about art, what it does, and how we respond. His work can be assessed neither as a mere reproduction of his culture, nor as a deconstructive critique. In this respect, my approach is inspired by, and offers a qualification to, Carl Schorske’s Pulitzer Prize–winning study, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture. The renowned historian gives a sensitive reading of Hofmannsthal’s views on art; ultimately, though, Schorske represents works of art as sites of avoidance: they are objects of refuge from an otherwise inhospitable reality that distract through their power to attract.29 My research has not so much resulted in a contrary reading as it has in a more nuanced one. Where Schorske sees avoidance, I find the possibility of engagement. For Hofmannsthal, the aesthetic encounter – a phrase Schorske would find oxymoronic – is a challenge to be taken up and responded to. Schorske is not wrong: Art can be a refuge; it can also pose a threat; and it can be a site of avoidance. But each encounter with a work of art presents various possible outcomes. Avoidance is not a foregone conclusion, and it is certainly not the one Hofmannsthal sought, because at the core of all those encounters is an aesthetic imperative: beauty and works of art place demands upon their audiences and viewers by issuing a call. The response will vary according to personal history, the history of the work, and the context of the encounter. While there is undeniably a culturally conservative strain in Hofmannsthal’s thought, it is there as part of a dialogue. Art confronts the human subject with the challenge of relating to the world. Simply to adopt old moralities would be insufficient. The past appears in Hofmannsthal’s work not as something towards which the present should reach back in facile emulation, but rather as an inspiration, a point of reference, or even a contrast.30 Past ideologies and works of art should not be forgotten, but it is naïve to think that they are stable or definitive. To borrow a sentiment from T.S. Eliot: “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.”31 Hofmannsthal takes that notion of responsibility a step further in order to reassess the dilemma of the aesthetic encounter. In doing so, he finds something that calls to countless unreachable others of past, present, and future.

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1 Aestheticism in “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht” (“The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two”) and the 1902 “Ansprache” (“Address”)

The movement known as Aestheticism has two major expressions: the cultivation of beauty in one’s surroundings – to the exclusion of anything ugly – with the aim of leading a ‘beautiful life’; and the direction of one’s aesthetic gaze at all the objects and people in one’s world. Hofmannsthal presents these two expressions of Aestheticism by exploring what they try to exclude; at the same time, he maintains a dual focus on the impossibility of ignoring the ugliness of life, and the power that beauty can exact on the subject (the viewer, reader, listener, etc.), effectively reversing the power dynamic assumed in the aesthetic gaze. Hofmannsthal’s bifocal fascination with the cultivation of beauty and the reversal of the gaze1 is already apparent in the 1895 tale, “Das Märchen der 672. Nacht,” translated into English as “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.”2 The plot can be summed up quickly: A wealthy merchant’s son lives almost entirely alone, ­surrounded by the beautiful furniture, tapestries, and other works of art he has inherited. The only people he sees with any frequency are his four servants. In the first half of the tale, nothing moves the plot forward, yet the atmospheric scenes suggest an internal struggle, which finds expression in the second half of the story: upon learning that his favourite servant is being accused (in very vague terms) of having committed a crime while in the service of a previous master, the Persian

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Emissary, the merchant’s son decides to travel to the city, with placatory intent. The reader follows the merchant’s son out of his house, through the dirty city streets, to his untimely and undignified death.3 In the secondary literature, the merchant’s son is most frequently portrayed as an aesthete who abandons his ivory-tower existence, prompted by some inner sense of guilt (regarding his Aestheticism, or perhaps his sexuality), and enters into the “real world,” where he is then punished by reality. The narrative is treated like a fable, and there is much that speaks in favour of this approach.4 On the other hand, the second half of the story (where the “real world” is depicted) introduces ambiguities that most fables cannot sustain. The “reality” of the second half of the story proves, in fact, stranger and more dreamlike than the fantasy-world of the first half. Important for understanding this curious inversion of reality and fantasy is the widespread turn-of-the-century interest in perception. According to impressionistic psychology – a growing field of inquiry at the time – the viewer-subject gathers impressions and then constructs from these impressions a reality.5 But there is also a growing interest in the object understood as a phenomenon, and in the subject’s perspective vis-à-vis the world of things outside the self and beyond the subject’s comprehension.6 Hofmannsthal’s tale invokes both impressionistic psychology and phenomenology. It has even been suggested that Hofmannsthal’s early writings exerted an influence on Edmund Husserl’s development of the phenomenological reduction.7 In a letter to Hofmannsthal, Husserl identifies a parallel between what he calls the “pure” aesthetic attitude of Hofmannsthal’s early dramas and the phenomenological method (a suspension of habitual existential attitudes) necessary for the ­critique of knowledge. What is common to both is an interest in how to face the external world: but aesthetics, as one aspect of this confrontation with the world, need not, indeed could not, be bracketed off from life and experience. Husserl, however, did not ever fully develop the aesthetic side of his phenomenology,8 and Hofmannsthal (who did not, as far as scholars can tell, respond to Husserl’s letter) developed the phenomenological side as it were only incidentally, in his literary production. In his notes from 1916 onward – published under the title Ad me ipsum by the Germanist Walter Brecht – Hofmannsthal identified the ambiguity of his own aesthetic attitude towards the phenomenal world, pointing specifically to “The Tale”: “Era of friendship with

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Poldy (‘merchant’s son’ ‘Garden of Knowledge’): The main problem of this very strange time lies herein: that Poldy completely (I less so, and in a rather indirect manner, insofar as I led a kind of double-life) overlooked the real: he sought to sense the essence of things – he took no account of the other face of things, he wanted intentionally not to notice it, to see it as nothing.”9 For Leopold (“Poldy”) von Andrian, a particular kind of ideality is made manifest in art (“the essence of things”); but there is another face of things: “the real.” The exclusion of either poses risks. In “The Tale,” the beautiful life – when understood as a flight from what is unpleasant  – comes under attack.10 The Hofmannsthal scholar Richard Alewyn wrote famously of the story that life will not be mocked; if defied, it becomes angry and vengeful.11 Put another way: the repressed can and often does return. This is equally true of the aesthetic: the human interest in art and beauty cannot be dismissed any more than real life can be. Hofmannsthal will argue in his writings that follow “The Tale” that we cannot simply ignore that aspect of the aesthetic that draws us out of our habitual mode of existence. For Friedrich Nietzsche, this might be called the Dionysian; for Freud, our unconscious drives; for Hofmannsthal, it is beauty.

E n c h a n t m e n t and Beauty: P a r t O n e o f “ The Tale” “A merchant’s son, a young man and very handsome who had neither father nor mother, grew weary of society and social intercourse soon after his twenty-fifth year.”12 So begins the story. “Schön” is one of the first adjectives used: here it means “handsome,” but its semantic flexibility is significant: it can also mean “beautiful,” “nice,” “lovely,” “pleasant,” “fine,” and even “considerable” when used in conjunction with another adjective. The word does not just describe the merchant’s son; it also sets the tone for the story. In the opening paragraph, it appears every few sentences like a leitmotiv: “sehr schön” (“very handsome”), “die Schönheit keiner einzigen Frau” (“nor … the beauty of any woman”), “seiner schönen Hände” (“his fine hands”), “die Schönheit der Teppiche” (“the beauty of the carpets”), “tiefsinnigen Schönheit” (“profound beauty”), “seine Tage bewegten sich schöner” (“his every day became fairer”).13 The word’s occurrences in the opening sections are so numerous that the reader becomes, like the merchant’s son, tired of the predictability. Indeed, each of the

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merchant’s son’s attributes has a formulaic significance: he is young, handsome, and weary – one might say today: bored. Ennui typifies the kind of decadence that Hofmannsthal’s story critiques.14 Yet readers are given rather little information and should not condemn the merchant’s son prematurely. He does not seem to harbour any misanthropic tendencies or desires; he is simply disengaged from it all. But why? One could read his weariness as what Adorno in his essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society” calls the “lyric spirit’s idiosyncratic opposition to the superior power of material things,” which is “a form of reaction to the reification of the world, to the dominion of human beings by commodities.”15 The character’s identity as a merchant’s son, after all, would suggest that the kinds of dealings he has with people and things are primarily of a commercial nature.16 Moreover, as the son of a merchant, his identity is already framed in opposition to the previous (absent) generation; he has inherited his mercantile relation to the world.17 Consider the abovequoted note from Ad me ipsum, in which Hofmannsthal nods to the broader social and cultural stakes with his reference to the “main problem of this very strange time.” The relation between subject and object has been altered in all areas of life – in physics, art, philosophy, psychology, economics, and even in the day-to-day interactions with other people. Philosophers, artists, and dilettantes alike must attempt to negotiate this new relation. In protest, Adorno’s “lyrical spirit” – the decadent aesthete – surrounds himself with beautiful objects and works of art. He sets up an artificial world in opposition to the hostile “real” world outside; he faces no challenges and can enjoy his surroundings unencumbered.18 In such a setting, the merchant’s son discovers meaning, life, and symbols: “Indeed, the beauty of the carpets and fabrics and silks, the carved and paneled walls, the metal sconces and basins, the glass and earthenware vessels had acquired a never imagined significance. He gradually came to see how all the shapes and colors in the world lived in his artifacts. In the intricacies of the ornaments he discerned an enchanted image of the intricate wonders of the world … He was long intoxicated by this great, profound beauty, all his, and his every day became fairer and less empty among these artifacts, which had ceased to be dead and lowly and were now a great legacy, the divine work of all nations.”19 Perfection and unity seem real – even tangible – in this divine image of generations spanning space and time. The merchant’s son can

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access that image through his possessions. But “possess” is a word to make us pause. On the one hand, these works of art have been passed on from previous generations, and as inherited possessions they call to mind Hofmannsthal’s tongue-in-cheek definition of “­modern” in the essay “Gabriele d’Annunzio”: “Modern are: old furniture and new nervosities.”20 On the other hand, possessions must be looked after and preserved. There is great responsibility in tending to such a great inheritance. But lofty thoughts like this are unsustainable, and Hofmannsthal’s irony cuts across the page: “Yet he likewise felt the vanity of all these things as much as their beauty, nor did the thought of death leave him for long: it would visit him amidst laughing, boisterous crowds, often in the night, often at table.”21 Even if one were to see in art a gesture towards continuity (the work exists long after its maker and awakens a sense of the infinite), art nevertheless does not allay the anxiety of life’s transience, giving credence to the saw: ars longa vita brevis. Beauty like this enlivens the surroundings of the merchant’s son, but the objects are also a memento mori, confronting him with the inevitability of death. The merchant’s son has not been able to reckon with his mortality,22 and art does not offer asylum to those in flight. Phenomenologically, the merchant’s son experiences art as full of life and, by extension, the promise of death. But instead of looking death in the face, so to speak, the merchant’s son attempts to mask any vanitas or meaninglessness (which he equates with ugliness), in essence ignoring the symptoms of an incipient existential dread; he tries to beautify death in the hope of rendering it harmless: “‘Your feet will take you to where you are to die,’ he would say, and saw himself, elegant, like a king lost on a hunt in an unfamiliar wood under exotic trees, meet a strange and wondrous fate. ‘Death will come when the house is done,’ he would say, and saw Death plod across a bridge resting on the backs of wingèd lions and leading to a palace, a house newly finished and filled with life’s spoils.”23 Like the speaker of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the merchant’s son is half in love with easeful Death. A death aesthetically adequate to a beautiful life, full of “profound beauty,” would not be so unwelcome a guest. Unsurprisingly, this mechanism of distancing typifies his approach to people as well. The merchant’s son’s four servants, whom he holds dear and without whom he cannot imagine living, pose a threat by the strength of their presence. The language of the narrative at this point oscillates between depictions of life and death, the distinction

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becoming increasingly blurred, just as the servants’ familiar gestures begin to change; their presence is oppressive precisely because they are alive, marching either towards death or into a kind of deadened life. Both fates are beyond the merchant’s son’s control, and yet they begin to mirror his own otiose existence. This kind of life has become a euphemism for meaninglessness – not death per se, but vain persistence. The merchant’s son is therefore disturbed when he senses his servants’ gazes resting upon him: “the older one’s listless and mournful, with a vague, disquieting challenge, the younger one’s with impatient or insolent vigilance he found even more disquieting.”24 Some scholars read the demand of the elder girl’s gaze as an expression of erotic attraction, which the merchant’s son is unable to recognize as such, let alone return.25 Whether or not the gaze is explicitly erotic (or ­derisive, as in the case of the younger girl), fear and vulnerability set the tone of the passage. The young man, accustomed to acting the observer, with increasing frequency feels himself the object of observation, like a hunted animal. Caught in and fully aware of his inadequacy, “he felt they were looking at his entire life, the depths of his being, his mysterious human inadequacy,” and his anxiety worsens as the servant girls’ gazes “forced him to think about himself in a fruitless and highly exhausting manner.”26 His inadequacy, which he is forced to acknowledge, is tied to the existential necessity of selfawareness in the face of others. It will soon become apparent that beauty is complicit in this imposed humility. The sensation of being watched has been read as a symptom of schizophrenia or a related psychotic illness.27 But Hofmannsthal is also working in an established literary tradition of observation, exemplified by Baudelaire. Compare this image from the opening lines of “Correspondences,” one of the sonnets in Fleurs du Mal: Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; Man walks within these groves of symbols, each of which regards him as a kindred thing.28 In “The Tale,” Hofmannsthal invokes and explores different aspects of Baudelaire’s motif of familiar gazes but creates an entirely d ­ ifferent atmosphere in the process. In Baudelaire’s image, the forest of symbols observes the man passing through. Their glances are familiar.

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At the heart of the poem is a sense of unity (line 6 ends with the word “unité”) and the identification of a space wherein “Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond” (“Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent”) in line 8. Where Baudelaire emphasizes correspondence, unity, and familiarity, Hofmannsthal evokes the uncanny. Two distinct aesthetic theories are at work here: Baudelaire’s, and that of John Keats. In his copy of Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), Hofmannsthal marked the quotation of Keats’ letter to Richard Woodhouse and wrote beside it: “Der Kaufmannssohn” (“The merchant’s son”).29 In that letter, Keats sketches his idea of the chameleon poet: one who loses his sense of self and disappears into his surroundings. The merchant’s son, having also lost his sense of self, is an observer caught between familiarity and non-identity. Such a state of ambiguity is made more palpable when a work of art is present. In a particularly elaborate scene – which featured on the cover of the Wiener Verlag 1905 printing of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen – Hofmannsthal juxtaposes the beauty of art to that of the human being through the description of phenomenological and existential oppositional pairs – death/life, immortality/ mortality, hard/soft, metal/flesh – only to have these distinctions ­collapse.30 In the same manner, the distinction between narrator and narration falls apart. In this scene, the merchant’s son observes the reflection of the elder of the two girls in a mirror. She is carrying two sculptures of bronze Indian deities. Thus doubly framed, the girl appears to approach the merchant’s son: She was carrying a gaunt, heavy, dark-bronze Indian deity under each arm, the figures’ ornamented feet resting in the ­hollows of her hands. The dark goddesses reached from her hips to her temples and leaned their dead weight against her soft, ­living shoulders, while their dark heads with evil snake mouths, three wild eyes in the foreheads, and eerie jewelry in the cold, hard hair moved next to her breathing cheeks, grazing her fair temples in time with her slow gait. However, it was not so much the goddesses’ weight and solemnity that seemed a burden to her as the beauty of her own head with its heavy jewelry of dark, vivid gold, two great arching coils on either side of her clear brow, like an Amazon queen.31

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Figure 1.1  Illustrated cover of the 1905 Wiener Verlag edition of Das Märchen der 672. Nacht und andere Erzählungen.

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Hofmannsthal’s deployment of free indirect speech allows his narrator to adopt the evaluative habits of the merchant’s son, thereby blurring the boundary between narrator, narration, and narrative – right at the moment of the aesthetic encounter: that is, the encounter with the girl and the bronze deities, taken together as a single aesthetic vision.32 Hofmannsthal will again use this literary signal to great effect in the prose version of Die Frau ohne Schatten (the more mature sister of “The Tale”). In the present scene, the poetic device of free indirect speech lulls the reader into a similar aesthetic attitude, creating in effect an analogical (literary) aesthetic encounter for the reader, multiplying the reflections. The language is appropriately heavy, like the bronze deities, especially in the slowly rolling rhythms and the prevalence of darker, long vowels in the first sentence of the German. Alliteration, like the sinuous initial syllables (“sch,” “s”), traces in sound the twisting metal, and the grandeur and heaviness are echoed in the sonorous word pair “großen gewölbten” (“great arching”). The repeated velar stop consonants of “Königin im Kriege” (a warrior queen – here rendered “Amazon queen”) terminate the image with a sense of aural finality. Hofmannsthal’s ekphrastic approach draws readers into the world of the merchant’s son, and into the aesthetic moment, where “living” hair at once serves as a contrast to the hard, non-living icon, and yet adopts the aesthetic characteristics of that icon – it is metallic, ornamental, and heavy, like the language of the passage. The comparison of the girl to a queen in war is a vision likely suggested to the merchant’s son (and the narrator-character) by his own reading.33 The effects of art and beauty draw him in (along with the narrator and the reader); but with his aesthetic gaze, the merchant’s son is able to distance himself from the vision again: “He was taken by her great beauty, though he knew as well that to hold her in his arms would mean nothing to him; he knew that in the end his servant’s beauty filled him with longing rather than desire.”34 As if following the Kantian notion of taste, the merchant’s son seems to hold an uninterested appreciation for his servant’s beauty: he can look without desire. Still, the sense of being arrested (“ergriffen”) before the aesthetic vision, in all its Medusa-like ambiguity, taints the cool objectivity. Cognition occurs alongside the vision (“aber gleichzeitig wußte er”), but the expression of that cognition  – the recognition – must come after. In other words, the aesthetic encounter is broken down into two distinct moments: it is the momentary

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experience of sense perception and cognition, followed by the recognition of that experience. The merchant’s son shows signs that he wishes to narrate his own experience precisely at the moment that the narrator slips into the merchant’s son’s perspective. That coincidence of perspective is formulated and actualized in the paradox of free indirect speech. The German term erlebte Rede expresses the paradox more directly: it is, literally, lived and experienced speech. What Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls the “ästhetisches Erlebnis” (“aesthetic experience”)35 is present here within the nexus of erlebte Rede. Then, in a second move, the experience is made into an object of study. The risk of losing oneself or one’s ego is tempered when it is translated into an epistemological matter (“He knew”; “Er wußte”). But that does not quell the threat completely. Consider the adornment of the girl’s hair.36 In this image Hofmannsthal conveys the unsettling potential of beauty, and in doing so he anticipates Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 definition of the uncanny as a psychic uncertainty resulting from the phenomenological ambiguity of objects – that is, when lifeless things seem to be animate, or when living beings seem inanimate.37 The servant girl’s beauty is so mingled with that of the bronze deities that it becomes difficult to disentangle the two. Such mingling thwarts conceptual categories, much like the experience of the sublime. In his discussion of Hofmannsthal’s “Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” Burkhard Meyer-Sickendieck mentions, but does not develop, two important aspects of the story: the contemplation of the lives of others (“Kontemplation des fremden Lebens”) and the feeling of estrangement (“Befremdlichkeit”).38 These are key ingredients for a tale that engages with contemporary psychological and philosophical questions. While the importance of “Befremdlichkeit” becomes more apparent in the second half of the tale, we can already see how “Kontemplation” functions here: it is part of that distancing, “pure” aesthetic attitude, as Edmund Husserl put it in his letter to Hofmannsthal. When contemplating something or someone, there is always a negotiation of distance. The merchant’s son wishes to safeguard his subject-position by regarding others from afar, and when that distance is compromised (as when the servant girl draws nearer), the safety of the subject position and the possibility of contemplation are threatened. In the scene under discussion, the traditional subjectobject hierarchy is upended, such that the subject no longer feels master in his own house.

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How does this happen, and why? The enframement of the young woman between the icons and within the mirror’s edges is imperfect: any still image properly framed should not move, after all. The living, human element threatens to upset the Kantian aesthetic experience of beauty, and it challenges the viewer’s perception of those assumed boundaries; equally, the icons highlight the mortality, but also the unreachable otherness of the woman, and of art. Unlike, say, the Persian carpet, which reminds the merchant’s son of his mortality, the cosmic unity of the world, and the generations of fruitful creativity, the reflection of the servant girl awakens in him something more than a melancholic sense of distance and inevitable decay. She, together with the deities at her side, issues a challenge to him because she can look back at him and remind him of his powerlessness to possess and preserve this beauty. Even the word choice (“Sehnsucht” instead of “Verlangen,” translated here as “longing rather than desire”) suggests the perpetual nature of a want impossible to ­satisfy – or even an addiction predicated on a distance that cannot be traversed. The etymological associations with illness (“Sucht” in German) tinge the word. By contrast, “Verlangen,” with its homophonic verb, conjures up a different relation to desire: one of duration, necessity, and involvement. The merchant’s son’s response is to disengage himself from a threatening situation. His desire for possession is wedded to his desire for “Ruhe,” for peace and stasis, but not the kind of stasis that involves the finality of commitment. He wants the calm forgetfulness that is sealed off from the chaos and turmoil of life that lurk behind the image. And so he walks along a riverbank populated by gardeners and flower sellers, searching (yet recognizing the futility of his quest) for some bloom or spice that “might put him in tranquil possession of that sweet charm which lay in his servant’s disturbing, unnerving beauty.”39 The merchant’s son’s encounter with the servant girl cannot accommodate simple binaries, so he seeks other distractions. And yet it is telling that he searches for a solution in one of the most ephemeral of senses: scent. Even the location (the riverbank) calls to mind to the Heraclitan/Parmenidean bind in which all are caught. The desire for the security of possession and peace leads him to some of the most familiar symbols of transience: flowers and their scent. The transitional moment comes when the merchant’s son searches for a substitute – in vain. To speak in terms of tragedy: there is a

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moment of reversal, but without the satisfaction of recognition. Wandering among the various plants, the merchant’s son recalls the verses of a poem which present an inverted image of his own activity: “In the stems of swaying carnations, in the fragrance of ripe grain thou didst arouse my longing, but when I found thee, thou wert not she whom I sought but the sisters of your soul.”40 The sophistication of this passage lies in the repeatedly frustrated attempts to set up one-to-one correspondences through parallel equivalents; instead, the verses articulate a double-chiastic structure of correspondence. In this way, Hofmannsthal draws attention to the constructed character of the tale, its fabric woven of words.41 Having been inspired by the living and aesthetically reified vision of the servant girl, the merchant’s son seeks her corresponding, non-threatening, equivalent in the pleasantness of some scent or other.42 He does not find it. The verses in his head speak to the same condition (the inspiration and subsequent failure of one-to-one correspondence), which nevertheless seemed to arise from the opposite set of circumstances: having been inspired in and amid the scent of flowers and ripe corn, the unspecified “Du” (“you” or “thou”) awakens his desire. Yet upon locating this “Du,” the merchant’s son discovers it is only a shadowy double, the sister(s) of “your soul.” In disentangling this structure, a few important points concerning beauty and its relation to the real become apparent. We know that the merchant’s son wants to avoid the threats he perceives by immersing himself in sensory pleasure and its anaesthetizing effects. This is one direction. But the reverse is equally plausible: he moves away from a hard and heavy beauty towards the very image of transience and weightlessness, represented by the scent of flowers. Accompanying this movement is a desire for the real as opposed to the substitute; or perhaps instead, a desire for the substitute as opposed to the real. The ambivalence of the subject’s desire is matched by the ambiguity of the object’s ontological status: which is the real, original beauty, and which the substitute? This question is announced in the irrepressible lines of the poem, the speaker of which, beginning from the opposite pole, seeks the “Du” ­of another subject – which he had intuited in the fleeting, sweet scent of carnations and ripe corn. Upon finding this sought-after human “Du,” however, he realizes it is but a pale image of what he had sensed before. Thus “the main problem during this very strange time” returns: should one privilege the realm of the aesthetic or that of the living?

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The lines of poetry mark the point of transition to the second part of “The Tale” and uncover a moment of aporia. Original and copy, art and life, the aesthetic, the erotic, and the ethical, the solitary and the social: all are tied together in this literary chiasm, located at the figurative threshold between reality and dream,43 and at the structural break between parts one and two.

D is e n c h a n t m e n t a n d the Uncanny: P a r t T w o o f “The Tale” After receiving a strange and threatening letter from the messenger of the Persian prince concerning an unnamed crime supposedly committed by his favourite servant, the merchant’s son elects to venture out of his summer residence and into to the city. Day gives way to evening as he wanders, and soon he must find a place to spend the night. Like a lost tourist, somewhat dazed, he soon finds himself in a poorer part of the city, where he sees little along his path that could be called “schön”: even the flowers are “häßlich” (ugly) and “verstaubt” (dusty). This is a world fallen into disrepair. It has been neither preserved nor cultivated. Yet there is something oddly familiar about the place. The merchant’s son, in a kind of déjà-vu, recalls foggy memories from a forgotten past and recognizes strange moments of deceptive correspondence. The narrative of the second section repeatedly and explicitly invokes descriptions from the first. Heike Grundmann has observed that Hofmannsthal understands beauty not merely as a pleasure for the senses, but as the manifestation of a correspondence between interior and exterior, such that the art-object becomes a symbol.44 Read through this lens, the first part of the tale, with its focus on beauty and interiority, might be the symbol of the second, the “exterior” world. Grundmann is drawing on two notions of the “symbol”: the image presented in Baudelaire’s “Correspondences,” and the birth of the symbol recounted by the fictional interlocutor Gabriel in Hofmannsthal’s literary dialogue from 1904, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte” (“The Conversation about Poems”). In that work, Gabriel locates the origin of poetry in the identity between priest and sacrificial animal and emphasizes that symbols do indeed mean (he uses the verb “bedeuten” intransitively), but we should not say what they mean. In other words, we must hold meaning in abeyance; “bedeuten” (“to mean,” but also derived from “deuten,” “to point”) is understood here as an immediate, intransitive gesture.45

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In the context of “The Tale,” the origin and “meaning” of the symbol are not fully worked out, but they are hinted at. As will become evident, Hofmannsthal’s 1895 story highlights the tension between a desire to endow correspondences with a particular meaning and the impossibility of doing so (as suggested by the lines of poetry from the end of the first part of the tale). “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” is an articulate example of a “beautiful” construction of correspondences. The irony is that the correspondences are uncanny and, in the fictional dreamlike context, they portend death. With such a proliferation of correspondences, “The Tale” easily lends itself to psychoanalytic interpretations of mirroring,46 and it goes one step further by linking the correspondences to an unspoken ethical dilemma: How does the merchant’s son relate to the world? How does his interior, cloistered self interact with and correspond to the “exterior” reality of the city? The first truly unsettling encounter of the second half of the story takes place, with biting irony, in a garden – a literal hortus conclusus. After wandering into a jeweller’s shop to purchase a gift for one of his servants, the merchant’s son notices an adjacent vegetable garden, and upon entering it, he opens himself up not to the beauty of the flora or the countless exotic scents he expects to find, but to a series of uncanny visions that trigger indistinct but powerful memories. As a literary motif, the garden is especially polysemous, and Hofmannsthal used it frequently.47 In the introduction to this book, I referred to Hofmannsthal’s poem “Mein Garten,” which likewise presented two gardens: one of stasis, and one of life and decay. Hofmannsthal’s friend Leopold von Andrian had also already started writing his novella Der Garten der Erkenntnis (The Garden of Knowledge), and we have seen how Stefan George’s lyrical-I introduces a black flower to his garden of sanctity.48 Gardens offer the possibility of re-establishing an (aesthetic) order of living. But, as Alexej Žerebin notes, entering the garden is not simply about escaping an ugly or hostile world. It is also about the desire for a certain kind of Erkenntnis, to be achieved through aestheticizing all aspects of life. This helps to explain the merchant’s son’s desire to enter – and linger in – the garden. What guides him are his fascination, his insatiable gaze, and his overwhelming desire to take in the unknown world and comprehend totality through aesthetic correspondences.49 Hofmannsthal writes: “The merchant’s son went in … to find so rich a collection of rare and curious narcissi and anemones and such strange

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and totally unfamiliar foliage that he stood there for a long while transfixed.”50 The garden’s contents reinforce the desire for possession and comprehension. The narcissus points clearly to narcissism (and by extension to a particular kind of Aestheticism), and the ephemerality of the anemone (the wind-flower, according to its Greek etymology) symbolizes transience and death. Vanity in both its senses is pictured here. Narcissism in this light can be seen as a futile and misguided attempt to maintain the integrity of the self in the face of one’s own transience. In the myth, Narcissus’s life was predicated on a rejection of the Delphic command to “know thyself.” When he did in fact come to know himself, he perished.51 As the sun slowly sinks, the merchant’s son becomes aware of the passing of time, yet he still wishes to look into the second glasshouse, if only briefly, through the windows – perhaps another gesture towards Narcissus. Peering through the glass, he is startled to see the face of a four-year old child glaring at him. Although he overcomes his initial surprise, he is shocked a second time: “For the child, who, motionless, was glaring at him maliciously, bore an inconceivable resemblance to the fifteen-year-old girl he had in his house. Everything was the same: the light eyebrows, the fine, quivering nostrils, the thin lips, even the way she slightly raised one shoulder. Everything was the same, except that in the child it came together in a way that terrified him. He did not know what made him feel that nameless fear; all he knew was that he could not bear to turn around knowing that the face would be staring at him through the glass.”52 In his quest for correspondences, the merchant’s son finds distortion and parody. Ursula Renner, in her afterword to the Reclam edition of Hofmannsthal’s Erzählungen, notes that the relationship between a thing, its sign, and its meaning has fallen victim to idle analogies (“Nachwort” 426–7). The correspondence of this four-year-old child to the fifteen-year-old servant girl is one that remains indeterminate. He sees the servant girl in the child and is ­confronted with the contradiction of the ostensibly stable self in the ­passage of time, and with the identity of two separate beings. The whole passage is characterized by repetition in diction, initiated by shock. The word “erschrak” (“he gave a start”) and the phrase “Alles war gleich” (“Everything was the same”) appear twice, each in parallel syntax, and the proximity of the phrases “Er wußte nicht” (“He knew not”) and “Er wußte nur” (“He knew only”) reenforces the parallels. In an eponymous essay on the English theorist Walter Pater, Hofmannsthal writes: “We are, almost all of us, in one way or another

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in love with a past seen through and stylized by the medium of the arts. It is, so to speak, our way of being in love with an ideal, or at least an idealized, life.”53 For the merchant’s son, the idealized world mediated by art and beauty has been replaced by absurdity: he leaves the garden in a state of abstraction “and with a numb feeling of something akin to hatred for the senselessness of his torture.”54 Having managed to escape the prison-like garden, he longs for his idealized past in the form of his bed, becoming more childlike than the child he encountered. Such idealization is coupled with the very last use of the word “schön” in a reference to the past – both his own, and a literary, imagined past: “With childlike longing he recalled the beauty of his own wide bed; he thought too of the beds that the great king of the past had made for himself and his companions when celebrating their weddings to the daughters of subservient kings: a bed of gold for himself and of silver for the others, carried by griffins and wingèd bulls.”55 Beauty is linked to an imaginary, literary past. And there is another correspondence. The bed he imagines belongs in the finished house of the proverb: “‘Death will come when the house is done,’ he would say, and saw Death plod across a bridge resting on the backs of wingèd lions and leading to a palace, a house newly finished and filled with life’s spoils.”56 The parallel between the bed, carried by gryphons and winged bulls, and the palace bridge,57 carried by winged lions, reinforces the connection to death. In his quest for a bed, this travesty of a medieval knight finds himself at soldiers’ barracks. The soldiers speak to him incomprehensibly, the smells are repellent, and the horses look angry, ugly, and wretched, like the soldiers. Beauty is put to rest, and the word does not appear again. In a gesture of generosity, the merchant’s son reaches into his pocket to pull out a few coins, thereby reintroducing mercantile means of dealing with others. (He is still the son of a merchant.) Equally, the generosity can be interpreted as an attempt to allay his own feelings of discomfort brought on by a strange memory: The face of one of the horses reminds him of a poor man he once saw in his father’s shop. The man was being hounded because he was discovered to be in possession of a gold piece, and he would not say how he had obtained it. Such monetary exchanges are a failure of one-to-one correspondence, and seem to succeed only in provoking antagonism. Indeed, the merchant’s son had already tried to give a few silver coins to the child in the garden in an attempt to mollify her animosity; she let them fall, worthless, into the void.58

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This time, however, as he reaches into his pocket to pull out one of his remaining gold coins, an unclear thought seizes him. He hesitates and pulls out his hand, perhaps sensing in this moment that his gift will be of no value to a poor man, in whose possession it would only rouse suspicion. Inadvertently, in this one gesture, he tosses out the piece of jewellery intended for the old woman, one of his servants. He bends down to retrieve it and is violently kicked in the groin by a horse. In effect castrated, the wealthy merchant’s son is then brought to his final resting place: a low, iron bed. Here he dies alone, renouncing his entire life and all that was a joy to him. His story ends with the ugliness of hatred: “He hated his premature death so much that he hated his life for having brought him to it.”59 The merchant’s son dies with an expression on his face resembling that of the horses: pained and unpleasant. He has become his own grotesque parody. If the merchant’s son in some way “deserves” this fate, then it must be because his life – according to his own adage – has led him to this death, as Hofmannsthal indicated to Beer-Hofmann on 15 May 1895: “The fall of the cards … is something that one forces from the inside out.”60 But what aspect of his life has led him to this death? Part of the difficulty with interpreting this story is the absence of a contrastive figure. We see no portrait of unmitigated joy anywhere – in neither the luxury of the merchant’s son’s surroundings, nor, of course, in the miserable city. The merchant’s son is the centre of the story, to the almost total exclusion of the other figures. And yet, as with the fantastic logic of the carpet, all things here are connected. Luxury is woven with poverty, pleasure with pain, joy with suffering. The merchant’s son’s only hope for meaningful human interaction, it seems, was in his favourite servant, whose continued presence could not be safeguarded. Hegel’s lordship–bondage dialectic is full at work here: the master needs the servant just as the servant needed his master. The two men are in fact mutually dependent. One can imagine the fate of the servant will be equally unpleasant. —*— According to Gregor Streim, one of the most important distinctions to make when considering the power of art is that between the artist and the dilettante, the latter embodying a strange hybrid of the scientist and artist. The dilettante seeks to grasp the aesthetic in conceptual

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terms, to render it an object of study, and in doing so, to neutralize it. The artist, by contrast – and the aesthete may go either way – engages with the work of art, contributing to its expansion rather than trying to subsume it under a conceptual totality.61 Hofmannsthal himself expresses this productive kind of reception in his 1905 ceremonial address, “Shakespeares Könige und grosse Herren” (“Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen”). He describes reading Shakespeare as “a pleasure and a passion, a conscious talent, an imagination, an innate art perhaps, like playing the flute or dancing, a shattering but silent inner orgy.”62 That is, to be struck by a work of art in this way is also to become a kind of artist, to respond to this gift. Yet nowhere do we see the merchant’s son responding in this spirit  – even his altruism hints at egotism. He contemplates, he admires, he possesses (or believes to possess), but he does not respond to beauty’s challenge. In this respect he is like the dilettante that Streim describes, imagining himself to be merely an observer, letting the impressions of life wash over him.63 He has the prerequisite appreciation for beauty, yet he lacks the artistic-productive capacity for the perception and reception necessary to give this fantasy life (hence the castration). This would require him not only to acknowledge but also to live with death. Fourteen years later, Rilke’s narrator in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) says that when we are born, a death is born as well, and we carry our deaths with us throughout life. This fin-de-siècle theme is present in “The Tale of Night Six-Hundred and Seventy-Two” as well, and tightly woven into it is the experience of the beautiful and its challenge to the coherence and stability of the subject. As in Malte Laurids Brigge, there are hints in “The Tale” that art, as an intensified experience of the interconnectedness of life on the one hand, and a challenge to notions of the stable, isolated self on the other, becomes increasingly important in a world organized around economic exchange, acquisitiveness, and the passivity induced in the pleasure had from watching, unresponsive, as the world passes by. The only response the merchant’s son knows is exchange value, compensation, and substitution: in aesthetic terms, one-to-one correspondence. As much as the merchant’s son wants to escape the society he has grown weary of, he is still a product of that society; his inability to respond to art with a creative spirit reflects as much upon his culture and society’s relation to creativity as it does upon his own.64 To

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paraphrase Mathias Mayer, whose characterization of the merchant’s son’s death strongly echoes Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge as well: Inasmuch as he does not die a death he recognizes as his own, he has not found his life’s path.65

B e a u t y R e defi ned: T h e “ A ddr e s s ” of 1902 Neither artistic beauty, nor human beauty, nor the love of beauty is the cause of the merchant’s son’s downfall. In “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” beauty has the capacity to make one aware, sometimes painfully so, of the precariousness of life. As in the encounter with the girl and the bronze deities, beauty can be a memento mori. Buried in “The Tale” is a nuanced understanding of beauty, not yet fully articulated, but which prefigures certain of Hofmannsthal’s later ideas. In a letter to Leopold von Andrian, dated 4 May 1896, Hofmannsthal describes an experience that bears a remarkable resemblance to certain scenes in “The Tale.”66 From Tlumacz: “Everything around me is uglier than you can imagine. Everything is ugly, miserable, and filthy, the people, the horses, the dogs, the children too.”67 He also experiences this ugliness as an ambiguous, anonymous threat: “Yesterday evening I was so startled by an old beggar, who in the twilight crept on all fours into my room and kissed my feet, that I felt exhausted and bitter afterwards, as after some grave and pointless danger … I don’t understand how all these things can have such power over me.”68 The distinction between the writer Hofmannsthal and the fictional merchant’s son lies in Hofmannsthal’s ability to see value in suffering: “Actually, these are states of anxiety. But they are also very good … They expand the inner sense; they bring up things which were as if buried. I think the beautiful life impoverishes one. If one could live out life simply as one wanted, one would lose all vitality.”69 The destabilizing threat to an orderly life of comfort, which itself leads to a kind of melancholy l­assitude, has the power to shake the young Hofmannsthal out of his lethargy: “When I wake up at night here, I am present to myself more strongly than I have been for a long time. I return to myself, like one who has constantly been putting on an act; it is an act that in some mysterious manner imitates this being, but it is still an act.”70 The sensation of returning to oneself is made possible precisely in the condition of anxiety; those

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fears allow Hofmannsthal to see the “other” life in a new light, to see the theatre of it all. In Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässse Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), there is a particular passage Hofmannsthal marked in his pocket edition: “but anything truly productive is offensive.”71 Hofmannsthal had read the Untimely Meditations for the first time three years before his experience in Tlumacz, and though we do not know when he underlined the passage, it is not hard to imagine that the word “anstößig” (“offensive”) resonated with him early on. The statement is ambiguous: it could mean that all truly productive things are offensive, shocking, or even repulsive. In any case, Hofmannsthal’s experience seems to have validated the statement in all its valences; or, perhaps Nietzsche’s words provided a paradigm for Hofmannsthal’s reflection on his experience. However one interprets “anstößig,” the idea provides an angle from which to understand aesthetic creativity, and it will become an important component for Hofmannsthal’s reassessment of the beautiful in art. In light of his own revulsion, Hofmannsthal-as-reader reflects on his appreciation for beauty just a day later (“Am 5ten weitergeschrieben”). While perusing Otway’s Venice Preserv’d in all the discomforts of a dirty stable (calling to mind the merchant’s son’s place of death), something inexplicable awakens in him. Flummoxed, he grapples for an explanation: “I have felt the beauty of the entrance and departure of every person, the beauty of two or three people standing with each other, and the beauty of their dialogues. I believe this is something incredibly rare and, in order for it to occur, all these specific conditions had to be present, the solitude that went on for days, the bad nights, and the vision of so many suffering people, even their smell and their voices.”72 Hofmannsthal has rediscovered his appreciation for beauty in mere gestures and situations, as if kindled by the jolting occurrence from the day before. As a result, his understanding of beauty now includes an attention to suffering. Such attention involves something like empathy, and Hofmannsthal writes that he, at least on some level, identifies with Otway: “For an hour, I loved as the poet did.”73 This identification is achieved through a recognition of human imperfection, and here his conviction intensifies: “It is a wondrously beautiful thing to sense the weakness of the artist in a work of art, the places where he, from his inadequacy and desire for beauty, becomes strange and forceful.”74 Hofmannsthal, unlike the merchant’s son, values the shortcomings of being human

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and the subsequent striving towards beauty. In fact, feeling those shortcomings is itself something wondrously beautiful. If beauty can incorporate suffering, what does that say about aesthetics? Hofmannsthal seems tentatively to suggest a new vision of what is “aesthetic.” The new vision integrates human frailty as a challenge and spur, rather than something to avoid or paint over. Under this new attitude, the merchant’s son’s own human inadequacy – his “menschliche Unzulänglichkeit” – would be part of what makes beauty possible. Hofmannsthal’s views on aesthetics were driven in large part by a desire not to be lost in a world-denying fantasy, but rather to acknowledge the role of suffering and imperfection in the creation of beauty. It is no surprise that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe exerted such a great influence on Hofmannsthal’s understanding and portrayal of art. With her 1947 study Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Goethe, Grete Schaeder compared how Goethe and Hofmannsthal turned towards the outer world as a way of thwarting the potentially self-destructive (and Narcissistic) interiority of the artistic personality. And again, like Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal is keenly aware of the need to escape the cycle of interiority by giving external form to what is felt. A text such as the 1896 essay on D’Annunzio’s fiction shows this well. The prevalence of the words “Leben,” “Tun” or “Tuen,” and “wollen”75 – life, deed, and will – drive the essay forward: “Only the deed gives birth to power and beauty. For that reason, we lay snakes into the cradle of the babe Herakles and let him strangle them, smiling, with his little hands – only thus can such power and beauty see the light of day. For that reason, Odysseus must be tossed about by the deceitful salt tide, so that his tremendous return home can take place, himself clothed in beggars’ rags, known by no one but his dog. Many paths he had to tread, and never with ease, in order that we might weep for him.”76 In the examples given in the quote above – one taken from myth and one from epic – Hofmannsthal suggests that “the deed” is a criterion that overreaches the boundaries of genre and even begins to blur the line between life and art. As Hofmannsthal makes explicit in his lecture “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”) the experiences of life are necessary not only for the depiction of a character, but also for the reception of a work of art: “only by walking the paths of life – with its wearisome depths and its wearisome peaks – can one acquire an understanding of the spiritual art.”77 Yet art is not meant

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to imitate life. In this lecture, Hofmannsthal uses Stefan George’s anti-­Naturalist vision of absolute poetry to combat the proliferation of literature that takes its sustenance from “real life” to the detriment of the art itself. Hofmannsthal discriminates between poetry and life by ­maintaining that there is no direct path from one to the other. Like the Romantics before him,78 he asserts that the language of everyday life is distinct from the language of poetry. His argument is that one should not attempt to make art mirror life as precisely as possible, for in doing so, one neglects the cultivation of the creative element – in effect, laming art, rendering it lifeless. Hofmannsthal rejects the Naturalist aesthetic that follows Arno Holz’s formula: Art = Nature – x, with ‘x’ approaching zero.79 And his irony is incisive: “You are surprised. You are disappointed to discover I am banishing life from poetry.”80 On the contrary, it is the facile imitation of life (or “Nature”) as present in the work of “Dilettanten” that drives the life of poetry out of poetry: “I know what life has to do with art. I love life, moreover I love nothing but life.”81 Without experiencing the polarities of life, art has nothing to say to us, no substance, no reason to exist. Still, art does not, indeed should not, try to replicate life. In the following passage, Hofmannsthal describes the lifeless figures of D’Annunzio’s novel Le vergini delle rocce: “One can be here and yet not in life: whatever it is that turns a person around, that makes it possible for that person to experience guilt and innocence, to have power and beauty – that is a complete mystery. For before that moment, this person possessed power for neither good nor evil, and had no beauty at all; he was too vain for that; for beauty comes into being only where there is power and humility.”82 Hofmannsthal’s terms seem to get lost in one another, but if we tread slowly, we can follow their paths. In saying that “beauty [Schönheit] comes into being only where there is power [Kraft] and humility [Bescheidenheit],” Hofmannsthal seems to be relying on circular reasoning: humility and power – in the sense of energy, vitality, and strength – are necessary for the emergence of beauty, and indeed also for the emergence of power itself. The terms are so tangled that we see neither beginning nor end, neither cause nor effect. The paradox of origin (power and humility being the “origin” of power and beauty) is like the construction of the Persian carpet in “The Tale” and the lines of verse the merchant’s son recalls when walking along the riverbank. Origins remain elusive.

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Hofmannsthal had already hinted at the connection between humility and beauty in his letter to Leopold von Andrian, noting that the experience of beauty was tied, on the one hand, to the experience of the wretchedness of life and, on the other, to the experience of the author’s human inadequacy – that is, those characteristics which the  merchant’s son attempted to neutralize. In the essay on D’Annunzio’s novel, these features are grouped under the term “humility” (“Bescheidenheit”). Hofmannsthal develops and refines this relationship between power and humility in his understanding of beauty just a few years later.

B e a u t y R evi ved In 1902 Hofmannsthal was asked to provide some opening remarks at the house of the count Karol Lanckoroński before an audience gathered for a viewing of Lanckoroński’s overwhelmingly eclectic art  collection. Hofmannsthal’s intention with this “Ansprache” (“Address”) was to set the mood and put the audience into a responsive frame of mind conducive to viewing the collection. He compares his words to musical accompaniment: “For it has often seemed to me that music has such a power to bring beautiful images to life.”83 Hofmannsthal speaks reflectively about his own half-poetic, halfprogrammatic “Address” as something meant to facilitate the reception of beauty by bringing these works of art to life. Referring to the paintings,84 he writes: “They are like the shadows which surround Odysseus, all desirous to drink of his blood, silent, avidly pressed in upon one another, their dark, hollow gaze fixed upon his living form. They want to have their share of life. Indeed, they seem to glow and tremble with a restrained energy of their own when not observed.”85 In “The Tale,” the (aestheticized) servants mysteriously draw life from the merchant’s son; here in the “Address,” the beautiful images draw life from the viewers. But art gives something in return through the suggestive power of its material, shaped by human hands. This serves as an explication of that moment Hofmannsthal recorded in his letter to Andrian: the recognition of the hand at work in a piece of literature – a sign of the author’s (Otway’s) humanity – is now a part of Hofmannsthal’s conception of the aesthetic encounter. In the “Address,” Hofmannsthal focuses in on the dizzying effect of such a recognition. The following passage saw almost no changes in the ­different manuscripts, so one can assume Hofmannsthal read this

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Figure 1.2  Dining room with tapestries in the Palais Lanckoroński in Vienna. This image is part of a postcard series that was made specifically for the building and its collection.

vertiginous sentence aloud, pulling his listeners into its whorl: “And thus, for a moment, a hanging or outstretched weaving is, as it were, able to breathe out its spirit: while one gazes fixedly upon it, while speaking or in silence, it will suddenly reveal that here there is something which has been knotted together, knotted by human fingers over endless hours, and for a moment, this thousandfold knotted work will light up and let one catch a glimpse of the suddenly arrested vitality, the arbitrary-will-become-form of the joining colours and shades, like a nocturnal landscape which, under a great flash of lightning, lets one glimpse the junction of roads and meeting of hills, and lets it sink down again into darkness.”86 Else Lasker-Schüler said it succinctly, in one word (and line) in her 1910 poem “Ein Alter Tibetteppich” (“An Old Carpet of Tibet”): Maschentausendabertausendweit (thousands-upon-thousands-ofstitches-vast); and Stefan George said it more esoterically, intimating

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a cryptic revelation in his poem “Der Teppich” (The Carpet).87 But Hofmannsthal wants his listeners to follow the thread into the weave and to stop and wonder at its knots and ties. Hofmannsthal’s own written and spoken tapestry (his sentence) is waiting to reveal its life, too, much as the carpet described in George’s poem: “And no one senses the riddle of entanglement … / that one evening the work will come alive.”88 Hofmannsthal’s momentary revelation of complex connectivity seems itself to spin the sentence into rolling repetitions with variation, demonstrating the convergence of material and content, the creation of form out of arbitrary volition (“Form gewordene Willkür”). And yet, sustaining this tension for any length of time is too much. The vision sinks away again into darkness. The sentence comes to a full stop. Behind the description of the revelatory power of beautiful art is a cultural-critical impulse that becomes more apparent when compared with a passage that Hofmannsthal marked in his copy of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Referring to the inner world (“Innerlichkeit”) of the German people, Nietzsche writes: “The foreigner will still be to some extend justified in maintaining that our interior is too feeble and disorganized to produce an outward effect and endow itself with a form. The interior of Germans can be receptive to an exceptional degree: serious, powerful, profound, and perhaps even richer than that of other nations; but as a whole it remains weak because all these beautiful threads are not wound together into a powerful knot: so that the visible act is not the act and self-revelation of the totality of this interior but only a feeble or crude attempt on the part of one or other of these threads to pose as being the whole.”89 Hofmannsthal identifies in the collected works of art (tapestries and carpets being some of the most vivid examples) precisely that connectedness, that strong knot (“kräftiger Knoten”) that Nietzsche believes is missing in the German people. Beautiful works of art demand a peculiar blend of strength and humility from the viewer: “there are moments, and they are almost frightening, in which everything around us wants to assume its full, strong life.90 Moments in which we feel them all, these silent beautiful things, living by our side, and our life is more in them than in ourselves.”91 The beautiful is characterized by its conceptual and linguistic silence and its capacity to inspire awe. And while this aspect of beauty is not restricted to art objects, art as a medium of silent articulation (not naming the thing)92 is a privileged location for such moments.

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These moments are potentially accessible to anyone present: “Each of us, even if he has never set foot in this house, will wander this place like the native land of his dreams. For our existences are grown through and with the existences of these works.”93 The two existences are inseparable and interdependent.94 This is what makes the exchange – revelation for sacrifice – possible. We may recognize in this “native land of [our] dreams” strains of the Freudian unconscious, and Hofmannsthal was in fact reading the work on hysteria by Freud and Breuer at the time.95 But for Hofmannsthal, the native land of our dreams extends beyond the psychology of the individual. There are also hints of Goethe’s notion of daemonic creative faculties: “how they stand there enwrapped in the mystery of that immense age now vanished, they take hold of us daimonically: and each is a world, and all are from a world which touches us through them and makes us shudder to the core.”96 These works of art are, in a sense, our shadowselves, yet they also are a world unto themselves. It is this ambiguity of identity that gives them that strange familiarity and destabilizing potential, and it is also what will lead Hofmannsthal to develop a dialogical conception of the aesthetic experience. Here is one of the first expressions of this dynamic: “It lives for us, it lives through us. There is something in us that responds to this world-picture.”97 Hermann Broch, in his study Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (Hofmannsthal and His Time), comments on this defining aspect of the word “beautiful.” He notes first that the “rediscovery of complete world identification” is the “highest ecstasy man can attain, probably the very highest attainable life value, and precisely because this complete identification with his object has been posited as the artist’s task, indeed his moral task, his work must be its expression, its image, its symbol; the work itself becomes ecstasizing and thus wins that quality specific to works of art for which the word ‘beautiful’ was coined.”98 Broch’s comment is one of the few to identify the specificity that the word “beauty” had for Hofmannsthal. The “Address” helps to ­substantiate Broch’s interpretation, but we see also that there is an element important to Hofmannsthal’s understanding of beauty that Broch did not emphasize: namely, that the “moral task” is not the artist’s alone. By invoking the word “beautiful,” the viewer too – artist or not – must realize the consequences of taking the object world seriously, and appreciate its resistance to possession. The potential power of the beautiful for Hofmannsthal lies in the double-recognition of the other and oneself simultaneously, in one gesture.

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These beautiful images are a world to which we respond: the character of that response depends on our understanding of the character of the encounter. As we have already seen in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the engaged response is neither automatic nor guaranteed. At most we can say that the response is prompted by this dual characteristic of beauty: its familiarity and its threatening character. In the words of Ernst Jentsch: “This powerlessness generates a vague feeling of threat emanating from something unknown and ungraspable, something which is as enigmatic as one’s own psyche usually is.”99 For the remainder of the “Address,” Hofmannsthal develops a notion of beauty that is reflected not only in the visual (or poetic) content of the work of art, but also in the idea of art-as-gift – an idea that will become important for chapter 3. In the second half of the “Address,” Hofmannsthal reverses the sacrifice metaphor used in the first half: “And now the never-ending world of paintings: there they hang, and what is long since past continually pours out from them as something present.”100 Beautiful art takes and gives. And this is what the viewer does, too, when sensing the breath of eternity arising in these objects of human creation: “Yes, thousands, individuals and nations, have wrought form, and what they could exalt to form lives on forever: artwork, symbol, myth, religion.”101 This is not a question of whether a work of art will survive a fire or a flood, or whether one religion will continue to exist after being succeeded by another. All are ephemeral. Yet they do have something time-defying about them: they can outlive their creators, for one. But more than this, they point to the past and the future: in other words, to that which is beyond the here-and-now of the individual. At this point, Hofmannsthal’s poetic language intensifies, just as he approaches the crux of his address: art’s imperative.102 “For if we are barred from knowing the spirit of the times through contemplation, then it is given to us instead to feel it when it demandingly descends upon us, seducing and tantalizing, oppressing and enchanting us with the breath of Otherness.” 103 Hofmannsthal knows quite well we can never, epistemologically speaking, fully comprehend the past.104 We can sense it, however, through art. This happens in the demand that descends upon us, as if we had no choice in the matter. For Hofmannsthal, this is no ordinary demand. It is rather like a divine command, transcending the limitations of time and self: “And thus an infinite demand confronts us, one most dangerous to our inner

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equilibrium: the demand that we reconcile ourselves with the ­thousandfold phantoms of the past, which want to be nurtured [or nourished] by us.”105 We cannot remain apathetic, for this concerns all of us. The phantoms are a part of our own existence, and to ignore their demand is to reject participation in this world. With the invocation of a single word – beautiful – we declare our participation and responsibility: “For such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’ There is no word loftier, no word more dangerous. It is the word which binds most deeply.”106 The word is lofty, even proud (“stolz”) because we have an intimate connection to the objects we call beautiful. In some way, we identify with them. This opens up a world of reciprocal offering and receiving and presupposes our adequacy to the task: “By uttering this word, we say that something within is stirred by what art has formed as only like can be stirred by like.”107 Moreover, we become as much an object of that word as we are the subject that speaks it, insofar as our identity is upset and cast into the world of the work of art: “And insofar as our lips are compelled by a deep magic to speak it again and again, we assume such a tremendous kingdom of art, as if a thousand souls in us were stirred by the act of aesthetic enjoyment.”108 Again, there is a reversal of terms: we have a share in the kingdom of art, just as much as the work of art has a share in life. In the case of art, the situation – potentially at least – moves beyond narcissism and hubris by opening space for dialogue and a new experience of the world. The dénouement: “But let us calm ourselves: the demand imposed on us by the world of beauty, this daimonic process of enticing out of us entire worlds of feeling, this demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected power of the mysterious line of ancestors within us, the towering stacks of layers of our supra-individual memory, piled one upon the other.”109 The artworks displayed in Lanckoroński’s villa were mostly Trecento and Quattrocento paintings, statues, and artworks from the Far East. These works of far-flung origin surrounded the viewers, respirating into the air temporal, geographical, and cultural difference. But ­according to Hofmannsthal, our human capacity to call artworks “schön” allows for entire worlds to be drawn out of us. It is as if the viewers contribute to this beauty, are drawn into participation, or, as another version of the text has it, into what Hofmannsthal calls “Communion.” The world of the beautiful sets us in relation with the

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other by pulling us out of our mundane, subject-centred existences. In yet another version of the text, the question of the subject receives slightly different treatment: “Here it appears we are in danger of losing ourselves: a great error! For here it is that we first are awakened and able to possess ourselves; for indeed we create the immortal content of these images, insofar as we feel after them and empathize, alive.”110 Perhaps Hofmannsthal left this out of the final version because it jarred with the tone of the subsequent conclusion. His discussion of beauty, at this precise point, is less about losing oneself and finding oneself again than it is about the direct implications of the word itself; Hofmannsthal seems to want to awaken a sense of enthusiasm, rather than to offer promises as explicit and grandiose as self-discovery; perhaps he even had his doubts. Instead, he closes the address with Goethe’s comment on enthusiasm, complementing his own guiding, preparatory remarks: “For ‘without enthusiasm,’ Goethe says, ‘art allows itself to be neither grasped nor comprehended. Anyone unwilling to begin with amazement and admiration will not find access to the inner sanctum. And the head alone cannot grasp any product of art; it can only do so in the company of the heart.’”111 Readers are left at the end of the “Address” with a sense that Hofmannsthal, in an effort to convince his listeners of the greatness of their task, must rely on religious language. This is certainly not an uncommon move – the Germanist Heinz Schlaffer characterizes much of German literature as an ever-renewed engagement with religion – but it risks displacing the discussion of the experience of art into the realm of mysticism, moving away from the very “life” that Hofmannsthal enjoins us not to forget. —*— Understanding Hofmannsthal’s use of the word “beauty” is crucial to appreciating his literary works. It helps to give form to the aesthetic experience, which so tenaciously resists definition. “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” asks what to do when confronted with beauty-as-threat: to flee, to neutralize (anaesthetize), or to engage? Beauty can induce sensations of self-dissolution as well as interconnectedness, leading Hofmannsthal to identify an ethical moment in the aesthetic encounter, which he describes as a call that demands a response. The “Address” makes this last point clear. But is it enough?

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In a letter Hofmannsthal wrote in 1923 to his daughter, Christiane von Hofmannsthal, the ambiguity of beauty re-surfaces. Long after “The Tale” and long after Tlumacz, he writes on lovesickness and suffering: “Not that suffering should be excised from existence: no, it is the very stuff of our existence and even that which we call beautiful is unthinkable without suffering – indeed it is the blossom that ­burgeons forth from suffering, but it’s one thing if you get yourself tangled up in unnecessary suffering, half playing and half desiring, and another if we must suffer and have no bulwark to protect ourselves. And here I’m troubled by the responsibility that I carry for letting you live so outside of conventions, which are of course the natural defensive walls of existence.”112 It is remarkable that, in this letter to his daughter almost thirty years later, Hofmannsthal articulates the same conviction that beauty is not an escape from suffering, but rather the blossom that grows from it. Yet underlying this is a persistent worry that one might not be fully protected, that one might die full of regret, having failed in one’s responsibilities – that is, having failed to respond adequately.

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2 Art and Society in “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (“The Letters of the Man Who Returned”)

The cultural and intellectual changes in Germany and Europe at the turn of the century led to what one could consider a phenomenological crisis, the most prominent symptom of which was existential nausea. Literary works like Kafka’s “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” (“Description of a Struggle”) from 1909, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge from 1908–10, and Hofmannsthal’s “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (“The Letters of the Man Who Returned”) from 1907–08 all touch on this wide-spread sense of unease; even Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1938 Nausea can be read as part of this group and is a testament to the enduring nature of the “illness.” Hofmannsthal’s fictional letters ­present one of the earliest glimpses into this particular crisis. They do so – unusually, when compared with his contemporaries – within the framework of an aesthetic encounter. With its socially and ethically charged background, “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” was initially intended to be an ambitious multi-volume project tracing several generations of the protagonist’s family. For reasons unclear,1 Hofmannsthal abandoned the idea after having just five of the fictional letters published. The text forms not only the beginning of an aborted project; it also embodies one of the work’s central themes of fragmentation and cohesion. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” bears a striking resemblance to Hofmannsthal’s great unfinished novel Andreas. Both are fragments, but there is more than a structural affinity; many of the characters initially planned for “The Letter of the Man Who Returned”

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found their way into the Andreas fragments, which the author continued to revisit in the two decades between 1907 and 1927. Hofmannsthal’s failure to bring his novelistic intentions to completion might well be interpreted in light of the drastic societal, cultural, and scientific changes of the early twentieth century: The idea of the novel, as a literary genre steeped in the tradition of ethical and aesthetic education, could not adequately demonstrate the internal contradictions and fragmentation of a protagonist destined not to follow a progressive (even if meandering) path of Bildung (i.e., education and formation of moral character), but rather a circular route that returns to the “self.” It is telling that, in 1905, the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey took the Bildungsroman and its cousins (like the coming-ofage story and the Künstlerroman) as objects of study: as if these genres had already become artifacts in literary history. Unlike the more “complete” novels of German literature (Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels, for example) or the examples of Bildungsroman in other European literatures, Andreas and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” are defined by their failure to demonstrate clear development, education, progress, and arrival. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” is not a story about the development of moral character, or at least not in the Bildungsroman sense; and despite the importance of art for the letters, it is not a story about developing artistic ability, in the sense of the Künstlerroman. There is a moral dimension, but it hovers above the action, suspended in the text’s own aesthetics – that is, its reflections on art and beauty. Furthermore, while the novelistic form accommodates subplots, detours, and aesthetic encounters, the fragmentary nature of these letters has the aesthetic advantage of performing its subject matter: the ecstatic moment of the aesthetic encounter is cut off from the rest of the character’s experiences, and cut off from the narrative elaborations in the unfinished Andreas.2 The letters were never published together in Hofmannsthal’s lifetime. The first three found an audience with the journal Morgen in the summer of 1907, while the last two were published in Kunst und Künstler in early February of 1908 under the title “Die Farben. Aus den ‘Briefen des Zurückgekehrten.’” Nonetheless, there is a line of continuity that has become evident in the more recent editions, r­ anging from the pocket-sized Reclam edition of the short stories, Erzählungen (edited by Ursula Renner-Henke), to the critical edition with notes and variora. In Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Writings on Art / Schriften

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zur Kunst I have translated the letters in full. Despite the clear connection between the letters, the text as a whole lacks a novelistic coherence and telos. It seems Hofmannsthal felt this too. Interest in such “productive failures” of Hofmannsthal has gained momentum: in 2017 the Hofmannsthal Gesellschaft hosted a conference on the author’s “produktives Scheitern.” It is evident that Hofmannsthal’s work – and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” is a particularly illustrative example – is interesting at least in part precisely because of the mysterious allure of its internal discord. This comes to a climax where ethics and aesthetics meet.3 The collection of fictional letters portrays a financially established man just returned from travelling the world on business (the nature of which is not explained). The year is 1901, and upon his arrival in Europe after eighteen years, the writer of the letters – henceforth referred to as the merchant4 – can no longer hold any meaningful concepts (“Begriffe”) about his own culture at the beginning of the new century. At the personal level, people seem internally fragmented and distracted, lacking in character, and guided by a desire for money. As if infected by this profit-seeking drive, the merchant repeatedly rejects the idea that he is a dreamer of any kind: for what could be less profitable than dreams (unless one is a successful psychoanalyst)? The merchant may be unhappy with modernity’s mercenary turn, but his own patterns of thought show how infectious that drive is. Still, there is a distinctly dream-like quality to his memories and thoughts. He will even come to designate some of his thoughts as “dreams” (“Träume”), and the last two letters (the focus of this chapter) present an aesthetic encounter which questions the value system that places a status-quo reality above the world of the imagination. Once this happens, it seems the merchant’s confidence in life and sense of stability is restored: he accomplishes his work as an exemplary capitalist and thereby embodies, as some scholars see it, the ideal of a human being of practical activity rather than passivity.5 I interpret this as a deceptive resolution, however: The end is not only about a successful business endeavour, nor is it an untainted triumph of activity and practicality. It is an unresolved struggle with the demands of a capitalism and the awareness that art, while it may provide a moment of relief from a mercenary world, contains its fair share of suffering as well. Hofmannsthal’s spin on the matter is a creative response (not a remedy) to the relation between social life and art.

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As discussed in chapter 1, Hofmannsthal was fascinated by the idea of a challenge, or demand, issued by beauty. Now the task is to see how reflections on beauty function in a literary text, and what the nature of that challenge is. Hofmannsthal does not write in a philosophically rigorous manner, but “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” (as well as other of Hofmannsthal’s works, notably the Chandos Letter) do engage with topics that interested psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers at the time; Franz Brentano, Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Edmund Husserl would all find in Hofmannsthal a literary colleague in the study of perception. In this epistolary collection, the final two letters trace the connection between the phenomenological and the aesthetic experiences of life, primarily by way of questioning the status of reality and art, and, by extension, the possibility of community and dialogue.

T h e P h e n o m e n o l o gi cal Cri s i s The final two letters depict the personal consequences of the merchant’s return home. His uneasiness in this society has already manifested as a psychological sickness, foreshadowed in the first letter by the merchant’s mal de débarquement. Such seasickness on land is triggered not by getting off the boat and setting foot upon terra firma once more after a long voyage, but rather by leaving the terra cognita of an ordered worldview and stepping into the whirling flux of a new reality. The symptoms worsen over the course of the letters, until the merchant loses his sense for the reality of things altogether: he suffers a phenomenological crisis, and his nausea takes on an existential significance. The merchant has lost his sense of orientation, and the world he finds himself in seems ghostly, tentative, and hollow in comparison to the Germany he imagined while on his travels. In the second letter, he has already written of the people: “And now I have for the last four months been looking into the faces of the real people: not that they were soulless, for it is not seldom that a ray of light of the soul breaks forth, but it flits away again, it is an eternal coming and flying away as at a dovecote.”6 In the fourth letter, the merchant describes how this fleeting reality comes to be characterized not by presence, but by absence. This ­dizzying destabilization of reality results in what the merchant calls “the crisis of an inner malaise; its earlier manifestations, admittedly, were as inconspicuous as was possible.”7 That sickness is insidious.

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It creeps into the merchant’s life and poisons his environment until the physical objects come unmoored. Through itemizing, the merchant attempts to re-establish the presence of the particular objects; he must list them, he says, “or tear this letter to shreds and leave the rest unsaid forever.”8 The presence of a symbol or sign (the word on the paper) and the second set of eyes (the recipient of the letter) both attest to the objects’ existence and significance. Listing also allows the merchant to move forward and write about his experience. Like lowering an anchor, listing alleviates some of the nausea by establishing a point of reference, even if the objects referred to seem elusive: “Sometimes it befell me in the morning, in these German hotel rooms, a jug or the wash basin – or a corner of the room with the table and the clothesstand – sometimes these things seemed to me so not-real, despite their indescribable ordinariness, so completely and utterly not real, ghostly in a way, and provisional at the same time, waiting, as it were, temporarily taking the place of the real jug, of the real wash basin filled with water.”9 Typically, the physical object is understood to be more “real” than its representation: works of art, dreams, and memories are supposed to be of lower orders of reality. But just one letter earlier, the merchant described a set of Albrecht Dürer prints he often looked at when he was a child; he initially described them as “unreal” (“unwirklich”) but then, as if seeking greater precision, appended the  adjective “surreal” (“überwirklich”).10 By contrast, in this ­letter, the real jug and the real wash basin are “so completely and utterly not real.” In this Biedermeier room of familiar objects, things are not quite as they should be. In fact, they do not seem to be at all. The diagnosis of the phenomenological crisis resembles the cultural critique that pervades the first three letters. In the cultural critique, Hofmannsthal focuses on what the merchant depicts as a lack of character in his compatriots. In the phenomenological crisis, the focus reveals a lack of presence. In articulating the cultural critique in the first three letters, the merchant gives a series of counterexamples; here, too, with the phenomenological crisis. There is even a link to the cultural critique in the merchant’s contrast between “here” and abroad: “Over there, in other lands, even in the most miserable of times, the jug or the pail with more or less fresh water in the morning was a given, and it was something living: a friend. Here, it was, one could say: a ghost.”11 Even houses12 and trees – in contrast to the beloved walnut tree of his childhood13 – induce this nausea with their ghostly, non-real aspect. And in contrast to the breath of fresh air he

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experienced while thinking of Germany from abroad,14 he now senses stagnation: “something shuddered through me, something that split my breast in two like a breath, a wafting, so indescribable, of eternal nothingness, of eternal nowhere, a breath not of death, but of not-life, indescribable.”15 The age-old trope of the internal split – like the two souls in Faust’s single breast or the medieval Parzival’s doubt, “zwîvel” – has been adapted to emphasize the actively separating, dissociating implications. Dissociation and parody are also worked into the description of the landscape16 as he now sees it: “it took on a face, its own ambiguous countenance so full of inner uncertainty, pernicious non-reality: it lay there so void – so spectrally void.”17 In the context of this ghostly reality, Jörg Schuster draws attention to Hofmannsthal’s confession to worrying that “real” people and things might be lost to him; they might instead be absorbed into his fantasy. Schuster cites a number of letters Hofmannsthal wrote to the countess Christiana Thun-Salm, the most striking of which dates to early January 1908 – that is, about a month before the last two epistles of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” were published. In the letter to Thun-Salm, Hofmannsthal writes of those things that make life “more beautiful, richer, and more endearing … and which, through the dangerous afflatus of poetic vision, could be driven out of life away into the world of fantasy.”18 Schuster reads this, and indeed most of Hofmannsthal’s epistolary writings – fictional and nonfictional – as the writer’s way of exploiting life by aestheticizing it and using it for his work. Schuster’s evidence is strong. He cites, for instance, a passage from another of Hofmannsthal’s letters, this time to Helene von Nostitz from 15 May 1907, wherein the author writes that the addressee is “necessary for my life, for the life of my fantasy or my thoughts.”19 According to Schuster, this statement makes use of a rhetorical correctio that reduces life to aesthetic production.20 This is one possible way to read the sentence, but there are others. It is not clear from Hofmannsthal’s statement that the movement from “my life” to “the life of my fantasy” is merely correctio; it can also be read (simultaneously perhaps) as amplificatio: that is, through repetition and further specification, he asserts how powerful an effect Nostitz has had on his life. In spite of his desire for community, Hofmannsthal constantly reminds us that our condition is always also one of isolation, and the monologic quality of the letters underscores this fact. Aestheticization is not so much an attempt to create distance – we already perceive the

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world at a distance – as it is a reification or acknowledgment of the human condition. Ignoring the essential difference that separates us and makes us particular may be even more severe a disease than trying to give form to our frustration with this condition. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” give that frustration form. In fact, this text develops the content of the letters to Christiana ­Thun-Salm and Helene von Nostitz. In the letter to Thun-Salm, Hofmannsthal writes that he fears the better parts of life might be “driven out of life away into fantasy”; the merchant expresses a similar fear that Europe “could steal me away from myself.”21 The so-called “reality” steals away (“wegstehlen”) the self, just as the poetic vision drives away (“­wegtreiben”) the “real” other. How these displacements occur is equally relevant: namely, with a breath. In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” it is “a breath [Hauch], a wafting, so indescribable” which threatens the subject; in the letter to Thun-Salm, it is “the dangerous afflatus [Anhauch] of poetic vision” which threatens real people and things. This is the same movement described from ­opposite perspectives. From the perspective of “real” life and the “real” letter, art is the danger. But from the perspective of the “­fictional” letter and the “fictional” life of the merchant, a fictionalized “reality” poses the threat. In light of the existential malaise and phenomenological precariousness, the merchant attempts a self-diagnosis. He wonders if his illness is psychosomatic, brought about by something that “the European air seems to lay out ready for him who has returned from far away after having been gone for a long time, perhaps too long.”22 Has the merchant abandoned something? Has he been avoiding something? Or has he, like another medieval German traveller, Iwein, simply been enjoying his adventure, without considering how much time has passed, without fulfilling his responsibility to return home punctually? Or is this a broader issue of time always being out of joint? Readers never get to learn what it was that started the merchant on his journey, or why it took eighteen years, but the reference to avoidance is intentional. While working on “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal was also writing a series of notes for what he called a “two-voiced soliloquy.”23 The speaker is a “Revenant” – a ghost or spirit returned to the world – that possesses two voices: a chiding voice that emanates from below, and an ameliorative one from above.24 The soliloquy embraces contradictory voices and highlights internal division. Like the Revenant, the merchant is a being who

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has returned (he is the “Zurückgekehrter”). He even experiences his world as splintered and ghostly; he feels separated from his body, and is simultaneously ashamed and in denial about his role in society. The source of his shame is the money he has made, or rather, the significance money has acquired. That is, in fact, the one thing that has become clear: “Today I cannot clearly express what went whirling through my whole self: but that my business and my own acquired money disgusted me … I had taken in twenty-thousand examples: how they forgot life itself in favour of that which should only be a means to living and should have no other value than as a tool.”25 As with the inversion of reality and non-reality, so too there has been an inversion of money and life. He continues: “For months, a flood of faces driven by nothing other than the money they had or the money others had. Their houses, their monuments, their streets, all that was for me in this somewhat visionary moment nothing more than the thousandfold reflected grimace of their ghostly non-­ existence.”26 This description alludes to the contemporary sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel’s diagnosis that “the more the life of society becomes dominated by monetary relationships, the more the relativistic character of existence finds its expression in conscious life, since money is nothing other than a special form of embodied relativity of economic goods that signifies their value.”27 Capital gain is lifeless growth without character. The preoccupation with money has morphed into something akin to a religion, so thoroughly do people desire the growth of capital for its own sake.28 This way of thinking has pervaded even the merchant’s own life, such that the physical objects before him exist, like money, only as provisional things, waiting in anticipation. Money, as a symbol of modern flux (evoked in the image of the flood of faces driven by greed), comes to stand in for a view of a world that resists reification, character formation, and existential coherence.

Visio Divina a s A e s t h eti c Encounter These thoughts seize the merchant just an hour before a meeting, at which he is meant to speak on behalf of his company’s interests. He contemplates his options but feels he has nowhere to go – everything reminds him of money and greed. To escape these impressions, he ducks into a quiet side street. The stillness, contrasting with both the hectic movement and the noise of the bustling streets,29 initiates the merchant into a new atmosphere. Upon noticing a placard advertising an

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exhibition of paintings and illustrations, he decides this will be a good distraction from his “absurd thoughts” (“unsinnigen Gedanken”).30 As a man in spiritual crisis might find himself drawn to a place of worship, so this merchant enters a gallery, not consciously looking for guidance. Formally, the visit to the gallery repeats the structure of flight depicted in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” but with key differences. Whereas the merchant’s son flees an uncanny beauty for pleasant fragrances, the merchant abandons the noxious air and lifeless world of things and directs himself towards art – and the nature and humanity discernible in it. He begins by attempting to catalogue what he sees: the subject matter, the number and kinds of works. Initially, the tone is suffused with the equanimity of the phenomenological gaze. The pictures seemed to me rather garish, unsettled, quite rough, quite ­peculiar, I had first to find my bearings in order even to see the first ones as pictures, as a unity – but then, then I saw, then I saw them all in this way, every single one, and all of them together, and the nature in them, and the human power of soul that formed the nature here, and tree and bush and field and hillside which were painted there, and that other thing as well, that which was behind what had been painted, the essence, the ­indescribably fateful –, I saw all this in such a way that I lost the feeling of myself in these pictures, then powerfully regained it, and then lost it again! … But how could I put into words something so incomprehensible, something so sudden, so ­powerful, so impossible to analyse!31 The initial confusion, which hitherto manifested in terms of a vague disjunction of things from reality, now has been given form (and fate); it has been reified in the artwork and set into motion by the overwhelming intensity of colour. The excited pace of the text – accelerated by repetition and intensification with each new beginning (“but then, then I saw, then I saw them all”) – reflects this bombardment with an altogether new tone for “The Letters,” recalling the language of a mystical vision – a visio divina. He identifies a substantial, unified otherness that has specificity and existence: first the internal cohesion of this world (a closed and self-sufficient, aesthetic world), then the sense of the artist behind it all (formed by nature and in turn a giver of form) then, finally, that essential (unnamed) thing.

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This vision recalls a much earlier essay by Hofmannsthal, “Die Malerei in Wien” (“Painting in Vienna”). In this 1893 text, the ­nineteen-year-old Hofmannsthal expresses an urgent call for a new sensibility: “In the presence of a painting, our public relates to everything that is inessential in a work of art, but never to the main thing, the truly painterly; it is interested in the anecdote, in tricks and ­gimmicks, everything but the one necessary thing: whether an artistic individuality has had the free power to offer a new perception of how the world is seen, gained through living eyes, in such a way that it might be conveyed to the soul of the viewer.”32 The merchant – ­perhaps because he has been spared eighteen years of philistinism – is able to and does see what he suspects is the essential in these paintings, and in them he sees too that they were made by an “artistic individuality,” one who had the “free power” to give form to his perception of the world-picture. In chapter 1, I referred to Hofmannsthal’s experience reading Otway’s Venice Preserv’d and his recognition of the faults and greatness of the human being who composed it. Likewise, in the 1902 “Address,” Hofmannsthal draws attention to the material construction of tapestries, “knotted by human fingers over endless hours.”33 His is an aesthetic appreciation insofar as it responds to the elements of the artwork that appeal to the senses; but crucially, in addition to this, he almost always invokes the person behind the work’s existence and the effort, ardour, and even suffering that went into its creation. If in modern society workers are alienated from their labour and what they produce, then the artist’s relation to the artwork presents a counterimage. Part of what constitutes this alternative is what Hofmannsthal calls “Frömmigkeit,” often translated as “piety.” In one of the variants of the dialogue “Furcht” (Fear), there is a definition of piety articulated with reference to the art of dance: “Dancing is being able to give oneself over totally and purely. Now this is. This is piety. Our mothers were such, for that reason the river stayed within its banks. For that reason the olive tree bore. For that reason the fountain gave.”34 “Piety” is: to give oneself over to something.35 It exhibits the same deictic structure as the symbol: it points beyond itself. And it seems to establish context for the flux – it does not halt it, but it ideally keeps it from inundating the world. Even the tree (here: the olive tree; in the letters: the walnut tree) bears intransitively (“the olive tree bore”), and does so out of piety. The fountain, that magical place from the

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merchant’s childhood, likewise gives out of piety (“Darum gab der Brunnen”). In a human being, piety would entail the whole person moving at once – in other words, overcoming that internal division and lack of character.36 This is why the dance is such an appropriate visualization. It is a kind of poising of the will, an intentionality or a posture of being, and an act of giving oneself, all in one gesture. After considering the inhumane and impious deeds perpetrated by Germans in China – a reference to the Siege of the International Legations ­during the Boxer Rebellion – the merchant asks himself: “Am I myself perhaps a pious man? No. But there is a piety of life,” he writes, and it is not a matter of praying in a church or temple: “and faith in the gin bottle is still a kind of faith. But here amidst the educated and propertied Germans, here I am uneasy.”37 Germany is stifling, and every act is performed without devotion, without giving – and without giving space. And all the intellectual training and money in the world cannot change that.38 And thus, for the first time in two decades, perhaps longer, the merchant himself is able to feel that sort of piety that involves giving himself over to something completely. Insofar as it requires him totally in this moment of dedication, it allows for a sense of the self as whole.39 The work of art, in l’art pour l’art fashion, is a world unto itself: it is given a frame, a stage upon which to present itself, in the particular artwork, at this particular hour, and here, in the effect of the colours.40 The merchant concedes: this is a highly personal response to a vivid portrayal of mundane objects. He cannot expect his reader to have the same experience. But this is precisely the point: in viewing the works of art, he has rediscovered the particularity and specificity that a world governed by monetary exchange negates. In a similar vein, Georg Simmel notes that money “lives in continuous self-alienation from any given point and thus forms the counterpart and direct ­negation of all being in itself.”41 The work of art, in this case, has cordoned off a space for autonomy and particularity. Yet, as Nietzsche says: “There is no regular path leading from those intui­ tions into the land of ghostly schemata, of abstractions: there are no words for them; man falls silent when he sees them or speaks in strictly forbidden metaphors and egregious combinations of concepts in order to correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition, at least by demolishing and ridiculing the old ­conception restraints.”42

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The merchant has found himself in this position. He does not remain silent, but he recognizes the futility of trying to give an objective representation of the encounter with the works of art. Listing off the scenes and subject matter portrayed in the paintings does nothing to reify a subjective experience; instead, he must make use of “egregious combinations of concepts in order to correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.” To do this, he devotes most of the remainder of this letter and the next to praising the power of colour.43 Colour, in fact, became a topic of great interest in the early years of the new century.44 1907 was a year that marked Hofmannsthal’s fascination with Van Gogh and Rilke’s fascination with Cézanne.45 The two authors’ writings on colour in painting have a remarkable number of points of contact; and both authors felt the epistolary form was an appropriate medium for presenting the experience. Moreover, both collections were written with publication in mind, and one ­wonders whether there was some undocumented contact between Rilke and Hofmannsthal during this time that led to their treatment of the topic. In any case, it seems they came to their particular formulations independently during the summer of 1907.46 I will occasionally compare their views in order to give greater articulation to the ­particularities of Hofmannsthal’s “Letters of the Man Who Returned” in light of their cultural context. The merchant’s initial description of the colours evokes something of the intensity of a medieval illuminated manuscript: “There is an unbelievable, most powerful blue that returns again and again, a green as if made from melted emeralds, a yellow ranging as far as orange.”47 And very quickly the descriptions move beyond the visible to suggest something of that longed-for piety: “But what are colours, if the innermost life of the objects does not break forth through them! And this innermost life was there, tree and stone and wall and sunken road proclaimed their innermost life, casting it towards me as it were, but it was not the ecstasy and harmony of their beautiful silent life, as long ago it sometimes flowed towards me from old pictures like a magical atmosphere; no, only the force of their existence, the raging wonder of their existence stared at with incredibility, assailed my soul.”48 Indeed, these colours do illuminate as in a manuscript: what they illuminate is a bearing so devotional that it begins to approach self-sacrifice. But this sacrifice is not self-annihilation. If anything, it dramatizes the struggle against the fall into a lacklustre deportment of non-existence.49

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The colours display, instead, an energetic and assertive movement: “Wucht” and “Wunder ihres Daseins” (“force” and “wonder of their existence”) instead of “Wollust und Harmonie” (“ecstasy and harmony”); their innermost life “assailed [his] soul” (“fiel [seine] Seele an”) instead of flowing to him, as happened with the Albrecht Dürer pictures from his childhood. This depiction of piety is anything but the quiet attitude of passivity: It is self-assertive and yet also altruistic. This could be read as a kind of psychological projection, devoid of any real interaction or communication.50 The highly personal nature of the experience – which the merchant himself has already highlighted – would support this view. Further, the subsequent description seems to apply just as much to the merchant as it does to the visual experience: “One being, every tree, every streak of yellow or virescent field, every fence, every sunken road torn into the stony hill, one being the tin jug, the clay bowl, the table, the heavy cushioned chair – they all held themselves up to me as if newly born from the terrible chaos of Not-living, from the abyss of non-existence, so that I felt – no – I knew how each of these things, these creatures, was born out of a terrible doubt concerning the world, and now covered up with its existence a horrible gorge, a yawning nothingness, for ever!”51 Can we presume that these depicted pitchers and tables and bowls – all things that the merchant had earlier experienced as not real – have truly been through this fight for existence that the merchant portrays? Is this the positive image of that mysterious thing that the merchant earlier described as lying within him, “a surge, a chaos, something unborn”?52 If one subscribes to Nietzsche’s early notion of the eternal wound of existence, “die ewige Wunde des Daseins” (which even seems to resonate in “Wunder ihres Daseins”), then yes. Art exposes the wound of existence, and is born out of it, but – this is crucial – it does not heal it. In a similar vein, Hofmannsthal wrote an essay in 1905 about Hermann Stehr’s book, Der begrabene Gott (The Buried God) in which he praises Stehr for taking readers into depths, “where we had never been before. Except perhaps insofar as we have suffered … But here, the nameless receives a name, the mute receives its language, and the formless its form. Here, the hands of creators have given the darkness a face and have built and shaped something from the nightmare. And we again recognize the gloomy depths of difficult times.”53 Anyone who has suffered knows the anguish of ­anonymity, formlessness, lifelessness. The human hands that can give the darkness a face do us all a service insofar as they give form

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Figure 2.1  Still Life with Blue Enamel Coffeepot, Earthenware and Fruit, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Features still life objects discussed in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.”

to that which in its formlessness makes us feel powerless; they render its visage visible to the eye or to the imagination. The paintings the merchant sees perform a similar function. At the end of the essay, Hofmannsthal writes two more sentences important in this context, showing a remarkable consistency of thought: “And a word more: Great, great, great. And one more: Reverence.”54 If the depths of being are to be given form, greatness must coexist with reverence and piety.

S u ffe r in g a n d Sacri fi ce Art works, as creative products of expression, give these things that have suffered55 a place to exist; in this way, suffering is as much a precondition for the success of this struggle as the willingness and devotion of the artist’s hand are.56 The images are all one being: they have all suffered57 through birth, have been born out of a “terrible doubt,” and are all made of the same thing, of paint on canvas. The merchant encounters a world in colour as an answer to his to struggle

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to locate reality in the colourless things around him. The colours and the created nature of the paintings allow him finally to set foot on a metaphorical terra firma, “like one who, after immeasurable reeling, feels solid ground beneath his feet and around him rages a storm, into whose whirling rage he wants to exult.”58 That which earlier “went whirling through my whole self”59 has been externalized and exorcized, such that he stands in the calm and silent centre, while the storm churns around him. The coloured forms contain this raging storm within themselves, and they in turn are born in it: in the storm “there were born before my eyes, born for my sake, these trees, with the roots staring in the earth, with the branches staring towards the clouds, in a storm, these fissures in the earth, these valleys between the hills revealed themselves, in even the heaviness of the boulders, the frozen storm was there.”60 More than that, the storm is also an answer from an “unknown soul of inconceivable strength.”61 The calm and (aesthetic) distance – achieved paradoxically by being in the centre of the storm – give the viewer the space requisite for desire, will, and relation, and even that piety which had been absent all along. Martin Heidegger’s words will later echo this idea of repositioning through speaking. Van Gogh’s work, Heidegger writes, “spoke. In proximity to the work we were suddenly somewhere other than we are usually accustomed to be.”62 With Hofmannsthal, however, there is an emphasis not on speaking as such, but on answering.63 Now that the merchant can see the world, he wishes to join in, close the distance, rejoice, and give himself over in answer to the soul who painted this world of revealed interconnectivity. Colours do not just mediate the experience. That experience exists, for the merchant, in the colours themselves. He writes: And now I could feel a certain something … could feel what was amongst them, with them, how their innermost life broke forth in colour and how the colours lived, each for the sake of the other, and how one, mysteriously powerful, bore all the ­others, and in all of this I could feel a heart, the soul of him who had made this, who himself with this vision gave answer to the catalepsy of the most dreadful doubt, could feel, could know, could see through, could enjoy the chasms and peaks, exterior and interior, one and all in one ten-thousandth a fragment of time as I jotted down the words, it was as though I was double, was lord over my life all at the same time, lord over my faculties,

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my understanding, felt time passing, knew, now only twenty minutes remain, now ten, now five, stood outside, hailed a coach, rode off.64 I have included almost the entire sentence in this quote because it is noteworthy for its length, rhythm, and, most importantly, its gradual descriptive movement from the centre of the storm to the open city street. The sentence aesthetically enacts through its syntax and length and through the openness of the conclusion (“rode off”), the connectivity that it describes. This connectivity is not casual; it is intended, and it is another example of Hofmannsthal’s concept of piety. Colours bear each other, reminding one of the olive tree that bears out of piety.65 Because the colours bear each other, it is possible to discern the “heart” of the person who gave these colours their place. In creating this vision, the artist “gave answer to the catalepsy of the most dreadful doubt.” He was strong enough to paint, in spite of the great doubt that threatened him. Painting was his defiant, worldforming answer to the abyss – and he gave this answer to himself. In doing so, he also gave the paintings their existence; and finally, he gave their potential audience (the merchant) a new picture of the world. This act, which originated from a sense of self-preservation, is altruistic by virtue of its effect and the attitude of piety. It is also artificial, insofar as it expresses a desire to see the world as picture – a Weltbild in the Heideggerian sense of the term – but in a new way. When Heidegger writes in “The Origin of the Work of Art” that “To be a work means: to set up a world,” he is suggesting that the work – the object – is the creator of the world; but we must also remember, he reminds us at the beginning of that text, that the work is created by and in turn helps to create the artist.66 The genetic origin gets lost in circularity.67 In a similar manner, the content of this aesthetic answer – the colours bearing each other in support – plays up the interdependence and confusion of internal and external worlds, and of subject and object: this can be conceived as a gesture of altruism just as much as it is one of egotism, highlighting an ethical moment in the dialogical (if also circular) movement of the aesthetic. The gesture of piety spins the wheel and seems to allow for that communion with the observer in his aesthetic enjoyment – perhaps the highest point for the merchant is this moment of taking pleasure in the contrasts brought together. But the word Hofmannsthal uses

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(“Genießen”) is multilayered: underneath enjoyment is an awareness that something has been sacrificed. There is always a sense of loss even in the moment of most profoundly felt presence.68 As if “doubled,” he no longer senses internal separation, dissociation, or doubt, so much as multiplication: presence is intensified.69 The internal chasm is experienced in its Keatsian negative capability rather than as something privative. He is able, as it were, to greet the other within. And with this awareness of doubleness comes also double perspective: he is here, amidst the paintings, but also acutely aware of the passage of time and the impossibility of the sustained moment. David Wellbery notes that aesthetic presence is characterized, for Hofmannsthal, by simultaneity and by a recognition of the passing of time.70 This doubleness gives the merchant the ability to direct himself wholly to the task at hand – and with that, he rides off to his meeting. The conference and its mundane financial concerns are re-­introduced almost in the same breath. There is no abrupt shift, and, from the merchant’s point of view, the financial world can be “conquered” by the heightened awareness achieved in that aesthetic moment, ­surrounded by Van Gogh’s paintings. Common to both situations is an appreciation for the interdependence of things in the world. Hofmannsthal is not the first to bring the economic and the aesthetic under the same umbrella: in the arch-Romantic novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis notably has the merchants (“Kaufleute”) teach the young Heinrich about poetry. In such a fairy-tale world, economics and aesthetics co-exist. Capital is not dead, but rather part of a larger life cycle of activity, production, and enjoyment of commodities and works. Economics is intimately linked to a healthy ecology, where the fruits of labour can be enjoyed by everyone. But what makes capital grow? Is capital, in fact, the unmoved mover, the new god?71 Must it be appeased? The merchant had earlier written: “I want to flourish within myself, and this Europe could steal me away from myself.”72 Perhaps capital, like its divine predecessors, demands a sacrifice from time to time; in order to grow, it parasitically steals from the other faculties of human experience – and especially from the imagination. The merchant has repeatedly written that he had no time to tarry with the creatures of his imagination. Yet if the imaginative faculty is necessary for the human experience, then it would seem art is a potential corrective to the “European-German feeling of presence” identified in the second letter.73 The merchant certainly alludes to that possibility

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when he says that “Conferences of this sort, where the magnitude of numbers appeal to the imagination, and the variety, the separation of the forces that come into play, require a talent for seeing the connections, the outcome is decided not by intelligence, but rather by a mysterious power for which I know no name.”74 If we did not know any better, we might think this were a matter of art, not economics. Appealing to the fantasy, to variety (as in Hogarth’s understanding of beauty as “composed variety”), to play, and to the connectivity of things – all of this sounds like a discourse on art. Can there be a poetry of economics? Perhaps yes,75 and perhaps this is the awareness that has been awakened in the merchant during the aesthetic experience: he now sees the world, including the economic world, with the sensitive eyes of poetry: “I was able to achieve more for my company than the board of directors had expected in even the best of cases, and I achieved it like someone in a dream who plucks a flower from a bare wall.”76 With the business growing, he can finally pluck the flowers – rather than the more useful fruits – of his investment, as if “in a dream.” So says the man who does not daydream! It also helps to recall that the wall – here, as in Robert Musil’s Young Törleß and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge – is a surface for projection. His life, in this moment, has become dreamlike, but also in some way cinematic.77 The dream here stands in metonymically for the aesthetic. It is that creative element – manifested convincingly in the paintings of Van Gogh – that does not attempt to reproduce a vision of reality, but rather to create a world out of a profound ­existential and phenomenological doubt. The repressed has returned: initially in its malicious form as the non-reality of the objects around him, and finally in its poeticized, aesthetic form. Georg Simmel articulates precisely the shift in perspective vis-à-vis reality that the merchant has experienced: “On the one hand, art brings us closer to reality; it places us in a more immediate relationship to its distinctive and innermost meaning; behind the cold strangeness of the external world it reveals to us the spirituality of existence through which it is related and made intelligible to us. In addition, however, all art brings about a distancing from the immediacy of things; it allows the concreteness of stimuli to recede and stretches a veil between us and them just like the fine bluish haze that envelops distant mountains.”78 The merchant has achieved a wide-angle ­perspective, seeing things at a distance, through a coloured haze.79 Yet he also sees things up close: “The faces of the gentlemen with whom

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I conducted this business came remarkably close to me.”80 In this moment, the nearness and the distance are united. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” could end here, in this moment of paradoxical union, with the merchant standing face-to-face with his colleagues and compatriots. It would end on a fantastic note of poetic economy. But the fourth letter continues with a postscript that reintroduces doubt about the harmonious coexistence of a world of business and the world of art. At the same time, the tension between the desire for community and the desire for isolation is brought into focus. The merchant identifies the artist as “Vincenz van Gogh” and notes that there “is something in me that compels me to believe he is of my generation, not much older than I am.”81 But we might ask: why does he feel compelled? Why does he not write simply: “I think”? Even in this moment of community, there is a tension: does the merchant value this moment of shared existence (and suffering), or does he, as Rilke says of Van Gogh in his Letters on Cézanne, find it in unbearable?82 Let us for a moment compare a similar fear of closing the distance, of leaping into the abyss understood as fear of intimacy, but also fear of identification or loss of self. In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the narrator remarks on the embarrassment and impotence one experiences with intimacy. John Zilcosky, in his book Uncanny Encounters, argues that, given the similarities between the youth Tadzio and the aging Aschenbach, a relationship “with this narcissistic double would signify the ‘return home’ (Heimkehr) and to ‘himself’ (in sich) that Aschenbach dreads.”83 The expressive affinities between Mann’s and Hofmannsthal’s texts raise the question: to what might the merchant return? To home? To himself? Does this inform his desire to maintain the security of distance? Perhaps the desire to keep at a distance is what prompts the merchant to entertain the following idea: “I don’t know if I will stand before these pictures a second time, though I will probably buy one of them, but not to take possession of it, but rather to give it to the art dealer for safekeeping.”84 With this consideration, the merchant has introduced a whole new set of problems. He is, first of all, acknowledging and supporting the commercialization of art. And maybe, from his new perspective, he can see the practical connection between money and art clearly: the artist, after all, has to make a living (in Van Gogh’s l­etters, money troubles are a recurring theme). The suggestion here would be that we should not try to sequester the aesthetic object and preserve its “sanctity” by refusing to treat it as a saleable commodity.

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In 1890, a youthful Hofmannsthal, much in the spirit of the sickened merchant, wrote a poem he called “Verse, auf eine Banknote geschrieben” (Verses written onto a banknote). That poem includes the following diatribe: Venal! All is venal! Honour too! … And all my verses, petty and decayed, Do grace this note of anguish ne’er allayed, To me they seemed as figures, branching out, Yet carved upon a deadly, glistening blade …85 What makes the anger expressed here particularly cutting is the realization that art is a secular commodity, and that its very existence and circulation depend upon this banknote (which doubles as a blade). To follow the thread a little further: Hofmannsthal himself collected art – and sold it, when he found himself in financial straits after the First World War and while working on one of the most demanding writing projects of his life, Der Turm (The Tower). In a letter to Carl J. Burckhardt, he states: “It isn’t money, it’s freedom.”86 The very real concerns for personal economic stability make way for what Simmel calls a “negative freedom,” which is financial independence – that is, if one wishes to make art, at least. In a sense, nearly all verses are written on banknotes. Hofmannsthal realized this early on. In one of the letters to his father, he signed off with: “Embracing you most warmly, your Son Hugo – poet and merchant.”87 In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” purchasing the painting is, from the ­perspective of the merchant, a sensible investment (even if idealistic sensibilities might be offended); but it is also an acknowledgment of necessity. Buying the painting is, moreover, a way of supporting artistic endeavours. And finally, it can be seen as a positive response to both painting (the product and the activity) and painter.88 But why give the paintings to an art dealer for safekeeping? Ursula Renner sees the paintings as having returned to the merchant his ­ability to carry out his mercantile duties and dealings – now with art understood as a commodity.89 Moreover, not all art dealers are ­created equal – presumably the merchant would find a trustworthy, knowledgeable person (perhaps like Vincent Van Gogh’s brother, Théo).90 But why does he not want to have the paintings in his presence? Simone Gottschlich-Kempf makes the case that the merchant’s

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act is one of resistance – an action of mixed sentiment, combining the desire to preserve with the desire never again to experience this moment for fear it might reveal itself as false or ineffective the second time around.91 In a similar vein, Susanne Scharnowski argues that this moment threatens the relation between self and world that the ­aesthetic experience allowed for in the first place. The purchase of a work of art would subject it to the same processes of capitalism that led to the merchant’s sickness.92 Gottschlich-Kempf’s point about resistance is key. However, given the merchant casually states he feels compelled to believe the artist is of his generation, I suspect this resistance has more to do with a desire for keeping the subjective, aesthetic world separate from the “real” world, and to thwart any ensuing experience of the works’ worldwithdrawal and world-decay, as Heidegger would say (“Weltentzug und Weltzerfall”).93 Yet in this desire lies an economic contradiction: money pulls art into the world. This in turn reveals the conflicting nature at the heart of the aesthetic experience: the closed world has a context, and that context is the ever-changing “real” world that ­surrounds it like water around an island. The paintings are born out of what is “real,” but then they are also able to create a more convincing, more assertive reality or terra firma than that out of which they are born. The contemporary dates of the artist make the experience that much more real. Whether the merchant wishes to preserve the aesthetic moment from reality, himself from community, his finances from loss, or the painting from deterioration, is left open. That Hofmannsthal has his merchant consider handing the purchase over to an art dealer for preservation is deliberate. In other words, the merchant’s transformation is not – nor can it ever be – a transformation that disregards his history and context. The merchant is still a merchant, and he still embodies and replicates the contradictions of his world. —*— “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” is structured around reflections and parodies and is itself a highly self-reflexive work of literature. But that raises a question: Is the production and reception of art condemned to the solipsistic, mirroring interiority of the artist (or the viewer)? The final published letter explores the relation between aesthetics and ethics with reference to this question.

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Each letter is a text, usually marked by a time and place. The letters can be read in isolation, but we know that they are part of a correspondence. Like beads on a chain, their overall effect is produced not in isolation, but in relation. And, like words in a sentence, the smallest unit of meaning never originates in the single word (or the single ­letter), but rather in the relation between words (or letters). When the merchant begins his “last” letter, it is with deliberate reference to the preceding one: “You will hardly be able to understand what I wrote to you, least of all how these pictures could so move me.”94 By making reference to the previous letter, this sentence heralds the focus of this letter, establishing a link between the two. Further, by emphasizing the singularity and subjectivity of the event, the merchant also attempts to set this event in relation to others, and to create out of it something that can be shared: “It will seem to you like a whimsy, an isolated incident, an oddity, and yet – if only one could place it, if only one could pull it out of oneself and bring it to light.”95 The merchant is describing three processes in one: the writing process, the communication process, and the productive-creative process, using a turn of phrase that is reminiscent of the German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe’s description of Van Gogh’s artistic process: “He did not paint his p ­ ictures, he cast them forth … He did not feel himself there, he was one with the element which he represented, and painted himself in the flaming clouds.”96 The gesture is slightly modified in Hofmannsthal’s text: rather than pushing the pictures out or casting them forth, the merchant desires to tear or pull them out (“herausreißen”).97 The ­subtle relation between the pushing and pulling, between casting forth and tearing out, suggests more basic, organic movements of relation, of dialogue, of giving and taking, and of exchange. What is it that he wishes to draw out and expose? ­The answer would seem to be: the effect of colours. And Van Gogh’s paintings, with their intense use of contrastive colours as opposed to gradual changes in tone, are an apt point of departure. The use of colour in this manner expressed something modern: painters around the last part of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century had discovered (or rather re-discovered) the expressive, affective quality of colour. On a psychological and sociological level, this makes perfect sense: the colours initially appear garish in contrast to what Spengler in Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) calls “studio brown” (“atelierbraun”), which he associated with the culture and

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faith of the baroque era.98 Further, the colours of modernity mirror those of the placard-speckled city, with its chaotic palette meant to distract, entertain, and advertise, the general effect of which might very well be a kind of colourlessness of modern urban society.99 The colours in Van Gogh’s paintings, however, reveal a different kind of correspondence, born out of the “the force of their existence” (“die Wucht ihres Daseins”).100 As Meier-Graefe has it: “The surge of water which frightens the shipwrecked describes a divine curve, and even the horrified face of the unlucky one, who clings to a plank, seems harmonious in this whirling rage of water. Van Gogh’s images are ordered in this manner. They give rise to a paroxysmic apprehension of nature.”101 The relation between colours strikes the merchant, too. At first, they shock: but unlike the colours of the city, which risk cancelling each other out, here they are organized into a composed variety, in which each enhances the other. Just as these letters are fragments of a larger epistolary collection, so too do the hues work together, producing a consonance of images and phrases. In one of the notes to “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal went so far as to write of “the boundless relativity of the colours: every colour exists only through its contiguity.”102 This note is an existential distillation of Van Gogh’s observations that colours appear only when their complements are also present. Otherwise, they appear “colourless”: “Fromentin and Gérôme see the earth in the south as colourless, and a whole lot of people saw it that way. My God, yes, if you take dry sand in your hand and if you look at it closely. Water, too, air, too, considered this way, are colourless. n o b l u e w i t h o u t ye l l o w and wit hout o r a nge , and if you do blue, then do yellow and orange as well, surely.”103 This aesthetic rule is adopted and given a central place in the context of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” Relationality is necessary for the perception of a thing’s existence, and a clearer vision of existence is accompanied by the aesthetic perception of harmony. In order to describe the effect of consonance, the merchant turns to a story of Rama Krishna he once heard, and which made a deep impression on him. The story of the Brahman’s experience of Enlightenment highlights the visual moment in which Rama Krishna fell to the ground and stood up, as if reborn. The visual experience is a result of the juxtaposition of two colours: “nothing more than these two colours against each other, this eternal unnameable thing, pierced his soul in this moment and loosed what was bound, and joined what

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Figure 2.2  Wheatfield with Crows, by Vincent van Gogh, Auvers, June 1890. Features the typical contrasting colours and the “paroxysmic apprehension of nature” described by Julius Meier-Graefe.

was unbound.”104 The imagery has an aesthetic analog in the material that is woven or knotted together to form a tapestry or a text: We are once again in Hofmannsthal’s image-world of art and (ethical) ties. But where does this “power” originate: in the colours, or in the merchant himself? The merchant asks: “Did I not say that at strange hours the colours of things have a power over me? But isn’t it I, rather, who takes on a power over them, the entire, full power, for some length of time, to wrest from them their wordless, abysmal secret, is not the force in me, do I not feel it in my breast as a swelling, a fullness, a foreign, sublime, enrapturing presence, with me, in me, in that place where blood comes and goes?”105 This passage has given rise to opposing interpretations: Antje Büssgen, for instance, sees the merchant’s experience of Van Gogh’s paintings as ultimately originating in the self and characterizes that experience as monological rather than dialogical or dialectical; duality of any kind is sublated in this colour-mysticism.106 Reading Hofmannsthal’s text alongside Gottfried Benn’s “Garten von Arles” (“The Garden of Arles”), Büssgen sees here a quest for authenticity, which is sought and asserted wherever dissociated parts (e.g., subject and object, word and thing) cannot be reconciled; only in the ecstatic visionary moment can their unity be (merely) imagined.107 Ursula Renner, on the other hand, reminds us that these moments are not set off by memories or daydreams, but rather by something in the external world – that is, the event cannot originate solely in the

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mind.108 The merchant’s vacillation marks this double-origin. The moment is structured, a priori, as a dynamic relation. That the moment may take place subjectively, for the merchant, is not the question at hand: what is in question is whether the subject can exist without reference to the outside. Further: what is the nature of this relation between subject and object? The merchant goes on to doubt his own power once again: “But if everything was in me, why couldn’t I close my eyes and, dumb and blind, enjoy the unnameable feeling of my self, why did I have to keep myself there … and look, look into the space before me?”109 Earlier, the merchant’s knowledge of his own existence was predicated upon the existence of the external world which also knows suffering. Here, his enjoyment of his sense of self depends on an altruistic gesture issued by the world: “this sacred simultaneous enjoyment of my self and the world, which opened up before me, as if it had opened up its breast, why was this doubleness, this entwinement, this outside and inside, this interlocked rhythmically beating You [“dies ineinanderschlagende Du”] tied to my looking?”110 Who exactly the “You” refers to is something of a mystery, and I have not found a single interpretation of it in the secondary literature.111 In one of his notes to the “Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal penned the following in a stream of consciousness: “Here there’s an overcoming of all inhibitions an almost raging You.”112 Similarly, in his notes to “The Conversation about Poems,” a reference to Novalis points the reader again in the direction of this relational “Du”: “Novalis: We should transform everything into a You, a second I; only by doing this do we lift ourselves to the great I.”113 While the drama might play in the head of the subject, that subject must at least entertain the idea that everything (“alles”) has a ­subject position. The statement is a paradox: only by recognizing that we are not the only I’s (and eyes) in the room, only by positing the I’s of others and of the world, can we be “great.” With “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal has reworked the notion he developed earlier in the “Address.” In that early lecture, he says that when we behold works of art and call something beautiful, we are subject to the great demand of the world of beauty: “this demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected power of the mysterious line of ancestors within us, the towering stacks of layers of our supra-individual memory, piled one upon the other.”114 In positing – or

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recognizing – the “You,” the merchant answers to a demand issued by beauty.115 Almost two decades later, Hofmannsthal will draft plans for a “Brief an einen Gleichaltrigen” (Letter to a contemporary) whose imagined recipient was to be modelled on the philosopher of religion Martin Buber. One of the notes reads: “A friend’s presence gives measure. Müller-Hofmann. Through him one expands the bedrock of experience. We put ourselves to the test of the whole You.”116 The “Du” of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” certainly resembles Buber’s notion of “Du,” and these notes would seem to indicate that Hofmannsthal was aware of an intellectual affinity between Buber and himself, particularly with respect to the development of dialogical thought.117 Consider the following passage from Buber’s 1932 philosophical treatise, Zwiesprache (Dialogue): “all art is, from its origin, essentially dialogical: … all music calls to an ear, which is not the ear of the musician’s, all visual art an eye, which is not the eye of the artist’s … they all in their unique language say something (not a ‘feeling,’ but rather a perceived secret) to the receiver.”118 Buber’s dialogical principle eventually finds a home in the “ethics” corner of philosophy, but the “Du” in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” even with its ethical overtones, is integral to the merchant’s experience of colours, which falls under the domain of aesthetics. And yet, to speak of such things is insufficient. “Colour. Colour. To me the word is now impoverished. I fear I haven’t explained myself to you as I wished. And I don’t want to strengthen anything in me that separates me from people.”119 These letters, monologic in nature, are nevertheless an attempt to express to someone else as much as to oneself something that is inexpressible: the word – the specific word “colour,” but also language in general – is and always will be “impoverished” in this respect. The merchant senses his very life in the revelation of what can only be described as force and foreignness: “And am I not there, in the inside of things, so very much a human being, myself more than ever before, nameless, alone, yet not benumbed in solitude, but rather as if the power flowed from me in waves, the power which makes me a chosen companion of the strong and mute forces that silently sit in a circle as if upon thrones and I among them? And is this not the place you always come to along dark paths when living, active and suffering, amongst the living?”120 This description suggests something of the “oceanic feeling” Freud famously outlined in the first chapter of Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents). Here, however, the emphasis is on

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a sense of belonging, not of dissipation. The sensation is characterized by the shelter of waves – as if the merchant were once again at sea – but also the comfort of anonymity and the recognition of difference. To be able to feel alone in the company of others, but not lonely, and to sense one’s power (“as if the power flowed from me in waves”) is to become aware of the connection of things in the flux. The waves ­resonate with each other. And yet accompanying that resonance is the suggestion that there is suffering involved, perhaps even a sense of guilt.121 The suffering is present in the colours themselves: “And why shouldn’t colours be the brothers of pain, for these, like it, draw us into the eternal?”122 In art there is sacrifice.123 Meier-Graefe wrote of Van Gogh: “It is as though a single person has felt the reproach of our whole era’s egotism and has sacrificed himself, much like one of these great martyrs whose fates have come down to us from a distant past.”124 According to such hagiographic logic, Van Gogh’s piety resounds in his colours, which carry each other. Some of those colours even display a willingness to recede into the background in order that others may shine forth more brilliantly.125 It is this gesture of giving oneself over that allows for the viewer to be pulled into “the eternal,” beyond the limitations of concepts. Perhaps the sacrificial aspect is an atonement as well, for, as Simmel says: “This transformation that reality suffers on its way to our consciousness is certainly a barrier between us and its immediate existence, but is at the same time the precondition for our perception and representation of it.”126 But the religious language of sacrifice and suffering is an aesthetic piety and can be understood metaphorically: Those with this peculiar aesthetic sensibility cannot bask innocently in the sensation of mystical union between art and reality; one must acknowledge the suffering that reality undergoes when observed, for it must, as it were, be bracketed off. In art, it is further manipulated and fashioned, but through that very manipulation a new kind of world is born. Van Gogh writes: “I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but still I don’t invent the whole of the painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made – but to be untangled – in the real world.”127 The “revelation” of art, then, is barely a revelation at all, except insofar as it reveals the precarity of an objective reality and one’s comprehension of it. The best way to counteract this suffering is not to work imitatively or with the assumption that the world is as one perceives it, but rather to engage with it by representing it symbolically, expressively, and most of all,

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creatively, by letting something in it be born – both in the sense of birth and endurance. The innovative use of colour in Van Gogh’s paintings would never heal the wound of existence, but it would at least be a testament to inevitable suffering. The image of the artist as martyr or as sacrificial victim is just that: an image, with all its potential and limitations. Art has no salvific power.128 In another note, Hofmannsthal writes with typical ambivalence: “Painters are there to reconcile us with appearances, and to give back to appearances their pathos. But perhaps what applies to poets applies also to painters: we are not the physicians, we are the pain.”129 Pain does not heal the wound; it makes us more sensitive to it. There may be no perfect, immediate communication between subject and object, but there is the deictic gesture of giving form (even if it is unfinished) in response to what one sees, hears, and receives. That gesture opens the dialogue, even as the dialogue opens the wound. The text – itself wounded and in search of reality, “wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend,” to quote Celan’s German130 – does not close it. —*— In 1907, Edmund Husserl scratched just below the surface of what one experiences as the overwhelming “tumult” or “maelstrom” of sensations: a mere maelstrom of sensations, I say, is indeed not absolute nothingness. But why must a world exist, and why must it have to exist? In fact, I do not see that it would have to. This ­concerns the world in the broadest sense, including the Ego as a person and other Egos. Thus we arrive at the possibility of a ­phenomenological maelstrom as unique and ultimate Being. It would be a maelstrom so meaningless that there would be no I and no Thou, as well as no physical world – in short, no reality in the pregnant sense.131 For Husserl, this possibility of dissolution is a possibility of experiencing “ultimate Being” in a phenomenological way. But the “I” that experiences it, the I of a “reality” that is constituted by more or less stable impressions, would not be able to reconcile that experience with a reality that has some semblance of regularity and relative stability.

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The phenomenologist goes on to say: “Obviously … regularity might gradually pass over into irregularity and … the presumed unity of things might again be dissolved – into a beautiful memory and phantasy, impossible to hold fast.”132 Husserl’s remarks depict a move towards theorizing an experience that was becoming increasingly common in the early years of the twentieth century. The typical conditions of modern urban life provided for just such a confusion of impressions and senses. From the sociological perspective, this results in what Simmel calls “characterlessness” (“Charakterlosigkeit”) on the level of the individual and of society, with money as its symbol. This confusion can further result in the destabilization of one’s mental and existential framework for understanding the world, leading to a kind of disorientation much like the merchant’s mal de débarquement. Although it cannot repair the world, art does not ignore the problems of society by causing the viewer to turn inward towards narcissism or egotism. “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” suggests that the typical conditions of ­modern art give rise to the creative expression of – though not a solution to – the instability of reality, the disorientation and “maelstrom of the senses,” and the displacement of self.

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3 Art and History in “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”)

Over the course of the next decade, and even into the 1920s, Hofmannsthal continued to explore the facets of the aesthetic encounter in different cultural, psychological, and sociological ­contexts. Many of the motifs explored in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the “Address,” and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” became an integral part of his literary repertoire. In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” the merchant finds his country utterly foreign and the things around him lifeless, but through an encounter with (contemporary) art and the humanity behind it, the world and the things around him come to life again. In “Augenblicke in Griechenland” (“Moments in Greece”), the ­situation is reversed: artists travel away from home, and the foreignness of Greece becomes, towards the culmination of the text, almost unbearable. “Moments in Greece” is based on Hofmannsthal’s actual travels.1 The text is divided into three sections, which highlight distinct but interrelated “moments,” expressed as encounters. As is characteristic for Hofmannsthal, the text engages in contemporary discussions of psychology, social thought, mysticism, and especially aesthetics.2 Underwriting the narrator’s encounters with places, people, and works of art is a recurring encounter with an otherness that renders communication and transformation of the subject possible by drawing the narrator into a dialogical relationship.

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Although Hofmannsthal’s actual experiences while travelling in Greece with his friend Harry Kessler and the French artist Aristide Maillot form the core of this text, Hofmannsthal deliberately arranges the events in reverse chronology, setting the aesthetic encounter at the culmination rather than at the beginning, when it probably would have occurred. “Moments in Greece” thus has a clear trajectory with dramatic intensification emerging out of otherwise discrete moments. This trajectory significantly qualifies a statement Hofmannsthal had made in his 1892 essay, “Südfranzösische Eindrücke” (Impressions of Southern France) concerning travel writing. In that short piece he writes that, as in a Chinese picture book, “the images of life [as presented in travel writing] follow each other without internal coherence and completely lack effective composition.”3 In other words, there is no necessary relation between the moments. The poetic impulse, however, is to seek out or even create coherence. I am inclined to see Hofmannsthal’s middle and later ­writings, such as those on Greece,4 as a deliberate move away from this earlier prescription of impressionistic representation; for Hofmannsthal’s middle period (roughly 1907–18), the connections may not be there by necessity, but they can be located, created, projected, and constructed. “Moments in Greece” is not about Greece as a place to be studied, observed, or reported on; it can only be experienced by the subject in a way that rejects essentialism and feigned objectivity. Hofmannsthal’s prose, likewise, departs markedly from the rhetoric of reportage that was common at the time.5 “Moments in Greece” depicts a twofold recognition: the impossibility of ever fully understanding the other, even in a transformative encounter; and the necessity of a non-ego-centric consciousness for any meaningful experience. The subject can move beyond narcissistic or solipsistic modes of being after recognizing that a necessary condition of being is coexistence. At the structural level, the text’s proliferation of internal correspondences and resonances seem to function as a metaphor for dialogue. Thus, while my main interest lies in the third section of “Moments in Greece,” it is important to understand how motifs in the first two sections relate to, inform, and are refashioned in the third. For this reason, I let the text’s tripartite division guide my reading, beginning with the encounters in “The Monastery of St Luke,” proceeding to “The Wanderer,” and ending with “The Statues.”

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E ch o e s in “ T h e M o n a s t ery of St Luke” Though originally published as a separate text, the first section sets the stage for the work as a whole, introducing motifs that are adapted and further developed in the subsequent sections: the importance of atmosphere (Stimmung); the connection between religious and aesthetic experiences; the paradoxical co-occurrence of the lofty and the lowly, or the sublime and the mundane; and the structural relationship of call and response as a religious, ethical, and aesthetic move that attempts to bridge the perceived distance between the self and the other. The German concept of Stimmung can be understood with reference to atmosphere, mood, and even musical tuning and voice (Stimme). Stimmung often colours the space of mediation between observer and object and, as several scholars have pointed out,6 even blurs the distinctions between the two: it can refer to the internal, psychological stance of the observer as well as the external environment and how it touches everything.7 It is, according to Hofmannsthal, the “totality of momentary imaginings, the relative consciousness of the world: depending on the Stimmung, we think about the lowliest and the loftiest things differently, there is simply no content of the imagination which is not influenced and painted by Stimmung, enlarged, obliterated, distorted, transfigured, desirable, apathetic, threatening, mild, dark, light, soft, smooth, etc. etc.”8 Stimmung’s connection to art is key. The content of imagination is painted (“gemalt”) according to the Stimmung. Stimmung can also result in a creative response in the imagination of the subject. It has a potentially aesthetic quality not only in its influence on the external surroundings, but also in the response to its influence. And it is no mere whim that prompted Hofmannsthal to conclude “The Monastery of St Luke” with the sentence, “Stunde, Luft und Ort machen alles.” Hour, air, and place – all of which contribute to Stimmung – are everything.9 The section’s opening sentence, on the other hand, seems to establish an objective tone; it is written in the indicative and devoid of any judgment or qualification: “We had been riding that day for nine to ten hours.”10 This objectivity, however, almost immediately gives way to a nuanced depiction of the world opening up before the travellers. In a note to “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal writes in a similar vein: “Nature had this effect on me, and here, something was painted. Here was a human language. In a flash I glimpsed the function of the artist.”11 The link between the thing

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painted (whether in paint or words) and human language suggests a communicative function of the artist. In “Moments in Greece,” the traveller/narrator experiences a similar phenomenon: the landscape (like “Nature” in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”) and the events that occur are collected in an undeviating rhythm of simple, repetitive syntax, expressing what one might see through the veil of distance: “and we looked down and across, as though from a balcony.”12 Looking out from above allows for a serene and totalizing vista, like that presented in a landscape painting. The “human language,” though, is yet to be heard. Gradually, the reader is visually guided into the monastery proper and made aware of the picturesque quality of the unchanging scene. The view closes in on a door, like a picture frame: “In the wall on the left was a small open door; in the doorway leaned a monk.”13 Upon arrival at the monastery, the prosaic style changes, though quite subtly. Hofmannsthal introduces rhetorical repetition and anaphora, charging the sentences with a more assertive tenor that seems inspired by the monk’s presence: “The long black gown, the high black headgear, the casual way he stood there, gazing towards us in this paradisal solitude – all this gave him the air of a magician.”14 In Hofmannsthal’s work, the magician is a being possessed of great creative force who lives in splendid isolation.15 The monk, too, inhabits a space isolated from the sorrows of the world. His very posture confirms this, as he leans languidly at the doorway, gazing at the visitors as they approach. For the first time in “Moments in Greece,” someone other than the first-person narrator is portrayed as commanding the faculty of sight; with the cenobite’s gaze directed at the narrator, Hofmannsthal opens the possibility for co-presence and multiple perspectives. And yet the monk’s location at the threshold also announces an ambiguity, ­mirrored in his countenance: “He was young, with a long, light red beard, its cut reminiscent of Byzantine portraits, an eagle nose, restless, almost intrusive blue eyes. He greeted us with a bow and a spreading of both arms, in which there was something forced.”16 The monk’s posture, his gesture of welcome, and the unsettled and forced quality of his expression which greet the travellers are the first indications of a powerful encounter with an uncanny otherness. For now, however, the visitors are led into the monastery grounds, where they perceive everywhere a constant rhythm “as far removed from haste as from slowness” and catch the strains of psalms being sung, “as remote from lamentation as from desire, something solemn

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which might have been sounding from eternity and continue to sound far into eternity.”17 Erwin Kobel described the music as the play of contrasts between human beings and God; its nature, he says, is both physical and religious.18 The observation is astute. It is worth noting, additionally, that the word “might” (in German “mochte”) pulls the moment into a space of uncertainty. The reality of the song’s path from and back to eternity is qualified by this “mochte” at the end of the sentence, and its metaphysical ambiguity is strengthened in the narrator’s description of another sound emanating from the voice of an unseen singer: “The echo-like quality, the utterly faithful following of this solemn, hardly any longer human sound, this will-less, almost unconscious voice, did not seem to issue from the breast of woman. It sounded as if mystery itself were singing, something insubstantial.”19 The inconclusiveness of “mochte” has given over now to appearance (“seem”) and to the counterfactual subjunctive mood (“as if mystery itself were singing”). The narrator then discovers that the voice belongs to a young boy, striking in his beauty, which transcends the division of gender, as if in answer to Goethe’s Mignon,20 or as a precursor to Thomas Mann’s Tadzio. And yet this boy does seem to embody duration, repetition, and those rituals conveyed through the ages. In him the narrator sees the  coming generation of monks performing the same ancient ­rituals manifest in song.21 Few things in the world (art perhaps being one of them) are comparable to this enduring enactment; and yet it is ­r e-enactment, each and every time. The ritual is the same and  ­different – not dasselbe (the self-same) but rather das Gleiche (a ­different instantiation of the same). For Hofmannsthal’s traveller, this is not a matter of identity, but of repeated sameness, which is established through participation. In the German text, the language itself performs this sameness in the rhythm of the syntax and even the rhyming of keywords: “Der gleiche Boden, die gleichen Lüfte, das gleiche Tun, das gleiche Ruhn” (the same ground, the same air, the same action, the same repose).22 Standing out like an errant line of poetry, the sentence re-enacts in miniature the rhythm and ritual of song. It is therefore especially striking when, in the same paragraph, Hofmannsthal switches tenses and brings that distant past into the present of the text. It is near to the reader as well. For Hofmannsthal’s narrator, there is something inexpressible that is calling from the past, through time, for a response. It does this by making its presence known in the serenely vibrating Stimmung.23

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Shortly after registering the echoes of the past in the presence of the music, the narrator overhears two men conversing, now with attuned (“abgestimmt”) ears: “The dialogue between the priest and the serving man is short. But its tone is from the time of the ­patriarchs … this insignificant incident, these few words exchanged in the night, have in them a rhythm hailing from eternity.”24 Eternity is transported on the wings of such small things: the seemingly ­insignificant incidents, the gestures, the few words exchanged. 25 We can understand what prompted Kessler to express preference for the text’s conclusion with the sentence: “That was how this dialogue sounded.”26 Yet for Hofmannsthal the dialogue is born out of a Stimmung that evokes and sustains a sense of continuity, connecting the conversation to the space; just as the scent of wax, honey, and incense is like the redolence of song,27 so too is there a very real, physical sense in which “The hour, the air, and the place are all-important.”28 —*— While “Moments in Greece” can be read as a series of juxtaposed episodes, any interpretation of the text will benefit from a reading that finds in these discrete moments intentional and meaningful repetition. Put another way: Hofmannsthal’s writing continuously – we might even say ritualistically – calls forth images and forms of expression already presented in the text, rendering them familiar while paying tribute to their uniqueness. In “The Conversation about Poems,” the fictitious interlocutor Gabriel conjectures that the eyes of poetry see everything for the first time.29 It is with such eyes that Hofmannsthal wants his readers to approach “Moments in Greece.” Each moment is a distinct event that occurs in relation to other moments. The paradox of the encounter lies in its preservation of distance and difference, as well as individuality; that is, there is no full identity. As the traveller says: “enough, it is near.”30 The religious Stimmung of the monastery is aesthetically evocative. The landscape is like a painting, and the monk, with his ambiguous gaze, is like the artist-as-magician. Even ritual – an interruption in linear temporality akin to the aesthetic moment of encounter – finds aesthetic expression in the music of a boy’s voice (Stimme). That voice calls out in answer to another voice; and, like beauty, it calls for a response.

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F a c e s a n d F a t e s in “ The Wanderer” Leaving the cyclical rhythms and echoes of the monastery, the travellers once more take to the road, where they engage in conversation. Passing through the landscape on foot, they become aware of the stark contrast between that sense of eternity in the monastery and the transience of their individual lives. Personal memories and once-familiar faces now become the focus of “one of the strangest and most beautiful conversations” the narrator can recall.31 The conversation consists not in a merely enjoyable exchange of opinions – it is treated as an aesthetic occasion. The travelling companions take turns evoking memories of significant encounters with other people, investing them (both the memories and the people) with new life; each memory then calls up other memories, each face answering the previous one. In this manner the conversation sustains itself: a sea of ever-changing faces gradually swelling up from the past. The setting and Stimmung, too, are important for the conversation. At the foot of Mount Parnassus – the famed home of the muses – and along the path where Oedipus is said to have journeyed, the clarity of the air, the lack of sleep, and the sense of connection to the past and to myth attune the travellers to their own bygone days. Much as the monks’ rituals invoke age-old practices, so this dialogue of memories draws poetic inspiration from the home of the muses and the path of Oedipus. The memories may stem from the individuals, but the setting lends those recollections an almost mythical status. With time, the travelling companions become acutely aware of their own existence: “Our friends rose before us and, by bringing themselves, brought with them the purest essence of our existence.”32 For Hofmannsthal, reciprocity is a condition for beauty, and this “most beautiful” of conversations adheres to the definition outlined in the “Address” of 1902 – as does the description of the travellers’ utterances as “serious and of almost frightening clarity.”33 Hofmannsthal repurposes a memorable image from the “Address”: “For such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’”34 Here, we have the counterpart: “Figure after figure rises up, satisfying us with its appearance, accompanies us, and vanishes again.” The word “satisfying” translates the German “sättigt,” which might equally be rendered “­satiates.”35 The metaphor of sustenance suggests that the faces of memory have a life of their own. But, like the ancient Greek spirits in Hades, they must wait

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their turn to imbibe the libations and speak: “others, evocative, have already been waiting to occupy the empty place. They illuminate a circle of lived life, then fall behind, as it were, on the road, while we walk on and on – as though it were upon our walking that the continuance of this enchantment depended.”36 Hofmannsthal’s travellers find themselves in the literary territory of some of the classic narratives: The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy. In all these stories, wanderers must speak with the dead in order to continue their journeys. Hofmannsthal’s “Moments in Greece” has a different tenor, however, which comes out most clearly in a description of the faces the narrator sees. Significance is to be found in trivial events rather than the heroic or legendary deeds: “While they were standing before us and looking at us, the smallest circumstances and things, through which our union with them had come to pass, were present.”37 The travellers imagine hearing the voices of those they once encountered and the “seemingly trifling short sentences.”38 Yet contained in these sparse words is the entire human being, and more: “and their faces are more than faces: the same quality as from the sound of their broken sentences surges up in them, comes nearer and nearer towards us, seems to be caught and confirmed in their features, in the inexpressible of their expressions, yet not quite at rest. It is a never-ending desire, possibility, readiness, something suffered and still to be suffered. Each of these faces is a destiny, is unique, the most singular that can be, and at the same time infinite, a wandering on to an immeasurably distant destination. It seems to exist only while it is looking at us, as though it were living merely for the sake of our responsive glance.”39 In this passage one can discern traces of the Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian concepts of will (“ein endloses Wollen,” translated as “a never-ending desire”), as well as a recognition of suffering (“Gelittenes, zu Leidendes,” translated as “something suffered and still to be suffered”) that evokes the writings of Georg Büchner.40 This is the fate of humanity, which should come as no surprise, for the face here is also fate. If we take the face to be, as Simmel calls it, the “locus of inner personality insofar as it is visible,”41 then we are also not far from that “dark” Pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus and his 119th fragment: character is fate.42 Each face shares in the same fate, yet it does so individually: each face is das Gleiche, not dasselbe. The fate in which all faces share is itself a kind of history, a part of which the two wanderers recall through the veil of time: “We are like two spirits that fondly remember having taken part in the banquets of mortal men.”43

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The likening of this encounter to that of spirits who once partook in the communion of mortals is inspired by ancient and Classical Greek. Plato’s Symposium, in particular, proves illuminating. The title of the dialogue derives from the verb συμπίνειν (sympinein), which means “to drink together.” Such communal repasts were opportunities to enjoy the company of others, to carry out customs (θέμις, themis), and to establish relationships based on hospitality, which was then given material representation in the form of a gift.44 Gadamer reminds us in Die Aktualität des Schönen (The Relevance of the Beautiful) that the σύμβολον (symbolon, symbol) was, for the ancient Greeks, ­precisely this gift of hospitality. It is a gift, furthermore, of recognition: “eine Erinnerungsscherbe”  – literally: a shard of memory. 45 As Gadamer explains, the symbolon was a kind of passport and token of hospitality of antiquity. One half of a broken plate, when reunited with its other half, might be the sign for recognition after years or generations of absence. In Plato’s dialogue, Aristophanes tells a story in praise of Eros using the symbolon as a metaphor for love, which, in this context, is imagined as elective affinity or marriage of the minds: two people existed as one but were separated, and now each half seeks the other. Gadamer suggests that the referential character of the symbolon, together with the sense of completion it suggests, is easily translated into the world of beauty.46 As in the experience of love, so too in the experience of beauty one is able to sense the open-ended conjuration of a possible ideal world. The faces the travellers see are such shards of memory, symbols that recall something lost or desired. The allusion to the “banquets of mortal men” seems an appropriate scene for the symbol of hospitality. Yet, for Hofmannsthal, a confrontation with memories is also a confrontation with suffering and loneliness. He draws our attention to one figure in particular: “him, who had suffered so unspeakably … He is poor and suffers, but who could dare to offer him help, this boy lonely beyond words?”47 The unnamed figure, whose affliction is demarcated by the limits of language, bears a resemblance to Arthur Rimbaud, who, when still a young man, rejected his vocation as a poet and chose instead a solitary wanderer’s life out of contempt for his former self. Impoverished, the young man of memory set out to secure financial stability, but in doing so, strove against “his own demon for something gigantic, which cannot be named.”48 The Rimbaud-like figure of memory disdains his situation and even seems to be in denial about his imminent death. The reader learns he, while

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incapacitated during a journey, would not let himself be borne down a hillside easily, but insisted rather “on a steep, fast descent, across country. Indescribable rebellion, defiance of death up to the whites of his eyes, the mouth distorted with suffering, yet refusing to complain.” 49 He may exhibit the same qualities of solitude and independence of will presaged by the monk at the Monastery of St Luke, but his world is no serene cloister – it is a long road of pain. As Wellbery aptly points out, the physical traits described recall the face of the merchant’s son on his deathbed.50 As if to reinforce the image of the defiant, solitary wanderer, the Stimmung too begins to feel antagonistic: “The morning sun shone almost threateningly on this solemn, foreign landscape … Strange destinies, normally invisible currents, struck some strong chord in us and revealed themselves.”51 These fates and faces, strange perhaps by nature of their reluctance to partake in the banquet of mortals, ­nevertheless approach the conversing travellers. The shared, though internal, world of memory extends its sphere of influence outward just as much as the environment affects the world of interiority. Whereas at the monastery of St Luke, “the hour, the air, and the place are all-important,”52 here Hofmannsthal draws from the subjective, internal world of reminiscence a literary anticipation of an actual encounter with another human being, one of these “strange destinies.” Subjectivity and even the implicit sense of responsibility that accompanies the (beautiful) conversation prepare the reader and the travellers for an encounter with what lies beyond their sphere of influence, and beyond their personal memories.

T h e r e is V e n g e a n ce i n Heaven f o r a n I n j u r ed Dog Set above the section heading of “The Wanderer” is an epigraph in Greek: εἰδὶ καὶ κυνῶν ἐρινύες. Hofmannsthal takes this quote from the classicist Gilbert Murray’s collection of lectures, The Rise of the Greek Epic: “There is vengeance in heaven for an injured dog.” Murray’s work was crucial to Hofmannsthal’s literary treatment of his 1908 Greek travels, as made plain by the many markings he made in his copy of The Rise of the Greek Epic [*fd h 1738]. As Hans-Jürgen Schings has pointed out, Murray’s commentary on social responsibility is echoed repeatedly in “Moments in Greece.”53 The classical scholar notes: “If you made a man your slave, that showed you did not regard

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him with aidôs … Of course a wrong done to a slave was hated by the gods and, one might hope, duly avenged. But that was the same with animals.”54 For the ancient Greeks, every dog, however lowly and abject, has his day.55 No dogs are mentioned in “The Wanderer,” yet the question of how to treat the abject other – whether human or animal – is omnipresent. The failure to treat another being with respect is represented by the tragic figure of memory who, filled with contempt for his community and for himself, suffered from a twisted kind of hubris. Like Oedipus, whose path the travellers have been walking, the man did not know, or rather, he refused to acknowledge his identity. In doing so, he also cut himself off from others and abrogated all social responsibility. The meeting with the man in memory anticipates a meeting with a “real” man along the road to Thebes: The travellers encounter by chance a German wanderer, whose life, they learn, also resembles that of Rimbaud’s. The German is a formerly strong young man of twenty-one, weakened by unceasing pain. He is helpless and barefoot. His face is described as “suffering” and his eyes are like those of a “tortured animal,” reminiscent of Murray’s injured dog.56 Yet unlike Rimbaud, he is trying to return home from his travels. This “shipwrecked” man is ill and in need of rest.57 Nevertheless, he refuses to retrace his steps and return to a place nearby where he could convalesce. Instead, he sets himself on a strictly linear path forwards: “Strangely unreal the way he had walked in silence towards his death.”58 But his initial refusal gives way to consent: he agrees to be accompanied to a town in the direction he wishes to travel, and to be tended to “with decorum and reverence.”59 The man in need who can accept help is also worthy of respect. As Gilbert Murray would have it, his aidôs is recognized: “The disinherited of the earth, the injured, the helpless, and among them the most utterly helpless of all, the dead. All these, the dead, the stranger, the beggar, the orphan, the  merely unhappy, are from the outset αἰδοῖοι, ‘charged with αἰδώς’ … It is the counterpart of what we, in our modern and scientific prose, call ‘a sense of moral responsibility’ or the like; the feeling roused more or less in most people by the existence of great misery in our wealthy societies.”60 That sense of moral responsibility is given symbolic expression in Hofmannsthal’s narrative. The travellers arrive at a spring, from which the injured German wanderer had earlier drunk; bowing down (very nearly mimicking the religious gesture of proskynesis – prostration

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whereby one kisses the ground), they take a drink from this same spring.61 Remembering the German wanderer and his suffering, the narrator suddenly senses the antagonism of the world, as if sharing in that suffering. The troubles of the German traveller become the narrator’s own as he recalls the man’s face inscribed with pain: “His face looked at me, as hitherto those other faces had looked at me; I almost lost myself to his face, and as if to save myself from his embrace, I said to myself, ‘Who is this? A strange man!’ Then alongside this face were the others, looking at me and exerting their power over me, and there were many more.”62 This one face has now joined the ranks of those faces of memory, and in doing so has unleashed the power of the o ­ thers, such that the force of the wanderer’s gaze threatens to disrupt the cohesiveness and sense of presence of the self. The desire to rescue the self reads like a deliberate response to Ernst Mach’s well-known proclamation in the Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen (Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations): “Das Ich ist unrettbar” – the I is unsalvageable. The coping mechanism used to achieve distance from such shame-conjuring faces63 is to deny their familiarity, to deny any relation or point of commonality, and to label them “fremd.” But such refusal is tantamount to ignoring social responsibility. Not surprisingly, the instinct backfires: the faces of the past reassert themselves in the form of what seems to be an early memory, yet the narrator, speaking now in the third person, does not identify it explicitly as his own. In contrast to free indirect speech (whereby the third person narrator approaches that of the first person), the narrator describes his own vision by sacrificing his first-person perspective for the third, essentially rendering in literary form the sensation of the doubled self described in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”: “It was as though I was double, was lord over my life all at the same time, lord over my faculties, my understanding, felt time passing.”64 Yet here, the experience is more traumatic than transformative, split rather than multiplied, and motivated by memories of the past rather than an encounter in the present moment: “a boy watching the faces of soldiers pass, company after company, countless numbers, tired dusty faces, always in fours, each a single individual and none whose face the boy had not absorbed into himself, forever groping mutely from one to the other, touching each one, counting to himself, ‘This one, this one, this one!’ while tears were rising in his throat.”65 The young boy – the narrator’s childhood self – is overwhelmed by each soldier’s individual suffering; and this suffering cannot be assuaged by any

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actions the boy might take. As in the Iliad’s catalogues of the dead and those about to die, the intensity and amount of suffering grows, etched as it is upon each and every face. And the boy senses that anonymous enjoinment to take responsibility for all. He would – if he could, hence the subjunctive hätte, not rendered in the English translation here – draw each of these faces into himself, all of them strangers, and all of them individuals, united in the human experience of pain and suffering. This awakens in the boy a desire to feel, to touch each one with his sympathetic counting, his acknowledging the other. Though he does not experience the suffering of the other directly, he is an active viewer of it, a witness, and his mere existence apart from what he witnesses makes him sense in his being – again, indirectly – a kind of guilt. This vision compels the narrator to turn his earlier question to himself: this time, he does not ask “Who is this?” and respond with “A strange man!” – instead, he asks: “Who am I?”66 This question arises out of the encounter with the many faces flooding his child-self’s vision; the narrator is overwhelmed completely by his own past, and yet it is also the moment where the self exists in communion with others, as symbolized by drinking and partial submersion in water. At one point in his notes to the “Address,” Hofmannsthal approached a similar dramatic peak when describing the confrontation with a work of art: “We see ourselves surrounded by beautiful forms and colours. Enjoying at first sight the manifold creations of nature and of the human hand … ‘Friend of Art’: A dangerous word, not without demonic content. Here we seem to be in danger of losing ourselves: a great mistake! Here we are first awakened to possess ourselves: for we do create the undying content of these creations in so far as we, alive, empathize with them.”67 The “Address” also points to the potentially positive, if also painful, effects of recognizing the stratified layers of supra-individual memory in one’s own psychic organization.68 In this division of the self, there is an opportunity to experience the self as other; in “Moments in Greece,” the narrator observes at a distance his younger self, the boy.69 Yet he also then must make the journey back to his present “self.” Paradoxically, this happens precisely when, caught in a state of wonder, he fears the total loss of his sense of self: “Then, in the moment of most anxious wondering, I once more came to, the boy sank into me, the water flowed by under my face, bathing one cheek, the propped-up arms supported my body, and I raised myself and it was nothing more than the rising of one who, with his lips lying upon the

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flowing water, had taken a long draught.”70 The dénouement is so quick as almost not to exist. In one sweeping sentence Hofmannsthal brings together the most intense moment and the return to the mundane, linking them with the multivalent symbolism of water. Like Narcissus, the narrator bows down to the water and initially does not recognize himself (“Who am I?”). But water also carries the opposite connotations of the symposium he shares with his former self – and with the German traveller he had encountered earlier. Finally, it is an image of life’s renewal,71 and of the flux of existence. In drinking from the spring, the narrator reveals the identity of the self precisely in its multiplicity and its participatory existence in the ever-changing flow of life. This is the moment when Narcissus listens to Echo and recognizes her voice’s similarity to and difference from his own. Even once the “boy” has sunk again into the narrator’s memory, the narrator still experiences the world as at once split and unified. He speaks of his body as both separate from and one with himself. “The propped arms”  – in German: “Die aufgestützten Arme” – hold up “the body” (“den Leib”).72 Rather than using the first-person pronoun and possessive adjectives, the narrator employs reflexive verbs to render the subject split, an object separated from itself. Finally, this most intense of moments is swept up entirely into generality, as if it were nothing more than some person – any person – standing up from taking a drink of water. In the end, the individual is just as much himself as he is everyman. In his notebooks, Hofmannsthal writes, referring to his play Gestern (Yesterday): “Memory belongs to the body alone: the body seems to reproduce the past, that is, it gives rise to something similar and new in Stimmung. My ‘I’ from yesterday is as irrelevant to me as the ‘I’ of Napoleon or Goethe.”73 In “Moments in Greece,” this is fully overturned. The traveller’s “I” from yesterday is still present and relevant to him, as are the “I’s” of others – be they soldiers, wanderers, or injured dogs. The ethical implication that the being of others is of relevance to the traveller is, furthermore, a thing of beauty.74 As early as the mid 1890s, Hofmannsthal had connected ethical and aesthetic sensibilities in a strikingly similar fashion. In a note from those years, he writes: “The kinship of beautiful things in time, and the deep sense of it: the picture books from Crane the kinship of those of different times … and so the parallel gestures of the countless hover around us, countless faces bow down to drink water with us.”75 The kinship of beautiful things transcends generations, revealing a moment of sameness in spite

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of the incorrigible march of historical time. Thus, Walter Crane’s images can share in their beauty with the medieval or – according to Pater, Hofmannsthal’s source – renaissance world’s celebration of the senses. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Hofmannsthal had located the countless faces kneeling down to drink of the same water we drink – the same unnamed inspirational source – in the invisible enchanted world-garden. The water in this locus amoenus is then transformed in “Moments in Greece” into an “actual” water source, where “real” travellers, including the weary German wanderer, drink. The “countless faces” in the imagined garden become the “countless numbers, tired dusty faces” in memory, revived and resurfacing like one’s reflection upon bending down towards the water. And it is no coincidence that both drink from the source. In the “Address,” the subject and the beautiful object exist in a relationship of mutual exchange. The narrator’s relationship to his memories of past encounters has a similar structure. In the case of the faces of the soldiers, the narrator maintains that “their faces are more than faces,” elaborating thus: “Each of these faces is a destiny, is unique, the most singular that can be, and at the same time infinite, a wandering on to an immeasurably distant destination.”76 We might very well read this distant destination as that fate shared by everyone who lives and ­suffers, yet unique always in its specific manifestation: individual death. The river is an image of life as much as it is of death, for it is also Acheron, the river of woe. This woe is integrated into the mere act of taking a drink of water: “Then, in the moment of most anxious wondering … and it was nothing more than the rising of one who, with his lips lying upon the flowing water, had taken a long draught.”77 This radical levelling of experiences – bringing together the ecstatic and the mundane – does indeed find its most final actualization in death, the most mundane and the most ecstatic moment we can imagine. As in both “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and in the letters Hofmannsthal wrote during his time in Tlumacz, ­witnessing the suffering of others – if that suffering cannot be experienced directly  – is for Hofmannsthal potential grounds for an experience of beauty. This is not just a matter of knowing beauty through its opposite, ugliness; rather, the very foundation of beauty, if there is one, is the ugliness of suffering, like the mud out of which a lotus flower grows. In “Moments in Greece,” this relationship of suffering to beauty is repeated and elaborated: the singularity of an

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event that revealed to the narrator the suffering of others becomes the underpinnings for the experience of beauty, and the text’s evocative qualities intensify the sense of beauty. In the few hours after this moment at the river, the narrator gazes at a nameless landscape, and yet the anonymity speaks: “The mountains called to one another; the clefts were more alive than a face; each little fold on the distant flank of a hill lived; all this was as near to me as the palm of my hand. It was something that I shall never see again. It was the guest gift of all the lonely wanderers who had crossed our path.”78 The vulnerability of the self and the confrontation with death (in one of its many forms) has opened up the opportunity to witness life external to the self: the earth itself proudly exhibits life in every crease of its physiognomy, and this life is close to the traveller, recalling the phrase from the first section: “enough, it is near.”79 Yet this is all nearer than near; it is almost a part of him, like the “Wurzel meiner Hand,” – the palm, or literally the “root” of his hand. This familiarity with the unnamed landscape reconciles the traveller with his own body, at least in language. Hofmannsthal has moved from the reflexive verbal structure of the propped-up arms holding “the” body to an analogy of familiarity focused on the hand of the traveller, which he refers to using the possessive adjective, “my.” The landscape calls, and in this call the narrator senses its nearness, and even his own body. And yet there is no delusion of grandeur in this; it does not give the narrator a sense of power or stability of being. It is also singular in incarnation; he will never see it like this again. And yet he calls this the “Gastgeschenk” – the “guest gift” – of all the lonely wanderers encountered, the gift of hospitality being the symbolon that suggests the infinite relationship of reciprocity and the covenant between host and guest. If the guest gift is a symbol, that is, something that has a complement elsewhere, it is also nevertheless still unique, because to see with the eyes of poetry is to see everything for the first time, and to do so requires the knowledge of suffering. “Everything alive, every landscape, reveals itself once, and in its entirety: but only to a heart deeply moved.”80 To those who have witnessed and been “deeply moved” (“erschüttert” is stronger, more like shattered or shocked) by affliction, beauty is a gift. In his copy of The Rise of the Greek Epic, Hofmannsthal made a note on the endpaper: “Der Bettler der Hilfelose beladen mit αἰδώς” (The beggar the helpless one, laden with αἰδώς). Aidôs is that which, in heaven, may be attributed even to injured dogs; on earth, it is the

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gift which the impoverished and afflicted have the right to bestow: it is a gift of beauty. Yet with the acceptance of this gift comes the awareness of taking on an unpayable debt. The luxury to enjoy the aesthetic all too often comes at the expense of others’ well-being. Whereas Hofmannsthal makes the connection to the social and economic forces explicit in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” here they are rendered as an existential problem, for beauty bears upon it the mark of suffering; it is not a place of solace, but rather a fraught reminder of both participation and the great divide between “subject” and perceived “object.” Once one is aware of the violent sacrifice at the altar of beauty, one cannot experience the same simple pleasure and enjoyment of seeing a work of art fashioned out of human misery by human hands. Any attempt to aestheticize the unpleasant and make it more palatable fails. We could read Hofmannsthal’s work as an exploitation of the unpleasant, but we would not be saying anything Hofmannsthal did not already know – nor would it make us, the “critical reader,” in any way morally superior to the writer. As readers, we are already implicated. Hofmannsthal consciously uses the unpleasant to literary effect – but he is also aware that the aesthetic is not an anaesthetic. Art is born out of a desire to make manifest indirectly what will not be articulated directly. For Hofmannsthal, the artist is always involved, interested, and implicated in the object, which comes to have a life – and demands – of its own. Some works of art are even capable of making us uncomfortably aware of the unpayable debt and that impassable divide; they issue a command to us to give up something of our own inner world in order to sustain what the artist began.

T h e P o v e r t y o f Presence Only a day after his encounter with the wanderer from Lauffen an der Salzach, his powerful vision at the spring, and the train ride during which he saw in the living landscape the “guest gift of all the lonely wanderers”81 who had crossed their path – only a day after this whirlwind of experiences, the narrator finds himself in the disappointing anti-climax of the present. Indeed, as if ashamed, he wants to forget the German traveller (and the pain of others) and all traces of the encounter: “But I was not tempted to think any more about it. ‘Passed,’ said I involuntarily, and lifted my foot over the fragments of ruin that

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lay around here by the hundreds.”82 The irony of this statement becomes apparent when we see that “passed” (gewesen in German, which is also the past participle of “to be”) refers not only to the man of yesterday, but to the narrator’s surroundings as well. The narrator’s desire to forget the encounter with the man affects his reception of the world around him, for now things take on a painful quality of transience as they threaten to slip out of the reach of the present. Even the stones on the hill seem now to be “decaying with age.”83 And so, whereas the previous day’s encounter had awakened the memories of yesteryear and the potential of life in memory and landscape, we have here the desire to forget the discomfort of that encounter, resulting in the narrator’s vision of a landscape receding into the past. The narrator wishes to seize control and halt the flow of time, ever out of joint, by placing the past securely in the past, and holding the present in the here and now; but the wish is never fulfilled. In Hofmannsthal’s hand, the temporal disconnection finds spatial expression as well. The narrator views the world around him, in this case focusing on a column: it is a thing of solidity and stability, and it is a monument to past cultural achievement. But there is something peculiar about the narrator’s view: He sees the column as though it were intimately linked to his own being and its mode of existence and behaviour dependent upon his own life-giving breath. He is transposing that feeling of shared existence, yet the selection of the object of his gaze – Pygmalion-like in its inspirational power – is beyond his control: “I felt that as I breathed, its contour rose and fell  … Unintentionally, my eye chose.”84 Much like the gaze in Sappho’s celebrated poem φαίνεταί μοι (phainetai moi), the eyes here seem to be somehow separate from the willing self; this distance creates a sense of poverty rather than possession (self-possession or otherwise).85 And yet this poverty, or lack, is ironically presented in terms of the richness of gold: “But in the evening light, clearer than dissolved gold, the consuming whiff of mortality also played around it.”86 What unites the column and the observer is neither the observer’s megalomaniacal gaze, nor his quickening artist’s eye, but the richness of their shared golden transience. Poverty and wealth are recurring themes in Hofmannsthal’s writings.87 In his early works, the poet or artist, portrayed as a reverse Midas, is the figure whose craft has the power to imbue a lifeless object with something much like life; whereas Midas turns living things into beautiful but lifeless gold.88 In “Moments in Greece,” the gold of the

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sun is rich; and while the enjoyment of beauty is often considered a privilege of the wealthy, it is never enough to purchase meaningful experiences. One must know poverty.89 Hofmannsthal critiques his own narrator, who wishes to forget the suffering of others and leave it in the past; yet the narrator cannot, if he is to see the world with the eyes of poetry, ignore the world’s own misery: for the world too slips away from him as he walks. Midas, as Mayer has pointed out, is a metamorphosis of Pygmalion: he freezes the motion of organic nature into inert gold. Yet for Hofmannsthal, art reveals itself to be always in motion, slipping out of one’s hands, exposing the uncomfortable relation between poverty and wealth as well as absence and presence. This has sociopolitical implications. Though neither sociologist nor political philosopher, Hofmannsthal puts into poetic form what Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about industrialization: “From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilisation works its miracles, and civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.”90 And he even approaches William Morris’s socialist critique: “The necessity of the time, I say, is to feed the commercial war which we are all of us ­waging in some way or another; if, while we are doing this, we can manage, some of us, to adorn our lives with some little pleasure of the eyes, it is well, but it is no necessity, it is a luxury, the lack of which we must endure. Thus, in this matter also does the artificial famine of inequality, felt in so many other ways, impoverish us despite of our riches; and we sit starving amidst our gold, the Midas of the ages.”91 An impulse to uphold Midas’s alchemic art drives the ­narrator to the column: “I felt the urge to walk around it; the side turned away from me, facing the setting sun, this held the promise of real life.”92 The narrator’s desires echo those attributed to the poet Rimbaud, “who believes he is struggling for money, money, and more money, but who is really struggling with his own demon for something gigantic, which cannot be named.”93 Though the narrator is not striving for money per se, he is striving for that security that comes with permanence, which the gilded life of the wealthy often seems to offer but cannot. He seeks that golden life that fades away with the setting sun. The narrator has already noted his anticipated disappointment, and the paragraph that follows confirms it: everything he has seen in Athens, everything in Greece, all of it is of the past, all of it a

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Figure 3.1  Column at Delphi. Image from Hanns Holdt’s book of photographs, Griechenland. Baukunst, Landschaft und Volksleben, with an introduction by Hofmannsthal.

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tribute to decay and the poverty of presence, frustrating Midas’ art with the tireless persistence of time. Even memory, which before had held such power, seems now to be only of a second order to itself, useless for enlivening the relics of the past. Having descended a rung on the ontological ladder, the memory of memories can offer only a distorted view of things; indeed, its ontological status resembles that of art (much maligned) in Plato’s Republic: “These Greeks, I asked within myself, where are they? I tried to remember, but I remembered only memories. Names came floating near, figures; they merged into one another as though I had dissolved them into a greenish smoke wherein they appeared distorted.”94 The description of images intertwining is not new to readers of Hofmannsthal: it was an important leitmotif for “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and was also used in the “Address” (see chapter 1). In both of the earlier instances, the effect of this ­weaving is a revelation of vitality and connection; here the image is transformed so that the individual ties are loosed. The identities meld and distinction disappears, becoming formless rather than “arbitrary-will-become-form.”95 The language here subtly recalls that used to describe the sunlight three paragraphs earlier. First, the past participle used above to describe the gold, “aufgelöst” (“dissolved”), reappears here in the phrase “als löste ich sie auf” (“as though I had dissolved them”), thereby introducing by way of the subjunctive mood the possibility – but not the reality – of the subject acting upon an object. The atmospheric quality, too, is underlined in this moment, except that  the golden light is replaced with a greenish smoke; and even the ­distortion (“verzerrten”) is as much a distorted auditory echo of “der verzehrende Hauch der Vergänglichkeit” (“consuming whiff of ­mortality”), as it is a visual one. The distortion dissolves the ­earlier descriptions, while at the same time recalling them as memories.96 The attempt to render presence tangible and lasting has failed in both instances: neither column nor memories of memories can fulfil the narrator’s desire for presence as an escape from the past and its reminders of poverty. His response is yet again reminiscent of the figure of Rimbaud, above all in its disdainful tone: “Because they had passed long ago I hated them, and also because they had passed so fast.”97 This sentence is also remarkably similar to the merchant’s son’s renunciation upon his deathbed: “He hated his premature death so much that he hated his life for having brought him to it.”98

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This disdain colours his entire judgment of the cultural artifacts the ancient Greeks had left behind, and does so in an antagonistic spirit akin to Plato’s critique of art in the Republic, expanding that critique to the Greek pantheon: “All was gone, even while it still believed it existed! And over it, floating, the eternal fata morgana of their poetry; and their deities themselves, what uncertain phantoms flitting by … Gods, eternal gods? Milesian fables, a decoration painted on the wall of a wanton’s house.”99 The critique rests on an ontology that identifies the true with existence and its eternal ebb and flow: art is no longer, precisely insofar as it believed itself to be. A clumsier but equally ­possible translation of the first sentence in the block quote would be: “Already, everything was not, insofar as it believed itself to be!” The word “indem” can mean both “while” (as in the quoted translation) and “insofar as” or “by doing something.” In any case, attributing the faculty of belief to the ostensibly inanimate object suggests that these figures, names, and fragments have an ambiguous ontological status. A distorted version of René Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, these objects believe they are, therefore they are not – or are they? If they can believe, then they are not merely objects for the subject’s cognition and gaze; they are also subjects in their own right – a factor that raises the phenomenological experience to the aesthetic, as will be made clearer in the encounter with the statues. I classify these things as part of the aesthetic because the narrator himself describes the “fata morgana of their poetry” that hovers above. We need not go back as far as Plato to understand the significance of this miragelike quality for the aesthetic; Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense” speaks precisely to this aspect of non-identification, uncertainty, and slippage, while Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” celebrates it. But even if we can attribute a “subjective” quality to these aesthetically experienced objects and thoughts, their coherence is still always in the process of dissolving and reforming. Art is ­evanescent; and so are the “eternal” gods, those “uncertain phantoms flitting by” whose existences have been relegated to murals in some wanton’s house. I have mentioned Plato in this chapter more than once, primarily in the context of his sceptical stance towards art. But Plato plays more than one role and even appears explicitly in a vision, amplifying the sense of disdain and even arrogance that the reader witnesses in the narrator:

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The sun must have sunk lower, the shadows lengthened, when a glance met mine – deep and equivocal as that of a passerby. He walked on and was already half-turned away from me, also ­contemptuous of this town, his hometown. His glance revealed me to myself, and revealed him: it was Plato. Around the lips of the inventor of myths, the despiser of gods, hovered arrogance and spook-like dreams. In a magnificent, spotless garment ­carelessly brushing the ground, he walked along, the non-citizen, the regal man; he floated past, like ghosts who walk with locked feet. Contemptuously he touched time and place, he seemed to hail from the East and to disappear towards the West.100 Plato becomes a placeholder for several qualities already at play in “Moments in Greece.” First, Plato’s gaze meets the narrator: The narrator is the object of the gaze as much as he himself is a gazer. The philosopher-ghost’s gaze and the careless (“lässig”) brushing of his gown upon the ground recall the figure of the monk from the monastery and his casual (also described as “lässig”) way of standing with his gaze directed towards the travellers. Plato’s gaze is also “equivocal as that of a passerby,” recalling the wanderer from Lauffen an der Salzach. And, if inclined to an intertextual reading, the reader is thrown into an abyss of allusion and suggestion. Consider Hofmannsthal’s laudatory yet eerie poem “Einem, der vorübergeht” (To one who passes by) with its poetic reference to and distortion of the poet Stefan George, with whom the young Hofmannsthal briefly associated. The poem depicts the power of another person to reveal to oneself aspects within oneself forgotten or unknown. The line in “Moments in Greece” – “His glance revealed me to myself, and revealed him” (Sein Blick enthüllte mir mich selbst und ihn) – echoes the poem’s first two lines: “You reminded me of things / hidden within myself” (Du hast mich an Dinge gemahnet, / Die heimlich in mir sind).101 This passage in “Moments in Greece” also seems to reference Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal poem “À une passante” and George’s 1901 translation, “Einer Vorübergehenden,” in Die Blumen des Bösen. In the Baudelaire poem and in George’s translation, we see imagery similar to that of this passage on the phantom Plato; in both the poem and the description of Plato, special attention is drawn to the hem of the “magnificent, spotless garment, carelessly brushing the ground.” This is where high meets low. In Baudelaire’s poem, a majestically

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melancholy woman walks by, “Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet” (George: “Ihr finger gravitätisch / Erhob und wiegte kleidbesatz und saum” – “her fingers ponderously / lifted and balanced the dress’s trimmings and hem”).102 Plato’s disdain, by contrast, is not for the low, as might be read in the image of the lady lifting her skirt to keep it clean. Rather, his ­disdain is for the high, or the high-seeming – he is a “despiser of gods,” and a disdainer of art (again, associated with “high culture” and the delusion of wealth); and yet he also betrays the arrogance of the mythmaker, the poet. Plato embodies the essential paradox of the ­aesthetic: its power, its ineffectuality (Plato is an insubstantial phantom), its height and depth. Plato is sceptical of art’s deception and power over the passions, yet he, “the inventor of myths,” is a great artist himself. Recalling Goethe’s famous proclamation in the West-östlicher Divan, Hofmannsthal reminds us that poetic writing is a kind of arrogance for which the poet should not be chid.103 Goethe’s poem is an apology for the artistic hubris of the poet who defies rational logic. Yet as we have seen, the lowly monk in “The Monastery of St Luke” displays something suggestive of a similar kind of arrogance. For the poet, arrogance is displayed in the very act of writing and is linked to the sin of pride. That is, this is demonic work. The image of Plato floating along with his feet locked is borrowed here (and again later in Die Frau ohne Schatten) from Goethe’s Faust. In that play, the titular character sees a magically conjured image (“Zauberbild”) floating by with locked feet. He believes this image to be his beloved Gretchen, yet it turns out to be the work of demonic magic.104 Art, even as a creative product of the poet as alter deus, has something vaguely diabolical about it. Yet Hofmannsthal, in grappling with the place and purpose of art, is not satisfied to leave it all up to arrogance and illusions. The narrator himself takes on the role of the passerby (der Vorübergehende). Jerry Glenn has suggested that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is also lurking behind the words of the poem addressed to George, namely, when the fool counsels Zarathustra to abandon the city: “Have pity on your foot! Rather spit on the city gate and turn back.” And Zarathustra, grown weary of the fool’s ramblings, concludes: “where one can no longer love, there one should pass by [vorübergehen].”105 If Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was an influence on the poem, it seems to have had an even stronger role to play in Hofmannsthal’s characterization of this ghost of Plato, a figure that combines the image of passing by with

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that of disdain for the city and the times (and more broadly, temporality itself) and space: “Contemptuously he touched time and place.” His disdain has the function of revealing to the narrator his own artistic weakness: “and my guilt lay clear as the day. It is your own weakness, I called to myself, you are unable to revive all this. It is you yourself who tremble with transience, you who steep all about you in the ­terrible bath of time.”106 In a gesture of frustration, the narrator decides that, if he cannot exercise his creative powers, he will at least read. But according to Hofmannsthal active reading involves creativity and a certain suspension of the notion of self-as-agent.107 The narrator’s choice of reading matter – the Sophoclean tragedy Philoctetes – is also significant: like Oedipus (whose path the travellers have walked), Philoctetes is wounded in the foot and cannot walk without constant pain. The German wanderer, too, walked barefoot, suffering the entire way; and, like the German wanderer, Philoctetes makes one uncomfortably aware of one’s own guilt. Gilbert Murray says of him: “So when Philoctetes charges Neoptolemus to look him in the face: τòν προστρóπαιον, τòν ἱκέτην, ὦ σχέτλιε; he means: ‘Me, charged with the wrath of God; me, who kneel before thee, O hard heart.’”108 Zarathustra is urged to have pity on his own feet and not enter the city. Plato practically hovers, his feet locked, neither one touching the ground. Even the verb vorübergehen is closely associated with the feet – gehen means “to walk,” and walking in this setting brings ­constant reminders of the passing (das Vorübergehen) of time, as we saw at the beginning of this section: “‘Passed,’ said I involuntarily, and lifted my foot over the fragments of ruin that lay around here by the hundreds.”109 Frustrated with the unclear motives of the character Odysseus in the play Philoctetes and the injustice that seems to govern so much of human actions, the narrator finds himself sympathizing with Philoctetes, thereby establishing a connection to the character’s dramatic fate.110 Yet there is something of a dramatic irony in this identity; the narrator does not seem himself to be aware of it and instead focuses on the incomprehensibility and vanity of the dramatic action, underscoring the necessity of Philoctetes’ presence: “they must know that without Philoctetes himself the town cannot fall.”111 The Sophoclean drama, beautifully written and enchanting, explains neither why this man need suffer, nor why the other characters do not see his importance.112 Frustrated with the other characters’ actions and apathy, the narrator puts down the book: he cannot be the stage upon which Sophocles’ drama plays out.

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The unbridgeable chasm between the narrator and the “impossible antiquity” he has encountered at every turn – the gods, the column, the book – is characterized first by the unavoidable transience of things; it is as if only the shell of the ancient world were left behind, its substance or essence having long since taken flight into the air: “Here, where I had hoped to touch it with my hands, here it is gone, here more than anywhere else.”113 This is more than an expression of frustration; it is a careful reworking of the ancient Greek (and Roman) encounter with the shades. Achilles in The Iliad sees a dream image of Patroclus and tries to embrace him, to no avail. Odysseus, likewise, in his katabasis thrice tries to embrace his mother, Anticleia, and thrice encounters only air. Now the narrator is faced with physically tangible ruins: columns, books, rocks, temples. But he cannot grasp antiquity. Its essence, its meaning, its explanation for the absurd injustices of life and suffering are absent. All these things have slipped from him as the shades from Achilles’ and Odysseus’ searching arms. The only possible response he can entertain is to abandon it all for lost, and to walk on: “I raised my foot to leave the ghostly place of the Nonexistent.”114 Despising that which seems to have no presence, the traveller betakes himself to a place where he expects to be surrounded by real presence – a museum, with “treasures found in the rubble of the graves: they have resisted, at least for the moment, the power of time; they express only themselves and are of incomparable beauty.”115 His hope is influenced not by a worldview associated with antiquity, but rather by a modernity enamoured with the small things that, in their simplicity and presence, are beautiful and promise a place of respite from an incomprehensible world. That is, Hofmannsthal’s narrator wishes to escape to the present, to his present. And he thinks he can achieve this by surrounding himself with things of enduring presence. In his essay on Auguste Rodin, Rilke writes of “things” and “the unwritten law that lived in the sculpture of the past,” noting that the “distinguishing characteristic of things – this complete self-­ absorption – was what gave sculpture its serenity; it could neither demand nor expect anything from outside itself, and it could refer to nothing and see nothing that was not within itself.”116 The emphasis on autotelic existence – on answering to no purpose other than its own existence – is what is meant by “autonomy of art,” here attributed to things. On 8 August 1903, Rilke writes to Lou Andreas-Salomé of the “art-thing,” or Kunst-Ding: it is removed from ravenous time,

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and given over to space  – the space, in this instance, being the museum.117 Yet the art-object itself is, in one respect, like a museum: it houses the beauty that otherwise would be subject to decay, not through imitative representation, but through the evocation or suggestion of something absent.118 Hofmannsthal, like Rilke, is fully aware of the suggestive potential of art objects (heir to symbolism that he is), and infuses this potential with his own melancholic nuance. The object exists as a productive absence; the presence of the thing is a monument to that absence; the museum is a mausoleum, with an aesthetic turn of the screw. The self-sufficiency of the symbolic art-objects segues into the Symbolist air of fin-de-siècle Vienna as the narrator very nearly quotes Hofmannsthal’s own 1896 poem, “Die Beiden” (translated as “The Both of Them” by McClatchy in The Whole Difference). The narrator moves from a general remark about these Kunst-Dinge (art-things) to a particular hypothetical example: “A goblet [Becher] resembles the roundness of a breast or the shoulder of a goddess. A golden snake that once encircled an arm evokes that arm.”119 In a similar gesture, the poem of 1896 opens: “In her hand she carried the cup [Becher] to him – Her chin and mouth were like its rim.”120 The physical body is compared with and then spatially juxtaposed to and expressed through reference to the cup. They share a space of existence, calling each other and responding within the framework of the symbol. In a similar manner, the imagined golden serpent once wound round an arm evokes the arm itself, now gone. Art recalls life through evocation and suggestion. The snake recalls the arm, but it also, indirectly, recalls another ekphrastic moment: the serpentine coils of gold in the servant girl’s hair in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” In that story, discussed at length in chapter 1, the living servant is framed by and arises out of a description of golden ornamentation, evoking the powers of Midas and Medusa: “while their dark heads with evil snake mouths, three wild eyes in the foreheads, and eerie jewelry in the cold, hard hair moved next to her breathing cheeks, grazing her fair temples in time with her slow gait.”121 The pull of such things is strong, for they promise duration – a satisfaction of the desire to fix beauty in space. In Georg Büchner’s 1836 novella, Lenz, the eponymous protagonist expresses a desire to fix beauty with a Medusa-like stare122 so that it might be preserved and shared with others. Similarly, in “Moments in Greece,” the narrator’s desire for preservation suggests a deeper

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discontent and a greater loss suffered. Turning something to gold or to stone is the mythical expression of a desire to overcome the poverty one feels when encountering death or absence. But to what degree can one rely on an economy of presence? The narrator himself, recalling yet again the image of Rimbaud and his quest for money, knows that any supposed essence or true being of Greek antiquity is unattainable, and so sets his sights on the lowly, the graspable, the Kunst-Dinge, that recall the life that once surrounded them.123

A e s t h e t ic E n c o u n t e r as Augenbli ck The first half of this third section has been concerned with the poverty of presence. The second half presents a complement in the overwhelming presence of a collection of Greek statues. That presence is felt in the aesthetic moment or Augenblick, a word whose etymology refers to “the glimpse (or blink) of an eye.” The moment is a double motion: the eye opens for an instant before it closes again. In the final “moment” in Greece, the Augenblick itself becomes an object of consideration. Upon entering the museum, the narrator encounters something far grander than the charming but unassuming goblet with its wispy hints of life. He encounters, instead, something that seems to have a life of its own: the faces of a collection of korai – those freestanding statues of ancient Greece known for their “archaic smile.” The narrator’s frustrated attempts to describe the last “moment” result in a proliferation of words strung together by colons, with each successive phrase serving as an attempt to clarify and inch towards an adequate description; but with each phrase, the immeasurability of the moment continues to overwhelm the words. Hofmannsthal’s sentences form a wavelike rhythm; the iterations and reiterations of this ineffable presence do not cease until the narrator comes to describing his vision of that mysterious, time-defying smile – a smile that has played so central a role in the long history of aesthetic discussions: “At that moment something happened to me: an indescribable shock. It came not from outside but from some immeasurable distance of an inner abyss: it was like lightning: the room, as it was, rectangular with whitewashed walls and the statues that stood there, became for an instant filled with a light utterly different from that which was really there: the eyes of the statues were all at once turned towards me and

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an unspeakable smile occurred in their faces.”124 Expressible only obliquely, this “something” is a “shock,” the source of which is located, if it can be located at all, in that distance within the interior abyss, its temporal quality conveyed only as the flash of an instant. The description resembles the visionary Augenblick in the “Address”: there, a hanging tapestry has the capacity to illuminate the “arbitrarywill-become-form of the joining colours and shades.”125 Here, too, the connectivity of things has been rendered aesthetically – or perhaps we could reverse the terms and say that aesthetic manifestation is rendered through connectivity. The surroundings in which this “something” takes place – its atmosphere – is a kind of Hofmannsthalian version of the Platonic khôra, the space described in the Timaeus (52a-b),126 where things come into being and form is given (as in the smile: “an unspeakable smile occurred in their faces”). It is the space of the universe of forms and their representation. Hofmannsthal gives this space an aesthetic emphasis: this is where the work of art can reveal its form. But that revelation, as scholars have affirmed, involves a moment of dissociation.127 That raises the question: What is it about the aesthetic experience and momentary revelation that brings us back to ourselves – after the dissociation? For Hofmannsthal, one answer is: beauty’s capacity to awaken a response. Khôra can prepare us to answer. Keeping beauty’s call to responsibility in mind, we see that Hofmannsthal’s idea of space here would in at least one respect be closer to Derrida’s explanation of the khôra than to, say, Heidegger’s “clearing” (Lichtung), insofar as there is ultimately a call of responsibility within this formproducing space. This is evident, for instance, in Derrida’s analogy between Socrates and khôra: “Socrates is not khôra, but he would look a lot like it/her if it/she were someone or something … Socrates does not occupy this undiscoverable place, but it is the one from which, in the Timaeus and elsewhere, he answers to his name. For as khôra he must always ‘be called in the same way.’”128 There is a call in the khôra, as there is in the aesthetic space. Responding to one’s name and doing so in a like (or adequate) fashion are demanded of the viewer (or listener). For Derrida, this kind of response involves a degree of effacement. In Ancient Greek theatre, effacement was commonly enacted by the humble character of the εἴρων (eiron), whence the phrase “Socratic irony” and, further down the line, our own literary understanding of the term. The effacement can be expressed as privation of any real

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referent.129 In Hofmannsthal’s text, too, there seems to be no real referent (the critique of Naturalism is still hale and hearty): “the room … became for an instant filled with a light utterly different from that which was really there.”130 And yet for Hofmannsthal, the work of art – “arbitrary-will-become-form” – will take on a face in this space, uniting humility and hubris. In fact, the face issues the call for responsibility. Hofmannsthal uses this space as a stage for the work of art and its ironic face.131 Keeping in mind the notion that beauty binds us to some duty,132 we see this expression of responsibility emanating from the eyes of the statues. In this moment of shock, being subjected to the statues’ gaze is indeed one of those profound moments that “can make us tremble.”133 Derrida uses that phrase when describing the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and it might seem strange to invoke the name of a man who wrote so eloquently on the nefarious appeal of art; yet Hofmannsthal himself has already done this for us in his vision of the phantom Plato. All three thinkers  – Plato, Hofmannsthal, and Levinas – wrestled with the same issues: art threatens to overtake us and to steal us away from reality by offering a fantasy world. Art is, like writing, a pharmakon, a drug with the capacity to heal and to harm. Hofmannsthal clearly falls on the side of art, but he does so in a way that accounts for the inherent ambiguity of the aesthetic. In “Reality and Its Shadow” Levinas argues that art inspires disengagement. He uses Pygmalion’s statue as an example par excellence for art: “The artwork does not succeed, is bad, when it does not have that aspiration for life which moved Pygmalion. But it is only an aspiration. The artist has given the statue a lifeless life, a derisory life that is not master of itself, a caricature of life. Its presence does not cover over itself and overflows on all sides, does not hold in its own hands the strings of the puppet it is.”134 The lifeless statue and other works of art by their very nature, according to Levinas, induce a similarly lifeless stupor in the observer: “Do not speak, do not reflect, admire in silence and peace – such are the counsels of wisdom satisfied before the beautiful.” The statues are, for Hofmannsthal too, speechless in that they, as Levinas says “have mouths but do not speak.”135 But Hofmannsthal does attribute faces to them (a distinctly ethically charged image for both Hofmannsthal and Levinas) and, more essentially, a physicality that demands response, and even responsibility. Levinas would argue against any kind of phenomenological or aesthetic mediation in the confrontation with the face: “Infinity presents

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itself as a face in the ethical resistance that paralyses my powers and from the depths of defenceless eyes rises firm and absolute in its nudity and destitution. The comprehension of this destitution and this hunger establishes the very proximity of the other … To speak to me is at each moment to surmount what is necessarily plastic in manifestation. To manifest oneself as a face is to impose oneself above and beyond the manifested and purely phenomenal form … In Desire are conjoined the movements unto the Height and unto the Humility of the Other.”136 There are remarkable parallels between Levinas’s description of the encounter with the face in its “ethical resistance” and Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the encounter with the statues’ faces – with their aesthetic resistance. One might argue, again along Platonic lines, that in the statues we have only images of faces (that is, a phenomenological intermediary, not self-made, mute, existing but not alive), but for Hofmannsthal’s narrator these images call attention to and validate physical existence. They possess, through their very plasticity and Medusa-like gaze, their own means to call to the observer and recall that “nudity and destitution.” The statues are a site wherein “are conjoined the movements unto the Height and unto the Humility of the Other” – and for Hofmannsthal, these movements of recognizing the other involve a return to the self. Height and humility, hubris and meekness, are united in the work of art. Shock is the traveller’s first (involuntary) response to the statues’ eyes and the “unsägliches Lächeln” (unspeakable smile) that graces their faces. The smile is associated with the beauty and mystery of the Mona Lisa as much as with the archaic smile of a statue like the Peplos Kore of Athens. It is worth lingering on this smile, which in the secondary literature on “Moments in Greece” has received surprisingly little ­attention; yet the image is key to the passage and to the narrator’s own awareness: “At the same time I knew: I am not seeing this for the first time.”137 Erwin Kobel and Zsuzsa Breier acknowledge that, with this smile, Hofmannsthal would be thinking of Leonardo da Vinci. Kobel calls this an “archaisches Lächeln” (archaic smile), which, while ­certainly not incorrect – it is the proper term from an art historical perspective – is inadequate, since it does not account for the timelessness and even the modernity of the moment; nor does Kobel ask what this smile could be suggesting. He leaves the allusion unexplored. Breier reduces the smile and the eyes to memory’s handmaidens, stating that they are important in this respect alone.138 It seems to me that Hofmannsthal’s images are more complex and meaningful than that.

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Figure 3.2  Phrasikleia Kore, Ariston of Paros, 550–540 bc. Depicts a typical archaic smile.

The eyes and the mouth are perhaps the most expressive parts of the face in Western physiognomy.139 Hofmannsthal is deliberately drawing on Walter Pater’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci (in The Renaissance), parts of which he had translated some years earlier.

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Towards the beginning of the essay, Pater identifies two of Leonardo’s early influences: “the smiling of women and the motion of great waters,” that is, the beautiful and the sublime. That the moment of shock in “The Statues” should be connected with the faces and smiles of the korai is meaningful first of all insofar as it unites the beautiful and the sublime in one aesthetic experience. Their “unspeakable smile” is practically a translation of what Pater identifies as the “­germinal principle” of Leonardo’s work, namely “the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it.” La Giaconda’s smile, one of the most well-known of such enigmatic expressions to grace canvas, embodies for Pater countless fates and histories, radiating outward from the present moment, as much an expression of today as of yesteryear, as familiar as it is strange.140 Hofmannsthal has located this smile in the korai, such that the narrator too recognizes something of the countless fates and stories in these faces – not just his own, but others’ as well. Yet Hofmannsthal resists the idea of totality as a final negation of particularity. Instead, communion is the key, as it was in “The Wanderer”: “in some other world I have stood before these, have had some kind of communion with them, and ever since then everything in me has been waiting for just this shock, and so dreadfully I had to be shaken thus within my innermost self in order to become again what I had been.”141 The insistent use of the demonstrative pronouns (“these,” “them,” “this”) highlights the importance of particularity and nearness; on the other hand, one can indeed be lost in a place and time defined only by vagueness, suggesting the indefinite rather than the definite: “At that moment something happened to me”; “It came not from outside but from some immeasurable distance of an inner abyss”; “in some other world”; “had some kind of communion.”142 This is a world of suspension between definitudes. It is what Hofmannsthal, in his notes to himself, entitled Ad me ipsum, calls “Präexistenz.”143 It is a moment of shared ritual – each repeated performance a unique occurrence (here, before the statues) yet partaking in a common practice – and a rite of passage, as Hofmannsthal clearly indicates, subject to the laws of neither space nor time: “Somewhere a ceremony was taking place, a battle, a glorious sacrificial offering: that was the meaning of this tumult in the air, of the expanding and shrinking of the room, the meaning of this unspeakable exaltation in me, of this effervescing sociability, alternating with this mysterious anxiety and despondency: for I am the priest who will

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perform the ceremony – I, too, perhaps the victim [“Opfer”] that will be offered: all this presses towards decision, it ends with the crossing of a threshold, with a landing.”144 The “landing” is a clear reference to the ship-wrecked man from the “The Wanderer,” but the link this time is marked by humility and sacrificial offering.145 Such sacrificial humility can be attributed to the poet-figure. The poet as priest (related to but distinct from the poet as alter deus) in German literature is a familiar trope. Novalis famously noted in Blüthenstaub (Pollen): “In the beginning, Poet and Priest were one.”146 But the connection between religion and the poet goes further back: the Sturm und Drang playwright and theorist Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz wrote in his Anmerkungen übers Theater (Remarks Concerning the Theatre): “For ever and always the feelings, emotions and passions of men have been grafted on to their religious concepts, a man with no religion has no sensibility whatsoever (woe to him!), a man of twisted religion has twisted sensibilities, and a poet who did not found the religion of his people is worth less than a fairground musician.”147 If art is to be a substitute for religion, however, there must be a way whereby the mystery is made manifest and ­aesthetic (plastic or otherwise). For Hofmannsthal, this is most elegantly achieved in the symbol, the idea of identity that is das Gleiche but not dasselbe. In “The Conversation about Poems,” the origin of the symbol is one of identity between the sacrificial offering and the person performing the sacrifice: the man, as priest, dies in the moment, for the moment, with the animal he sacrifices. In “Moments in Greece,” the scene is more elaborate, the paradoxical nature of the identity more prominent: “effervescing sociability” and “despondency” coexist. Furthermore, the movement arises out of participatory identification: “all this presses towards decision.” This is not a decisionist philosophy in the sense of Carl Schmitt – it is not about the existence of authority justifying the content of the decision – but rather about the necessity of response, of the deed: “it ends with the crossing of a threshold, with a landing.” This action is framed as a poetic rite. “At that moment something happened to me.” This sentence opens the long paragraph detailing the auratic experience, but it seems to end as quickly as it came on. The face – both in art and in life – is the window to this chaos, this ultimate confusion from which the ordered cosmos must again and again be separated: “And now already all this dies down into their faces turning back into stone, it expires and is gone; nothing remains but the death-sigh of despondency. Statues stand

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about me, five of them, only now am I aware of their number, strange they stand before me, heavy and stonelike, with slanting eyes.”148 These statues preserve and re-enact that moment of being in the world before the separation of light from darkness. That confusion exists like a vestige in the work of art. This can be seen in the image of petrification as a continual process, rendered grammatically as a present participle: “turning back into stone.” Crossing the threshold is a kind of death, and whatever remains after this event still is tainted with that death. The moment of identification – which seems not only to have threatened the observer’s independent existence, but even to have killed some part of him – gives way to impenetrable difference.149 The statues’ physical outline is as much a rift in space (frustrating any totalizing identification) as it is a demarcation of their physical presence; at every point along this line of demarcation there is an abyss of difference. The narrator goes on, drawing attention to the particularity of the physical statues before him and to their now seemingly static presence: note the change from present participle “versteinernden” (turning into stone) to the simple adjective “steinern” (stonelike). The ritual has been accomplished. He counts the statues – five – repeating the child’s counting of the soldiers’ faces, only here the number is finite. It is the limiting adumbration of materiality – in short, their physical presence, which will now challenge the observer’s notions of life, of subject and object, and of reality. The narrator writes that there is a life that plays around their chins: they have in their aesthetic presence an aesthetic vitality that appears to have been given them in that moment of strange identification between observer and observed. And yet now, given that life, they stand before him, utterly foreign and ­unattainable symbols of the original chaos: “Am I not standing before the strangest of the strange? Does not the eternal dread of chaos stare at me here from five virginal faces?”150 Despite the shock, the statues, in their imposing physical presence, nearly force a response from the observer. And the narrator does respond, with a kind of paean: “Yet, my God, how real they are! They have a breathtaking sensual presence.”151 The description “breathtaking” (“atemberaubend”) operates chiastically with the above “death sigh of despondency” (“totbehauchte Verzagtheit”) said to have been left behind. Whereas before, held in the throes of ambiguity, the narrator is left with a despondence, the only quality of which is that it has upon it the breath of death, here the narrator’s breath is taken away in amazement at the form and its life. This form is made

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manifest, first, as the reality of physical presence (the phenomenon), a presence appropriately likened to the temple with its architectonic clarity and its privilege as the site of sacrifice and ritual, and also as a metaphor for the body itself. The sentence that follows establishes the link between the body and the face, the seat of represented personality: “Their solemnity has nothing of masks: the face receives its meaning from the body.”152 Moving from the temple of the body to the inner sanctum of the face with its commanding presence and distinction, we trace the trajectories from both the phenomenological and the religious to the aesthetic. Walter Pater writes in his essay on the eighteenth-century German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann: “Greek art … is entangled with Greek religion.” Greek religion, he says, like all religions, is founded on a “pagan sentiment” that “measures the ­sadness with which the human mind is filled, whenever its thoughts wander far from what is here, and now.”153 Hofmannsthal identifies this pagan sentiment as common to religion, art, and phenomena generally; that is, what unites all three is the condition of difference, distance, and absence. Yet Hofmannsthal does not forfeit the notion of participation – rather, he elevates it: “They participate in things that are above any common conception.” This pronouncement ­heralds the move from the phenomenological to the aesthetic: “How beautiful they are!”154 Beauty, in this sense, is not the pleasant loveliness of the objects the narrator had expected to find,155 but something overpowering that emanates from the statues’ bodies: “Their bodies are more convincing to me than my own … Never before have I seen anything like these proportions and this surface. Did not the universe, for a fleeting moment, open up to me?”156 The universe’s revelation through the physical presence of the statues seems a thoroughly mystical moment. The narrator aptly compares himself to a dreamer. But dreams  – and poetry  – have a special ­connection to reality, according to an aphorism from Hofmannsthal’s collection Buch der Freunde (Book of Friends): “Insofar as one can say anything conclusive about reality, one approaches dream, or rather poetry.”157 For “Moments in Greece,” it is the realm of physical reality that houses this eternity, providing the material for its expression: “it is the secret of infinity in these garments.”158 The material is, in a Hegelian sense, adequate to the idea.159 The statues’ physical presence – their grandeur – is in this aesthetic, sensual moment nevertheless receding and unattainable.

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In light of this aesthetic encounter, and sensing its inevitable ephemerality, the narrator draws a conclusion: “He who would truly be a match for them must approach them by means other than the eye, with greater reverence yet with more daring. And still, it is the eye that would have to bid him, beholding, absorbing, but then drooping, growing dim as with one overwhelmed.”160 This statement is key to understanding Hofmannsthal’s aesthetics. It is the conundrum of Hofmannsthal’s artist-viewer. Just as critical observers have become artists, so too must artists become critical observers while preserving their identity as creators. They must approach with reverence, as one would approach an altar. Yet the eye, in all its metaphorical multivalence, is a necessary medium for that approach; an affected observer responds by sinking, bowing, breaking, and ultimately being overpowered by the vision of the divine, falling into a proskynesis: “My eye did not droop, but a figure sank down over the knees of the priestess, someone rested his forehead on the foot of a statue. I know not whether I thought this or if it happened.”161 There is a sense in which the self is separated from itself in the aesthetic encounter, as if undergoing a near-death experience. The scene recalls an earlier moment, when the traveller takes a drink from the spring. Yet unlike the earlier instance, here the grammatical subject “Ich” is still present; that is, here the self experiences itself as multiplicity. But the artist’s approach is not only reverential; it is bold and at times defiant. Pride functions as a necessary antidote that accompanies its correlative poison – that is, whatever might stifle the creative force, be it anxiety of influence, a sense of inadequacy, or deference to an object more idolized than aestheticized. Defiance and self-assertion, through creating that which is beyond the self, rise to meet the ­aesthetic object, itself a formidable thing. The Platonic pharmakon reasserts itself in the “Moments in Greece” and elsewhere – we might again refer to Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan and the confusion of “Gift” and “Theriak,” that is poison and its antidote. In one of the poems from that collection, Ebusuud Efendi praises Hafis for his poetry, but warns against the excesses of aesthetic indulgence: If you want to err on the side of caution, you must know how to differentiate between snake venom and theriac.162 In “Der Deutsche dankt” (The German gives thanks), which directly follows, one reads the counterstatement: Snake venom and theriac must seem alike to the poet; the one will not kill, the other will not heal.163 As in Goethe, so too in Hofmannsthal one witnesses the yoking together of opposites.

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Both reverence and boldness must be present even to approach such an encounter and to see the world with the eyes of a poet. The importance of power and boldness for artistic creation – especially innovation – is apparent. And if we are unsure, Hofmannsthal himself has already told us, for example, in one of his essays on D’Annunzio, “for beauty comes about there, where there is power [Kraft] and humility [Bescheidenheit].”164 Art transcends the rules of the quotidian by transgressing the boundaries of discursive reason. But how does Hofmannsthal explain the humility necessary for the generation of beauty, and the awe (Ehrfurcht) needed in approaching it? Hofmannsthal has repeatedly invoked notions of communion and participation, and it is this which allows him to conclude the “Moments in Greece” with the triumphal sentence: “If the Unattainable feeds on my innermost being and the Eternal builds out of me its eternity, what then still stands between me and the Deity?”165 Scholars have not offered a satisfying interpretation of this sentence. Zsuzsa Breier calls it “radikal” but does not elaborate. Hans-Jürgen Schings refers to the “Kühnheit der Schlußwendung” – the brazenness of the conclusion’s turn – but he does not explore this further either.166 Carlpeter Braegger, on the other hand, makes an interesting point in referring to the much later introduction Hofmannsthal wrote to Hanns Holdt’s Griechenland: “Perhaps we still take in a complete form, made of marble and rising before us, with a romantic view. Perhaps we lend it too much of our consciousness, of our soul.”167 We also find an interpretive clue in the “Address” from 1902: “The demand imposed on us by the world of beauty, this daimonic process of enticing out of us entire worlds of feeling, this demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected power of the mysterious line of ancestors within us, the towering stacks of layers of our supra-individual memory, piled one upon the other.”168 From a “Romantic” point of view, we are more than merely individuals; at the moment of such an encounter, we live beyond our selves, and we offer ourselves up as sustenance to the other. Where does this ability to offer ourselves up come from? Again, the 1902 “Address”: “For such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’”169 In “Moments in Greece,” the narrator has emphatically designated the statues “schön.” Moreover, the beauty of these statues is tied to something we might call a phenomenological suffering, or sadness. I have already discussed the role of suffering in Hofmannsthal’s “The

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Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” and here it takes several forms as well, the most explicit of which is the depiction of the German wanderer. But even in the statues – these nonhuman entities – the viewer is made privy to a peculiar kind of suffering that arises from phenomena and speaks to the passing away of great things. Having offered himself up to the ecstatic moment of the encounter with the beautiful – his own katabasis – the traveller is then “returned” (the anabasis) and given an understanding of the transience of experiencing that atemporal moment – that Augenblick – and of the interdependence of human being and artwork that gives the moment vitality. In his long study Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (Hofmannsthal and His Time), Hermann Broch describes Hofmannsthal’s “Moments in Greece” in terms of a poetic ecstasy, whereby the artistic mind finds its way back to complete identification and pre-existence. The question remains, though: is this a complete identification? Broch qualifies his statement upon further reflection: the artist, like anyone, must deal with the flux, the constant motion of the world.170 In “Moments in Greece,” there is a heightened awareness of the unknown and of the impossibility of penetrating the surface of things. As Hofmannsthal himself writes in Buch der Freunde (The Book of Friends): “Depth must be hidden. Where? On the surface.”171 The statement betrays a typically fin-de-siècle appreciation for the surface, relief, and outline of things, and marks an aesthetic view that focuses on materiality. But the surface is anything but stable: “It would be unthinkable to want to cling to their surface. This surface actually is not there – it grows by a continuous coming from inexhaustible depths.”172 The surface is not; rather, it becomes. Insofar as it comes into being, it passes away as well. Of course, this can be said of all things, animate or otherwise. But in this particular moment, the narrator is able to experience communion with the world. But that connection is tinged with the melancholy of untraversable distance to and universal difference from what is foreign, unknown, and other.173 “They are here and are unattainable. So, too, am I. By this we communicate.”174 —*— As with “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” one might here be tempted to call this encounter a mystical one and leave it at that. The religious tone, the temporal suspension, and the feeling of dissociation

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would all support such an interpretation. The contraction and expansion of space, the very notion of the Reise (as pilgrimage or as metempsychosis), and the sacrifice all read like a medieval dream vision. It seems no coincidence that Hofmannsthal wrote on the final leaf of his copy of The Rise of the Greek Epic the name “Buber,” as if the philosopher Martin Buber’s 1909 Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions) were a source of inspiration. Hofmannsthal adopts much of the imagery associated with the ecstatic, mystical experience as outlined in Buber’s book, yet he creates a literary text that ultimately represents an aesthetic moment. For Buber, the mystical, ecstatic moment is characterized by unity (Einheit); for Hofmannsthal, unity is impossible, except as participation, and even this comes about with the recognition of unreachable otherness. At the same time, Hofmannsthal stresses the dialogical reciprocity in the encounter, quoted above: “They are here and are unattainable. So, too, am I. By this we communicate.” Such reciprocity represents a departure from the ecstatic confession in the sense that Buber describes. This last of the Moments does not exhibit unity, but comes about in the face of the other. If anything, “Moments in Greece” has more in common with Buber’s later work on dialogical philosophy, here anticipated in Hofmannsthal’s depiction of the work of art. Some fourteen years later Buber will write in Ich und Du (I and Thou) about art in a way that recalls “Moments in Greece”: “Tested for its objectivity, the form is not ‘there’ at all; but what can equal its presence? And it is an actual relation: it acts on me as I act on it.”175 The surface, too, is not there, but is in a process of becoming; and both the viewer and the statue have the power to affect each other through a kind of identification. In The Book of Friends, Hofmannsthal writes of the generation of “das Plastische,” which can refer to sculpture, threedimensionality, and malleability: “The plastic does not arise from seeing, but rather from identification.”176 The hierarchy of the gaze must be overturned in that momentary loss of the sense of Ego (the self, standing in opposition to the other). The ontological (not simply epistemological) realization comes about in the aesthetic encounter, suggesting that art, too, participates in that dialogue which recognizes and can only exist in conjunction with an other. This is for Hofmannsthal the ethical moment in art. But it remains to be seen whether the union of ethics and aesthetics can ever be realized in the world beyond the page, and beyond the gaze.

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4 Aesthetic Transfiguration in Die Frau ohne Schatten

The Märchen, or fairy-tale, is the least realistic of literary genres. On a philosophical level, it serves a similar experimental function to that of the essay. But unlike the essay, the aesthetic features of the text are not merely aides for the imagination, they are frequently objects of reflection. Just as beauty cannot be, as Hermann Broch says, “its own critical authority,” neither can ethics.1 Die Frau ohne Schatten, Hofmannsthal’s most convoluted Märchen is, paradoxically, also one of his most sustained meditations on ethics. Die Frau ohne Schatten has an unusual genesis.2 As early as 1909, Hofmannsthal had an idea for a fairy-tale opera, which would eventually result in a grandiose and difficult collaboration with Richard Strauss. Ten years later, the opera premiered in Vienna on 10 October 1919 under the direction of Franz Schalk. But post-war circumstances had a considerable effect on both the staging and the reception. The situation was neither economically nor socially propitious. Restricted imports from Czechoslovakia – especially coal, reduced steel, and iron – brought industry to a halt, and limitations on power usage and the reduction of food imports contributed to a generally unpleasant life in Austria. The change in the form of government did, however, introduce ­subventions for theatre and music – a product of the Social Democrats’ ambition to make “high art” available to more people.3 After the war, Strauss was asked to be co-director (together with Schalk) of the Wiener Staatsoper – hence the choice of Vienna for the opera’s premiere. He accepted a substantially reduced income, which nevertheless seemed to many rather high for such a city with such economic woes.4

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For an opera like Die Frau ohne Schatten, the financial limitations could have proven fatal. This is Strauss’s and Hofmannsthal’s most demanding work: it is their longest opera, and it requires five worldclass singers and an immense (and tireless) orchestra. Hofmannsthal’s symbol-laden libretto and cinematic stage directions likewise require many resources that opera companies for years after the war simply lacked.5 Many critics did receive the opera positively, but audiences were not as enthusiastic.6 Though staging the opera so soon after the war was far from ideal, the other option would have been to hold off indefinitely. Technical and financial difficulties aside, Hofmannsthal began to sense while writing the libretto that the material of Die Frau ohne Schatten demanded more than one approach. He decided to work on a prose version of the story while still writing the libretto. In October of 1919, he penned a letter to a fellow writer, Raoul Auernheimer, and explained: “There are six years of work in this book, all the good, pure moments I was able to salvage from these dark times, and an unspeakable effort.”7 Like the opera, the prose version bears the scars of its conception. But this prose Märchen could say more, because the stage of the imagination has fewer limitations than a physical stage. The prose tale is interesting also because of what Hofmannsthal added to the story.8 Key elements like the carpet motif, the elaborate description of the Emperor’s petrification (the human being transformed into a work of art), and the explosion of colour at the end of the story are absent from the opera, or function merely as part of the background. Furthermore, the prose version, both in its structure and its imagery, offers a response to the problems of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” Not only the broader narrative strokes – a protagonist from a world of beauty descends to a world of ugliness – but also particular motifs, such as the carpet, recall the earlier work.9 Most importantly, in both tales, the question of beauty and the confrontation with works of art explore the dialogical relationship between ethics and aesthetics, this time in a wartime and post-war context. In an essay from 1949 entitled “Hofmannsthals Wandlung” (Hofmannsthal’s Transformation), Richard Alewyn formulated what became an oft-cited interpretation of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” thus: “Life – according to Hofmannsthal – will not be mocked. If defied, it becomes angry and vengeful.”10 Alewyn reads

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Die Frau ohne Schatten as a transformation of the aestheticism conundrum presented in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,”11 but his observations want demonstration. In what, precisely, does this transformation (“Wandlung”) consist? Hofmannsthal’s transformation need not be read as a refutation of earlier work, nor as a herald of a sudden, new interest in social or ethical concerns.12 Transformation can incorporate what existed before. In the case in Die Frau ohne Schatten, the earlier literary material is clarified – one might even say “transfigured” (verklärt). In a literary studies context, “transformation” as a motif occurs most frequently in two kinds of stories: the novel genre of Bildungs­ roman, and mythical stories like Ovid’s Metamorphoses and fairy tales. The characters in Die Frau ohne Schatten are not novelistic, and although they are treated with subtlety and given a complexity of emotion, they are more like the characters of Shakespeare’s Tempest than of his Hamlet, still somehow of the aether, even if they gain shadows in the end. The ethical resolution is too magical a transformation to realize in a novel. In this wartime Märchen, unlike the Märchen from 1895, the resolution is a happy one, but it is achieved artificially (or artfully) through a logic of deus-ex-machina in the guise of sacrifice. In his essay “Die Ironie der Dinge” (“The Irony of Things”), written in 1921, Hofmannsthal reflects on a fragmentary observation attributed to Novalis: “After an unhappy war, comedies must be written.”13 According to Hofmannsthal, comedy is the genre of irony par excellence.14 Whoever has survived a crisis gains the clear spirit and insight of irony, much like one who has died and returned.15 Die Frau ohne Schatten can therefore be described as a comedic Märchen (by contrast, the “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” would be a tragic Märchen), which explores the possibility of life after death (of some kind), not just of the individuals who have survived trauma, but of future generations. If there is a message or a moral in the story it is this very obvious one: Life may persist after death insofar as we create the conditions for future generations to thrive. The story is complex, so a summary is in order. The setting is a mythical empire of the Southeastern Islands. While hunting, the Emperor of the land comes upon a shadowless gazelle and shoots it. The gazelle transforms before his eyes into a woman, the daughter of the Spirit King (“Geisterkönig”) Keikobad. The Emperor’s falcon attacks the

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gazelle-woman in the moment of her transformation, for which it is chastised before flying away. The Emperor and this newly transformed woman fall in love, but their union is troubled. In marrying a mortal, the woman loses her ability to change shape at will; furthermore, if within a year she still casts no shadow – a sign that she will bear no children – then her husband, the Emperor, will turn to stone. The Empress (now wife of the Emperor) has mysteriously forgotten (or repressed) her knowledge of the curse. Only her Nurse, who harbours a deep distrust of and aversion to humans, remembers. Time passes, and with every new month a messenger from the spirit realm comes to the palace to remind the Nurse of what will happen if the Empress fails to cast a shadow. But the Nurse keeps her knowledge silent, hoping for an eventual return to Keikobad’s realm. There are now three days remaining. This is when the narrative begins. When the Empress awakes one morning, her husband is already away again on one of his daily hunts. As she speaks with her Nurse, a falcon suddenly appears in the sky – the same falcon that had flown away – and with its appearance, the Empress recalls the curse. She then commands the Nurse to help her acquire a shadow. To do so, they must descend to the city below, where suffering souls might be willing to sell their shadows. According to the Nurse, humans are venal creatures. The two make their way through the city and find a woman, the wife of a Dyer named Barak (the Semitic root of which means “to kneel down”). The Dyer’s Wife is unhappy in her marriage and says she is prepared to exchange her shadow for a life of eternal beauty and freedom from her aging husband. This means she will never be able to bear children and must abandon Barak for a demon. With time, the Empress comes to see the suffering such an exchange will bring about: Barak will lose his wife and any hope of a family; and his wife will lose not just her ability to bear children but her humanity as well.16 With this knowledge, the Empress decides to sacrifice her own and her husband’s lives for those of the poor couple. In doing so, she restores the shadow to the Dyer’s Wife, gains her own, and saves her husband. This is a summary of the story’s plot; but woven into the plot is another story about the power of art and its relation to ethics. How these two stories inform each other is central to Hofmannsthal’s reflections on the encounter with art.

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T h e P a l a t ia l Ves ti bule Die Frau ohne Schatten begins, like the “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” with a description of the world that the Empress inhabits: a secluded blue palace on an island in an almost magical, typically German Kunstmärchen setting  – an imaginative space removed not only from the reader’s world, but also from the harsher climes of other, impoverished people in the tale itself.17 The story begins with the Empress’s Nurse as she nostalgically recalls in the early ­morning darkness how the Empress, before her marriage to the mortal Emperor, could change her shape at will and live as any and all creatures. Now enclosed in the palace, which belongs neither to the spirit realm nor to the city below, the Empress and the Nurse are as if suspended between dream and reality.18 In many ways, this world is antagonistic to the characters’ development.19 Neither here nor there, neither this nor that, there is something ontologically ambiguous about the place, which recalls that “Nicht-Leben” (not-life) described in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” as well as Dante’s vestibule to Hell. Here, Hell is the city below, where mortals toil and suffer.20 Stuck in this vestibule, the Nurse has been counting the fruitless months and monotonous days as they die away. The Emperor goes out to hunt and returns late at night to sleep at the Empress’s side. This repetition is not ritual; it is an attempt to hold on to what has passed. Or, in Nietzsche’s words: “Woe speaks: Vanish! Yet all delight desires eternity – profound eternity!”21 All three characters at this point are possessed by their desire to retain something of the past, something that can and will slip through their fingers into oblivion. For the Nurse, the goal is to repurchase what was lost; for the Emperor and the Empress, the goal is to re-enact daily their moment of falling in love. One might say they are trying to capture their moment of Kairos and smuggle it into the regularity of Chronos. In the Emperor’s case, this sort of regularity induces blindness to the flow of time, which has several repercussions. He enters the scene only briefly – the description takes up a mere eighteen lines – and his gestures are telling. In the opera, the Emperor has a memorably long aria in which he waxes lyrical about his quests – his hunt of the gazelle transformed into the Empress, and of his search for the red falcon, who disappeared after the Emperor had chastised it for causing injury to the future-Empress. He even talks to the Nurse briefly. In the prose version, however, Hofmannsthal paints with a few simple strokes three

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important aspects of the Emperor’s character: 1) rising fully clothed from his bed, he seems not to have engaged in sexual activity with the Empress, thus not conceiving with her, meaning she will still cast no shadow; 2) his activities are repetitive (as described above), and a result of habit; and 3) he is blind to beauty and its ethical command. The last point is an inference informed by Hofmannsthal’s other writings. Consider the Emperor’s encounter with the Nurse in this scene: “With a light foot, the Emperor stepped over the body of the Nurse, who pressed her face to the ground. He paid her no more attention than if she had been a rug.”22 Like the souls in Dante’s Vestibule to Hell, the Emperor (and the Empress, it might also be argued) is not malicious; his failure is one of sight – a strikingly Dantean sin.23 This is the first time the Emperor’s ethical insufficiency is presented, and it is done so by way of reference to a work of art: the carpet. Like the merchant’s son of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the Emperor owns many beautiful objects but takes no notice of them, and – worse yet – he takes no notice of the living being at his feet, whom he treats as if she were merely a rug upon the floor. This instance foreshadows the dramatic tension to come: later in the story, the Emperor will behold a beautiful carpet, at which point his moral fortitude will be put to the test. Hans-Günther Schwarz put it succinctly when he argued that the Emperor’s eyes must be opened to life as well as to the carpet. For now, however, he is set only on re-enacting the pursuit, and goes again on the hunt.24 The Empress, upon waking from unpleasant dreams, repeats to the Nurse the story of that fateful hunt that brought the two lovers together and sent the red falcon flying. She too replays this moment, even before those who witnessed it at the time: “The story of that hunt and the first hour our love was familiar enough to her [the Nurse]: it was as if a red-hot stylus had burnt the story into her soul.”25 The Nurse becomes angry, however, when the discussion shifts to the subject of the Empress’s dreams: namely, human beings. The Nurse is keen to see that the Empress remain secluded from those other mortal creatures who, unlike the wealthy and handsome Emperor, are ugly, both in face and in soul. The Empress betrays the same prejudice, despite her marriage to a mortal: “Why,” she asks, “are human faces so wild and ugly, and animal faces so honest and pleasing?” 26 Reversing the typical characteristics of human and animal, she attributes wildness and ugliness to the former, but tameness and beauty to the creatures of nature. It is worth noting that elsewhere Hofmannsthal

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has had his characters express precisely the opposite view: in “Das Gespräch und die Geschichte der Frau von W.” (The conversation and the story of Frau von W.) one reads: “Face – hieroglyph. There are no ugly people.”27 But when the red falcon suddenly appears with the Empress’s talisman, upon which the curse is etched, the Empress knows that she – like the merchant’s son in the “Tale,” and like Gianino in The Death of Titian – must descend into the hideous lower world of humankind to find a shadow. The Empress has failed to remember something of great importance – the curse. What alerts her to her error is the talisman: in Arabic, the word ‫مسلط‬ (ṭillasm) means “magical picture” and derives from the Greek τελέω (teleō), “I complete, perform a rite.” While not explicitly an encounter with a work of art (as in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” or “Moments in Greece”), this reunion with the talisman recalls the power that Walter Pater ascribes to beautiful, if seemingly trivial objects: “That sense of fate, which hangs so much of the shaping of human life on trivial objects, like Othello’s strawberry handkerchief.”28 Quite literally, the talisman – a beautiful, pale white stone upon which the symbols glow like fire – is an object upon which the fates of the Emperor and the Empress hang. And the pictorial quality of the talisman further suggests the possibility that the Emperor and Empress will have their eyes opened; this is what enables the ultimate move from repetition to rite and consummation. With this recognition, however, comes a sense of time quite different from that of the Nurse’s: “I will not know how much time is left! Perhaps it shall elapse this hour, and I might freeze, if I knew … Here and nowhere else begins the path, today and not tomorrow, in this hour and not only once the sun is higher in the sky … the seconds are burning my heart.”29 The hic et nunc imperative of desire is, in its active quality, distinct from the desire to tarry in the sweetness of the honeymoon, or before a work of art – or the hesitation before taking decisive and life-changing action. As with the hunt, this spirit of adventure seeks its fulfillment in the pursuit and capture of something outside the ­palace; but unlike the Emperor, the Empress is motivated by a different temporal sensibility: she feels each second burn away. Driven by this almost Faustian exigency, the Empress must descend into the city. The Nurse, too, bears Mephistophelean traces. Like Goethe’s Mephisto, the Nurse leads the Empress through the world on a quest. And like Christopher Marlowe’s Mephistophilis, she hates this world. In answer to Faustus’s inquiry as to how Mephistophilis

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was able to leave Hell, the devil replies with words that could equally be spoken by the Nurse: Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss?30 The elision of the difference between Hell and Earth is telling. In Die Frau ohne Schatten, “Heaven” is, for the Nurse, Keikobad’s realm of timeless beauty and endless possibility; all else is Hell in comparison. But it is her experience of the lower pits of a worldly Hell that make her qualified to be the Empress’s guide in the quest for a shadow.

T h e P o e t in t h e Ci ty of Woe Having disguised themselves to be as inconspicuous as possible, the two travellers descend into the city. As in the “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the city is deliberately contrasted to the palace. Even the palette is reversed: instead of the crystal-clear blue of the palace, we have the dirty yellow water of the river which “flowed with great spots of dark colour that came from the Dyers’ Quarter beyond the bridge.”31 To borrow Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of the Manchester waterways: “It is the Styx of this new Hades.”32 This multisensory hellscape is composed from the stench rising from the tanneries (where one finds the poorest of the poor); the sight and smell of hanging skins; the clangour of hammers; the stink of hooves burnt for shoe fitting. Masses of people crowd around the Empress, disorienting her in the process. Like a modern metropolis, this city overwhelms the senses and awakens an unnamed anxiety. “The dreadful aspect in the faces of the people struck her from such nearness as never before. She wanted boldly to pass by them, her feet were willing, her heart was not. Every hand that moved seemed to grasp at her, ghastly were these many mouths in such closeness. The merciless, greedy, and, as it seemed to her, anxious glances from so many faces blended into one another in her breast.”33 This passage echoes aspects of the “Address,” yet what there was a metaphor is here a physical reality for the Empress. There the works of art are “like the shadows which surround Odysseus, all desirous to drink of

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his blood, silent, avidly pressed in upon one another.”34 The works of art as well as the faces and hands of the people in the crowd are portrayed as having a desire to possess. They are threatening and greedy. In the works of art, however, this experience is transfigured: “they take hold of us daimonically: and each is a world, and all are from a world which touches us through them and makes us shudder to the core.”35 In the case of the Empress, the experience presents itself as a real physical threat. But here too, as so often with Hofmannsthal, there is a chiastic relationship between the real and the imagined. The encounter with the work of art is presented in the indicative mood – that is, the mood of reality: “they take hold of us.” By contrast, the ‘reality’ of the Empress’s experience is qualified by one word: “Every hand that moved seemed to grasp at her” (my emphasis). As in Baudelaire’s work, ugliness is here made the object of an aesthetic depiction of something like modernity, infused with a Hofmannsthalian sensibility for empathy (with notes from Keats): “[The Empress] nearly went under in the tangle [Knäuel] of people, all of a sudden she found herself before the hoof of a large hinny, whose knowing and soft animal’s gaze met her, and she recovered. The rider struck the head of the hinny, which hesitated so as not to tread upon the trembling woman. – Is it for him to decide that I must transform into an animal and expose myself to the cruel hands of human beings? This thought went through her soul and she shivered, and with that she forgot herself for a moment and found herself c­ arried by the current to the end of the bridge, she knew not how.”36 The narrator presents the Empress’s limited point of view: the “Knäuel” threatens to pull her under and suffocate her. But this tangle will later unravel and be re-tied in an aurea catena homeri – an alchemical image of a chain of transformations, made popular in the eighteenth century by Anton Josef Kirchweger.37 The focus on the hinny contributes to this consideration as well: The animal’s gaze spurs the Empress to consider her own ability to transform into any animal she wishes: that is, she is in some essential way connected to the animal. They are both part of that golden chain. There is an emotional connection as well: As in Raskolnikov’s dream of the pitiable horse,38 the animal here is struck by his rider, awakening in the Empress a sympathy that will later come to guide her actions. Her question – “Is it for him to decide?” – is akin to that posed in Crime and Punishment. Who is responsible? The more the Empress becomes a witness to that life in the shadow of the blue palace, the

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more difficult it is to disentangle her fate from the fates of others. What is more disturbing is the implicit link to her former life: here, the hinny attempts to avoid injuring the Empress, as the rider strikes him violently upon the head. This re-enacts with subtle differences the scene of the hunt, in which the Empress, changing from gazelle- to humanform, is attacked by the red falcon clawing at her head; the falcon is punished by the Emperor. The ties between the beautiful world above and the wretched world below are increasingly evident. As she and the Nurse approach the house of the Dyer (Barak) and his wife, more evidence of suffering confronts them. They observe Barak’s three brothers, once whole in body, now fragments of their former selves. One had lost his eye to an angry bailiff, one had lost his arm in an oil mill accident, and one was crippled after being trampled by a camel – a fate the Empress had just now only narrowly escaped. Their bodies are casualties of labour: The oil mill accident, in particular, points to the ever-present, dangerous working conditions for the lower class. Though these are characters in a fairy tale, contemporaneous readers might well have thought of other mutilated bodies – those of First World War veterans.39 This fictional world makes use of unsettlingly familiar images from reality. In this ugly world there is one beautiful person: The Dyer’s Wife, a woman full of pride and spite (“Hochmut” and “Bosheit”).40 She is contrasted with her husband not only in physical form – to the Empress, Barak is repulsively ugly (“abschreckend häßlich”) – but also in movement and attitude. Barak bears all the signs of his job as a dyer: his hands are stained dark blue, and he carries a great bale of scarlet red cloth he intends to use on a saddle. This he then heaves onto his back, like a camel. Against the pride and lassitude of his wife, Barak’s humility and industriousness seem almost exaggerated. The saddlecloth he carries turns him into a beast of burden. His wife, on the other hand, would fit perfectly into Bruegel’s 1557 depiction of “Desidia,” the sin of sloth. Initially sitting on the ground and staring blankly into space, she moves only once her husband has gone, ­performing her quotidian tasks with utter listlessness. But she is more than an allegorical figure of idleness and vanity. She has been placed into this position by force, not by her own will. Under the (albeit benevolent) rule of a husband old enough to be her father, she lacks the freedom and responsibilities of adulthood. Stunted in this way, she behaves with immaturity. Upon entering the married couple’s home, the Empress trips, and the Dyer’s Wife laughs out loud

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Figure 4.1  Sloth (Desidia), from the series The Seven Deadly Sins, Pieter van der Heyden’s engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1558.

like a child.41 And she is held in stasis by a dilettantish infatuation with beauty – her own, in this case – and is unable to see how her fate is entwined with others’ fates. Like the slumbering woman at the ­centre of Brueghel’s “Desidia” engraving, she is vulnerable to the demons which surround her. And there are demons. In her Mephistophelian manner, the Nurse is able to manipulate the Dyer’s Wife to relinquish her shadow – and with it the possibility of children. All seems to be going according to plan, until the Empress begins to perceive what no one else can: Seven fish, which have been thrown into a pan to fry, begin to cry out in singing tones: “Mother, mother! Let us come home / the door is locked: we cannot get in.”42 In the opera these voices are sung by children, heightening the agony and pathos in their entreaty and connecting them directly to the Dyer’s Wife’s unborn children – now, it seems, condemned to nonexistence.

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This is one of a number of intensifying moments in which the Empress’s feels overwhelmed with compassion  – the first being the encounter with the hinny. Having descended to the world of labour and toil, relegated in this moment literally to the shadows and sensing the suffering of others, the Empress allegorically embodies Hofmannsthal’s artist more than any other character in the story. Richard Alewyn summarizes Hofmannsthal’s views succinctly: “The incognito is the poet’s lifeform. Hofmannsthal leads the poet down from his ivory tower into the bustling markets and streets … Like St Alexius of legend, he lies in his beggar’s clothes, in his house, the house of time, under the stairs, there where he sees and hears all … A St Sebastian, he is bound by the law: bar no one and nothing entry into your soul.”43 Kurt J. Fickert and Peter Celms characterize the Emperor as the poet or artist figure, but given Hofmannsthal’s description in “The Poet and Our Time,” from which Alewyn draws his characterization, it is more reasonable to see the Empress in this role.44 The Empress, like the poet, must descend, disguised, from the blue palace (her ivory tower) to the markets and streets of the city. Like St Alexius, she finds herself in the house of time – a new temporal sphere, breaking from the repetition of her days – and relegated to dark corners where she sees and hears everything. No one recognizes her – not even the Nurse really knows her – and she will experience suffering, for she, now like St Sebastian, must give all things access to her soul. That suffering is brought to a crisis when the Nurse summons the demonic Efrit to place the Dyer’s Wife into a trancelike state of acquiescence and loveless desire. The Empress recognizes that this woman, at heart, does not want to enter into the alliance this way. Hofmannsthal draws his readers’ attention to the hands and the eyes, those parts of the body connected with will and power: “With both hands, the Efrit grasped the wrists of the Dyer’s Wife and forced her to look up towards him; her glances could not resist the penetration of his gaze  … the oppressive feeling of reality held everything together.”45 Like an unwilling witness to violent seizure or rape, the Empress is stunned. She cannot turn away: for not only is she a witness, she is also implicated in the crime. This gives that phrase “the oppressive feeling of reality” a new valence: everything is bound together by this nightmarishly oppressive sense of reality. But the Dyer’s Wife’s desire is intermixed with aversion – though enraptured by the Efrit, she does not fully assent to the union, and her hesitation

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affords her the opportunity to pull herself away from the demon just before Barak enters. At this moment, the Empress’s compassion unfolds and she responds, stepping in between the Dyer’s Wife and the Efrit, whose terrifying face she now boldly confronts: “Through his two unlike eyes there grinned the abysses of a region that barred trespass, a fear seized her, not for herself, but rather in the soul of the Dyer’s Wife, that the latter should lie in the arms of such a demon and let her breath blend with his … An awful feeling shot through the Empress from her spine to the soles of her feet. She hardly knew any more who she was, nor how she had come to be here.”46 In Die Frau ohne Schatten the abyss is almost always at the periphery of the story, and sometimes it is acknowledged, as in this moment. The eyes of the Efrit reveal a grinning – not a gaping – chasm which is both enticing and menacing. Like the faces of the smiling korai in “Moments in Greece,” the Efrit’s face is an abyss which would swallow any sense self. The scene is interrupted when Barak enters. Having come from the market with a variety of delicacies and children in tow, he introduces an incongruously celebratory tenor. His three brothers and the accompanying flurry of children are rambunctious and happy to feast upon such bounty. Yet despite his good intentions, Barak fails to see his wife’s suffering: alternating between feeding treats to the children and to his own wife, “He did not notice that she choked on the bits of food and grew cold and stiff under his caresses, like a corpse.”47 He treats her like a child, but also wishes for her to share in his joy and desire for children. Singing jauntily out of tune – expressing the lack of harmony in their marriage  – he then gently tosses one of the children to his wife, who responds by violently spurning the gesture, quickly standing up, and knocking down the child, who then tumbles into the open fire. Chaos ensues as the other children cry and pull their sister to safety, and the Dyer’s Wife cries out, suffering from what would seem to be a rather cliché example of “hysterics.” Hofmannsthal shows here that those fits which were attributed to “women’s issues” are an expression of deep suffering. A kind of rigor mortis sets in as she bares her teeth at her husband, like an animal. On the level of the plot, both married couples seem to be moving further away from each other as their pain becomes increasingly ­difficult to bear. Meanwhile, the aesthetic web of the story is pulling them together all the more tightly.

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T h e E m p e r o r ’ s Contrapa s so The scene shifts to the Emperor on his hunt, but in an unexpected turn of events, the hunter himself is lured into a trap. Hearing singing voices, he follows them into a cave, described as the “region of his first adventure with the beloved woman.”48 Like the medieval lovegrotto of the tragic lovers Tristan and Isolde, this cave calls forth images of sequestered romance, hidden away from society and the sense of time’s passing. The Emperor’s love for his Empress strikes at the heart of what Kierkegaard writes of in “The Aesthetic Validity of Marriage”: Can so intense an experience as that first moment of love be repeated?49 What does love look like over time? Kierkegaard writes: However you turn and twist in it, you must admit that the task is to preserve love in time. … Your misfortune is to ­identify love simply and solely with these visible signs. If these are to be repeated over and over again and, let it be noted, with a morbid concern for their constantly having the reality they had by ­virtue of the accidental feature of its being their first occurrence, it is no wonder you are afraid and refer these signs and “gesticulations” to those things of which one dare not say “decies repetitia pacebunt,”50 for if it was the first time that gave them their value, then a repetition is an impossibility. But healthy love has a quite different worth; it works itself out in time, and is therefore also capable of rejuvenating itself through these outward signs … it has quite another idea of time and of the meaning of repetition.51 Numerous clues suggest that Emperor’s love for the Empress has not matured into that other “idea of time” and repetition. The singing he hears, for one, is full of despair: “To what avail is this, we shall not be born!”52 These are the voices of his unborn children, the witnesses to his failure to preserve love in time. The Emperor enters a room with a table set for two – for himself and the Empress. A child who has brought in the table settings bows to the Emperor, recalling the multiple instances of this gesture in “Moments in Greece”: “He pressed his hands together upon his breast and bowed … The boy bowed before the Emperor down to the earth and spoke no word. But he pointed with a reverential gesture towards one of the sitting places, at the upper end of the table.”53 The gesture

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of respect before one of higher rank is not only a sign of humility – although it is certainly this – for it is accompanied by a voice from behind: “It is up to him!” (“Es ist an dem!”). This is on the one hand a sign of traditional respect: Do not speak before being spoken to. But it is also an indication that the Emperor is supposed to initiate the dialogue – and indeed, their lives. In this moment, everything depends on him. But, like the medieval Parzival, he is slow to recognize his duty to ask the right question: “It took a moment for the Emperor to realize that it was up to him to speak the first word.”54 The children grow in number, and one in particular – a girl, somewhat older – deserves particular attention. Like the servant in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” she bears in her arms a work of art with religious significance, though this time it is not a pair of bronze statues but a carpet that she herself has woven. The two girls’ gaits are inversions of each other. In “The Tale,” the girl moves thus: “Though perfectly erect, she moved slowly and with ­difficulty … The dark goddesses reached from her hips to her temples and leaned their dead weight against her soft, living shoulders … However, it was not so much the goddesses’ weight and solemnity that seemed a burden to her as the beauty of her own head with its heavy jewelry of dark, vivid gold.”55 Rhythmical but heavy, her movement mimics the movement and sounds of the sentence, as discussed in detail in chapter 1. The girl in Die Frau ohne Schatten, on the other hand, glides rather than walks, and at the end of the section she starts again “as if she were moving towards him with her feet closed together,” explicitly linking her movements with those of the ghost of Plato in “Moments in Greece,” and a whole host of otherworldly beings in Hofmannsthal’s writing.56 The effect is one of elegance and grace, but it also shows ontological difference. Kneeling nearly to the floor, she presents the rolled-up carpet to the Emperor and speaks. Though unborn, she offers pictures (the carpet) and words (dialogue) to the Emperor: “pardon, she said, that I did not hear your arrival, so absorbed in my work on this carpet I was. But if by the time we eat it is to be worthy enough for you to take it – which we hope you will – and have it lie under you, then the final thread dare not be torn off; it must be looped back into the initial thread. – She brought it forth with eyes cast down; the lovely tone of her voice pressed so deeply into the Emperor that he nearly failed to catch the sense of her words.”57 This presentation and her subsequent explanation of the carpet’s manufacture – it is made by hand – link

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several important aspects of the story together. Indeed, this is the central image in the central chapter of the story. The girl’s labour on the carpet draws our attention to the demanding nature of the craft. Such careful craftsmanship is key to the work’s being “worthy”: the thread of the end must be woven together with the thread at the beginning. Compare the Gobelin tapestry described in the “Address” of 1902: “What a peculiar dream an early Gobelin is! A completely closed and bound, exceptional world! … It lives for us, it lives through us. There is something in us that responds to this world-picture.”58 The “completely closed and bound, exceptional world” is separated from the living, breathing world of growth and rot. All the elements and emblems of the Emperor’s life and personhood – the hunter, the lover, the falcon – are brought together into an orderly, symmetrical form; not a bacchanalia of tangled bodies, but an Apollonian harmony of symmetry. The circularity of uniting end and beginning is a sign of chilling perfection. As is typical of Hofmannsthal’s writing, a long and serpentine sentence winds its way through harmonious descriptions only to end abruptly, in this case breaking not the rhythm so much as the magic: “The textile was underneath his feet, flowers passed into animals, hunters and lovers unwound themselves from out of the lovely vines, all things held each other in an embrace, the one was entendrilled in the other, the whole was splendid beyond all measure, but a waft of cool air rose from it up to his hips. – How were you able to construct this with such perfection?”59 This sentence draws together seemingly disparate moods: the beauty of connectivity and the cold air emanating – unlike breath – from the perfect carpet. The visual motifs and the chill rising “up to his hips,” reflect both the content and the form of the Emperor’s life while also revealing his kinship with the merchant’s son of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” who dies after being kicked in the groin – that is, emasculated. But rather than being concerned about the spreading chill, the Emperor asks how the carpet was made, and in the child’s response we hear incantations of the Enlightenment-era author Christoph Martin Wieland’s fictitious character Theophron.60 “I separate the beautiful from the material when I weave; that which is to the senses a decoy and which rattles them to folly and corruption I leave out. When weaving, she said, I proceed as your blessed eye when looking. I see not what is, and not what is not, but rather what always is, and according to this I weave.”61

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The process of refinement through separation contrasts with the process of connection through weaving. Yet it also recalls the original separation common to many myths and religions. Ovid’s Metamorphoses opens with chaos and the separation of the elements, out of which a world is born: the first metamorphosis. The Book of Genesis tells of the separation of matter, space, and time out of the void: Tohuwabohu. The creation of the work of art – its genesis – is in miniature the creation of cosmos from chaos. Unlike “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” where things are reborn from the “chaos of Not-living” as artworks,62 the unborn children do not know chaos, nor do they know suffering; they know only an unnamed longing to move on from what Hofmannsthal calls the “Präexistenz” of this underworld. The artwork which is born out of a division of “das Schöne vom Stoff” (the beautiful from the material) is thus a product of stripping or carving away the base matter. Paradoxically, the “Stoff” (material) could equally refer to the very material out of which the carpet is made. But how can one separate the carpet from the material? In addition to this rarefied view, there is an aesthetic and ethical connection to life beyond the vestibule (whether palatial or “präexistential”). At the Emperor’s strange questions, some of the younger children must make great efforts to avoid laughing out loud, recalling the Dyer’s Wife’s uncontrollable laughter. The children of this beautiful realm of rarefied art are connected through their gestures to the adultchildren of an ugly world. Moreover, the carpet’s very creation depends not only on the weaver, but also on the Dyer.63 We have already seen in the dyers’ district the squalor and toil where the threads and cloths are made brilliant. In real works of art, below the shining surface there is the shadow of labour: colours are the brothers of pain here as in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” The Emperor’s questions all operate according to a logic of separation, division, analysis, and definition. He asks where the children live and where they are going, using binary oppositions: “Is your house nearby or far away? … Is this the beginning of a journey or the end of one?”64 But there are no simple answers. As Hofmannsthal has it in one of his notes: “wrong: seeing every work of art as something definite; always saying: he has given this up, he’s turned to this now, he sees only this; and so he means this and that / wrong the definite / wrong: all cheap antitheses like ‘art’ and ‘life,’ Aesthete and the opposite of aesthete … right: seeing production as a murky business between the individual and tortuous existence.”65 The Emperor

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must learn a new way of seeing – a “Neues Sehen”66 that includes a mature appreciation for that which is not “definite,” and for that which is beyond “all cheap antitheses.” The children, furthermore, answer in paradoxes and upset the parent-child hierarchy by highlighting the Emperor’s own naïve ignorance. They teach him humility in their gestures, bowing as they respond: “Your questions are nonsensical, O great Emperor, like those of a little child. For say to us this: when you go to table, do you do so in order to remain in your state of satiation or to free yourself from it again? And when you go on a journey, do you do so in order to stay away or to return?”67 These questions do not deter the Emperor from trying to attain his desire. Like a spoilt child he cries: “I’m used to getting what I want!” The outburst is met then with reverence, tenderness, and fear.68 The children desire to live, but cannot if the Emperor fails to mature. In a vague recognition of his parental role, the Emperor exhibits behaviours and desires similar to those of Barak: a love for his future children seizes him and, like Barak in the earlier meal scene, he wishes to feed the children with sweets, but when he tries to hold them, he catches only cold air.69 Among the Japanese Buddhist proverbs collected by Lafcadio Hearn, whose writings Hofmannsthal knew well, we find one that speaks to precisely this situation: “Ko wa Sangai no kubikse. A child is neck-shackle for the Three States of Existence.” Hearn’s footnote to this proverb offers this explanation: “That is to say, the love of parents for their child may impede their spiritual progress – not only in this world, but through all their future states of being, – just as a kubikasé, or Japanese cangue, impedes the movements of the person upon whom it is placed. Parental affection, being the strongest of earthly attachments, is particularly apt to cause those whom it enslaves to commit wrongful acts in the hope of benefitting their offspring.”70 Both Barak’s and the Emperor’s affections are a potential threat. This overabundance of affection takes the form of feeding, that is, controlling the site of the logos. What initially seems like an act of affection easily transforms into one of aggression. But these unborn children cannot be had, held, or controlled. The Emperor is in an underworld and has to do with pre-existent beings whose very corporeality is doubtful. Still, he has not overcome his desire to possess beauty. By contrast, Barak lives in a world where ugliness is part and parcel of existence. Though flawed, he is a man who affirms not only his own life, but the lives of others: for this reason, the children now bow in his

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honour. And as the Emperor asks repeatedly who Barak is, he receives this response: “Just a grain of magnanimity!”71 Envy – that sin of sight, invidia – transforms the Emperor’s affection into aggression. Anger literally seizes him: “He hated the message and the messenger and felt his heart had become stone through and through. Without a word, his hand sought the dagger in his belt in order to throw it at her, since he could not throw it at his wife; when the fingers on his right hand could not feel anything, he tried it with the left, but neither hand belonged to him any longer, the stony arms already hung, stiff, at his petrified hips, and there came no sound across his petrified lips.”72 The desire for possession easily slips into violence when any sort of resistance is encountered.73 The Emperor’s failure to possess “just a grain of ­magnanimity” translates into his failure to possess himself; his body revolts and does not heed his will – or rather, it heeds a deeper drive to petrification. The Emperor’s contrapasso is like Hearn’s kubikasé. As the children disappear and the ceiling opens up to reveal the solitary night sky, the Emperor is left silent and alone, turned to stone. Having treated the world as his object, he has himself become an object – in fact, he has become a parody of a work of art.

B e a u t y ’ s Lab o u r’s Los t Barak’s world is the inverse of the underworld and reveals with naturalistic details the grit and dirt involved in the production of real, beautiful textiles. Barak loads the dyed fabrics upon his back to take them to market; he cleans them of blood and dirt: “and so he beat out the dirt and blood from a butcher’s garment … The Dyer had laid out the garment onto clean boards and coated it anew with white. The Empress helped him. The blood-stained effluent poured out from the tipped-over tub into the gutter. The two of them worked diligently and did not look up from their labours.”74 In the process of washing, the Dyer is doing in the “real” world what the child in the underworld did in order to fashion her fantastic carpet – separating out the baser elements in order to reveal something beautiful. The dirtied run-off drains away, presumably into the yellow river the Empress and the Nurse had seen earlier upon entering the Dyers’ Quarter. That is, the waste never really goes “away.” Blood and dirt run through the city’s veins. And just as the signs of labour course through it, so the dyes adhere and stain all they come into contact with, marking the dyers, mixing with their sweat.

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Despite the physical demands of the work, Barak’s hands move with surprising delicacy to make sure that every single strand has access to air. For all the roughness of this man’s manners, he is adroit and demonstrates a level of devotion worthy of his name and an attention to his labour that contrasts sharply with the Emperor’s (initial) obliviousness. With these qualities, Barak is able to effect almost magical transformations: bloodied, dirtied clothes are made to gleam white, and yellow-green fabrics are cleaned and dyed to a brilliant blue.75 By assisting Barak, the Empress learns to appreciate his work and person. In earlier versions of the prose text, Hofmannsthal spends a great deal more time on the Empress’s reaction to this work. Even the words she uses recommend a comparison with the pageant of the underworld: “The ceremonies he performs: the paths and the combinations his blessed hands effect, the splendor of the colours and their simplicity [Bescheidenheit], all this the magical power of his nature [seines Gemütes] directs: the love he holds for his tools: the poise, composure, and the pious care with which he labours towards his goal: the deep respect [Ehrfurcht] he has for himself and for ­paving the way for something higher – … so artfully did he work. How was it you never told me how good people are?”76 The tone of this passage is perhaps too sentimental for the otherwise relatively reserved style of the prose tale. It is also too expository for a Märchen – and for an opera77 – though its explicit references to ­ceremony, magic, piety, humility, and art make a strong case for reading Barak as a consummate artist, and the Miranda-like wonder with which the Empress comes to see him speaks to the possibility of a brave new world. In an aphorism contrasting the present and the past, Nietzsche sheds light on the sociological transformations that art has already undergone in the “real” world: “Formerly, all works of art adorned the great festival road of humanity, to commemorate high and happy moments. Now one uses works of art to lure aside from the great via dolorosa of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment – a little intoxication and madness.”78 Hofmannsthal’s and Strauss’s work with the renowned theatre director Max Rheinhardt and their collective founding of the Salzburg Festival attest to Hofmannsthal’s devotion to the reinvigoration of festivals and ceremonies in this Nietzschean sense. It is not simply about pomp and circumstance and distraction. It is about

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celebrating humanity – and that means humanity’s trials, too. Both Nietzsche and Hofmannsthal see this in terms of something “higher.” In Barak’s case, labour is also ceremony and a celebration of existence. This work is described in the note by the Empress as “good” – a rejection of the Nurse’s assessment of humanity’s decrepitude. The Empress even says to the Nurse that Barak should receive his rightful due. The Nurse’s response shows how far she is from understanding what the Empress has understood: “His due? How has that elephant earned anything?”79 The Dyer’s Wife, too, sees nothing of the beauty of Barak’s work. Instead, she is enthralled by the beauty of the Efrit. Indeed, she is precisely one of “those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick,” of whom Nietzsche speaks: she even refers to herself as “krank” (sick).80 Although she knows her sickness has been reanimated by the Efrit, she still desires him for his ability to draw her away from the via dolorosa of humanity: “She was beautiful in this moment and her young blood coursed through her so that she glowed, and the old woman [i.e., the Nurse] watched her with delight. – No, no, she shouted suddenly with passionate rapture, he is handsome, pay no attention to me, you foolish woman, he is beautiful like the morning star, and his beauty, that is the barb on the nail.”81 The Efrit presents the Dyer’s Wife with an opportunity to experience a beauty she has never known. But the Efrit is merely a decoy. Though she desires to escape the prison of her marriage, she recognizes that absconding like this leaves Barak no chance to defend himself – the Nurse has slipped him a drug. But then there is also the sense that this chain is one not of bondage, but of fate. Her marriage has been arranged – by her mother.82 She thus stands in stark contrast to the Empress, who fell in love with and married the Emperor contrary to the wishes of her father, Keikobad. We cannot speak here only of a tyranny of fathers, nor of a tyranny of men. If there is supra-individual conflict, it is a generational one that involves both the father and the mother: not quite a “collective oedipal revolt,” as Carl Schorske calls it,83 nor a collective revolt à la Electra, although the text might suggest that at first glance. Schorske is right to emphasize the fact that one generation defines itself against another. But what is more interesting is the fact that Hofmannsthal’s tale is not about two conflicting generations, but about countless generations that define themselves both through and against each other. The four main characters are at the point of transitioning from being defined as

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the children of parents to being defined as the parents of children. But “parents” here is not to be taken only literally. Metaphorically, it is about the process of maturation through turning the gaze from self to other and developing one’s creative capacities. In Hofmannsthal’s ­artist, the two develop together and reinforce each other. At this moment the Empress betrays a change in appearance: she weeps, such that “her face was swimming in tears and pain, like that of a mortal woman.”84 Her compassion for both Barak and his wife stems from her recognition of her own responsibility for their fates; the pain lends her a mortal aspect and a moral compass, which, coupled with her powerful will, enable her to reanimate Barak’s body. Only half-conscious, Barak believes his children have been murdered or stolen away. He picks up a hammer and swings it, hoping to strike the culprit, all the while showing a remarkable resemblance to the Efrit in his strength and ferocity. Significantly, this raging man is calmed by the familiar, unpleasant voices of his brothers: “the trusty sounds of their voices seemed to press towards his soul.”85 At this he wakes from his rage, and, entirely overcome with shame, makes a gesture that, in this story as elsewhere in Hofmannsthal’s work, demonstrates a profound sense for humility: true to his name (“to kneel down”), Barak goes down on his knees before his wife to ask forgiveness. In contrast to the compassionate Empress, the Dyer’s Wife betrays an increasing coldness: she does not grant him her pardon. In his moment of repentance, he is sorry for having married so late, for holding the delusional hope that he would live a long life with his beautiful wife and children. It seems he is sorry for something else, too, but cannot say it; this speechlessness links him with the Emperor, who could not formulate the decisive question to the children before him.86 The emotional states do not add up. At the end of this chapter, one has the feeling that everything is out of sorts, all threads hanging loose, untied. Important gestures go unanswered or are misunderstood. And yet the play between beauty and ugliness as well as compassion and coldness is clearly guiding the narrative as well as the aesthetic arc.

T h e F a c e s o f I n n o c ence and Gui lt Beauty in its various manifestations guides the reader through the characters’ developmental states. Above all, this is inscribed upon their faces – the site of reckoning and of ethical resistance. But for Hofmannsthal, the human face is also inherently beautiful. It is the

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point of convergence of the ethical and the beautiful, a new kalokagathia87 which is not based simply on sensory pleasure, but rather results from a kind of sympathetic reverberation between two distinct but connected beings. Hofmannsthal’s presentation of beauty in the face of the other is inspired by his understanding of the effects of aesthetic beauty – specifically, of art. And so it is with a vision of beauty that the Dyer’s Wife’s resolve begins to waver. When wandering through the poorest part of town, she remarks in a manner most strange, even poetic: “A small child is filthy, and they have to give it to the pet dog to lick clean; and yet it is beautiful like the rising sun; and such did we have a mind to sacrifice. – It was a strange, almost singing tone in which she said these things.”88 This is a portrayal of utter destitution: there is not even clean water to wash away the dirt. But the dog has a particular ­significance for Hofmannsthal. In “The Poet and Our Time,” Hofmannsthal describes the poet as having been sent to the dogs.89 In a quite literal sense, this is precisely what would happen to the dirty child, linking the child (if only vaguely) to the poet. But the association becomes clearer with the word “schön” and the simile of the sunrise with its suggestion of newness, hope, and light. A dirty child is beautiful like this: striking, natural, and bright, made clean by its proximity to abjection. We might even go further and interpret the singing tone in which the Dyer’s Wife makes this remark as her having come under the influence of the unborn children, who are associated with singing. But singing might equally be a palliative measure; the Dyer’s Wife seems here to see the tragedy her actions would lead to, and she must somehow make the decision less painful. The image and act turn in on themselves: sacrifice becomes a euphemism for murder. As if crowded in by both future generations and past ones, the Dyer’s Wife finds herself having wandered to her mother’s grave. She sinks onto her knees, but as she arises, her movement is not that of a devout or divinely inspired woman: instead, she is pure dynamism, having thrown off the yoke of “an old law.”90 She springs into flight, like a fleet-footed creature. But the tinnitus of conscience is persistent. No matter how hard she runs, the Dyer’s Wife cannot escape the voice of her mother, who calls after Barak.91 Barak, meanwhile, sits in the midst of chaos – a complete inversion of the orderly, attentive world he had cultivated before. Having lost his mind, he imagines he is speaking to his “diligent children” with their “clean little hands.”92 Showing them the dyeing process, he

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reveals the fantastical sacrifices involved: “We take the colours from out of the flowers and fix them to the cloths, and so too we take colours from the worms, and from birds’ breasts, there where their feathers glow and are exposed.”93 Though there have been a number of meditations on the process of art production so far in the story,94 none has been so explicit as this. The depiction of Barak speaking to his imagined children is full of pathos, in part because he clearly wants to pass on his art to the next generation. In other words, this is the moment when the motivic thread of art production crosses the thread of reproduction. Passing on the craft of dyeing ensures the survival of beauty, while integrating the next generation into the social fabric. Barak’s motives unite aesthetic and ethical considerations; he embodies the artist as described by the philosopher Jacques Maritain: “Hence the tyrannical and absorbing power of Art, and also its astonishing power of soothing; it delivers one from the human; it establishes the artifex – artist or artisan – in a world apart, closed, limited, absolute, in which he puts the energy and intelligence of his manhood at the service of a thing which he makes. This is true of all art; the ennui of living and willing, ceases at the door of every workshop.”95 The Dyer’s Wife’s sacrifice of their children is a twofold blow to Barak. In her ennui and vanity, she will not have her beauty passed on in time and life, but wishes to retain it for herself: in other words, to possess it eternally and exclusively: “They, who are supposed to come to greet me one day, shudder before the eternal softness of these cheeks and these breasts that shall not wither.”96 But she is shown to be less decisive than she would have herself to be: just as she is about to fulfil the deed, ritualistically tossing seven fish over her shoulder, Barak takes a step towards her, and her conviction shrivels: “Her lips moved and she muttered the words, but it was as if she were unaware; she raised her hand with the fish above her shoulder and cast, but as if in a slumber; she did what was required, but she did it as if she were not doing it: her eyes were riveted to the Dyer and her lips became distorted like those of a child about to cry … She took a few indecisive steps, saw help nowhere, pressed her lips together and stood still.”97 At the moment of metaphorical petrification, Hofmannsthal uses syntactical repetition with variation that gives his prose a sense of ritualistic fulfillment. And he does so with irony. The ritual itself is already compromised, and, as we shall see later, is ultimately invalid – due in part, it might be argued, to her very hesitation. The subjunctive mood and the as-if comparisons (the “unreal”) come to have more

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weight than the indicative statements (the “real”). The ritual, which seems embedded in the language itself, is a false sacrament. Paradoxically, this act does not free her. It seems rather to entrap her by drawing Barak’s anger nearer. Those that come to her aid, ironically, are Barak’s brothers – the hideous creatures who remind us of a suffering we would rather forget. They wish only that their brother not become a murderer – murder is an act that could not be undone – and manage to move the Dyer’s Wife for a moment out of reach of her husband. They then bid her farewell, wishing upon her “a bitch’s fate.”98 Given Hofmannsthal’s penchant for canine symbolism, the curse is oddly fortuitous. It suggests that the Dyer’s Wife might suffer, but she might also be capable of finding beauty in this world of suffering. The description that then follows is from the perspective of the Nurse, who has been studying the struggling, flickering shadows and in the meantime lost sight of the Empress. She then sees that a female figure is lying at the Dyer’s feet, “her face pressed to the earth, with unspeakable humility she stretched out her arms without lifting her face till her hands reached the Dyer’s feet and grasped them. The Dyer seemed not to notice her … And now the one lying there pushed herself closer and she pressed her chin onto the Dyer’s feet. Her lips murmured a word heard by no one. Then she lay in this position as if dead.”99 The woman lying at Barak’s feet, it would seem, is the Dyer’s Wife, who has just run in the direction of her husband. Her humble prostration suggests an appeal for forgiveness, which, in the light of her wavering actions, is certainly plausible. But to the Nurse’s amazement, a “Lebendes” (contrasting with the figure outstretched “as if dead”) appears near her, stretches forth both her hands, and reveals herself to be the Dyer’s Wife. The Nurse is shocked when she realizes that the woman lying at Barak’s feet is the Empress. This confusion is calculated: it is the moment when the Empress and the Dyer’s Wife share a sense of ethical responsibility and it is a moment of profound equality. The Dyer’s Wife appropriately takes on a beauty more typical of that of the Empress: “a wonderful and innocent beauty … the tremendous fear did not disfigure her, it rather transfigured her.”100 Like the Empress-as-gazelle, the Dyer’s Wife possesses a beauty that reflects both fear and innocence, but it is also one of intense bravery, for she stretches both hands out towards her husband (like the Empress had done in her prostration), as if to ­welcome death. Indeed, she is described as having a face ready for death: “todbereite[s] Gesicht.”101

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This moment is also typical of what Karl Heinz Bohrer refers to as the suddenness (Plötzlichkeit) of the Augenblick. Barak reflects the gaze of his wife and realizes for the first time the impotence of his earlier unwanted embraces; and in this he sees the impenetrable otherness of his wife’s being, the abyss of her difference and the span of her ages: She is a young and innocent girl and a mature woman in one. At this sight – much as in the aesthetic encounter – he is rendered powerless and his fists begin to shake. He wavers, just as his wife had earlier done. And in this instant a weight is lifted and he is as if reborn: “in the greatness of his powerful body he seemed a child on the verge of tears.”102 He thus shares with his wife the beauty of innocence, but this beauty only comes as a result of having seen the abyss of the other person.103 The moment in Die Frau ohne Schatten thus draws on both the aesthetic encounter and the ethical moment when one recognizes the fully other (“das ganz Andere”) as other, à la Bohrer. In refraining, Barak acknowledges the power of the moment of encounter before the embrace. In another work of short fiction, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen” (Paths and encounters) Hofmannsthal imagines the erotic as a tension, at the heart of which is a respect for distance. There is something of the innocence of animals in this: “Methinks it is not the embrace but rather the encounter which is the truly decisive erotic gesture. In no other moment is the sensible so soul-like, the soul-like so sensible … Here is a striving towards one another still without desire, a naïve mix of trust and reserve. Here there is that element of the deer, of the bird, of animal muteness, of angelic purity, of the divine. A greeting is something without bounds.”104 The encounter is a greeting and an invitation to communication. Communication in turn is an idealized moment: the Dyer’s Wife’s un-kissed kisses are described as “sparkling” (perlend), like tears might be, and she enters into an “embrace without entwinement and a kiss in which lips neither touched nor parted.”105 Recalling the strange paradoxes of the unborn children, this encounter is one that defies logic and exists as that unsubstantial rainbow that spans the “inexorable plunge of existence.”106 At this climax, the shadow frees itself from the Dyer’s Wife and flees to the water. In the moment the shadow has been freed from its rightful owner, the Empress too is transfigured. Whereas the face of the Dyer’s Wife radiates an innocent beauty, the Empress’s face now betrays mortality: she knows and displays her own guilt.

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S o u n d , C o l o u r , and Moti on With responsibility comes freedom. Having been magically transported away from the scene, the Empress now finds herself utterly alone – the Nurse, now a kind of Virgil to the Empress’s Dante, is unable to accompany the Empress along her new journey, and disappears into the woods. As the Dyer’s Wife had earlier called to her mother, so now the Empress calls to her father, evoking one of the most chilling arias of the more familiar opera Elektra: “Allein, weh ganz allein.” Both Elektra and the Empress call to their absent fathers. In Elektra’s case, the patriarchal Agamemnon is dead, but his memory and unavenged spirit wield power over the living Elektra. The first few lines of the aria, except for the name “Agamemnon,” might equally have been sung or cried by the Empress: Alone! Woe, utterly alone. The father gone, cast away into his cold chasms below Agamemnon! Agamemnon! Where are you, father? Have you not the strength to drag your face up here to me? It is the hour! Our hour it is!107 In an almost exact quotation, the Empress “called … ardently: Father, where are you? The word echoed.”108 That echo is a variation of Elektra’s repeated call: “Agamemnon! Agamemnon!” It also establishes a stark contrast with the Nurse’s cry from a paragraph earlier: “She [the Nurse] shrilly called out the name of her child, with no response, not even an echo.”109 Furthermore, as it was for Elektra, so this is “the hour” for the Empress. The decisive hour – the moment of Kairos – is upon her. For every parallel move, there is also a divergence. Unlike Elektra, who wishes to sacrifice others to the memory of her father and the accomplishment of vengeance, the Empress will sacrifice herself and her own happiness for the sake of others, to make up for her own crime. She has realized that she is no longer an innocent child. It is also telling that, whereas Agamemnon is an absent ghost for Elektra, Keikobad is more an insubstantial presence for the Empress: “In his unapproachability she felt him, his reflected splendour shined upon her brow.”110 This indirect presence – the shining light upon her forehead – is a precursor to the colour to come, and heralds a lifeaffirming intergenerational relationship, rather than a tragic one.

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The description of inaccessibility recalls the statues in “Moments in Greece,” but Hofmannsthal does not linger here, for good reason: the focus must be on the new generation, not the old one. Hofmannsthal thus channels Oswald Spengler’s art historical interpretations: “The statue is rooted to the ground, music – and the western portrait is music, soul woven from colour tones – permeates the boundless space. The fresco is bound up with the wall, grown with it; the oil painting, as panel painting, is free from the barriers of a place. The Apollonian language of forms reveals something that has been; the Faustian – above all – reveals something in the process of becoming.”111 The statue is bound, whereas the portrait (music composed of “colour tones”) is unbound, floating. It is in a process of becoming, where the statue is static. But the connection to Spengler’s theory goes further: this kind of portraiture allows for what the ­philosopher ­considered to be one of the greatest achievements of “western art,” namely the child and family portraits. For Spengler, the child is a bridge between past and future. These aesthetic and metaphysical reflections are present in Hofmannsthal’s text as well. The Empress is awakened to the nearness of unborn children first by the sound of water. She turns around, as if turning from the past generation – that of her father – to the future generation, to see a tall boy standing before her. From his appearance, he seems to be one of the unborn sons of Barak and his wife. It is as if this unborn son is both child and family portrait in one. Like the unborn children in the underworld seen by the Emperor, this boy too is like an impossibly clarified work of art: “He wore a robe of wondrous blue, not as though one had taken a white fabric and laid it in a dying vat, where the intensity of the indigo and the woad mixed, but rather as if the blue of the bottom of the sea itself had been pulled forth and draped across his body.”112 As with “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” so here the colour is the centre of focus, but behind this are the words of the Dyer, who, in his state of madness, explained to his imagined unborn children how colour was lifted out from the plumage of birds, from flowers, and from worms.113 What is more, these colours have the capacity to change; their iridescence suggests the visual dance of colour one sees in a bird’s feathers, or in the washing of fabrics. The colour changes from the blues of the ocean floor to a nocturnal “blackblue, before the first rays of the sun illuminate the sky.”114 Even the simile is telling: in the previous section,

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the Dyer’s Wife described dirty children as “beautiful like the rising sun.”115 Here we have the moment just before sunrise, just before birth, figured in the colours. Another child appears with equally strange aesthetic features, “resembling the Dyer’s Wife, from the delicate waxlike feet to the dark hair that shone like copper,” and glides “upon the green ground as if it were glass, with feet pressed together, and no other manner of movement could have suited the delicacy of the limbs and the glistening colours.”116 Like a wax figure, the child is lovely, but not alive; the feet are still bound. This is the plastic translation of the dark blue colour just before sunrise. These children are at the threshold of existence, but do not yet walk in the sun. As more children arrive, the Empress asks whether they bring a message, but the response is mysterious: “The colour seemed to come to him from eternity, so too the answer, which slowly rose up in him and reached the edge of his lips with hesitation. – We have no commission, we have no message. That we show ourselves, Lady, is all that is vouchsafed to us.”117 If art could speak, this would be its answer. They can only show themselves. But even this is qualified, for when the Empress asks where one of the children has disappeared to, the response she receives is simply that she is: “There, and not there, Lady, as it shall please you! … and his robe was like blood which turned into gold; all the trees received from him the confirmation that they were living, as from the first ray of the rising sun.”118 Blood red turns into life-giving gold water. The confirmation of life is reminiscent of the existential guarantee afforded by the walnut tree – only here it is the tree that receives confirmation – and later the colours in the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” In their transience, the colours change once more, sinking from red into violet “like a cloud in the evening sky, as one of the boys says to the Empress, reminding her of the importance of the hour at hand: “You are not being presented to, Lady, rather you are being presented, and this is the hour.”119 As in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two,” the one ostensibly in power – to gaze, to judge – is revealed to be the one gazed upon and judged. This hour of judgment is the moment of encounter between the Empress and her unborn children. The trial and judgment are rendered verbally and aesthetically, by the play of colours: “Dark was his robe, like the starless night sky.” The Empress’s thoughts, likewise, are dark: “I have committed a serious offence … She lowered her eyes and then looked to him again.”120 These words and the gesture of her eyes are

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so effective that he seemed to caress the words – an image of embrace without holding on that recalls the idealized embrace of Barak and his wife. And his response is to the point: “Everyone who sets one foot in front of the other must say that. For that reason, we go with locked feet.”121 The link between mobility and moral culpability recalls Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment motto: “Enlightenment is the human being’s stepping out of their self-inflicted immaturity. Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s reason without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-inflicted when the cause lies not in a lack of reason, but rather a lack of resolution and courage to help oneself without guidance from another. Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own reason! This, therefore, is the motto of Enlightenment.”122 The twist is in the focus: The Empress’s guilt – her self-inflicted immaturity – affects not only herself, but others as well. This is partly aesthetic: the simple dismissal of the ugly world below is a kind of immaturity; but it is also social: the lower, poverty-stricken realms are not to be treated as mere tools for the achievement of some goal. The Empress has realized this – and it is why she can stand before this aesthetic and ethical otherness, one of the unborn sons of the people whose lives she wishes not to destroy, and “her reverence for him, who spoke with her thus, was no less than his for her.”123 I would suggest this reverence is learned – perhaps from Barak, whose reverence and piety in labour the Empress so admired. Two more children enter the scene to explain to the Empress the distinction between her actions and those of their mother (the Dyer’s Wife). The difference is a matter of time, and of seizing the decisive moment of opportunity. The actions of their mother happen in the passage of time as Chronos and are thus revokable, but for the Empress, another law is at work: “Everything lies in the moment: counsel and deed!”124 The Empress’s first step was one of transgression: she threatened the lives of others. Her second was Kantian egression: she steps out of her life of self-inflicted immaturity and recognizes her own culpability; her third step will be a Kierkegaardian leap.

N e w L ife: A M e t aph o r a n d a Metamorphosi s The parallel stories of ethics and aesthetics cross in a kind of nonEuclidean narrative geometry, forming a Gordian knot. The ethical story serves as a comment on the aesthetic story and vice-versa. In this

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section of the final chapter of the story, there is a rebirth not only of soul, but also of senses: the ethical rebirth occurs in tandem with an aesthetic rebirth, and both are brought about by a recognition of and response to human frailty and human strength. This recognition takes place, as it did in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” and even more explicitly in “Moments in Greece,” at the moment of seeing the irreducible difference of others. The curious phrase from The Letters – “dies ineinanderschlagende Du” – is imagined here as a new and clarified kind of embrace or union at-a-distance, like the embrace of Barak and his wife. As noted earlier, Hofmannsthal’s dreamer in “Die Wege und die Begegnungen” (Paths and encounters) esteems the encounter above the embrace, noting: “A greeting is something without bounds.” The dreamer then follows with an invocation of Dante’s Vita Nuova and the power of sound emanating from that which is different from the self: “Dante dates his ‘New Life’ to a greeting that was given him. Wondrous is the cry of the great bird, the strange, solitary, premundane sound at dawn, issuing from the tallest fir, listened to somewhere by a hen. This ‘somewhere’ – this unspecified and yet passionate desire, this cry of the stranger to the stranger, is what is tremendous.”125 In Die Frau ohne Schatten, there is a similar cry of one stranger to another, and it will be answered by an embrace that is informed by a respect for unreachable otherness. The “new life” is new both ethically and aesthetically, as is made clear when the Empress sees the unborn children of the couple whose lives she has stained. The fluctuating colours of the children’s garments as well as their disappearance before her eyes have left her sense of sight bewildered; it seems appropriate, even a relief, that she should then be led into a dark cave. But in the dark cave the senses are again activated to such a pitch that her whole trajectory seems to be an aesthetic one: the high room is like a temple, lit by a single torch which emits a pleasing fragrance, and it is also like a bath, but lovelier even than those of her own palace. In the presence of such atmospheric beauty, the Empress seems in danger of losing herself – on both ethical and aesthetic grounds. The atmosphere begins to ring – literally – with tension. The tension is even erotic: she feels the presence of her husband and releases one of the most recognizable sounds of desire: “Ach! came over her lips, ashamed and full of yearning at the same time, and the breath-becomesound from her own mouth made her glow from top to bottom.”126 Hofmannsthal’s paraphrasis is important: her “Ach” is a breath – a

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sign of life – that has become sound. The phrase’s structure recalls the description of art as “arbitrary-will-become-form” (Form gewordene Willkür) from the “Address.” Like the bells at elevation during a celebration of mass, this sound serves a liturgical function. Indeed, the water – the sound of which had awakened her to the presence of the unborn children – does rise. And at a certain elevation, light from a torch strikes a column, which then gives “a resounding clang, which with its sweet sound nearly split the Empress’s heart in two.”127 The reverberations of climactic tension occur at the moment the Emperor appears, caught between life and death: “he seemed heavy like a bronze grave stone built in the middle of a pond.” Bereft of weapons and leg braces, the statue has been rendered utterly vulnerable: only the light hunting armour was left, and everything else was like marble. The metal and marble invoke the myths of both Midas and Pygmalion, but there is something else at work: the statue is both dark and light, black and white, but devoid of colour. Thus robbed of protection, life, and colour, he stands there “unspeakably beautiful … yet unspeakably strange.”128 The Emperor displays a colourless, lifeless beauty. The Empress’s response is an inarticulate cry (in the opera, the singer screams), accompanied by a gesture that draws her into the familiar mythologies of metamorphosis: “she threw herself into the golden, gently undulating pool; like a swan with its wings outstretched she swooped to her lover.”129 Like many a fairy-tale swan maiden, she is married to a mortal man and has lost her metamorphic ability. But the Empress’s swan transformation is purely one of simile: she is like a swan.130 The Empress’s former metamorphic abilities have themselves been transformed into metaphoric power; but then this is the stuff of poetry. The statue’s effect on her is above all troubling, because it shows her something that eludes understanding: death. In “Moments in Greece,” the korai have a similar effect: they are both beautiful and foreign, displaying their strange unspeakable smiles. Just the like the ancient Greek statues, there is something utterly inaccessible in the petrified Emperor that shocks and terrifies the Empress. The aesthetic takes form in the ethical decision the Empress must confront: As their gazes meet, she sees in his eyes a fear that makes his visage hideous: The German term “gräßlich” is used in multiple other places in the text: to describe the flight of the injured falcon; human faces in the Empress’s dream; the words of the curse; the expression

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on the Nurse’s face when the Empress realizes she has been withholding her knowledge all this time; the many mouths of real people she encounters in the crowded streets of the city; her own face, when full of fear and disquiet; and the vanishing of the unborn children into thin air.131 All of these instances are associated with powerlessness. As if to highlight the helplessness of the situation, the golden light shifts, following the Emperor’s gaze to a wall upon which the shadow of the statue falls. The Empress, however, still casts no shadow. The statue is “gräßlich” and uncanny because it is an embodiment (or entombment) of the human: the statue can move a little, but it cannot leave its spot; its face responds, but it is not alive. The demand issued by this work of art is united with the demand of the ethical relationship. And so, the foreign shadow appears to her, offering her a bowl of golden water, more than humbly: “it was the gesture of a slave surrendering completely, to the death.” And here again the senses are explicitly brought to the fore: “She felt how she would lose her senses and drink.”132 Losing the ability to see, feel, hear, touch, and taste, but also losing her mind and consciousness, she would act fully anaesthetized. Drinking the water and appropriating the shadow of another would be a senseless act in all senses of the word, on some level not even willed (mirroring the Dyer’s Wife as she threw the seven fish over her shoulder). Without the will, this act would be divorced from ethics: or the will would be a negative one, an abnegation of the aesthetic and ethical senses. But before she drinks, one of the unborn children – resembling Barak – appears and presents an alternative possibility: The Empress’s actions do not have to be unconscious and senseless. Of particular importance here is the description around this moment of decision. Like a priestess, the Empress holds in her hands the bowl of water – a potential libation. Her conscience, however, is intimately linked to the sounds of reality: Hideous and strange, as from the breast of one sleeping deeply, the curse emanated from her own breast and struck her ear … – she listened inwardly as her own heart beat, slow and heavy. She saw with one glance, as if she were hovering outside herself, how she stood there, and at her feet the shadow of the other woman, who had fallen slave to her, and over there the statue. The terrible feeling of reality held everything together with iron chains. The cold wafted towards her and to her core and

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­ aralyzed her. She could not take a single step, neither forwards p nor backwards, she could do nothing but this: drink, and win the shadow, or pour out the bowl.133 The auditory admonition experienced by the Dyer’s Wife earlier is reproduced here, though it is the curse of the father Keikobad rather than the curse of the mother. The body’s response is to dissociate: a common enough idea in psychology and literature of the early twentieth century.134 But it is not just the psychological dissociation that is at play here; it also has characteristics of that ecstasis that occurs in mystical moments,135 and in the aesthetic encounter, especially as presented in “Moments in Greece.” The turn in Die Frau ohne Schatten occurs with the evocation of reality, which holds everything together with iron chains (the negative image of the aurea catena homeri). In the unreal world of art, there is the alchemical potential to transform these iron chains into gold. This is part of the imagined vita nuova, and it is suggested in this passage, ironically, in a complete reversal of the opera’s handling of the scene. In the opera, the music begins pianissimo, and with the slow crescendo and the gongs, it begins to swell and reaches such a height that the Empress’s singing transforms into a terrified scream. The orchestral accompaniment abruptly ceases, leaving the Empress’s voice alone: but she does not sing. She speaks the formula of renunciation, as if breaking from the fairy-tale world of opera into the spoken, discursive world of “reality.” She speaks, with a heavy pause before and after each word: I will not.136 In the prose tale, Hofmannsthal reverses the change, but again, only metaphorically: the words rise from the depths of her being and leave her mouth: “as if they were sung, far away in the distance; she just had to repeat them. She repeated them without hesitation. – I owe you, Barak! She spoke … and poured out the bowl before the feet of the veiled figure. The golden water burst into flames, the bowl in her hands vanished into thin air.”137 The golden water possesses the power of metamorphosis; the Empress, of metaphor. But metaphor, in this moment, becomes metamorphosis. The libation makes this transformation possible. Hofmannsthal shares with Walter Benjamin an appreciation for the ancient Greek ritual: libation is a way of g­ iving something back to the earth and the gods.138 The notion of the symbol as gift in “Moments in Greece” is adapted here as libation, as giving back.

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This gesture of response makes transformation possible. And so the water rises, carrying both the Empress and the heavy statue upwards as they embrace, as if weightless, till “she felt herself pulled into the bottomless deep.”139 The abyss is the place of birth and death, like Derrida’s khôra. It is here too that the symbolic sacrifice takes place: in “The Conversation about Poems,” the symbol is born when the priestlike man dies for a moment with the animal he sacrifices. Here, the Empress is the priestess and the offering at once, and this is once again accompanied by a disturbance in the senses: “Incomprehensible torment shattered her senses. She felt death creep over her heart, but at the same time she felt the statue in her arms move and come alive. In an incomprehensible state, she surrendered herself, and, shaking, was now there only in the intimation of life which the other had received from her. Into him, or into her, there pressed the sensation of a darkness clearing, of a place receiving, of a breath of new life. They took it in with senses newly born: hands, which carried them, a stone gate, which closed behind them, swaying trees, smooth firm ground, upon which the bodies lay resting, the bright sky’s expanse.”140 The Empress, in pain, feels death and comes very near to it herself, perhaps she does die in this moment, like the sacrificial animal and the man in “The Conversation about Poems.” And perhaps her life transmigrates into the stony limbs of the Emperor, imbuing him with life. The text switches for a brief time to free indirect speech, marking the dissolution of self – precisely when both Emperor and Empress feel the same thing. The narration is uncertain and even stylistically fragmentary, as if conveying fleeting thoughts: “Into her, or into him there pressed the sensation of a darkness clearing.” Like infants, whose sight is undeveloped, they are reborn and cross the threshold into existence, into the light, as the entrance to the cave closes behind them, and the Empress senses the trees, the ground, the sky. There is something cinematic in this passage. Like a film shot from the first person of view, we follow her, then their, impressions. As the Empress looks into the sky, a transfer of perspective takes places. The perspective narrows momentarily and then broadens again as the narrative lens pans out in order to encompass the Empress and the Emperor in the landscape more objectively: “In the distance, the river glistened, behind a hill the sun was rising, and its first rays struck the Emperor’s face, who lay at the feet of his wife, curled up like a child.” With this broadening perspective, the intricacy of relations becomes clearer: The once powerful Emperor is now like a child, and

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as the Empress rises, she – finally – casts a shadow over him, tracing a bridge between them. The Emperor awakens at the Empress’s cry of delight over having caught sight of her own shadow, and they wordlessly embrace: “their shadows combined into one.”141 A parallel shadow bridge forms between the Dyer and his wife, and, like the transition from stasis to motion that takes place in the Emperor, so too does the Dyer’s Wife undergo a visual transformation: from the wan colourlessness of fear to the brilliant colour of life. The Dyer pair are reunited in the same landscape, not far from the Emperor and Empress. The Dyer’s Wife carries a great basket containing a sword and a blood-dyed carpet, where colours are concentrated and then explode, covering and imbuing the Dyer’s Wife with new life. It is important here that the colours do not just adorn her; they permeate and enliven her. Colours here do the work of the artist, and the Dyer’s Wife becomes like a work of art given life – for with these colours, she also regains her shadow. We might go so far as to say that Hofmannsthal is representing here his own idea of the poetic act: within the imagined “reality” of the story, the Dyer’s Wife and the Emperor, as well as the Empress and the Dyer, have been given a new life. Renewed life correlates to renewed aesthetic sensations: those who are catatonic are animated, while pale faces are given the colour of life and the shadow of humanity. All of these transformations are, of course, enveloped by an aesthetic frame itself – the tale. Although the characters are given a kind of life, it is ultimately no Promethean act. It is humbler than that, since it is just a story, but does not lack for boldness: paradoxes, contradictions, and reversals are possible and even demanded. The shadow bridge that forms between the Dyer and his wife is a visual echo of the colourful arc which the soul makes when spanning the abyss: “Like the rainbow, unsubstantial, our soul spans across the inexorable plunge of existence.”142 The colours of the rainbow are in the Dyer’s Wife herself. The gesture of art is a bold one in its attempt to undo wrongs committed, and to unite what is disparate.143 But for Hofmannsthal there is no artistic act without humility; hence the reciprocal prostrations of the married couples: “He pressed his hands upon his breast and bowed before her. Like a stone, she fell down before him, her brow, her lips touched his feet”; “as the Dyer’s Wife had thrown herself at the feet of her husband, so too the Emperor threw himself before his wife and buried his convulsing face in her knees. She knelt down beside

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him; to her, too, weeping was new and sweet.”144 The gesture of humility is the common denominator for all of the characters, men and women, the royal pair and the dyer pair.145 The end of the prose tale, as Harry Seelig has emphasized in “Musical Substance and Literary Shadow,” does not review the fates of the characters simultaneously. Rather, each individual character is given individual attention. The dyer pair are awarded a future full of the wonder of prosperity – they have been magically lifted out of their destitution and given a perfect fairy-tale ending. A figure full of colour, the Dyer’s Wife sits upon stacked carpets in their fairy-tale boat, while Barak sings “as no one had heard him sing before,”146 essentially reversing the earlier portrayal of him singing out of tune.147 The new singing corresponds to a new ethical understanding and relation with his wife: theirs is now a harmonious marriage. For the Empress and the Emperor, the end is similarly one of reconciliation and hope. Having sunk to his knees, the Emperor gazes into the sky at his falcon returning, while the Empress hears a song from the heavens: “Soft words and quiet tones found their way inexplicably from the heights down to her.”148 This song is the only instance in the prose text given as it is in the libretto: it is kept in verse, separated from the rest of the text by its genre and its difference. Like Goethe’s Chorus Mysticus at the end of Faust II, the singing voices celebrate the paradox of life and the mystical union of host and guest: “If ever there were such a feast, would we secretly be both the hosts and the guests?”149 The talisman has the last word: the curse is now a blessing, celebrating the connection of all things to all things.

T h e M ä r c h e n : “ A s L o v ely as a Persi an Car p e t ,   a n d a s Unreal” Die Frau ohne Schatten – both the opera and the novella – is one of the most representative cases for Hofmannsthal’s fascination with the relation between what we consider to be “real” and “unreal.”150 The central motif of the carpet raises the question in the form of an image: the carpet is shown both in its real and its ideal (unreal) production; it is ascribed magical properties, and it is a symbol of perfection and cosmic interconnectedness. Aesthetics and ethics are figured here as the warp and weft of the carpet: they are never the same, but without either, the fabric of human existence would come undone. Hofmannsthal’s strange mix of the

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real and the unreal – like the realistic detail and ideal images and riddles that defy logic – is a response to this double-drive, as well as an attempt to depict the drama of life. We see it in his use of colours, for instance, which (as in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”) change in response to each other and even exhibit what Sabine Schneider identifies as the essence of the dramatic, namely the counterplay of forces. Schneider goes on to say that Hofmannsthal’s understanding of colour is a somewhat forced interpretation of Goethe’s view that colours are the silent language of nature and are part of a harmonious totality.151 It is true that Hofmannsthal tends to highlight the dramatic (and agonistic) display of forces at play in colours, but he also depicts colours as mutually reinforcing one another, allowing for a potentially harmonious depiction of the interconnectedness of things, as is made clear in the motif of the carpet, and in the (controlled) explosion of colour at the end of the story. Fickert and Celms repeat the anti-aestheticist formula: “Significantly, in the opera, the character named die Kaiserin [the Empress] acquires a shadow and the ability to bear children after she has put the insubstantial world of the cult of beauty as expressed in art behind her.”152 This assertion is based on an analogy with the figure of Claudio in Der Tor und der Tod (Death and the Fool), whom the noted British translator Michael Hamburger once called “the man without a shadow, the potential man incapable of crossing the threshold into reality.”153 While the opera and the prose tale bear a certain thematic resemblance to Death and the Fool, the Empress never expresses a rejection of art – in either the opera or the prose tale – and in fact art (song, the carpet, even the Emperor-as-statue) plays a significant role in her and the other characters’ transformation. In Die Frau ohne Schatten art too experiences a kind of baptism in the (albeit fictional) world of “reality,” to use Hamburger’s term. The broader issue at stake is that the kind of resolution between aesthetics and ethics is only ever imagined through art (especially as a comedic Märchen). Die Frau ohne Schatten is an aesthetic theodicy, where all characters and all plot points, all suffering and all paradoxes have their justification in the aesthetic whole. The carpet is a portrait of this theodicy, but its unreal status puts into question a real ethical expression of this aesthetic success. This ambivalent attitude is evident in Hofmannsthal’s own comments. In a letter from 27 May 1918 to the countess Ottonie Degenfeld, he wrote: “In these dreadful weeks I have written perhaps the most

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beautiful chapter of the Märchen: how the Emperor comes to the unborn children … Eberhard said to me a few months ago how little these dreamt up harmonies have to do with life – how they have nothing to do with it – and yet how felicitous it would be, that they should exist and that more such things should ever come to be.”154 The dreadful reality contrasts all too much with the dreamt-up harmonies, and yet these harmonies are perhaps even more necessary because of the horrors of reality – in this case, the First World War. Richard Strauss, too, makes this explicit (even in his off-putting patriotism) in a letter to Hofmannsthal from 8 October 1914: “In the midst of all this unpleasant news, which this war brings – with the exception of the magnificent deeds of our army – diligent work is the only salvation. Otherwise, one would die from frustration at the inaction of our ­diplomats, our press, the Emperor’s apologetic telegram to Wilson.”155 Such diligent work in the sphere of art has intrinsic value for Strauss, and indeed seems necessary for survival. But this is no easy task. The negotiations between the necessities of creating beauty and the ethical questions of the time (is art a luxury in war?) result in a tale that imagines – must imagine – the impossible. Art and war have something in common: they are situations in extremis. And war, too – as with the Futurists and, to a certain degree, the author and Imperial German soldier Ernst Jünger – can be experienced aesthetically. With Hofmannsthal though, one always has the sense that the aesthetic could very possibly send the subject to the brink of existence. There at the world’s edge one finds a rickety bridge, or perhaps it is that unsubstantial rainbow, crossing in a blur the unfathomable chasm between art and life, the imaginary and the real. Those are two poles of existence. The fact remains that one cannot cross the bridge, for it would not hold real weight. Instead, one experiences the paradoxical reality of the unreal in the aesthetic encounter, in its effect of strangely persistent presence as it withdraws from one’s grasp. For Hofmannsthal, art invents an imaginary language for this, and is itself the invention.

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5 Violence and Art in Andreas

Not every work of Hofmannsthal’s depicts a successful aesthetic encounter; that is, not every encounter with artworks is characterized by that feeling of timelessness, connection, the sensation of being “called,” or the pious sense of duty and responsibility that arises in recognition of what is beautiful. The works discussed in the previous four chapters all depict elevated moments (“erhöhte Augenblicke,” to use Pestalozzi’s phrase) in the aesthetic encounter; and these tend to occur when one is confronted by a work of art. The novel-fragment Andreas is different. The characteristics of the aesthetic encounter are not concentrated in the work of art. They are dispersed. In fact, while a painting does feature in the text, it is precisely not the site of the aesthetic encounter. It is, one might say, a failure. If Die Frau ohne Schatten is an aesthetic “success” in the sense that it has a clear beginning, a sense of progression, and a resolution, then Andreas is its counterpart: obsessively circular in its story, unfinished, and fragmented.

A ppr o a c h in g Andreas Documentation of Hofmannsthal’s work on Andreas1 spans twenty years, from 1907 until about two years before the author’s death.2 Scholarly opinion is markedly divided in its evaluation of this fragmentary collection: while many see it as a failed Bildungsroman or an act of self-censorship on the part of the author, others see in the novel’s fragmentation one of the high points of literary modernism.3 The former arguments carry weight insofar as Hofmannsthal never ­published any of the novel, even though he had previously published

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other unfinished works in instalments and with varying lengths of time between sections (as with “Moments in Greece” and “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”). One would think Andreas simply never turned into anything cohesive enough to be published and was in this sense a failed project. But those who champion the work’s achievements find support in Hofmannsthal’s own estimation of the “fragment” as a genre and a work of art. In his 1911 essay “Wilhelm Meister in der Urform” (Wilhelm Meister it its original form) Hofmannsthal writes: “Here, the torso is truncated. What a work! … What an abundance of figures, what wonderful richness in juxtaposition!”4 In a similar tone, the 2017 symposium on Hofmannsthal’s comedy of failures (“Hofmannsthals Komödie des Scheiterns”) featured a dramatic reading called “Menschliches Gebiet” (Human territory), borrowing the title from Hofmannsthal’s a­ phorism: “The half, the fragmentary, is truly human territory.”5 Whether this is also a form of excuse for not finishing a work is debatable. Hofmannsthal often returned to literary material, even after it had been published, in order to rework it, to find a new angle, even a new genre. Die Frau ohne Schatten – first opera, then prose tale – is a case in point. It is not clear, however, whether or when Hofmannsthal ever planned to publish Andreas. If nothing else, the novel fragment can be read as a place for experimentation, a kind of sketchbook that accompanies, tracks, and comments on Hofmannsthal’s other writings. If one were to outline the “plot” it might look something like this: Andreas, a young and inexperienced man, is sent out on a journey of maturation. He wanders first through rural Austria, where he meets the ironically named Gotthelff (“God-help”), a devilish figure who forces his way into Andreas’s service. They travel together through Carinthia and stay at the farm of the noble Finazzer family. There, Andreas falls in love with the daughter, Romana. Gotthelff, however, ruins the idyllic sojourn by seducing (a charitable reading) a maid, tying her to a bed and starting a fire in the room, killing the family dog, and stealing Andreas’s horse and much of his money. Laden with guilt at having brought such a man into their world, Andreas leaves the Finazzer farm, and as he travels through the mountain passes and the distance grows, he senses that Romana will always be by his side. He plans to return and marry her one day, once he has redeemed himself – a violent but plausible beginning to a typical Bildungsroman.

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Upon arriving in the labyrinthine city of Venice, Andreas finds himself drawn into a twisted and confusing world: he stays with (another) noble family, though this family is struggling financially and has decided to set up a “lottery” with their youngest daughter, Zustina, as the prize. The elder daughter, Nina, is seen by everyone to be model of moral perfection: appropriately, she lives outside the house, removed from the mess, like a work of art. The painter Zorzi, whose room Andreas takes, serves as the young man’s guide during his first few days in the city, and introduces him to a number of people, including the mysterious Sacramozo (also called Sagredo), who will later be a kind of (flawed) mentor to Andreas. While on his way to meet Nina (and guided by Zorzi), Andreas is left alone briefly and wanders into a church. Out of nowhere a woman appears, praying. In fact, she seems to direct her supplication towards Andreas rather than towards the altar, before she sinks down again. He decides to leave the church, and as he is about to exit, he turns around briefly and a different woman appears in the same spot. (This is Maria/Mariquita – a woman who seems to be experiencing split personality. The many notes to Andreas sketch a growing relationship with “both women”). Andreas leaves the church and walks back towards Nina’s apartment, but cannot find the right door and wanders into the wrong building. In the building’s courtyard, he sees the woman from the church again, this time from below: she is balanced strangely above the latticework and gazes down on Andreas “with unending sympathy, nay, love,” as blood drips from her fingertips onto Andreas’s forehead, before she disappears again over a wall.6 It is as if she has anointed and incriminated him simultaneously. After these strange encounters, Andreas returns to the street, where he finds Zorzi once again, who leads him to Nina’s apartment. There he is asked to comment on her portrait (painted by Zorzi). Left alone with Nina, Andreas senses an erotic tension. The main fragment ends with Zorzi and Andreas’s departure from Nina’s apartment, but the notes continue to outline the relationships with Maria/Mariquita, Romana, and Nina, as well as a number of other characters. Sacramozo/Sagredo plays an increasingly important role as mentor. More so than Hofmannsthal’s other works, Andreas presents numerous interpretive problems. Even if the main fragment7 – those thirty-seven contiguous pages in the Kritische Ausgabe – is read

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without extensive reference to the copious notes (an approach taken by Katrin Scheffer and Waltraud Wiethölter, for example), the story itself is labyrinthine, full of changes in perspective, tone, and place. To complicate matters, it is not clear which, if any, versions of certain passages Hofmannsthal considered finished. Achim Aurnhammer observes that there are many places where different versions of the story are picked up and expanded; it becomes impossible to tell if Hofmannsthal favoured one version over another.8 It is possible that Andreas has an intentionally, radically “open” form; as such, it is difficult to offer a thoroughgoing interpretation of the whole work, because the “whole” work emphatically would not exist. And yet, as Scheffer has pointed out, this openness contributes to the kind of reader-response criticism in the classic sense articulated by Wolfgang Iser,9 and to the creative reception that Hofmannsthal strove after.10 Scheffer’s emphasis on communication, specifically as expressed in “Moments in Greece,” also resonates well: “They are here and are unattainable. So, too, am I. By this we communicate.”11 “Communication” here does not emphasize the content or the transmission of a particular, premeditated message. Rather, it is an exchange born out of a mutual (communal) recognition of difference. It is a communality born out of separation. The author cannot determine what the reader will “understand” or “feel” – the author can only create the form and space for a potential encounter. That form must be defined enough to have form at all, but it must be open enough to allow the Erlebnis of the aesthetic ­encounter to take place. For Hofmannsthal, holding the form open is the “primary social obligation” (“oberste gesellige Pflicht”) to others. Those who write books have a social obligation to the reader: they must allow readers to co-create through the use of the imaginative faculty, “for a gift cannot be presented without thinking of the recipient beforehand.”12 This is a reformulation of the notion of beauty developed in the “Address”: beauty is the word that binds (“verpflichtet”) most deeply. The “primary social obligation” of an author is to give a space for the reader to co-create (“mitzuschaffen”). From the depths (“am tiefsten”) to the heights (“die oberste”), there is this duty or obligation to others, where art is involved. In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” too, the idea of co-creation is present in the encounter with the paintings of Van Gogh. The “social obligation” is realized by both creator (Van Gogh) and viewer: together, they create the space for all those objects to be reborn aesthetically and phenomenologically.13

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But the rebirth of the subject’s relation to the world is not always successful. To continue the analogy, the encounter might not lead to co-creation; artists and viewers can fail to fulfil their duties to each other and to the objects they encounter and create. As in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” there is a prominent moment in Andreas wherein the titular character finds himself before a painting.14 But the encounter is far different – we might even speak of a non-encounter. The focal points of this chapter then are the conditions contributing to this ‘failed’ encounter and the meta-aesthetic commentary on Hofmannsthal’s artistic project. As with the other texts explored in this book, certain motifs and events prepare for this moment and should therefore be considered in relation to the ekphrastic passages. In particular, the depiction of ­suffering and identification with others, power structures between subject and object, and perceptions of reality will contribute to the analysis of this ‘failed’ aesthetic encounter.

T h e P a inti ng In the first note (N1), which sketches the initial narrative trajectory of Andreas’s travels, Hofmannsthal wrote: “Reasons for the educational journey [Bildungsreise]. Painters. Famous names. Palaces. Salon customs. Introductory conversations leading to an entrée into society. Seeming. Pleasing.”15 The goal of this educational journey is to teach the young man the ways of society – a society not unlike that portrayed in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.”16 It is puffed up and ­hollow – Andreas specifically feels that this journey is about “representation and reputation.”17 Representation can also refer to art, and painters are mentioned, inviting comparisons with Goethe’s Italienische Reise (Italian Journey), which describes, among other things, a number of outstanding examples of artworks in Italy. But the prospect of this kind of cultural Bildung is immediately compromised when, in this same first note, the word “painter” appears again, referring this time to a specific painter: the shady figure called Zorzi (and occasionally Galli).18 The first depiction of this painter – which is taken up in the main fragment – is telling: “Once again upstairs to the painter: he shows me a picture of a beautiful person (for dalla Torre). Promises to take me to her. Along the way, tells me the story of the two pictures of Count Camposagrado … how the brothers send their own to him, he laughs immoderately and displays

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a sum of money, so that they can send him the Goya and copy the Tintorettos. The painter promises to present me to the duke, etc.”19 In this brief sketch, there is enough indirect characterization to surmise that, for Zorzi, paintings are about money. Of course, this is not uncommon for the era portrayed. Andreas arrives in Venice on 12 September 1778, a time when artists lived from commissions; producing artworks was a breadwinning craft, and art for art’s sake was a rare luxury. Indeed, that very rareness of opportunity raises questions about the conditions of creativity both in the artist and in the society. In Andreas, just as in Die Frau ohne Schatten, the regard for art and beauty tracks the regard for people. Like Zorzi’s art, Andreas’ hosts’ young daughter Zustina is to be sold to the highest bidder in order to rescue the family from financial struggles.20 The immoderate laugh he lets forth while flashing his money to Andreas betrays this as well. Themes of commodification and possession are amplified and personalized throughout the text: Money is necessary for sustaining a certain lifestyle; Zustina’s family is noble but impoverished, and their poverty induces them to “sell” their daughter. Zustina even accepts this as the best solution because money sustains the family’s way of life. But Zorzi’s example shows that money is not simply a means to survive. Money has taken the place of art insofar as art exists to be sold, and insofar as the principle of art for art’s sake has been replaced with that of money for money’s sake. This fact and Zorzi’s unpleasant character throw into relief one of the deep problems of a decadent, sinking Venice: Just as family relations and art are in some sense ­corrupted, so too are the elements that help establish the relation between aesthetics and ethics. The experiences of suffering and empathic identification in the aesthetic encounter are the first to be compromised – even parodied. In the next note, the “Painter Galli” (i.e., Zorzi) is mentioned again: “has the stone he uses for crushing pigments placed on his stomach to help with stomach pains.”21 It is not clear what the origin of these stomach pains is, but the situation also appears in the larger fragment, where it becomes clear that this is a regular occurrence for the painter, and is not indicative of a serious health issue. According to Zustina, “he’s supposedly lying up there with his stomach-ache. At that, it was decided that the men should go up there in order to remove the useless person.”22 If the artist suffers for his art, this is an unusually comical depiction of that suffering. And yet this awkward moment plays into Hofmannsthal’s (perhaps self-parodic) depictions of the artist’s

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empathic ability to experience the suffering of others. Here, the painter Zorzi is experiencing his own (physical) pain, while Andreas (more typically artist-like) experiences pangs of sympathy for the man who is to be kicked out of a room so that he, Andreas, might have a place to sleep – but he does not feel badly enough to decline the room. There is a kind of base pragmatism at the foundation of things, which makes for unsure footing.23 In response to the nausea brought on by the consumerist society as presented in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Van Gogh’s paintings offered a different world (one might go so far as to speak of a Heideggerian “world-creating” moment), dramatizing the (re)birth pangs of objects from the terrible non-existence they suffered in a “reality” that had begun to consume itself, unable to escape its own confined system of empty circulation. This new world was conceived of as an “Antwort” – a response. Zorzi’s paintings are different: they attempt to replicate a world motivated by economic gain, and in turn act as that world’s mirror. Rather than “creating” the world, the paintings act as a narcissistic reflection of the world as it is. But if Zorzi, like Gotthelff, is a Mephistophelean character, then there is also, perhaps, an unintentionally creative side-effect produced by his world-ridding (and “reality”-asserting) paintings. One could entertain the idea of a productive failure in the case of Zorzi’s artwork. Why stage an aesthetic failure? What does the underwhelming moment of seeing an uninspired (and uninspiring) painting contribute to the fragmented text? The scene with the painting, short though it is, provides an opportunity for reflection on the circumstances of artistic creation; further, it is a commentary on the violence one sees in the protagonist, the painter, and the society; and finally, it illustrates both literally and figuratively the paradox of Hofmannsthal’s productive, perhaps even his (un-)beautiful failure. The reader has been prepared for an aesthetic encounter by the many instances of confusion between dream, imagination, memory, and the reality of the present. Even the meeting with Nina is described using the technique of ekphrasis. Nina looks like a work of art: “They found Nina on a sofa in a relaxed and handsome position: everything about her was tinged with light and had a lovely delicate roundness: her hair was light blond like faded gold and she wore it unpowdered: three things, which were fetchingly curvilinear and seemed of a piece: her eyebrows her mouth and her hand, which had an expression of serene curiosity and great kindness, were raised towards the guests

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as they entered. A picture without a frame was leaning, turned around, against the wall: through the canvas ran an incision, as if it had been slashed with a knife.”24 The irony is that the character Nina is more like an artwork than the painting turned to the wall. She is in a “­handsome position” (“hübschen Stellung”) as if she has been deliberately placed here, and her features are strikingly balanced, soft, and charming. The description itself is rather uninflected: all the sentences have standard, predictable syntax, and while the adjectives are descriptive, they are not particularly evocative. In fact, one might say the passage is almost naturalistic in its attempt to objectively depict the “reality.” It is worth considering for a moment, by way of contrast, the aestheticized description of the servant girl in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” The two instances mirror each other in a number of respects. In both cases, living people (both female) are juxtaposed to artworks. In “The Tale,” the older servant girl is framed by the two bronze deities she is carrying. She herself looks like work of art, practically immobile, while the dark gold ornamentation in her hair looks alive and moves against her temples in rhythm with the girl’s breath. This dark gold hair jewellery contrasts with Nina’s unpowdered, unadorned, light blonde hair. The passages also differ in one other striking way: the encounter in “The Tale” slips into free indirect speech (erlebte Rede), affirming the experiential quality of the moment (Erlebnis). For the duration of a sentence, the narrator speaks the mind of the observing merchant’s son: “Eigentlich aber,” the narrator says. It reads like a passing thought uttered unreflectively, as in English one might say: “But really.”25 The passage in “The Tale” stands out for its lyricism and sonority, the repeated sibilants tracing in language the curve of the jewellery, the long vowels weighing down the sentences like the  heavy adornment. The  sensuous language is exemplary for Hofmannsthal’s usual ekphrastic approach. And despite the Medusan evocations, the merchant’s son does not desire the servant in a sexual way. He looks at her like he would a work of art (and reminds the reader that works of art can be threatening in their allure). The highly wrought passage in “The Tale” could not be further from the plain, uninflected description in Andreas. In “The Tale,” the twisted language belies a fear inspired by the aesthetic, and the lack of a sexual desire; in Andreas, the ostensibly sober, objective tone belies an uncertainty in the face of the erotic.

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The two scenes resonate with each other through their difference because they both signal the de-centring of the protagonists. In “The Tale,” this takes the form of an uncanny aesthetic encounter, resulting from the impression that lifeless things are animate while living beings are inanimate. In Andreas, the very much alive woman attracts the young man. The narrator, in a kind of suppressed free indirect speech, does in fact take on the voice of Andreas, and it is one that attempts to counterfeit objectivity by taking inventory of what can be seen. But the realistic tone rings false. And indeed, this cool, objective approach towards representation is about to come under critique: “The picture was roughly similar: the features were Nina’s, but cold, crude. Her lightly upwardly curving brows were so fetching precisely because they were in a face that was almost too soft; a harsher critic might have found her neck somewhat wanting in slenderness – but something in the way her head was balanced upon it lent a charming je ne sais quoi of feminine helplessness … This was one of those embarrassing portraits about which one can say: it contains an inventory of the subject’s face, but betrays the soul of the painter.”26 The painting is imitative, not imaginative, but it is a misrepresentation in its imitation. The “inventory” of the face has no “soul” or life of its own, as is made clear by the oxymoronic descriptions: the narrator goes onto describe the fire in the painted subject’s eyes as cold; the definition of the eyebrows is common. Every potential point at which the dialogical aesthetic moment – that call to the other – might occur is quashed. There is neither humility nor artistic daring in this ­painting. It is a lifeless representation, and the beautiful imperfections of the living Nina are replaced with the meretricious strokes of hollow opulence. If Zorzi’s approach inflicts metaphorical violence on art and reality, then the slash through the canvas brings this metaphorical assault into the narrative “real” world. Nina even comments: “Get it out of my sight … it reminds me only of anger and brutality.”27 It is not entirely clear what anger and brutality are being referenced here: it could be something to do with the infamous violence of Nina’s “Protector,” Camposagrado. A page earlier, Zorzi alludes to Camposagrado’s temper: “in a fit of rage and jealousy, he bit off the head of a live rare bird – sent a day before by her Jewish admirer, Mr dalla Torre.”28 It is likely that Camposagrado, in his rage, also slashed the painting (probably commissioned by dalla Torre, as N1 suggests).

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But Zorzi, too, seems to be a culprit here in the sense that his painting does not move beyond mirroring his own soul, and only his own soul. That is perhaps why the painting is also a striking image of vanity in both senses of the word: it is the emptiness and futility of a narcissistic mirroring that is trapped in its self-­referentiality, unsuited to the dialogical aesthetic moment. One might counter that, in other texts, Hofmannsthal uses similar language: the soul of the painter is present, for instance, in Van Gogh’s paintings. Similarly, in the 1902 essay “Diese Rundschau” (This review), Hofmannsthal writes: “Correct: viewing the work of art as a continuous emanation of a personality, as happening now, illuminations which cast a soul into the world … We all, every one of us, can dissolve what we have made. To make it unending again. We do not keep silent.”29 But the soul in the portrait of Nina is not thrust into the world, it is self-centred (like Zorzi). Zorzi’s painting is not beautiful because, although the portrait resembles Nina (who is beautiful), it does not resonate with the viewer; it does not challenge or provoke Andreas, nor does it send him on a journey so that he might return to himself. It is ugly not because it is unpleasant, but because it is lifeless, in spite of being lifelike: the product of an all too tight grip on reality, the self,30 and profit. The otherness that is necessary for a work of art to stand on its own is absent here; so too is the “world” which the artwork needs.31 There is no “other” in the painting to call or command; in short, it is not beautiful. And Andreas says as much when asked his opinion: “I find it very like the subject, and very ugly.”32

D o g s a n d O t h e r A b j ect Creatures As a work of art, the painting is hollow, but as a literary symbol, it is a powerful recapitulation of a cycle of violence directed at both art and life. It depicts just how pervasive and indiscriminate violence can be, ignoring boundaries of person or fate. Camposagrado’s violence recalls Gotthelff’s, but Andreas himself is part of this triumvirate, and functions as “the locus of foreign fates.”33 Both notes and fragment suggest that Andreas’s past is besmirched with episodes of sadism, coupled with an identification with his victims.34 For Andreas, the sadistic acts he recalls are a source of shame – even when he is not quite sure he committed these acts in actuality. His capacity to imagine committing them is enough to make him feel culpable. Tied to this is a repetition compulsion: he desires

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to relive these events in order that he might once again sense that feeling of endlessness achieved in the moment of identification (with the victims). The secondary literature and Hofmannsthal’s own notes on the text make quite clear that Gotthelff is, among other things, a part of Andreas, expressing and performing those destructive and violent desires that the young man does not wish to act upon himself. Gotthelff represents one – or perhaps many – of Andreas’s fragments: the seducer, the arsonist, and the animal abuser. The dog, for Hofmannsthal, unites in one image the condition of the artist and the demands of ethics.35 In the case of Andreas, those demands become inescapable. The fate of the Finazzer-family dog, it turns out, reimagines a scene from Andreas’s adolescence. While walking one day, a dog crosses the youth’s path. Andreas is immediately struck: “The humility with which it looked at its master from their first encounter onwards was incomprehensible.”36 As discussed in chapter 3, humility before the incomprehensible and unattainable is a key component for Hofmannsthal’s understanding of art; but where the viewer (and the artist) must approach people and things with humility, here it is the dog approaching Andreas with humility. But the humility is not reciprocal in this instance, and when one day the twelve-year-old Andreas discovers that “his” dog does not exhibit this submissive behaviour to Andreas alone, but behaves the same before another (dominant) dog, the boy’s rage and jealousy become uncontainable – and that incomprehensible humility becomes a site of contact with the eternal: The fury rose up in him, he called the little dog over. At ten paces, the dog was already aware of his master’s ­wrathful mien and came crawling towards him, his trembling gaze riveted on Andres’s face. He scorned the dog, calling him a low and corruptible creature, and under the scorn the dog crept nearer and nearer: it seemed to him that he raised his foot and struck the spine from above with the heel of his shoe. It seemed to him – the little dog gave a short cry of pain and crumpled, but he wagged his tail at him. He turned suddenly and left, the little dog crept behind him, his back was broken, in spite of that he slid after his master, like a snake. Finally, he stopped, the little dog gazed up at him, and died, fawning. He was not sure whether he had done it or not; but it emanates from him. In this way, the infinite touches him.37

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The event is all the more disturbing for the calm and objective tone with which it is described. Yet throughout the entire passage there is a tension between this objective quality and how the event unfolds. The contrast between master and dog could not be clearer: high and low, fury and fear, authority and obedience, perpetrator and victim. And all of this is set up in a structure of call and response that comes from an overflow of energy: he calls the dog to him, to where the fury rises up in him, and upon seeing his master’s face the dog lowers himself, “crawling.” Almost every sentence begins with a focus on Andreas’s action and then depicts the dog’s response. Only the sentence that begins “At ten paces” focuses first on the dog; and this is still a response to the preceding sentence, “he called the little dog over to him.” This call/response structure increases in tension as the distance between Andreas and the dog closes, while the discrepancy between submission and domination grows. Fear and humility pull the dog down, while the boy’s wrath – like fire – burns upwards. The dog approaches humbly, while the boy reviles and humiliates his dog. They match each other in intensity; but at the moment of contact, marked by the colon, the vision becomes muddied. One can only see with the aid of distance. And here, Hofmannsthal’s use of converging perspectives signals the encounter: neither narrator nor Andreas really knows what happened. Two sentences, both introduced by the hesitant phrase “it seemed to him,” and both marked by their use of the subjunctive mood, express the unspeakable nature of the event. While the call and response structure of the passage imitates dialogue, the content of what happened resists direct, indicative discourse. Analogous to the aesthetic encounter, this encounter with the infinite defies objective description. And perhaps because the scene is so terrible, it must be dampened through a kind of dissociation or forgetting. As trauma victims sometimes cannot recall the moment of trauma in words or images, so Andreas cannot clearly recall what happened in that moment. It seemed to him that he raised his foot and trampled the dog’s spine under his heel. According to Robert Boehringer, the editor of the 1938 edition of Hofmannsthal’s and George’s correspondence, the real break between the two poets occurred when the seventeen-year-old Hofmannsthal witnessed George violently kick a stray dog, yelling at it as it whimpered and ran away.38 The situation that Andreas recalls is made more complex by the proliferation of what seem to be mixed signals: in spite of the pain, the dog “wedelte.” The verb “wedeln” typically refers to a gesture of

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excitement: in English, tail wagging or fawning. This might suggest a masochistic tendency, the deep-rooted character of happy submission: The dog did cry out, but he wagged his tail and followed his master despite the injury. The dog is also a kind of Philoctetes, or Oedipus: an image of suffering, walking, on the verge of death. The moment of contact between high and low is announced not with a bang, but a whimper. That this contact occurs at the level of the feet is significant. Andreas did not strike the dog with his hand or a stick. He trampled the dog’s back under the heel of his shoe.39 But feet have another significance in Andreas: They are associated with women Andreas has been romantically attracted to. Like Anton Reiser and Wilhelm Meister before him, Andreas loved the theatre as boy on the cusp of pubescence. Its allure for him was concentrated into a single fetishized object: The floor of the stage was uneven: the curtain was too short in some places, riding boots came and went … between the bridge of a contrabass and the head of a musician, one could see the feet of a lion, or – once – a bespangled sky-blue shoe. This sky-blue shoe was more wondrous than anything else – later there stood a creature who had this shoe on, it belonged to her, was one with her blue and silver robe: she was a princess, dangers surrounded her, dark figures, torches, a magical forest … all of that was lovely but it was not that double-edged sword of most delicate delight and profane desire that went through the soul, unto tears, when the blue shoe was there alone beneath the curtain.40 W.G. Sebald remarked that this passage exemplifies the connection between the forbidden delights of art and fetishism.41 Repressed art returns in strange ways: here it is the “forbidden” theatre (of which Andreas’s parents did not approve) – and the dangerous delights associated with it. Romana re-awakens this image at various instances, as when she suggestively touches the bedframe with the tips of her toes, just before she and Andreas kiss. Andreas later imagines her bare feet pulled up under her gown.42 But in a dream, a heavy left foot prevents him from reaching her, as she runs barefoot in the Viennese Spiegelgasse – with its suggestion of psychological mirroring. In this dream, the image of the dog and its broken spine return, but now as a cat: “It was the cat whose spine he had once struck with a carriage

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shaft and which would not die: and so she still was not dead, after so many years! … It’s no use, he must pass her, with unspeakable anguish he lifted his heavy left foot above the animal whose spine moved incessantly in serpentine fashion up and down, and the cat twisted its head and fixed its gaze on him, the roundness of the cat’s head with its simultaneously feline and canine face, filled with voluptuousness and agony in a grisly confusion – he wants to scream, at which point there is a scream inside, in the room.”43 As is not uncommon with Hofmannsthal, a symbol used often turns in on itself, like the cat’s twisted head, hinting at that great span that exists between and connects eros and thanatos: from desire to transcendence to violence. The violence of contact goes deeper. It is also figured in a dreammemory that suggests that Andreas was molested as a child: “A gaze which the boy dreaded more than any other, the gaze of his first ­catechist, shot through him and the dreaded little plump hand seized him, the repulsive face of a boy, who in the evening twilit hour on the back stairs told him what he did not wish to hear, pressed against his cheek, and how he struggled to push it away, there lay before the door, through which he had to pass in order to follow Romana, a creature and began to move towards him: it was the cat.”44 The cat, a symbol of eros and thanatos, blocks the door, just as Gotthelff’s foot earlier had blocked Andreas from closing his door. Andreas seems to be both a victim and a perpetrator of violence.45 From a psychoanalytic point of view, this helps to explain Andreas’s cruelty towards animals, as well as the erotic undertone in that violence. Andreas re-enacts the trauma, but he takes on the dominant role of agent (or master). It is a kind of lex talionis that has undergone transference: survivors of cruelty deal the blows of “justice” too late, and not on the original perpetrators, but on those who come after. The logic of trauma in Andreas operates the same way; the victim perpetuates the violence on an object perceived to be a threat to the subject’s authority, such as young Andreas’s little dog, which showed fealty to another dog, casting doubt on Andreas’s authority. But, as Hofmannsthal wrote in “Moments in Greece,” quoting the classicist Gilbert Murray: there is vengeance in heaven for an injured dog (εἰδὶ καὶ κυνῶν ἐρινύες). “The Conversation about Poems” offers an analog to the experience and perpetration of violence, namely in the moment of identification between the sacrificial victim and the person performing the ritual. Just as readers and audience members are “co-creators” of works of art, so too may victims of violence become co-producers of violence;

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this is the awful rite into which Andreas was initiated as a boy; this was his catechism. And it has indeed been given an aura of the “sacred” – that is, it is set apart. These events aspire towards eternity, towards being set outside of time and apart from the “real” life experienced in its chronic linearity. The trauma becomes, in a sense, unreal, because it was not experienced as happening in time; this is why its narration occurs in the contexts of memories and dreams. Elaine Scarry refers to this as “world-ridding”: “It is in part this world-­ ridding, path-clearing logic that explains the obsessive presence of pain in the rituals of large, widely shared religions … [and] why, though it occurs in widely different contexts and cultures, the metaphysical is insistently coupled with the physical with the equally insistent exclusion of the middle term, world.”46 Such world-ridding aspiration to eternity is relived in the moment the boy Andreas senses the rift from the real world in that violence which emanated from him: “He was not sure whether he had done it or not; but it emanates from him. In this way, the infinite touches him.”47 That moment of freedom from the temporal world is one of the hallmarks of the aesthetic, and heightened sensitivity to stimuli is the hallmark of the aesthete. To sense the touch of the infinite requires just such a heightened sensitivity. The downside is that undesired stimuli can seem louder and harsher, too. In the Finazzer home, before falling asleep, Andreas hears Romana’s mother and father in the room next door, as well as their dog, and recalls his childhood: “His senses were sharpened and he could hear that the farmer’s wife was braiding her hair while they conversed, and that the dog was gnawing away at something. Who feeds a dog at this hour of the night, the thought occurred to him, and at the same moment he felt pressed, as if he had to return to his childhood, when he still had the small room next to his parents and would overhear them through the recessed wardrobe whether he wanted to or not. He did not want to hear now either, and yet he heard.”48 The artist is indeed supposed to have a heightened sensibility, and this is also what allows the artist to feel the suffering of others. After this reminiscence and fantasizing about a happy future with Romana, he sees the dog in the courtyard: “The dog stood in the centre of the light, held his head strangely at an angle, turned in circles: it was as if he were enduring a great suffering, perhaps he was old and near death. Andres [sic] was beset with a dull sadness, he was tremendously ­distressed by the sufferings of the creature – when he was just now so

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happy – as if in this vision he were reminded of his father’s approaching death. He stepped away from the window, now he could think of his Romana.”49 For Andreas, empathy is an affliction. Not yet able to handle these overwhelming feelings for the suffering of the “creature,” he turns away from it. The circles traced by the dog suggest that Andreas, too, might well be turning in circles, only to confront again (or again avoid) traumatic events.50 Andreas’s experience of suffering either replicates itself on the abject, or is displaced into dreams, which then begin to dissolve the edges of reality. Writing about torture, Elaine Scarry says: “The physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of ‘incontestable reality’ on that power that has brought it into being. It is of course precisely because the reality of that power is so highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used.”51 Andreas’s desire for his lack of agency (the experience of being touched against his will) to be unreal is reaffirmed in the desire for the agency to be real in that moment of perpetrating violence; but it is, ironically, only destruction. This circle is a vicious one. Although Andreas’s hypersensitivity is felt as an affliction, it does present a chance to transcend the repetition of violence: pain has the capacity to awaken a sense of shame and humility. The site of this awakening is, appropriately, the feet, which in turn are connected to Hofmannsthal’s definition of beauty. The polysemy of the foot becomes apparent when one considers the differences between Andreas and his mentor, Sacramozo. In N60 Sacramozo recounts two dreams he has had, the first of which features bare feet: “I. he resided in the palace. The tolling of a bell. The cock’s crow, A second one. He stands up barefoot. He feels through the soles of his feet everything all the way down into the mountain.”52 The elemental connection to the earth occurs at the contact point between the bare foot and the ground’s surface. That connection reaches – paradoxically – “down” into the mountain. This is a thing of beauty, combining humility and boldness, the depths and the heights. The word “schön” even appears at the end of this first dream: “On the other side, silvered ancestors step from out of the mountain wall, an image so beautiful that he cried out in his dream: ‘I am dreaming!’”53 The passage evokes the aesthetic imperative as it is described in the “Address”: “This demand is so immense only because that which in us is prepared to meet it is itself so boundlessly great: the collected

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powers of the mysterious line of ancestors within us.”54 The second dream, however, speaks to Sacramozo’s sense of guilt and his desire to escape it: Sacramozo flies through (“durchfliegt”) the landscape, brooks, and cemeteries, echoing Andreas’s early aimless springing, leaping, and bounding through the landscape at the Finazzer farmyard: “finally he [Andreas] sprang from himself as if from a prison, he leapt in bounds and knew nothing of himself but the moment.”55 The attempt to avoid the command of the earth’s pull is either achieved in dream (as in Sacramozo’s flight) or in dissociation. Neither flight lasts. In seeking to escape the present and himself, Andreas finds himself at the grave of the dog Gotthelff had killed; and Sacramozo, in his second dream, breaks that connection to the earth (like the apparition of Plato gliding above the ground in “Moments in Greece”). But his flight suffers: “his flight already dull … now the cock crows. He knows it is the third time and Knows [sic] that he has betrayed his saviour.”56 The aesthetic exemplified in the beautiful image of ancestors before the barefooted Sacramozo, and the holiness that he denounced, come together again in several related notes concerning Andreas: N148: What kind of light is this. Clear transparent: the life of branches in this light: the distance as an exhilarating feeling. He disrobes and bathes in the river. A frightful moment, as he loses the ground beneath his feet. N149: while stepping into the water, naked, he believes he sees Romana doing the same He gives himself a fright. In the meantime, she is gone. He renounces her, so sure is he of her. He lived through one of the happiest days of his life and he did not know it. N150: After bathing and after losing consciousness: “He ­carried shoe and stockings in his hands and walked with ­bleeding feet across the meadow.”57 These three notes show how the elements of the aesthetic moment (such as the “exhilarating feeling” and “frightful moment” in N148) suffuse an event that has its nexus at the feet. The fear – even the loss of consciousness – that comes from losing one’s footing occurs in the aesthetic moment, as has been made clear in previous texts. This moment is not an encounter with a work of art, but it is an aesthetically informed way of encountering and experiencing the world. This is why Andreas can now perceive the life of the branches in the trees.

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The final words relating to the event speak to the asymptotic movement of aesthetics and ethics as they near each other: Andreas “walked with bleeding feet across the meadow.” Whatever Hofmannsthal might have been planning to do with this episode, it ends with a reference to pain, suffering, and humility: those qualities of the aesthetic that can never be erased from the work of art, but about which it can give no specific commentary – it can only bear witness. As is typical for Hofmannsthal, that moment of suffering is connected to piety. Sacramozo’s renunciation of the connection to the earth has been countered by Andreas’s bleeding feet. Like the Discalced Carmelites, whose bare feet are a sign of a life dedicated to poverty, Andreas accepts the pain of earth’s pull as he lifts his bare feet one at a time and sets them on the ground, again and again.

A B e a u t if u l F ai lure In a letter to Gershom Scholem from 1938, Benjamin characterized Kafka’s “failure” thus: “To do justice to the figure of Kafka in its purity and its peculiar beauty one must never lose sight of one thing: it is the purity and beauty of a failure. The circumstances of this failure are manifold. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual ­failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream. There is nothing more memorable than the fervor with which Kafka emphasized his failure.”58 Hofmannsthal, too, was keenly aware of his failure with Andreas. He knew that art in and of itself cannot make us ethical, and that aesthetics cannot be a handmaiden to ethics, nor vice versa. But his writings hold out a hope that the aesthetic encounter can still be an Erlebnis: A lived experience that destabilizes audiences and readers, and demands that they take steps to respond with a recognition of their shared human condition – that is, stepping out of their selfinflicted immaturity and self-absorption. At its best, Hofmannsthal’s work is not prescriptive; rather, it is experiential. It is suffused with unnamed ethical concerns that cannot be shaken off, and these are almost always linked to or encased in the question of the effect of the aesthetic on human beings. In another author’s hands, Andreas might have depicted the Bildung of its protagonist. But Hofmannsthal never completed a Bildungsroman. The failure adequately to depict a marriage of aesthetics and ethics in an imagined “real life” is a beautiful failure: beautiful in the sense that Hofmannsthal intended when he wrote of beautiful works of art: “For

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such an entitlement to nourish themselves from our inner being we do grant them when we call them ‘beautiful.’ There is no word loftier, no word more dangerous. It is the word which binds most deeply.”59 It is a beautiful failure that recognizes the aesthetic responsibility of letting oneself go and providing instead a space for art; and it is a beautiful failure because, to use the language of ethics, it provokes its readers into engaging with it as something totally other. Beautiful is that failure which cannot help but try to imagine the impossible. Art is insistently “other.” And in this otherness of art, there is space for an ethical moment in the encounter, which cannot be translated or realized, but must be acknowledged. That is the aporia. But it is also why Hofmannsthal writes: “We feel the plunge of existence. We assume nothing. From ourselves we spin out the thread that carries us across the abyss, and sometimes we are blissful as wisps of cloud in the evening sky. We create our language in tandem with others, each quickening the other. We carry within us a vision, an affliction, a face, a tone … We do not keep silent.”60 Art speaks, as long as people are prepared to hear.

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Notes

I nt r o d uc t i o n   1 When citing Hofmannsthal’s work, I refer most often to the recently ­completed critical edition of the collected works: Sämtliche Werke (Kritische Ausgabe). When referring to an entire volume, rather than a ­specific work printed in the volume, I use the abbreviation ka followed by the volume number, a colon, and a short title of the volume (e.g., ka  40: Bibliothek). Volume titles are listed in full in the bibliography. In cases where I did not have access to the more recently published volumes of the critical edition, I cite two older but widely available editions, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden and Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben.   2 Payne and Barbera, A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, 16.   3 Schwarz, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Rainer Maria Rilke,” 165. Some recent translations include: Alexander Stillmark’s Hugo Von Hofmannsthal: Select Narrative Prose, from 2020; my own Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Writings on Art / Schriften zur Kunst, from 2017; David S. Luft’s Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses, 1906–27, from 2011; and J.D. McClatchy’s The Whole Difference: Selected Writings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, from 2008. With forty volumes of material, there is still very much left to translate.   4 By 1914, Hofmannsthal’s poetry had already entered the canon, even by international standards, as evidenced by the series “The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English,” edited by German-American educator Kuno Francke. Four years later, in 1918, the American author Charles Wharton Stork published an almost complete translation of Hofmannsthal’s Gesammelte Gedichte under the title The Lyrical Poems of Hofmannsthal, comprising his lyric poetry until 1907.

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  5 Hofmannsthal, “Sunt animae rerum,” 25.   6 “Drum flieh aus deinem Selbst, dem starren, kalten, / Des Weltalls Seele dafür einzutauschen, / Lass dir des Lebens wogende Gewalten, / Genuss und Qualen, durch die Seele rauschen, / Und kannst du eine Melodie erlauschen, / So strebe, ihren Nachhall festzuhalten!” Ibid.   7 Thomas Kovach’s Hofmannsthal and Symbolism: Art and Life in the Work of a Modern Poet and Robert Vilain’s The Poetry of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and French Symbolism treat this topic at length.   8 For more on this characterization, see Douglas A. Joyce’s contribution, “Hofmannsthal Reception in the Twentieth Century” in A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal.   9 Allan Janik’s representation of Hofmannsthal’s work in Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited exemplifies this view: “The cultural manifestation of this flight from society … typified the works of Hofmannsthal from his early world-weary lyricism to his later fairy-tale plays of social regeneration after the war, which would create a refuge from the real world for the alienated aesthete.” Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited, 39. Janik does not provide textual evidence for this assertion, and his allusion to Hofmannsthal’s “fairy-tale plays” is a misnomer. Hofmannsthal’s ­fairy-tale opera, on the other hand, calls up disturbing events that veterans of the First World War would have recognized. Janik’s comments adopt a narrative initially disseminated by Hofmannsthal’s contemporary, the critic Karl Kraus (1874–1936). 10 “Die sämtlichen merkwürdigen Bücher von d’Annunzio hatten ihr Befremdliches, ja wenn man will ihr Entsetzliches und Grauenhaftes darin, daß sie von einem geschrieben waren, der nicht im Leben stand. Der sie geschrieben hatte, wußte alle Zeichen des Lebens: wundervoll wußte er sie alle, und doch glaube ich heute, er war bis jetzt kein großer Dichter, überhaupt kein Dichter. Aber er war von der ersten Zeile an ein ­außerordentlicher Künstler.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 233. 11 Although the term “object-oriented” is suggestive of more recent posthumanist, objected-oriented ontologies, the moment discussed here has a distinct genealogy. Adorno summarizes the fascination with objects (“things”) well: “Instead of things yielding as symbols of subjectivity, ­subjectivity yields as the symbol of things, prepares itself to rigidify ­ultimately into the thing which society has in any case made of it.” (Anstatt daß die Dinge als Symbol der Subjektivität nachgäben, gibt Subjektivität nach als Symbol der Dinge, bereit, in sich selber schließlich zu dem Ding zu erstarren, zu dem sie von der Gesellschaft ohnehin

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gemacht wird.) Adorno, “The George-Hofmannsthal Correspondence,” 223; “George und Hofmannsthal,” 234. Though not specified by Adorno, for Hofmannsthal the relationship is more reciprocal: just as the thing ­animates the subject (viewer), so the viewer animates the thing. In the ­aesthetic experience, the two are mutually dependent and mutually distinct. 12 Committed art is not to be equated with propaganda: “Even if politically motivated, commitment in itself remains politically polyvalent so long as it is not reduced to propaganda, whose pliancy mocks any commitments by the subject.” (Engagement als solches, sei’s auch politisch gemeint, ­bleibt politisch vieldeutig, solange es nicht auf eine Propaganda sich reduziert, deren willfährige Gestalt alles Engagement des Subjekts ­verhöhnt.) Adorno, “Commitment,” 3; “Engagement,” 410. 13 In Kierkegaard’s various depictions of the demonic, there is always a clear temporal marker: suddenness. Suddenness represents the solipsistic ­opposite of continuity (associated with community). In the Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard writes “the demonic is the sudden” – but this is only one ­attribute of many that Kierkegaard posits, and it is difficult to understand without its counterpart notion, “reserve”: “Reserve shuts itself off ever more from communication. But communication is in turn the expression of continuity, and the negation of continuity is the sudden.” Kierkgeaard, Concept of Anxiety, 154, 156. Suddenness is “reserve” understood ­temporally. Language, on the other hand, is not about “reservedness,” but rather communication. For this reason, it is “subject to ethical ­categories.” Music, by contrast, has “the erotic sensual genius” as its object: “In other words, music is the demonic.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 75. 14 See the section “Für immer stolz und glücklich, diesem Volk anzugehören” in the program to Österreichs Antwort (exhibition concept by Katja Kaluga). Hofmannsthal’s initial enthusiasm for the war waned with time, and by 1917 he was thoroughly disillusioned. In a letter to the countess Ottonie Degenfeld from 1923, he writes: “With horror, I see now from the ­memoirs of Paléologue, together with those of Tirpitz, and now those of Conrad, that we – Berlin and Vienna – are completely to blame for the outbreak of this war.” (Mit Grausen sehe ich aus den Memoiren von Paléologue, zusammengehalten mit denen von Tirpitz, jetzt mit denen von Conrad, daß die ganze Schuld am eigentlichen Ausbruch bei uns liegt, Berlin u. Wien). This letter is quoted in the Epilogue of Österreichs Antwort. 15 Hofmannsthal finds an unlikely ally in the thought of Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse: “The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension. Its relation to praxis is inexorably indirect, mediated, and frustrating. The more immediately political the work of art, the more

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it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical transcendent goals of change.” The German reads slightly differently: “Nur in ihr selbst liegt ihr politisches Potential. Ihre Beziehung zur verändernden Praxis ist ­unentrinnbar ‘indirekt,’ vermittelt, frustrierend. Je unmittelbarer, direkter, expliziter politisch ein Werk sein will, desto weniger wird es revolutionär, subversiv sein.” Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, 70; Die Permanenz der Kunst, 9. Hofmannsthal’s relation to the Frankfurt School and critical theory is an unexplored, but promising topic, especially given Hofmannsthal’s ­correspondence with and early championing of Walter Benjamin. 16 “Politik ist Menschenkunde, Kunst des Umgangs auf einer höheren Stufe. Ein irrationales Element spielt hier mit … wer verborgenen Kräfte anzureden weiss, dem gehorchen sie. So offenbart sich der grosse ­politische Mensch. Vom Dichter ist es genug, wenn er die Mächte ahnt und mit untrüglichem Gefühl auf sie hinweist.” Hofmannsthal, “Grillparzers Politisches Vermächtnis,” 406. The above translation is my own. The entire essay can be found in English in David Luft’s Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea, 73–8. 17 Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 12. 18 See Anderson, “1963: Love as Fascism,” 882. This assessment rests uneasy with the fact that Hofmannsthal wrote and published drama and essays consistently throughout his writing career, even before his l­yrical output tapered off. The argument hinges on one’s definition of “socially engaged,” but Anderson does not go into specifics. 19 Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, 114. 20 Kovach, A Companion to the Works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 4. 21 The “call” in art and literature has a long history, and in the context of Aestheticism, the ethical relevance of this call gains traction. Elaine Scarry notes that many ancient and medieval writers (Homer, Plato, and Dante, among many others) considered beauty to be a kind of greeting or call. See Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, 25, 126. Hofmannsthal’s prose tale “Die Wege und die Begegnungen” (Paths and Encounters) presents a ­similar idea: “A greeting is something boundless. Dante dates his ‘Vita Nuova’ to a greeting.” (Ein Gruß ist etwas Grenzenloses. Dante datiert sein ‘Neues Leben’ von einem Gruß.) Hofmannsthal, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 160. 22 “denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.” Rilke, “Archäischer Torso Apollos,” 557. 23 “Es führt kein direkter Weg ins Leben, aus dem Leben keiner in die Poesie. Das Wort als Träger eines Lebensinhaltes und das traumhafte Bruderwort,

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welches in einem Gedicht stehen kann, streben auseinander und schweben wie fremd aneinander vorüber, wie die beiden Eimer eines Brunnens. Kein äußerliches Gesetz verbannt aus der Kunst alles Vernünfteln, alles Hadern mit dem Leben, jeden unmittelbaren Bezug auf das Leben und jede direkte Nachahmung des Lebens, sondern die einfache Unmöglichkeit: diese schweren Dinge können dort ebensowenig leben als eine Kuh in den Wipfeln der Bäume.” Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 16. 24 “Heureux celui qui peut d’une aile vigoureuse / S’élancer vers les champs lumineux et sereins; / Celui dont les pensers, comme des alouettes, / Vers les cieux le matin prennent un libre essor, / – Qui plane sur la vie, et ­comprend sans effort / Le langage des fleurs et des choses muettes!” Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 17; Les Fleurs du mal, 12. 25 “Wie zeug ich dich aber im heiligtume / – So fragt ich wenn ich es sinnend durchmaß / In kühnen gespinsten der sorge vergaß – / Dunkle große schwarze blume?” George, Hymnen, Pilgerfahrten, Algabal, 96. 26 For the important role of forgetting and not being able to forget, see Matussek, “Tod und Transzendenz.” Similarly, Mayer notes that, in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos), the titular character cannot forget. Mayer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 103. Another opera, Die ägyptische Helena (The Egyptian Helen) also engages with the conflicting desires to forget and to remember. Moreover, memory has an ethical import for Hofmannsthal: see his annotation to Freud’s Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (Psychopathology of Everyday Life): “Forgetfulness from disregard for the other.” (Vergesslichkeit aus Geringschätzung des Andern.) Hofmannsthal, KA 40: Bibliothek, 214; *fdh 1308. The marker *fdh refers to the catalogue number in the Freies deutsches Hochstift in Frankfurt. 27 “Schön ist mein Garten mit den goldnen Bäumen.” Hofmannsthal, “Mein Garten,” 20. 28 Tellingly, one of the earlier titles of the poem is “Midas’ Garten.” See Hofmannsthal, ka 1: Gedichte I, 135. The motif of gold will be ­discussed in the subsequent chapters. 29 Throughout his book, Schorske characterizes art at the turn of the century as a site of avoidance. Consider his comments on Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze: “This psychological posture is classic for the weakened ego finding in f­ antasy a substitute for power over reality: wish is king; encounter is avoided.” Describing the aesthetic experience, he writes: “It gives form to the feelings arising out of experience, but not to the experience itself. By the very fact of standing for life, art separates us from it.” Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 258, 311. Schorske is charitable towards

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Hofmannsthal, whom he characterizes as having “sought to return art to ethics, aesthetic culture to society, and his cultivated class to fruitful participation in the body social.” Ibid. On the one hand, Hofmannsthal “returned to revitalize a traditional morality of personal responsibility; on the other, he thrust forward toward depth psychology and the ­affirmation of instinct … Hofmannsthal had rescued the function of art from the hedonistic isolation into which his class had carried it and had tried to redeem society through art’s reconciling power. But the rifts in the body social had proceeded too far. Society could tolerate tragedy or comedy, but not redemption through aesthetic harmonization.” Ibid., 313, 318. I am not entirely convinced Hofmannsthal was as consistently ­optimistic about art’s potential as Schorske makes him out to be. For more on Hofmannsthal’s doubts, see my discussion of Andreas in ­chapter 5 of this book. 30 Cf. Katherine Arens’s portrayal: “Hofmannsthal is by no means simply looking backwards (as critics like Michael Steinberg argue), but rather continuing a long-term project begun at the start of his career: the ­renovation of western traditions for a new generation … these essays [the late essays] document Hofmannsthal’s hopes for a cosmopolitan art that was not elitist or nationalist – an art that mediates rather than excludes because it grows from the historical experience of the group, not just from an elite.” Arens, “Hofmannsthal’s Essays,” 182. Egon Schwarz, with his expansive comparative work from 1962, Hofmannsthal und Calderon, makes a similar point about Hofmannsthal’s use of literary traditions. 31 Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 45.

C hapt e r O n e   1 Carsten Strathausen posits that the gaze and its reversal is one of the ­central themes in fin-de-siècle literature. “The look of things,” he ­summarizes, “refers to the – possibly deceptive – visual appearance of external objects, but also evokes the power of everything to look back at us once we have learned to look at it.” Strathausen, The Look of Things, 27. Strathausen’s primary example is Rilke, though Hofmannsthal’s work would serve his purposes equally well. Strathausen does discuss Hofmannsthal in the context of the relation between speech and silence.   2 Quotes in English are from Heim’s translation in McClatchy’s The Whole Difference, unless otherwise stated. For brevity, I use the shortened title, “The Tale.”

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  3 The merchant’s son contrasts with other figures in Hofmannsthal’s oeuvre who are witness to, or objects of, degradation: Gianino in the lyrical drama Der Tod des Tizian (The Death of Titian) and the Empress in both opera and prose versions of Die Frau ohne Schatten are humanized and strengthened by their encounters with grime, ugliness, and poverty.   4 Charles Hammond’s sensitive readings of Hofmannsthal’s relation to Aestheticism and Decadence offer strong support for a moral ending: the merchant’s son’s Aestheticism, Hammond argues, “ultimately ­provokes society into exacting its own revenge against him.” Hammond, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Das Märchen,” 447. This is a valid reading, supported by the structure of the tale. That provocation, moreover, can come from within the individual: the antagonistic forces, for instance, include chance, which, according to Hofmannsthal’s views at the time, is motivated from within the self (not society). Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Richard Beer-Hofmann from 15 May 1895: “The fall of the cards … is something that one forces from the inside out; that is the deep, great truth of which Poldy’s story is meant to be a sign, and my Tale a childlike and crude allegory.” (Das Fallen der Karten … erzwingt man von innen her; das ist das tiefe grosse wahre wovon dem Poldy seine Geschichte ein ­hilfloses und mein Märchen ein kindlich rohes allegorisches Zeichen sein soll.) Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann, Briefwechsel, 48. Hofmannsthal refers in this letter to Leopold von Andrian’s novella, Der Garten der Erkenntnis (The Garden of Knowledge).   5 This is exemplified in the writings of Ernst Mach. The importance of Mach’s views was announced by Hermann Bahr in his 1903 essay, “Das unrettbare Ich” (The Unsalvageable Ego). Judith Ryan has treated the topic of impressionistic psychology at length in The Vanishing Subject.   6 Claudia Bamberg refers in this regard to the theatrum mundi of things. Bamberg, Hofmannsthal, 233.   7 Wolfgang Huemer argues that Husserl’s phenomenological reduction was inspired by a creative misunderstanding of Hofmannsthal’s ­portrayal of the ­aesthetic experience. Husserl would later understand the ­phenomenological reduction to lead only “to a solipsistic point of view that cannot provide a foundation to explain intersubjectivity.” Huemer, “Phenomenological Reduction,” 124. While I do not entirely agree with Huemer’s reading of Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos Letter – a text critical to his argument – as an expression of a language crisis, I accept the g­ eneral direction of his article, and, in particular, the ­importance placed on the problem of intersubjectivity, which also ­occupied Hofmannsthal.

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  8 See Wallenstein, “Phenomenology.”   9 “Epoche der Freundschaft mit Poldy (‘Kaufmannssohn’ ‘Garten der Erkenntnis’): das Hauptproblem dieser sehr merkwürdigen Epoche liegt darin, daß Poldy vollständig (ich weniger vollständig, sondern ausweichend, indem ich eine Art Doppelleben führte) das Reale übersah: er suchte das Wesen der Dinge zu spüren – das andere Gesicht der Dinge beachtete er nicht, er wollte es absichtlich nicht beachten, für nichts ansehen.” Hofmannsthal, Ad me ipsum, 244. 10 This is also the criticism Hofmannsthal levies against Oscar Wilde, whose works he nevertheless valued for their aesthetic brilliance. See his essay “Sebastian Melmoth.” For a thorough study of Hofmannsthal’s early views on Wilde’s aesthetics, see the dissertation by Charles H. Hammond, Jr, Blind Alleys. 11 “Das Leben … läßt seiner nicht spotten. Verstoßen wird es böse und ­rachsüchtig.” Aleweyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 175. For a brief overview of the literature related to “The Tale,” see Meyer, “Erzählter Körper.” Meyer’s focus on the creation of an artificial world reformulates Alewyn’s thesis. 12 “Ein junger Kaufmannssohn, der sehr schön war und weder Vater noch Mutter hatte, wurde bald nach seinem fünfundzwanzigsten Jahre der Geselligkeit und des gastlichen Lebens überdrüssig.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 39; “Das Märchen,” 15. 13 Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 39–40; “Das Märchen,” 15. 14 Cf. Rasch, Die literarische Décadence, particularly the sections on “Welthaß und Willensschwäche,” “Ästhetizismus,” and “Lebensferne und Isolierung.” Hermann Bahr offers a similar view: “The decadence of Montesquiou and Wilde is a flight of dilettantes, who have a correct feeling for art but who lack the creative power of the artist” (Die Décadence der Montesquiou und Wilde ist eine Ausflucht von Dilettanten, die ein rechtes Gefühl der Kunst, aber die schöpferische Kraft der Künstler nicht haben.) Bahr, “Décadence,” 172. 15 “Die Idiosynkrasie des lyrischen Geistes gegen die Übergewalt der Dinge ist eine Reaktionsform auf die Verdinglichung der Welt, der Herrschaft von Waren über Menschen.” Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 40; “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft,” 52. 16 The tension between the commercial and the aesthetic is central to “Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten” (translated and published in English as “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”), discussed in chapter 2. 17 In contrast, Hinrich Seeba argues that “Hofmannsthal and many of his contemporaries, who considered themselves members of the cultural elite,

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if not the ruling class, seemed to live in denial of the alarming signs of what was in store for them.” Seeba, “Hofmannsthal and Wiener Moderne,” 33. Yet even an early passage like this one in “The Tale” ­indicates otherwise: Hofmannsthal was more self-reflective (and perhaps self-parodic) than scholars like Seeba have given him credit for. 18 Cf. Alewyn, who writes of the character Claudio in Der Tor und der Tod (Death and the Fool): “Unable to experience anything, be it a thing or a familiar person [ein Du], unable to act, unable even to enjoy, he lives out his life without a world, without a fate, in the dungeon of his ego [sein Ich]. The beautiful life is transformed from blessing to curse.” (Unfähig, etwas zu erleben, weder ein Ding noch ein Du, unfähig zu handeln, unfähig auch nur zu genießen, lebt er ohne Welt und ohne Schicksal in dem Kerker seines Ichs dahin. Das schöne Leben verkehrt sich aus einem Segen in einen Fluch.) Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 68. The absence of a “you” – “du” in German, the ­second person singular ­pronoun of familiarity – will be of greater ­concern in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” and the later works. 19 “Ja, die Schönheit der Teppiche und Gewebe und Seiden, der geschnitzten und getäfelten Wände, der Leuchter und Becken aus Metall, der gläsernen und irdenen Gefäße wurde ihm so bedeutungsvoll, wie er es nie geahnt hatte. Allmählich wurde er sehend dafür, wie alle Formen und Farben der Welt in seinen Geräten lebten. Er erkannte in den Ornamenten, die sich verschlingen, ein verzaubertes Bild der ­verschlungenen Wunder der Welt … Er war für lange Zeit trunken von dieser großen, tiefsinnigen Schönheit, die ihm gehörte, und alle seine Tage bewegten sich schöner und minder leer unter diesen Geräten, die nichts Totes und Niedriges mehr waren, sondern ein großes Erbe, das göttliche Werk aller Geschlechter.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 39–40; “Das Märchen,” 15–16. 20 “Modern sind alte Möbel und junge Nervositäten.” Hofmannsthal, “Gabriele d’Annunzio (I),” 176. 21 “Doch er fühlte ebenso die Nichtigkeit aller dieser Dinge wie ihre Schönheit; nie verließ ihn auf lange der Gedanke an den Tod und oft befiel er ihn unter lachenden und lärmenden Menschen, oft in der Nacht, oft beim Essen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 40; “Das Märchen,” 16. 22 Similar baroque themes abound in Hofmannsthal’s earlier works, like Der Tor und der Tod (Death and The Fool) and Der Tod des Tizian (The Death of Titian). The 1911 play Jedermann (Everyman), performed annually at the Salzburg Festival, and the late tragedy Der Turm (The Tower) can also be read as meditations on ars moriendi/ars vivendi.

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23 “Er sagte: ‘Wo du sterben sollst, dahin tragen dich deine Füße,’ und sah sich schön, wie ein auf der Jagd verirrter König, in einem unbekannten Wald unter seltsamen Bäumen einem fremden wunderbaren Geschick ­entgegengehen. Er sagte: ‘Wenn das Haus fertig ist, kommt der Tod,’ und sah jenen langsam heraufkommen über die von geflügelten Löwen getragene Brücke des Palastes, des fertigen Hauses, angefüllt mit der ­wundervollen Beute des Lebens.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 40; “Das Märchen,” 16. In his 1901 novel Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann puts the latter saying (ostensibly a Turkish adage) into the mouth of Thomas Buddenbrooks, who, having finished his own house, senses imminent decline. The deeper connections between decline, fulfilment, and ­bourgeois establishment ­cannot be addressed here, but certainly deserve further exploration. 24 “mit einer unbestimmten, ihn quälenden Forderung, die der Kleineren mit einer ungeduldigen, dann wieder höhnischen Aufmerksamkeit, die ihn noch mehr quälte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44; “Das Märchen,” 19. 25 See Hammond, “Das Märchen,” 454. 26 “ihm war, sie sahen sein ganzes Leben an, sein tiefstes Wesen, seine geheimnisvolle menschliche Unzulänglichkeit … daß sie ihn zwangen, in einer unfruchtbaren und so ermüdenden Weise an sich selbst zu denken.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44; “Das Märchen,” 19. 27 See, e.g., Wunberg, Der frühe Hofmannsthal, 57–8. 28 McGowan’s translation. The original, which is printed alongside the ­translation, reads: “La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; / L’homme y passe à travers de forêts de symbols / Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.” Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 18–19. 29 See Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 210. 30 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s notes for an essay entitled “Diese Rundschau” (This review): “false: to regard every work of art as definitive; always to say: he gave that up, he’s turned to this, he sees only that; he thinks, ­therefore, this and that; false, the definitive / false: all simple antitheses like ‘art’ und ‘life,’ Aesthete and its opposite.” (falsch: jedes Kunstwerk als ­definitiv anzusehen; immer zu sagen: er hat das aufgegeben, er wendet sich jenem zu, er sieht nur das; er meint also das und das; falsch das ­definitive / falsch: alle billigen Antithesen wie ‘Kunst’ und ‘Leben,’ Aesthet und Gegentheil von Aesthet.) Hofmannsthal, “Diese Rundschau,” 234. 31 “Sie trug in jedem Arme eine schwere hagere indische Gottheit aus dunkler Bronze. Die verzierten Füße der Figuren hielt sie in der hohlen Hand, von der Hüfte bis an die Schläfe reichten ihr die dunklen Göttinnen

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und lehnten mit ihrer toten Schwere an den lebendigen zarten Schultern; die dunklen Köpfe aber mit dem bösen Mund von Schlangen, drei wilden Augen in der Stirn und unheimlichem Schmuck in den kalten, harten Haaren, bewegten sich neben den atmenden Wangen und streiften die schönen Schläfen im Takt der langsamen Schritte. Eigentlich aber schien sie nicht an den Göttinnen schwer und feierlich zu tragen, sondern an der Schönheit ihres eigenen Hauptes mit dem schweren Schmuck aus ­lebendigem, dunklem Gold, zwei großen gewölbten Schnecken zu beiden Seiten der lichten Stirn, wie eine Königin im Kriege.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44–5; “Das Märchen,” 20. 32 See Hofmannsthal’s own comments on narration: the narrator “least of all finds the courage to disentangle the weave of motifs; after all, he has just spent a great deal of energy tying together the external and internal content, thread by thread, leaving not a single one of these threads loose that someone might pull at.” (findet am wenigsten den Mut, das Gewebe der Motive aufzulösen; er hat ja gerade alle Mühe darangestellt, das Außen mit dem Innen, Faden um Faden zu verknüpfen und nirgends den Faden hängen zu lassen, den man herausziehen könnte.) Hofmannsthal, “Die ägyptische Helene,” 216. 33 “In the afternoon, before the sun fell, he would sit in his garden, ­spending most of the time with a book that recorded the wars of a very great king of the past.” (Am Nachmittag, bis die Sonne hinter den Bergen hinunterfiel, saß er in seinem Garten und las meist in einem Buch, in welchem die Kriege eines sehr großen Königs der Vergangenheit ­aufgezeichnet waren). Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 42–3; “Das Märchen,” 18. This is a reversal of the notion that art imitates life; here, life imitates art. 34 “Er wurde ergriffen von ihrer großen Schönheit, aber gleichzeitig wußte er deutlich, daß es ihm nichts bedeuten würde, sie in seinen Armen zu halten. Er wußte es überhaupt, daß die Schönheit seiner Dienerin ihn mit Sehnsucht, aber nicht mit Verlangen erfüllte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 45; “Das Märchen,” 20. 35 Gumbrecht, “Epiphanien,” 206. 36 Hair is frequently a symbol of danger and attraction in literature. See for instance Hammer-Purgstall’s poem “Kraftlosigkeit der Talismane” (The powerlessness of talismans), especially verses 7–12: “who can save me from these enchanted chains which locks of hair have placed me in?” (Wer aber kann mich retten / Vor jenen Zauberketten, / Die mir die Locken legen an?) Purgstall, Duftkörner, 137. 37 Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie des Unheimlichen,” 197.

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38 Meyer-Sickendieck, Affektpoetik, 316. 39 “den süßen Reiz zu ruhigem Besitz … welcher in der Schönheit seiner Dienerin lag, die ihn verwirrte und beunruhigte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 45; “Das Märchen,” 20. 40 “In den Stielen der Nelken, die sich wiegten, im Duft des reifen Kornes erregtest du meine Sehnsucht; aber als ich dich fand, warst du es nicht, die ich gesucht hatte, sondern die Schwester deiner Seele.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 45; “Das Märchen,” 20–1. 41 In “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”), Hofmannsthal characterizes the material of poetry as “a weightless weave of words” (ein gewichtloses Gewebe aus Worten). Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 15. 42 Much later, Hofmannsthal will compile a series of poetological reflections on his own writing. In one observation, he notes that, following the fall from totality (also called pre-existence, and understood as the condition of fatelessness, analogous to the fall from grace), there is a subsequent search for some equivalent. Human beings want to get back to the Garden. Hofmannsthal, Ad me ipsum, 217. See also the passage ­concerning Des Esseintes’s pursuit of scent in the tenth chapter of Huysmans’s novel of decadence, À rebours (Against the Grain): “Fatigued by the tenacity of this imaginary scent, he resolves to bury himself in real perfumes.” (Fatigué par la ténacité de cet imaginaire arôme, il résolut de se plonger dans des parfums véritables.) Huysmans, À rebours, 216. 43 Impressed by the story, Arthur Schnitzler questioned Hofmannsthal’s motivation for the title. In a letter written on 26 November 1895, Schnitzler suggests the story resembles a dream more than a fairy tale or “Märchen.” Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, Briefwechsel, 63–4. 44 Grundmann, Mein Leben, 11. 45 Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 79. 46 See, for example, Waltraud Wiethölther’s monograph, Geometrie des Subjekts, and Dorrit Cohn’s article, “Als Traum erzählt.” 47 Ursula Renner in “Pavillons, Glashäuser und Seitenwege” and Alexej Žerebin in “Der unheimliche Garten” have noted the anticipatory ­character of the first section, particularly with respect to the garden. The merchant’s son sits contentedly in his garden at home, until he senses his servants watching him. In the second garden (after the fall, as it were), the gaze takes on a malevolent character. For other examples of the use of the garden in fin-de-siècle literature, see Thomas Koebner, “Der Garten” and Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 265–303. 48 Žerebin explores the merchant’s son’s desire to control his surroundings, playing a sort of aesthete-king in his garden. But the accompanying

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feeling of anxiety that comes with the desire for possession and “Erkenntnis” remains unexplained: this anxiety permeates ­practically all of Hofmannsthal’s loci amoeni. Even in the poem “Der Kaiser von China spricht:” (The Emperor of China speaks:) the ambiguous last two lines (40–1) threaten to reverse the ­subject-object hierarchy of ­perspective: “unto the sea, the last wall, / ­surrounding my kingdom and myself.” (Bis ans Meer, die letzte Mauer, / Die mein Reich und mich umgibt.) Hofmannsthal, “Der Kaiser von China spricht:” 72. 49 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note from 1894: “The garden of dilettantes in the feuilltonistic spirit … Fleetingly, the intimation of latent harmonies drifts towards them.” (Der Dilettantengarten in feuilletonistischem Geist … Flüchtig weht sie die Ahnung latenter Harmonien an.) Hofmannsthal, “Aufzeichnungen aus dem Nachlaß,” 381. 50 “Der Kaufmannssohn … trat ein und fand eine solche Fülle seltener und merkwürdiger Narzissen und Anemonen und so seltsames, ihm völlig unbekanntes Blattwerk, daß er sich lange nicht sattsehen konnte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 49; “Das Märchen,” 24. 51 Cf. Book 3, lines 334–50 in Ovid, Metamorphoses, 109: “Liriope gave birth to a child, already adorable, / called Narcissus. In course of time she consulted the seer; / ‘Tell me,’ she asked, ‘will my baby live to a ripe old age?’ / ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘so long as he never knows himself’ – / empty words, as they long appeared, but the prophet was proved right. / In the event, Narcissus died of a curious passion.” 52 “Denn das Kind, das ihn regungslos und böse ansah, glich in einer ­unbegreiflichen Weise dem fünfzehnjährigen Mädchen, das er in seinem Hause hatte. Alles war gleich, die lichten Augenbrauen, die feinen ­bebenden Nasenflügel, die dünnen Lippen; wie die andere zog auch das Kind eine der Schultern etwas in die Höhe. Alles war gleich, nur daß in dem Kind das alles einen Ausdruck gab, der ihm Entsetzen verursachte. Er wußte nicht, wovor er so namenlose Furcht empfand. Er wußte nur, daß er es nicht ertragen werde, sich umzudrehen und zu wissen, daß ­dieses Gesicht hinter ihm durch die Scheiben starrte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 49; “Das Märchen,” 24–5. 53 “Wir sind fast alle in der einen oder anderen Weise in eine durch das Medium der Künste angeschaute stilisierte Vergangenheit verliebt. Es ist dies sozusagen unsere Art, in ideales, wenigstens in idealisiertes Leben ­verliebt zu sein.” Hofmannsthal, “Walter Pater,” 204. 54 “mit einem dumpfen Gefühle, wie Haß gegen die Sinnlosigkeit dieser Qualen, ging er.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 52; “Das Märchen,” 27.

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55 “Mit einer kindischen Sehnsucht erinnerte er sich an die Schönheit seines eigenen breiten Bettes, und auch die Betten fielen ihm ein, die der große König der Vergangenheit für sich und seine Gefährten errichtet hatte, als sie Hochzeit hielten mit den Töchtern der unterworfenen Könige, für sich ein Bett von Gold, für die anderen von Silber; getragen von Greifen und geflügelten Stieren.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 52; “Das Märchen,” 27. 56 “Er sagte: ‘Wenn das Haus fertig ist, kommt der Tod,’ und sah jenen langsam heraufkommen über die von geflügelten Löwen getragene Brücke des Palastes, des fertigen Hauses, angefüllt mit der wundervollen Beute des Lebens.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 40; “Das Märchen,” 16. 57 The bridge, another important motif in Hofmannsthal’s work, features in Das kleine Welttheater (The Little Theatre of the World), “Reitergeschichte” (“A Tale of the Cavalry”), “Das Erlebnis des Marschalls von Bassompierre” (“An Episode in the Life of the Marshal de Bassompierre”), Die Frau ohne Schatten, as well as in the l­ittle-known poem, “Wir gingen einen Weg mit vielen Brücken” (We went along a path with many bridges) and even as a pun on the name of the Doctor and the popular card game in Der Schwierige (The Difficult Man). It also appears in another place here in “The Tale” as a counter-image to the bridge of the merchant’s son’s imagination. In order to leave the garden, the ­merchant’s son must cross a kind of makeshift bridge above an abyss. Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 51; “Das Märchen,” 26. 58 Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 50; “Das Märchen,” 25. 59 “Er haßte seinen vorzeitigen Tod so sehr, daß er sein Leben haßte, weil es ihn dahin geführt hatte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 55; “Das Märchen,” 30. 60 Hofmannsthal and Beer-Hofmann, Briefwechsel, 48. 61 Hofmannsthal anticipates Levinas’s critique of Western philosophy’s ­privileging of totality (resulting in totalitarian thinking) as developed in Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity). The crucial difference between the two thinkers is that Levinas, in this book and indeed throughout most of his philosophical journey, maintained a highly sceptical stance towards art (see his most virulent attack: “La réalité et son ombre,” translated in English as “Reality and its Shadow”). Though he came to adjust these views later in life (as Reinhold Esterbauer points out in “Das Bild als Antlitz”), Levinas for many years saw the aesthetic experience as a way of avoiding responsibility and as an ultimately distracting enterprise. Hofmannsthal comes to a different conclusion, as will become clearer in the next chapters.

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62 “eine Lust … und eine Leidenschaft, eine bewußte empfangene Gabe, eine angeborene Kunst vielleicht wie Flötenspielen oder Tanzen, eine ­zerrüttende und stumme innere Orgie.” Hofmannsthal, “Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen,” 111; “Shakespeares Könige und große Männer,” 77. 63 See Streim, Das “Leben” in der Kunst, 88–90; and Grundmann, Mein Leben, 158. 64 Hofmannsthal’s critique of society’s failure to appreciate the role of the artist is most explicit in “Der Dichter und diese Zeit” (“The Poet and Our Time”), given first as a lecture in 1906 and published in 1907. 65 Mayer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 126. 66 Karl Pestalozzi wonders whether Hofmannsthal’s literary depictions have a biographical origin, or if rather his lived experiences have a literary inspiration. The latter represents the aestheticist notion popularized by Wilde in The Decay of Lying: namely, that life imitates art. We see with Hofmannsthal a tantalizing ambiguity – one, it seems, he wishes to ­preserve. See Pestalozzi, “Wandlungen,” 133. 67 “Alles was mich umgibt, ist häßlicher als Du denken kannst. Alles ist häßlich, elend und schmutzig, die Menschen, die Pferde, die Hunde, auch die Kinder.” Hofmannsthal and Andrian, Briefwechsel, 63. 68 “Gestern bin ich abends über einen alten Bettler, der im Halbdunkel auf allen vieren in mein Zimmer gekrochen ist und mir die Füße geküßt hat, so erschrocken, daß ich nachher ermüdet und verbittert war, wie nach einer vergeblichen großen Gefahr … Ich begreife nicht, wie alle diese Dinge eine solche Gewalt über mich haben können.” Ibid., 63–4. 69 “Solche Zustände sind eigentlich ängstliche. Aber sie sind auch wieder ganz gut … sie erweitern den innern Sinn, sie bringen vieles wieder, was wie vergraben war. Ich glaube, das schöne Leben verarmt einen. Wenn man immer so leben könnte, wie man will, würde man alle Kraft ­verlieren.” Ibid., 64. 70 “Wenn ich hier in der Nacht aufwache, bin ich so stark bei mir selbst, wie schon sehr lange nicht. Ich komme so zu mir zurück, wie einer der fortwährend Theater gespielt hat, zwar eine Rolle die diesem Wesen geheimnisvoll nachgeahmt ist, aber doch eine Rolle.” Ibid., 64. 71 “[A]nstößig ist aber alles wahrhaft Produktive.” Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 49. (*fdh 1756: 76). The marker *fd h refers to the ­catalogue number in the Freies deutsches Hochstift – which holds much of what remains of Hofmannsthal’s library – and the second number refers to the page in that edition.

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72 “Ich habe die Schönheit des Hereinkommens und Abgehens aller Personen gespürt, die Schönheit des Beisammenstehens von zweien oder dreien, und die Schönheit aller ihrer Reden und Gegenreden. Ich glaube, das ist etwas ungeheuer seltenes und damit es geschehen konnte, haben alle diese besonderen Umstände da sein müssen, das tagelange Alleinsein, die schlechten Nächte, und der Anblick so vieler elender Menschen, ja ihr Geruch und ihre Stimmen.” Hofmannsthal and Andrian, Briefwechsel, 64–5. 73 “Ich habe eine Stunde lang so geliebt, wie der Dichter es geliebt hat.” Ibid., 64. 74 “Wunderschön ist es auch, in einem Kunstwerk die Schwäche des Künstlers zu fühlen, die Stellen, wo er aus Unzulänglichkeit und Sehnsucht nach der Schönheit sonderbar und gewaltsam wird.” Ibid., 65. 75 As early as 1891 in “Das Tagebuch eines Willenskranken” (The diary of an invalid of the will), Hofmannsthal depicts the role of willful ­productivity in artistic creation. 76 “Nur das Tuen entbindet die Kraft und die Schönheit. Deswegen schicken wir dem Kind Herakles Schlangen in die Wiege und lassen ihn lächelnd mit den kleinen Händen sie erwürgen, weil nur so seine Kraft und Schönheit an den Tag kommt. Deswegen muß Odysseus hin und her geworfen werden von der trüglichen Salzflut, damit jene ungeheure Heimkehr entstehen könne, in Kleidern des Bettlers, von niemandem erkannt als dem Hund. Viele Wege muß einer gegangen sein und nie müßig, damit wir über ihn weinen können.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 237. 77 “Nur mit dem Gehen der Wege des Lebens, mit den Müdigkeiten ihrer Abgründe und den Müdigkeiten ihrer Gipfel wird das Verstehen der ­geistigen Kunst erkauft.” Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 19. 78 Cf. Novalis in a letter to his brother Karl von Hardenberg (end of March 1800): “Indeed: No imitation of nature. Poetry is thoroughly the opposite. At most, the imitation of nature, of reality, can be used now and then, but only allegorically, or in contrast, or for tragic or comic effects. / Everything must be poetic.” (Ja keine Nachahmung der Natur. Die Poësie ist durchaus das Gegentheil. Höchstens kann die Nachahmung der Natur, der Wircklichkeit nur allegorisch, oder im Gegensatz, oder des tragischen und lustigen Effects wegen hin und wieder gebraucht werden. / Alles muß poëtisch seyn.) Novalis, Tagebücher, Briefwechsel 4:327. 79 Holz, “Die Kunst,” 111. 80 “Sie wundern sich über mich. Sie sind enttäuscht und finden, daß ich das Leben aus der Poesie vertreibe.” Hofmannsthal, “Poesie und Leben,” 18.

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81 “Ich weiß, was das Leben mit der Kunst zu schaffen hat. Ich liebe das Leben, vielmehr ich liebe nichts als das Leben.” Ibid., 18. 82 “Es kann einer hier sein doch nicht im Leben sein: völlig ein Mysterium ist es, was ihn auf einmal umwirft und zu einem solchen macht, der nun erst schuldig und unschuldig werden kann, nun erst Kraft haben und Schönheit. Denn vorher konnte er weder gut noch böse Kraft haben und gar keine Schönheit; dazu war er viel zu nichtig, da doch Schönheit erst entsteht, wo eine Kraft und eine Bescheidenheit ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 235. 83 “Denn es ist mir oft erschienen, dass Musik eine solche Gewalt hat, schöne Gebilde leben zu machen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 46; “Ansprache,” 7. 84 I will be referring to the edited version as given in the Kritische Ausgabe. Hofmannsthal revised the address before having it published. See Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 251–2. 85 “Sie sind wie die Schatten, die den Odysseus umlagern und alle vom Blut trinken wollen, lautlos, gierig aneinander gedrängt, ihren dunklen hohlen Blick auf den Lebenden geheftet. Sie wollen ihren Antheil haben am Leben. Ja sie scheinen von einer eigenen verhaltenen Energie zu erglühen und zu erzittern, wenn man sie nicht beachtet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 46; “Ansprache,” 7. 86 “Und so vermag ein hangendes, ein hingebreitetes Gewebe für einen Augenblick gleichsam seinen Geist auszuhauchen: während es einer unterm Reden, unterm Schweigen starr ansieht, wird sich ihm auf einmal offenbaren, dass da Geknüpftes ist, von Menschenfingern in endlosen Stunden zu Tausenden von Knoten Zusammengeknüpftes, und einen Augenblick wird dies tausendfach Geknüpfte aufleuchten und die erstarrte Lebendigkeit, die Form gewordene Willkür der zusammentretenden Farben und Schattirungen erkennen lassen, wie eine nächtliche Landschaft unter einem grossen Blitz die Verknüpfung der Strassen und das Zusammentreten der Hügel für einen Augenblick erkennen und dann ­wieder ins Dunkel zusammensinken lässt.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 7–8. 87 “Sie wird den vielen nie und nie durch rede / Sie wird den seltnen selten im gebilde” (lines 15–16). This might be translated as: “Never to the many and never through speech / seldom to the select will it take on form.” George, Teppich des Lebens, 40. 88 “Und keiner ahnt das rätsel der verstrickten … / Da eines abends wird das werk lebendig.” George, Teppich des Lebens, 40. 89 “Dabei kann es [unser Inneres] sich in seltenem Grade zart empfänglich, ernst, mächtig, innig, gut erweisen und vielleicht selbst reicher als das

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Innere anderer Völker sein: aber als Ganzes bleibt es schwach, weil alle die schönen Fasern nicht in einen kräftigen Knoten geschlungen sind: so daß die sichtbare That nicht die Gesammtthat und Selbstoffenbarung ­dieses Inneren ist, sondern nur ein schwächlicher oder roher Versuch irgend einer Faser, zum Schein einmal für das Ganze gelten zu wollen.” Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 81; Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 272. 90 The idea that inanimate things take on a strong life is echoed by Rilke ­several times in his Sonnette an Orpheus from 1922. 91 “Es gibt Momente, und sie sind fast beängstigend, wo Alles rings um uns sein ganzes starkes Leben annehmen will. Wo wir sie alle, die stummen schönen Dinge, neben uns leben fühlen und unser Leben mehr in ihnen ist als in uns selber.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8. 92 The fascination with the limitations of language harks back to the Romantics (especiaally Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel) and is renewed in the work of the Symbolists and in philosophers of language of the time. A key name in this connection is Fritz Mauthner, with whose Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a critique of language) Hofmannsthal was familiar. Mauthner and Hofmannsthal corresponded during this time, acknowledging their shared interests. Both anticipate developments in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. See Nethersole, “The Limits of Language,” 652–8. 93 “Jeder von uns, auch wenn er dieses Haus nie betreten hat, wird hier ­herumgehen wie in der Heimat seiner Träume. Denn unsere Existenzen sind mit den Existenzen dieser Gebilde durchwachsen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8. 94 Cf. the similar disposition of the boy in “Dämmerung und nächtliches Gewitter” (“Dusk and Nocturnal Thunderstorms”): “He was at the edge of such despair and doubt, that it seemed to him a mother’s-hand-­ murderer’s-hand grasped at him, when in fact it was grasping at another being near him – and he could not distinguish between the two.” (Er war am Rand einer solchen Verzweiflung gewesen, daß ihm geschienen war, es greife eine Mutterhand-Mörderhand nach ihm, die doch nach einem Wesen neben ihm griff – und er vermöchte es nicht zu sondern.) Hofmannsthal, “Dämmerung und nächtliches Gewitter,” 440. 95 The editorial notes to the “Ansprache” in the critical edition suggest that Hofmannsthal was interested in the therapeutic effects of art in the sense described in Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria. See Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 253. 96 “wie sie da stehen, umwebt vom Geheimniss der ungeheuren ­hinabgesunkenen Zeit, sie fassen uns dämonisch an: und jedes ist eine Welt,

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und alle sind aus einer Welt, die uns durch sie anrührt und ­anschauert bis ins Mark.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8–9.   97 “Es lebt für uns, es lebt durch uns. Es ist etwas in uns, das diesem Weltbild antwortet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 9.   98 “höchsterreichbare Ekstase, wahrscheinlich sein [human-kind’s] ­höchsterreichbarer Lebenswert überhaupt, und da eben dem Künstler diese Voll-Identifikation mit seinem Objekt zur Aufgabe, ja zur ­moralischen Aufgabe gestellt ist, hat sein Werk ihr Ausdruck, ihr Bild, ihr Symbol zu sein, wird es selber ekstasierend und gewinnt hierdurch jene spezifisch kunstwerkliche Qualität, für die das Wort schön geprägt worden ist.” Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time, 119; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 153.   99 “Diese Ohnmacht erzeugt daher leicht das Gefühl, von einem Unbekannten, Unbegreiflichen bedroht zu sein, das dem Individuum ebenso rätselfhaft ist, als gewöhnlich seine eigene Psyche auch.” Jentsch, “Zur Psychologie,” 204. 100 “Und nun die endlose Welt der Gemälde: sie hängen da, und immerfort ergiesst sich aus ihnen in uns, wie in ein geräumiges Becken, ein Längstvergangenes als Gegenwärtiges.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 52; “Ansprache,” 9. 101 “Ja, geformt haben Tausende, haben die Einzelnen und die Völker, und was sie zur Form emportreiben konnten, das lebt ewig: Kunstwerk, Symbol, Mythos, Religion.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 54; “Ansprache,” 10. 102 Hofmannsthal’s imperative anticipates Rilke’s famous line from the poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” – “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” (“you must change your life”) – by about six years. Claims, such as Jahraus’s, that Rilke’s imperative initiates a revolution in lyrical, literary, aesthetic, and ­cultural paradigms are hasty because they read Rilke w ­ ithout reference to earlier and contemporary iterations of the same “­revolution.” See Jahraus, “Die Provokation der Wahrnehmung,” 123. In fact, the ­sociologist Georg Simmel is an even earlier “revolutionary” in this respect. He writes, for instance, of the “the ability of a tangible s­ ymbol to awaken in us … the ­feeling of obligation not to remain ­indifferent to great events, but to respond to them.” (Die Bedeutung irgend eines ­körperlichen Symbols, uns zu religiösen Gefühlen zu ­erregen … die ­pflichtartige Empfindung, grossen Ereignissen gegenüber nicht ­gleichgültig zu bleiben, sondern unsere Innerlichkeit auf sie reagieren zu lassen.) Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 71; Philosophie des Geldes, 9. Rilke’s and Hofmannsthal’s imperatives are part of a larger shift in the aesthetic discourse.

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103 “Denn wenn es uns versagt ist, den Geist der Zeiten betrachtend zu ­erkennen, so ist uns dafür gegeben, ihn zu fühlen, wenn er fordernd uns überfällt, mit dem Anhauch des Andersseins uns verlockend und quälend, beklemmend und bezaubernd.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 54; “Ansprache,” 10. 104 Broch, too, was aware of this impossibility and quickly qualifies his idea of full identification, while expounding on the unfinishable task at hand: “At stake here is not a static object but one that fluctuates to an ­uncommon degree; and not a single act of identification but an entire chain is required, an entire chain of symbolic constructions, symbol ­symbolizations which in their initial links may exhibit a certain ­similarity to primitive metaphor construction, but then reach way beyond that in order to provide by means of an ever closer rapport with reality at least the idea of a total symbol of the world from within the slice of reality it represents – tat twam asi of art.” (Statt mit einem statischen Objekt hat man es also mit einem ungemein flukturierenden zu tun, und statt eines einzigen Identifikationsaktes ist eine ganze Kette hievon erforderlich, eine ganze Kette von Symbolgebungen, von ­Symbol-Symbolisierungen, die in ihren ersten Gliedern noch eine gewisse Ähnlichkeit mit der primitiven Metapherkonstruktion aufweisen mögen, dann aber weit darüber h ­ inausreichen, um vermittels ständig enger ­werdender Anschmiegung an die Realität schließlich, wenigstens der Idee nach, im dargestellten Realitätsausschnitt ein Totalsymbol der Welt zu liefern, das tat twam asi der Kunst.) Broch, Hofmannthal and His Time, 120; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 153. What Broch calls the “tat twam asi of art” would have been familiar to his audience, and ­f­in-de-siècle discourse generally. The phrase is borrowed from the Hindu tradition and is sometimes translated as “thou art that,” referring to the unity of the absolute and the i­ndividual. The relevance of this concept to aesthetics has yet to be fully explored in the secondary literature and would offer insight into the m ­ etaphysical and cultural questions of the time. 105 “Und so tritt eine unendliche Forderung an uns heran, dem inneren Gleichgewicht höchst bedrohlich: die Forderung, mit tausendfachen Phantomen der Vergangenheit uns abzufinden, die von uns genährt sein wollen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 106 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen. Es gibt kein stolzeres, kein gefährlicheres Wort. Es ist das Wort, das am tiefsten verpflichtet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11.

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107 “Indem wir dieses Wort aussprechen, sagen wir, dass etwas in uns durch das Kunstgebilde erregt wird, wie nur Gleiches durch Gleiches erregt werden kann.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 108 “Und indem unser Mund es wieder und wieder auszusprechen von einer tiefen Magie gezwungen wird, nehmen wir an dem ungeheuren Reich der Kunst einen so ungeheuren Antheil, als wären es tausende Seelen in uns, die sich im Acte des ästhetischen Geniessens regen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 109 “Aber beruhigen wir uns: die Forderung, welche die Welt der Schönheit an uns stellt, jenes dämonische Aus-uns-heraus-locken ganzer Welten des Fühlens, diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos gross ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns, die übereinander gethürmten Schichten der aufgestapelten überindividuellen Erinnerung.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 110 “Hier scheinen wir etwa in Gefahr, uns selbst zu verlieren: großer Irrthum! Hier werden wir erst geweckt, uns selber zu besitzen: denn wir schaffen ja den unsterblichen Inhalt dieser Gebilde, indem wir sie lebendig ­nachfühlen.” Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 255. 111 “Denn ‘die Kunst,’ sagt Goethe, ‘lässt sich ohne Enthusiasmus weder ­fassen noch begreifen. Wer nicht mit Erstaunen und Bewunderung ­anfangen will, der findet nicht den Zugang in das innere Heiligthum. Und der Kopf allein fasst kein Kunstprodukt, als nur in Gesellschaft mit dem Herzen.’” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. The quote attributed to Goethe seems to be a redacted version of a statement Goethe made to Friedrich Schiller in a letter from 19 November 1796: “Unfortunately, I have again seen some of the most deplorable examples of passive interest, and it is always the same refrain: I can’t wrap my head around it! Of course, the head cannot grasp any product of art; it can only do so in the company of the heart.” (Von den passiven Teilnahmen habe ich leider schon die betrübtesten wieder erlebt, und es ist nur immer eine Wiederholung des Refrains: ich kanns zu Kopf nicht bringen! Freilich faßt der Kopf kein Kunstprodukt als nur in Gesellschaft mit dem Herzen.) Goethe, Briefe der Jahre 1786–1805, 245. 112 “Nicht als ob das Leiden aus dem Dasein auszuschneiden wäre: nein es ist der eigentliche Inhalt unseres Daseins und auch was wir das Schöne nennen, ist ohne das Leiden nicht denkbar – ja es ist die Blüthe die aus dem Leiden hervorwächst aber es ist ein Anderes ob wir leiden müssen und wovor keine Schutzwehr uns bewahren kann, oder ob Du Dich in ein unnotwendiges Leiden halb spielend halb begehrlich verstrickst.

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Hier ängstet mich nun die Verantwortung dass ich Dich so außerhalb der Convention leben lasse, die eben die natürlichen Schutzmauern der Existenz sind.” Quoted in Weinzierl, Hofmannsthal, 216.

C hapt e r T w o   1 For the history of its composition, see Hofmannsthal, KA 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 416–23; and Ellen Ritter, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Die Briefe des Zurückgekehrten.”   2 Alice Bolterauer’s study, Zu den Dingen, offers a brief overview of turnof-the-century authors – including Hofmannsthal – whose works portray epiphanic moments catalyzed by an experience of “things.” See also Walter Jens, “Der Mensch und die Dinge.”   3 Hofmannsthal’s marriage of the aesthetic and ethical spheres occurs – ­significantly – not in a novel, but in a later fairy-tale: Die Frau ohne Schatten.   4 Ursula Renner in Zauberschrift der Bilder uses the designation Kaufmann, the German word for merchant. Renner’s designation is appropriate because it establishes a thematic (and contrastive) link to the merchant’s son (Kaufmannssohn) of the “Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.”   5 This is essentially Brian Coghlan’s argument. See Coghlan, “The Whole Man Must Move at Once.”   6 “Und nun sehe ich seit vier Monaten in die Gesichter der Wirklichen: nicht als ob sie seelenlos wären, gar nicht selten bricht ein Licht der Seele hervor, aber es huscht wieder weg, aber es ist ein ewiges Kommen und Wegfliegen wie in einem Taubenschlag.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 74; “Die Briefe,” 159.   7 “die Krise eines inneren Übelbefinden; dessen frühere Anwandlungen freilich waren so unscheinbar gewesen, wie nur möglich.” “The Letters,” 88; “Die Briefe,” 165.   8 “oder diesen Brief zerreißen und das weitere für immer ungesagt lassen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 88; “Die Briefe,” 166.   9 “Zuweilen kam es des Morgens, in diesen deutschen Hotelzimmern, daß mir der Krug und das Waschbecken – oder eine Ecke des Zimmers mit dem Tisch und dem Kleiderständer so nicht-wirklich vorkamen, trotz ihrer unbeschreiblichen Gewöhnlichkeit so ganz und gar nicht wirklich, gewissermaßen gespenstisch, und zugleich provisorisch, wartend, ­sozusagen vorläufig die Stelle des wirklichen Kruges, des wirklichen mit Wasser gefüllten Waschbeckens einnehmend.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 88; “Die Briefe,” 166.

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10 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 80. Hofmannsthal, “Die Briefe,” 162. 11 “In den andern Ländern drüben, selbst in meinen elendesten Zeiten, war der Krug oder der Eimer mit dem mehr oder minder frischen Wasser des Morgens etwas Selbstverständliches und zugleich Lebendiges: ein Freund. Hier war er, kann man sagen: ein Gespenst.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 90; “Die Briefe,” 166. 12 Metaphysically ambiguous houses that “are no longer” can be found as well in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge: “es waren Häuser, die nicht mehr da waren.” See Rilke, Malte, 749–51. Unlike Hofmannsthal, who emphasizes the ordinariness of the houses, Rilke highlights the gloom and delapidation, eventually focusing in on one of the remaining walls. Interestingly, Hofmannsthal in his notes to “The Letters” had at one point intended to allude to a similar moment in Robert Musil’s 1906 Bildungsroman, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless): “lonely times: the secret about which he brooded: the doubleness, that had to unite itself. (The sight of the wall in the novel Törless).” (einsame Zeit: das Geheimniss über dem er brütet: das Doppelte, das sich vereinigen muss. (Der Anblick der Mauer in dem Roman Törless)). Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 426. 13 In the first letter, the merchant mentions he will return to Gebhartsstetten, Austria, where he is sure to see again the scenes of his childhood: a fountain, and an old, crooked walnut tree that “will, in all its crookedness and age, somehow give a sign that it recognizes me, and that I am there again, and that it is there, as always.” (der wird in all seiner Schiefheit und ­seinem Alter irgendwie ein Zeichen geben, daß er mich erkennt und daß ich nun wieder da bin und er da ist, wie immer.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 66; “Die Briefe,” 155. 14 “It was the most delicate redolence of an entire existence, the German existence.” (Es war der zarteste Duft eines ganzen Daseins, des deutschen Daseins.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 66; “Die Briefe,” 155. 15 “und zugleich zitterte etwas durch mich hin, etwas, das mir die Brust ­entzweiteilte wie ein Hauch, ein so unbeschreibliches Anwehen des ­ewigen Nichts, des ewigen Nirgends, ein Atem nicht des Todes, sondern des Nicht-Lebens, unbeschreiblich.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 90; “Die Briefe,” 166. 16 By way of contrast, the landscape in “Moments in Greece” (discussed in chapter 3) has a physiognomy described as familiar and even charitable. In Tania and James Stern’s translation: “The mountains called to one another; the clefts were more alive than a face; each little fold on the ­distant flank of a hill lived; all this was as near to me as the palm of my

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hand. It was something that I shall never see again. It was the guest gift of all the lonely wanderers who had crossed our path.” (Die Berge riefen einander an; das Geklüftete war lebendiger als ein Gesicht; jedes Fältchen an der fernen Flanke eines Hügels lebte: dies alles war mir nahe wie die Wurzel meiner Hand. Es war, was ich nie mehr sehen werde. Es war das Gastgeschenk aller der einsamen Wanderer, die uns begegnet waren.) Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. Compare also the landscape in Andreas: “Yon mountain, which rose before him and buttressed the heavens, was a brother to him, and more than a brother … and as he looked across he realized that the mountain was his prayer. An ineffable sense of certainty befell him: it was the happiest moment of his life.” (Jener Berg, der vor ihm aufstieg und dem Himmel entgegen pfeilerte, war ihm ein Bruder und mehr als ein Bruder … und wie er hinübersah war er gewahr daß der Berg nichts anderes war als sein Gebet. Eine unsagbare Sicherheit fiel ihn an: es war der glücklichste Augenblick seines Lebens.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 76. 17 “das nahm ein Gesicht an, eine eigene zweideutige Miene so voll innerer Unsicherheit, bösartiger Unwirklichkeit: so nichtig lag es da – so ­gespensthaft nichtig.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 90; “Die Briefe,” 167. 18 “einem das Leben schöner, reicher und lieber macht … [und welches] durch den gefährlichen Anhauch der poetischen Vision von sich weg, aus dem Leben weg in die Traumwelt hinüber zu treiben [könnte].” Hofmannsthal and Thun-Salm, Briefwechsel, 170. 19 “sehr notwendig für mein Leben, für das Leben meiner Phantasie oder meiner Gedanken.” Hofmannsthal and Nostitz, Briefwechsel, 37. 20 Schuster, “Kunstleben,” 37. 21 “dies Europa könnte mich mir selber wegstehlen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 60; “Die Briefe,” 152. 22 “in der europäischen Luft für den bereitzuliegen scheint, der von weither zurückkommt, nachdem er sehr lange, vielleicht zu lange, fort war.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 167. 23 “zweistimmiges Selbstgespräch.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 466. 24 Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 177. 25 “Ich kann heute nicht in klare Worte bringen, was wirbelnd durch mein ganzes Ich ging: aber daß mein Geschäft und mein eigenes erworbenes Geld mich ekeln mußten … ich hatte zwanzigtausend Beispiele in mich hineingeschluckt: wie sie das Leben selber vergessen über dem, was nichts sein sollte als Mittel zum Leben und für nichts gelten dürfte als für ein Werkzeug.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 167–8.

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26 “Um mich war seit Monaten eine Sintflut von Gesichtern, die von nichts geritten wurden als von dem Geld, das sie hatten, oder von dem Geld, das andere hatten. Ihre Häuser, ihre Monumente, ihre Straßen, das war für mich in diesem etwas visionären Augenblick nichts als die tausendfach gespiegelte Fratze ihrer gespenstigen Nicht-Existenz.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 168. 27 “Je mehr das Leben der Gesellschaft ein geldwirtschaftliches wird, desto wirksamer und deutlicher prägt sich in dem bewußten Leben der ­relativistische Charakter des Seins aus, da das Geld nichts anderes ist, als die in einem Sondergebilde verkörperte Relativität der wirtschaftlichen Gegenstände, die ihren Wert bedeutet.” Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 555–6; Philosophie des Geldes, 716. Hofmannsthal was reading Simmel while working on “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” For Simmel’s influence on Hofmannsthal, see Lorenz Jäger’s study “Zwischen Soziologie und Mythos.” 28 The idea of “money for money’s sake” (l’argent pour l’argent, rather than l’art pour l’art) is also important for Andreas and the characterization of Zorzi (discussed in chapter 5). 29 Hofmannsthal’s merchant is like the later, weary Baudelaire who no ­longer enjoys the city streets as a flaneur, but feels jostled and lost. Benjamin traces Baudelaire’s development meticulously in the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” 30 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 94; “Die Briefe,” 168. 31 “schienen mir in den ersten Augenblicken grell und unruhig, ganz roh, ganz sonderbar, ich mußte mich erst zurechtfinden, um überhaupt die ersten als Bild, als Einheit zu sehen – dann aber, dann sah ich, dann sah ich sie alle so, jedes einzelne, und alle zusammen, und die Natur in ihnen, und die menschliche Seelenkraft, die hier die Natur geformt hatte, und Baum und Strauch und Acker und Abhang die da gemalt waren, und noch das andre, das, was hinter dem Gemalten war, das Eigentliche, das unbeschreiblich Schicksalhafte – das alles sah ich so, daß ich das Gefühl meiner selbst an diese Bilder verlor, und mächtig wieder zurückbekam, und wieder verlor! Wie aber könnte ich etwas so Unfaßliches in Worte bringen, etwas so Plötzliches, so Starkes, so Unzerlegbares!” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 94; “Die Briefe,” 169. 32 “Unser Publikum setzt sich vor einem Bild zu allen möglichen Nebensächlichkeiten des Kunstwerkes in Beziehung, nur nicht zur Hauptsache, zum eigentlich Malerischen; es interssiert sich für die Anekdote, für kleine Mätzchen und Kunststückchen, für alles, nur nicht für das eine Notwendige: ob hier eine künstlerische Individualität die freie

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Kraft gehabt hat, eine neue, aus lebendigen Augen erschaute Perzeption des Weltbildes in einer Weise darzustellen, die sich der Seele des Betrachters zu übertragen geeignet ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Painting in Vienna,” 20; “Die Malerei in Wien,” 526–7. 33 “von Menschenfingern in endlosen Stunden zu Tausenden von Knoten Zusammengeknüpftes.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 7. 34 “Tanzen heisst sich ganz und rein hingeben können. Nun ist dies. Dies ist Frömmigkeit. So waren unsere Mütter, Darum blieb der Fluss in seinen Grenzen Darum trug der Ölbaum. Darum gab der Brunnen.” Hofmannsthal, “Furcht,” 388. Emphasis as in original. 35 In “Das Gespräch über Gedichte” (“The Conversation about Poems”), the act of sacrifice is used to explain the moment of simultaneity and the traversion of difference which give rise to the symbol. With “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” sacrifice involves giving oneself over by extending oneself beyond the quotidian limits of subjectivity. This is taken up again with greater consequence in “Moments in Greece” (as discussed in chapter 3), and made explicitly ethical in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Cf. also Goethe’s definition of piety as “not an end, but a means to reach highest culture through the purest composure.” (Frömmigkeit ist kein Zweck, sondern ein Mittel um durch die reinste Gemüthsruhe zur ­höchsten Cultur zu gelangen.) Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, 815. 36 Cf. The merchant’s use of the English phrase “The whole man must move at once.” The ­merchant purports to have glimpsed the realization of this ideal in other places and cultures, from the exotic to the ­traditional, and even to the very centre of modern commerce, in the US, where the keen b ­ usinessman is characterized by “this almost insane, wild and at the same time cool and collected way they’ll ‘go in for’ ­something.” (dieses fast wahnwitzig wilde und zugleich fast kühl ­besonnene ‘Hineingehen’ für eine Sache.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 62; “Die Briefe,” 153. 37 “und der Glaube an die Gin-Flasche kann noch eine Art von Glaube sein. Aber hier, unter den gebildeten und besitzenden Deutschen, hier kann mir nicht wohl werden.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 76; “Die Briefe,” 161. 38 As Derrida has shown in Donner le temps. 1. La fausse monnaie (Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money), it is nearly impossible to think of the gift outside of economic circulation, thereby rendering the “pure” gift ­impossible. This is a failure, for there is no opportunity for a moment of reciprocity (for instance, in the form of an answer) or exchange without the moment of giving, and without space. See also the role of space as khôra in chapter 3.

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39 Cf. one of the earlier versions of the “Ansprache”: “Here it would seem we are in danger of losing ourselves: a major error! / Here we are first awakened to possess ourselves.” (Hier scheinen wir etwa in Gefahr, uns selber zu verlieren: großer Irrthum! / Hier werden wir erst geweckt, uns selber zu besitzen.) Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 255. 40 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s essay “Die Bühne als Traumbild” (“The Stage as a Dream Image”), which also contains a depiction of suffering from ­phenomenological uncertainty: “Whoever wishes to erect a stage must have lived and suffered through the eyes. He must have sworn to himself a thousand times, that the visible alone exists, and a thousand times he must have asked himself with a shudder, whether this visible, above all, does not exist. The sight of the familiar tree, which transforms the full moon, raises it above its peers and crowns it king, must have shaken him … De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire are his favourite books. He measures the power and the intensitiy of colour against their enduring frightful ­solemn dreams.” (Wer die Bühne aufbauen wird, muß durchs Auge gelebt und gelitten haben. Tausendmal muß er sich geschworen haben, daß das Sichtbare allein existiert, und tausendmal muß er schaudernd sich gefragt haben, ob denn das Sichtbare nicht, vor allen Dingen, nicht existiert. Der Anblick des wohlbekannten Baumes, den der Vollmond verwandelt, zum König über seinesgleichen erhebt, muß ihn erschüttert haben. … De Quincey, Poe, Baudelaire sind seine Lieblingsbücher. An ihren dauernden furchtbaren feierlichen Träumen mißt er die Macht und die Farbentiefe seiner eigenen Träume.) Hofmannsthal, “Die Bühne,” 42. Like the ­merchant, the artist measures not reality against imagination, but his dreams against his art. The stage – because it is constructed after one has suffered and doubted reality – is in this instance the standard. 41 “lebt in kontinuierlicher Selbstentäußerung aus jedem gegebenen Punkt heraus und bildet so den Gegenpol und die direkte Verneinung jedes Fürsichseins.” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 554; Philosophie des Geldes, 714. 42 “Von diesen Intuitionen aus führt kein regelmäßiger Weg in das Land der gespenstischen Schemata, der Abstraktionen: für sie ist das Wort nicht gemacht, der Mensch verstummt, wenn er sie sieht, oder redet in lauter verbotenen Metaphern und unerhörten Begriffsfügungen, um wenigstens durch das Zertrümmern und Verhöhnen der alten Begriffsschranken dem Eindrucke der mächtigen gegenwärtigen Intuition schöpferisch zu ­entsprechen.” Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie,” 39; Ueber Wahrheit und Lüge, 887. Ursual Renner remarks that imagery serves as an expression for intuitive creative ability. Renner, Zauberschrift, 158.

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43 Renner and Braegger both quote the following note from Hofmannsthal’s literary estate: “Scientists do everything they can to find out what can be calculated – artists are familiar with absolute variability and have the ­spiritual strength to strive towards expression, metaphorical expression … Art(-)Experience makes it possible to sense the essence of things: Scientists as victims of a mechanical use of their terminology: in contrast, Goethe’s treatment of colour theory.” (Wissenschaftlern ist alles darum zu thun, das ausrechenbare zu finden – Künstler ist sich des absolut variablen klar und hat Seelenstärke genug doch zum Ausdruck zu streben und zwar ein bildlicher … Kunst(-)Erfahrung gibt Möglichkeit sich dem Wesen der Dinge anzufühlen: Wissenschaftler Opfer des mechanischen Gebrauchs ihrer Termini: dagegen Behandlung der Farbenlehre durch Goethe.) Renner, “Der Augen Blick,” 140; Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 36. 44 As Carlpeter Braegger has shown, the importance of visual art for Hofmannsthal’s literary practice was established early on. Braegger’s study includes a reading of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” that is compatible with my own: Braegger suggests that part of Hofmannsthal’s cultural critique was catalyzed by what he (Hofmannsthal) saw as the ­relative dearth of art in Germany before and at the turn of the century. Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 95. 45 Rilke, for whom an excellent work of art must be completed in a ­trance-like, wholly sub-conscious state of mind, was disappointed by Van Gogh’s meticulousness and his ability to speak coherently about his own work. Rilke writes: “Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights … That Van Gogh’s letters are so readable, that they are so rich, basically argues against him, just as it argues against a painter (holding up Cézanne for comparison) that he wanted or knew or experienced this and that; that blue called for orange and green for red.” (Daß man Van Gogh’s Briefe so gut lesen kann, daß sie so viel enthalten, spricht im Grunde gegen ihn, wie es ja auch gegen den Maler spricht (Cézanne daneben gehalten), daß er das und das wollte, wußte, erfuhr; daß das Blau Orange aufrief und das Grün Rot.) Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 66–7; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 628. Hofmannsthal did not share this opinion. On the other hand, Rilke learned much from Van Gogh’s writings and adopted many of his literary strategies in the Cézanne letters. See Büssgen, “Bildende Kunst,” 143. 46 For an insightful history on the relation between painting (and colour in particular) and writing, see Le Rider’s Les couleurs et les mots. In this

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book, and in the chapter “Du musée des images à la couleur pure” of his Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Le Rider briefly treats Hofmannsthal and Rilke as part of a history of writers’ fascination with colour. 47 “Da ist ein unglaubliches, stärkstes Blau, das kommt immer wieder, ein Grün wie von geschmolzenen Smaragden, ein Gelb bis zum Orange.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 169. This echoes Van Gogh’s 22 May 1888 letter to Emil Bernard: “It’s thus a variation of blues enlivened by a series of yellows ranging all the way to orange.” On 21 August 1888, Van Gogh writes again to Emil Bernard of the ­intensitiy of the colours in a painting of sunflowers: “A decoration in which harsh or broken yellows will burst against various blue ­backgrounds, from the palest Veronese to royal blue, framed with thin laths painted in orange lead. Sorts of effects of stained-glass windows of a Gothic church.” Jansen, Luijten and Bakker, Vincent van Gogh, Letter 612; Letter 665. 48 “Aber was sind Farben, wofern nicht das innerste Leben der Gegenstände in ihnen hervorbricht! Und dieses innerste Leben war da, Baum und Stein und Mauer und Hohlweg gaben ihr Innerstes vor sich, gleichsam entgegen warfen sie es mir, aber nicht die Wollust und Harmonie ihres schönen stummen Lebens, wie sie mir vor Zeiten manchmal aus alten Bildern wie eine zauberische Atmosphäre entgegenfloß: nein, nur die Wucht ihres Daseins, das wütende, von Unglaublichkeit umstarrte Wunder ihres Daseins fiel meine Seele an.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 169. 49 Schneider likens this to a performative drama of the Four Last Things (death, judgement, heaven, and hell) and notes that several elements of classical rhetoric (the figurae sententiae) are present in the text. Schneider, Verheißung der Bilder, 223. 50 For a similar reading of the Chandos Letter, see Schuster, “Kunstleben,” 152. 51 “ein Wesen jeder Baum, jeder Streif gelben oder grünlichen Feldes, jeder Zaun, jeder in den Steinhügel gerissene Hohlweg, ein Wesen der zinnerne Krug, die irdene Schüssel, der Tisch, der plumpe Sessel – sich mir wie neugeboren aus dem furchtbaren Chaos des Nichtlebens, aus dem Abgrund der Wesenlosigkeit entgegenhob, daß ich fühlte, nein, daß ich wußte, wie jedes dieser Dinge, dieser Geschöpfe aus einem fürchterlichen Zweifel an der Welt herausgeboren war und nun mit seinem Dasein einen gräßlichen Schlund, gähnendes Nichts, für immer verdeckte!” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 52 “ein Gewoge, ein Chaos, ein Ungeborenes.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 66; “Die Briefe,” 155.

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53 “wo wir nie waren. Es sei denn, indem wir litten … Aber hier hat das Namenlose seinen Namen bekommen, das Stumme seine Sprache und das Gestaltlose seine Form. Hier haben Schöpferhände der Finsternis ein Gesicht gegeben und aus dem Alpdruck etwas gebaut und gebildet. Und wir erkennen die dumpfen Tiefen schwerer Stunden wieder.” Hofmannsthal, “Der Begrabene Gott,” 69–70. 54 “Und noch ein Wort: Groß, groß, groß. Und noch eins: Ehrfurcht.” Ibid., 71. 55 Cf. Rilke who, in a remarkably similar fashion, writes: “After all, works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity … Therein lies the enormous aid the work of art brings to the life of the one who must make it, – : that it is his epitome; the knot in the rosary at which his life says a prayer, the ever-returning proof to himself of his unity and genuineness, which presents itself only to him while appearing anonymous to the outside, nameless, as mere ­neecessity, as reality, as existence.” (Kunstdinge sind ja immer Ergebnisse des in Gefahrgewesen-Seins, des in einer Erfahrung bis ans EndeGegangenseins, bis wo kein Mensch mehr weiterkann. Je weiter man geht, desto eigener, desto persönlicher, desto einziger wird ja ein Erlebnis und das Kunstding endlich ist die notwendige, ununterdrückbare, möglichst endgültige Aussprache dieser Einzigkeit … Darin liegt die ungeheure Hülfe des Kunstdings für das Leben dessen, der es machen muß, – : daß es seine Zusammenfassung ist; der Knoten im Rosenkranz, bei dem sein Leben ein Gebet spricht, der immer wiederkehrende, für ihn selbst gegebene Beweis seiner Einheit und Wahrhaftigkeit, der doch nur ihm selber sich zukehrt und nach außen anonym wirkt, namenlos, als Notwendigkeit nur, als Wirklichkeit, als Dasein.) Rilke, Letters On Cézanne, 4; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 594. The motif of the return (here the “ever-returning proof”) is likewise present in both writers’ descriptions. 56 Simmel too emphasizes the clarifying process things undergo when they are represented artistically: “The work of art interprets the meaning of the phenomenon itself, whether it is embedded in the shaping of space or in the relations of colours or in the spirituality that exists, as it were, both in and beneath the visible … the artistic process is completed as soon as it has succeeded in presenting the object in its unique significance … The slogan ‘l’art pour l’art’ characterizes perfectly the self-sufficiency of

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the purely artistic tendency.” (Das Kunstwerk deutet uns doch gerade den Sinn der Erscheinung selbst, liege ihm dieser nun in der Gestaltung der Räumlichkeit oder in den Beziehungen der Farben oder in der Seelenhaftigkeit, die so in wie hinter dem Sichtbaren lebt … der artistische Prozeß ist abgeschlossen, sobald er den Gegenstand zu dessen eigenster Bedeutung entwickelt hat … das Stichwort des l’art pour l’art bezeichnet treffend die Selbstgenügsamkeit der rein künstlerischen Tendenz.) Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 485; Philosophie des Geldes, 618–19. 57 Cf. Goethe’s comment: “The colours are the deeds of light, the deeds and the suffering.” (Die Farben sind Taten des Lichts, Taten und Leiden). Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, 9. For more on Hofmannsthal’s ­reception of Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours), see Schneider, “Farbe. Farbe,” 83. 58 “wie eine[r], der nach ungemessenem Taumel festen Boden unter den Füßen fühlt und um den ein Sturm rast, in dessen Rasen hinein er j­auchzen möchte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 59 “was wirbelnd durch mein ganzes Ich ging.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 92; “Die Briefe,” 167. 60 “gebaren sich mir zu liebe diese Bäume, mit den Wurzeln starrend in der Erde, mit den Zweigen starrend gegen die Wolken, in einem Sturm gaben diese Erdenrisse, diese Täler zwischen Hügeln sich preis, noch im Wuchten der Felsblöcke war erstarrter Sturm.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 61 “unbekannte Seele von unfaßbarer Stärke.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 62 “hat gesprochen. In der Nähe des Werkes sind wir jäh anderswo gewesen, als wir gewöhnlich zu sein pflegen.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 15; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 21. 63 Heidegger’s comments on Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes ­resemble Hofmannsthal’s primarily with respect to the idea of revelation of truth-as-event. “What is happening here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, in truth is” (Was geschieht hier? Was ist im Werk am Werk? Van Goghs Gemälde ist die Eröffnung dessen, was das Zeug, das Paar Bauernschuhe, in Wahrheit ist.) Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 16; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 21. In order to w ­ itness the event (­disclosure) of truth, the subject must be shaken out of everyday habits of thought when confronting the aesthetic, according to Heidegger: “What really matters is that we open our eyes to the fact that the workliness of the work, the equipmentality of equipment, and the thingliness of the thing

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come nearer to us only when we think the being of beings. A c­ ondition of this is that the limits imposed by s­ elf-­evidence first fall away and that current pseudo-concepts be set aside.” (Worauf es ankommt, ist eine erste Öffnung des Blickes dafür, daß das Werkhafte des Werkes, das Zeughafte des Zeuges, das Dinghafte des Dinges uns erst näher kommen, wenn wir das Sein des Seienden d ­ enken.) Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 18;  “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 25. 64 “Und nun konnte ich … ein Etwas fühlen … konnte das Untereinander, das Miteinander der Gebilde fühlen, wie ihr innerstes Leben in der Farbe vorbrach und wie die Farben eine um der anderen willen lebten und wie eine, geheimnisvoll mächtig, die andern alle trug, und konnte in dem allem ein Herz spüren, die Seele dessen, der das gemacht hatte, der mit dieser Vision sich selbst antwortete auf den Sturrkrampf der fürchterlichsten Zweifel, konnte fühlen, konnte wissen, konnte durchblicken, konnte genießen Abgründe und Gipfel, Außen und Innen, eins und alles im zehntausendsten Teil der Zeit, als ich da die Worte hinschriebe, und war wie doppelt, war Herr über mein Leben zugleich, Herr über meine Kräfte, meinen Verstand, fühlte die Zeit vergehen, wußte, nun bleiben nur noch zwanzig Minuten, noch zehn, noch fünf, und stand draußen, rief einen Wagen, fuhr hin.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170, my emphasis. 65 “darum trug der Ölbaum.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 388. Cf. Rilke’s description of the colours in the Cézanne paintings: “There’s something else I wanted to say about Cézanne: that no one before him ever demonstrated so clearly the extent to which ­painting is something that takes place among the colors, and how one has to leave them completely alone, so that they can come to terms among themselves. Their mutual intercourse: this is the whole of painting.” (Ich wollte aber eigentlich noch von Cézanne sagen: daß es niemals noch so aufgezeigt worden ist, wie sehr das Malen unter den Farben vor sich geht, wie man sie ganz allein lassen muß, damit sie sich gegenseitig ­auseinandersetzen. Ihr Verkehr untereinander: das ist die ganze Malerei.) Rilke sees in the colours of Cézanne’s paintings a sacrificial component as well: “weaker local colors abandon themselves with reflecting the ­dominant ones. In this hither and back of mutual and manifold influence, the ­interior of the ­picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself, and does not have a single unmoving part.” (schwächere Lokalfarben geben sich ganz auf und ­begnügen sich damit, die stärkste vorhandene zu spiegeln. In diesem Hin und Wider von gegenseitigem vielartigen Einfluß schwingt das Bildinnere, steigt und fällt in sich selbst zurück und hat nicht eine

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s­ tehende Stelle.) Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 66, 72; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 627–8, 631. 66 “Werksein heißt: eine Welt aufstellen.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 22; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 31. 67 Heidegger sees this as justified: “So we must move in a circle. This is ­neither ad hoc nor deficient. To enter upon this path is the strength, and to remain on it the feast of thought, assuming that thinking is a craft. Not only is the main step from work to art, like the step from art to work, a circle, but every individual step that we attempt circles within this ­circle.” (So müssen wir den Kreisgang vollziehen. Das ist kein Notbehelf und kein Mangel. Diesen Weg zu betreten, ist die Stärke, und auf diesem Weg zu bleiben, ist das Fest des Denkens, gesetzt, daß das Denken ein Handwerk ist. Nicht nur der Hauptschritt vom Werk zur Kunst ist als der Schritt von der Kunst zum Werk ein Zirkel, sondern jeder einzelne der Schritte, die wir versuchen, kreist in diesem Kreise.) Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 2; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 3. 68 Art reception for Hofmannsthal involves something of an artistic ­productivity as well, if not expressed, then at least in the imagination. Cf. “The Poet and Our Time”: “For he [the poet] suffers all things, and insofar as he suffers all things, he enjoys them.” (Denn er [der Dichter] leidet an allen Dingen und indem er an ihnen leidet, genießt er sie). Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 138. This notion has a ­predecessor in Goethe’s poem “An Suleika.” Suleika’s perfume can please only because thousands of roses have been sacrificed in the process. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 66. Katrin Scheffer has also noted the ­connection between suffering (“Leiden”) and enjoyment or pleasure (“Genuss” or “Genießen”). Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 297. 69 Split personality and schizophrenia are familiar themes in Hofmannsthal’s work, and especially in Andreas. Here we have the positive correlative, a multifaceted nature of the soul: others, including ancestral others, are present within the self. Depending on the circumstances and perspective, this can have the effect of empowerment or it can be overpowering. 70 Wellbery, “Die Opfer-Vorstellung,” 287. 71 Ten years later in his notes to “Über die europäische Idee” (On the European idea) Hofmannsthal asks this very question. Hofmannsthal, ka  34: Reden und Aufsätze 3, 325. 72 “Ich möchte in mir selber blühn, und dies Europa könnte mich mir selber wegstehlen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 60; “Die Briefe,” 152. 73 “ein europäisch-deutsches Gefühl.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 72; “Die Briefe,” 158.

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74 “Konferenzen von der Art, wo die Größe der Ziffern an die Phantasie appelliert und das Vielerlei, das Auseinander der Kräfte, die ins Spiel ­kommen, eine Gabe des Zusammensehens fordert, entscheidet nicht die Intelligenz, sondern es entscheidet sie eine geheimnisvolle Kraft.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 170. 75 Cf. Maren A. Joachimsen’s dissertation: Die Poetisierung der Ökonomie. 76 “Ich konnte für meine Gesellschaft mehr erreichen, als das Direktorium mir für den denkbar günstigsten Fall aufgelegt hatte, und ich erreichte es, wie man im Traum von einer kahlen Mauer Blumen abpflückt.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171. 77 Hofmannsthal would later make the connection explicit with his 1921 essay “Der Ersatz für die Träume” (“The Dream Replacement”). There he writes that city-dwellers, particularly those who have been sacrificed to the modern industrial way of life, have become machines, a tool among tools (“Werkzeug unter Werkzeugen”) in a world where only numbers speak. Unable to dream, people “wish to fill their fantasies with images, strong images, in which the essence of life is condensed.” (wollen ihre Phantasie mit Bildern füllen, starken Bildern, in denen sich Lebensessenz zusammenfaßt.) Be it a canvas or a movie screen, people flee “from cypher to dream vision” (von der Ziffer zur Vision). Hofmannsthal, “Der Ersatz für die Träume,” 141, 144. 78 “Sie bringt sie uns einerseits näher, zu ihrem eigentlichen und innersten Sinn setzt sie uns in ein unmittelbares Verhältnis, hinter der kühlen Fremdheit der Außenwelt verrät sie uns die Beseeltheit des Seins, durch die es uns verwandt und verständlich ist. Daneben aber stiftet jede Kunst eine Entfernung von der Unmittelbarkeit der Dinge, sie läßt die Konkretheit der Reize zurücktreten und spannt einen Schleier zwischen uns und sie, gleich dem feinen bläulichen Duft, der sich um ferne Berge legt.” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 513; Philosophie des Geldes, 658–9. 79 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s remark on poetic distance: “What we hold to be the transfiguring power of distance … is the poetic power in us, the poetic capability, the synthetic power: the begger, when he looks through the windows of the wealthy, is poetic.” (Was wir für die verklärende Macht der Entfernung halten … ist die poetische Macht in uns, das poetische Vermögen, die synthetische Kraft: der Bettler insofern er ins Fenster des Reichen hineinblickt, ist poetisch). Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 324. 80 “Die Gesichter der Herren, mit denen ich verhandelte, kamen mir ­merkwürdig nahe.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171.

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81 “Es ist etwas in mir, das mich zwingt zu glauben, er wäre von meiner Generation, wenig älter als ich selbst.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171. 82 “but no sooner did Gauguin, the comrade he’d longed for, the kindred spirit, arrive than he had to cut off his ear in despair, after they had both determined to hate one another and at the first opportunity to get rid of each other for good.” (kaum war Gauguin da, der ersehnte Genosse, der Gleichgesinnte – ; da mußte er sich schon aus Verzweiflung die Ohren abschneiden). Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 5–6; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 595. 83 Zilcosky, Uncanny Encounters, 211. 84 “Ich weiß nicht, ob ich vor diese Bilder ein zweites Mal hintreten werde, doch werde ich vermutlich eines davon kaufen, aber es nicht an mich nehmen, sondern dem Kunsthändler zur Bewahrung übergeben.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 171. 85 “Feil! alles feil! die Ehre selber feil! / […] / Und meiner Verse Schar, so tändelnd schal, / Auf diesem Freibrief grenzenloser Qual, / Sie schienen mir wie Bildwerk und Gezweig / Auf einer Klinge tödtlich blankem Stahl.” Hofmannsthal, “Verse, auf eine Banknote geschrieben,” 29. 86 “Es ist nicht Geld, sondern Freiheit.” Hofmannsthal and Burckhardt, Briefwechsel, 36. 87 “Deinen Dich innigst umarmenden Sohn Hugo –Dichter und Handelsmann.” Quoted in Weinzierl, Hofmannsthal, 77. Weinzierl devotes an entire chapter to the biographical importance of art and money: “Von Kunst und Geld und vornehmer Natur.” 88 Hofmannsthal marked the following passage in his copy of Philosophie des Geldes with two daggers, “selbst für feinere und der Sache lebende Menschen kann in dem Gelingen der Leistung nach der ökonomischen Seite hin ein Trost, Ersatz, Rettung für die gefühlte Unzulänglichkeit nach der Seite des Haupterfolges hin liegen; zum mindesten etwa wie ein Ausruhen und eine momentane Verpflanzung des Interesses, die der Hauptsache schlieſslich gewachsene Kräfte zuführt.” *fd h 1910: 313; Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, 345. The English translation reads: “but also, for more sensitive and idealistic people, the material success of the performance may be a consolation, a substitute, a salvation for the ­insufficiency that is felt with regard to the primary goal. At the very least, it will be something like a respite and a momentary shift of interest which will finally channel new strength into the main objective.” Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 336. 89 Renner, “Nachwort,” 408.

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90 Van Gogh himself had at one point planned to be an art dealer, like his brother Théodorus, and his uncle. Furthermore, it was his brother the art dealer who introduced him to the revolutionary new way of painting. See Margarete Mauthner’s introduction to Van Gogh’s Briefe; *fdh 5050: 1–2. 91 Gottschlich-Kempf, Identitätsbalance, 302. 92 Scharnowski, “Funktionen der Krise,” 59. 93 The notion that works of art lose presence is particularly evident in “Moments in Greece” (“Augenblicke in Griechenland”). Heidegger speaks of the Greek temples thus: “World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be reversed. The works are no longer what they were. The works themselves, it is true, are what we encounter; yet they themselves are what has been. As what has been they confront us within the realm of tradition and conservation. Henceforth, they remain nothing but objects of this kind.” (Weltentzug und Weltzerfall sind nie mehr ­rückgängig zu machen. Die Werke sind nicht mehr die, die sie waren. Sie selbst sind es zwar, die uns da begegnen, aber sie selbst sind die Gewesenen. Als die Gewesenen stehen sie uns im Bereich der Überlieferung und Aufbewahrung entgegen. Fortan bleiben sie nur solche Gegenstände.) Heiddegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 20; “Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 26–7. “Moments in Greece,” however, presents a chance at having a profound aesthetic encounter with such works of art, even if they are already “gewesen.” See my discussion in chapter 3. 94 “Was ich dir schrieb, wirst du kaum verstehen können, am wenigsten, wie mich diese Bilder so bewegen konnten.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 100; “Die Briefe,” 171. 95 “Es wird dir wie eine Schrulle vorkommen, wie ein Vereinzeltes, wie eine Sonderbarkeit, und doch – wenn man es nur hinstellen könnte, wenn man es nur aus sich herausreißen könnte und ins Licht bringen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 100; “Die Briefe,” 171. 96 “Er malte seine Bilder nicht, er stiess sie aus. Er fühlte sich nicht dabei, war eins mit dem Element, das er darstellte, malte sich selbst in den lodernden Wolken.” Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 136. 97 This recalls Albrecht Dürer’s aesthetic philosophy, according to which beauty is to be pulled out of nature. By referencing Dürer, Hofmannsthal is making a connection to the merchant’s childhood: in the third letter, the merchant recalls his affinity for Dürer’s copperplate engravings. See Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 103. 98 See also Riley, Color Codes, 50. 99 Simmel links this colourlessness to monetary transactions: “This ­colourlessness becomes, as it were, the colour of work activity at the

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high points of money transaction.” (An den Höhenpunkten des Geldverkehrs wird diese Farblosigkeit sozusagen zur Farbe von Berufsinhalten). Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 514; Philosophie des Geldes, 596. 100 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 169. 101 “Die Woge, die den Schiffbrüchigen schreckt, beschreibt eine göttliche Kurve, und selbst das entsetzte Gesicht des Unglücklichen, der sich an die Planke klammert, wirkt harmonisch in diesem Taumel der Wasser. So ordnen sich in den Bildern Van Goghs, die ein Paroxysmus der Naturerfassung entstehen liess.” Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 136. This passage was marked by Hofmannsthal in *fd h 1696: 136. 102 “das grenzenlos relative der Farbe: jede Farbe existiert nur durch ihre Nachbarschaft.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 437. 103 Jansen, Luijten and Bakker, Vincent van Gogh, Letter 622. 104 “nichts als diese zwei Farben gegeneinander, dies ewige Unnennbare, drang in diesem Augenblick in seine Seele und löste, was verbunden war, und verband, was gelöst war.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 102; “Die Briefe,” 172. 105 “Sagte ich nicht, die Farben der Dinge haben zu seltsamen Stunden einen Gewalt über mich? Doch bin’s nicht ich vielmehr, der die Macht bekommt über sie, die ganze, volle Macht für irgendeine Spanne Zeit, ihnen ihr wortloses, abgrundtiefes Geheimnis zu entreißen, ist sie nicht in meiner Brust als ein Schwellen, eine Fülle, eine Fremde, erhabene, entzückende Gegenwart, bei mir, in mir, an der Stelle, wo das Blut kommt und geht?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 102; “Die Briefe,” 173. 106 Büssgen, “Bildende Kunst,” 521. 107 Ibid., 534. 108 Renner, Zauberschrift, 389. While the experience is not brought about by personal memories, these nevertheless play a great role in preparation for the encounter with the work of art. The merchant, by remembering the ambiguous feelings of his child-self when contemplating the Dürer prints, is in effect preparing himself in a way that combines external ­reception and personal memory. See also Hoffmann, “Kunsterfahrung als Icherschließung,” 291, and Schuster, “Kunstleben,” 569. 109 “Aber wenn alles in mir war, warum konnte ich nicht die Augen schließen und stumm und blind eines unnennbaren Gefühles meiner selbst genießen, warum mußte ich mich auf Deck erhalten und schauen, vor mich hinschauen?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 102; “Die Briefe,” 173.

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110 “dies heilige Genießen meiner selbst und zugleich der Welt, die sich mir auftat, als wäre die Brust ihr aufgegangen, warum war dies Doppelte, dies Verschlungene, dies Außen und Innen, dies ineinanderschlagende Du an mein Schaun geknüpft?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 104; “Die Briefe,” 173. 111 Ursula Renner comes closest to offering an interpreation by highlighting the dialogical aspect with an “unknown ‘You’” (“unbekannten ‘Du’”). Renner, Zauberschrift, 412. 112 “hier ist ein Überwinden aller Hemmungen ein fast wüthendes Du.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 438. 113 “Novalis: Wir sollen alles in ein Du, ein zweites Ich verwandeln; nur dadurch erheben wir uns selbst zum großen Ich.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 324. 114 “diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu ­entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos gross ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns, die übereinander gethürmten Schichten der aufgestapelten überindividuellen Erinnerung.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 115 In his 1898 lecture “Moderne Lyrik” (Modern lyric poetry), which in ­several respects resembles Hofmannsthal’s 1896 lecture “Poesie und Leben” (“Poetry and Life”), Rilke too invokes what Torsten Hoffmann calls a “dialogical aesthetic” between human and thing. He describes the striving of an individual to come to an understanding with all things through a constant “Zwiegespräch” or dialogue that brings one to the source of all life. Hoffmann, “Kunsterfahrung als Icherschließung,” ­294–5. For Rilke, as for Hofmannsthal, the intimacy of this dialogue finds expression in beauty. Rilke’s dialogical aesthetics thus bears a ­striking resemblance to Hofmannsthal’s; the key difference is that Rilke spends less time exploring the external world, the “Du,” and more time examining the inward experience. Hofmannsthal’s exploration takes the opposite course. 116 “Eines Freundes Da-sein gibt Maß. Müller-Hofmann. Man verbreitet durch ihn die Erlebnisbasis. Es ist immer das ganze Du, uns daran zu erproben.” Hofmannsthal, “Brief an einen Gleichaltrigen,” 214. Hofmannsthal refers here to the Austrian painter and graphic designer Wilhelm Müller-Hofmann, a friend of his from 1913 onward. 117 This affinity between Buber and Hofmannsthal has yet to be fully explored in the secondary literature. 118 “alle Kunst von ihrem Ursprung her [ist] wesenhaft dialogisch … daß alle Musik einem Ohr ruft, das nicht das eigne des Musikers, alle Bildnerei

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einem Auge, das nicht das eigne des Bildners ist … und daß sie alle dem sie Empfangenden etwas nur eben in dieser einen Sprache Sagbares sagen (nicht ein ‘Gefühl,’ sondern ein wahrgenommenes Geheimnis).” Buber, Zwiesprache, 176. 119 “Farbe. Farbe. Mir ist das Wort jetzt armselig. Ich fürchte, ich habe mich dir nicht erklärt, wie ich möchte. Und ich möchte nichts in mir stärken, was mich von den Menschen absondert.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 106; “Die Briefe,” 174. 120 “wenn das sich auftut und wie in einer Welle der Liebe mich mit sich s­ elber in eines schlingt. Und bin ich dann nicht im Innern der Dinge so sehr ein Mensch, so sehr ich selber wie nur je, namenlos, einsam, aber nicht erstarrt im Alleinsein, sondern als flösse von mir in Wellen die Kraft, die mich zum auserlesenen Genossen macht der starken stummen Mächte, die rungsum wie auf Thronen schweigend sitzen? Und ist dies nicht wohin du auf dunklen Wegen immer gelangst, wenn du tätig und leidend lebst unter den Lebenden?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 106; “Die Briefe,” 174. 121 The notion of Schuld, which can be translated as guilt, blame, debt, ­culpability, etc., has long been acknowledged as a condition for entering into “Existence” or life, in the Hofmannsthalian paradigm. See Walther Brecht, “Grundlinien,” 173. 122 “Und warum sollten nicht die Farben Brüder der Schmerzen sein, da diese wie jene uns ins Ewige ziehen?” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 106; “Die Briefe,” 174. 123 In I and Thou, Buber will make a similar assertion, namely that the act or deed (“Tat”) consists of sacrifice and risk: “The deed involves a ­sacrifice and a risk. The sacrifice: infinite possibility is surrendered on the altar of the form; all that but a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated. The risk: the basic word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits himself may not hold back part of himself … if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me.” (Die Tat umfasst ein Opfer und ein Wagnis. Das Opfer: Die unendliche Möglichkeit, die auf dem Altar der Gestalt dargebracht wird; alles, was eben noch spielend die Perspektive durchzog, muss ­ausgetilgt werden … Das Wagnis: Das Grundwort kann nur mit dem ­ganzen Wesen gesprochen werden; wer sich drangibt, darf von sich nichts vorenthalten … diene ich ihm nicht recht, so zerbricht es, oder es zerbricht mich.) Buber, I and Thou, 60–1; Ich und Du, 16–17. In his discussion of Hofmannsthal’s Chandos Letter, Wellbery notes that the fascination of revelatory moments is indebted to their evocation of sacrifice. Wellbery, “Opfer-Vorstellung,” 298.

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124 “Es ist, als habe ein Einziger den Vorwurf gegen den Egoismus unserer ganzen Epoche gefühlt und sich hingegeben, ganz wie einer jener grossen Märtyrer, deren Geschicke uns aus fernen Zeiten überliefert wurden.” Meier-Graefe, Impressionisten, 143. 125 Cf. Rilke’s comments: “weaker local colors abandon themselves with reflecting the dominant ones. In this hither and back of mutual and ­manifold influence, the interior of the picture vibrates, rises and falls back into itself, and does not have a single unmoving part.” (schwächere Lokalfarben geben sich ganz auf und begnügen sich damit, die stärkste vorhandene zu spiegeln. In diesem Hin und Wider von gegenseitigem ­vielartigen Einfluß schwingt das Bildinnere, steigt und fällt in sich selbst zurück und hat nicht eine stehende Stelle.) Rilke, Letters on Cézanne 72; Rilke and Key, Briefwechsel, 631. 126 “Diese Umformung, die sie [die Wirklichkeit] auf dem Wege in unser Bewußtsein erleidet, ist zwar eine Schranke zwischen uns und ihrem unmittelbaren Sein, aber zugleich die Bedingung, sie vorzustellen und ­darzustellen.” Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 559; Die Philosophie des Geldes, 659. 127 Jansen, Luijten, and Bakker, Letter 698. 128 Cf. Hermann Broch: “he recognized the dangers of pan-aestheticism: the idea of a work of art whose universality would by means of symbolic wealth produce an ultimate total knowledge appeared to him condemned in the end to a leap into a void, because the beautiful, even when ­surrounded with the nimbus of religiosity, can never be elevated to the absolute and must therefore remain mute in the transmission of knowledge.” (er erkannte die Gefahren des Pan-Ästhetizismus: die Idee von einem Kunstwerk, dessen Universalität infolge Symbolreichtums schließlich All-Erkenntnis vermitteln sollte, zeigte sich ihm als verurteilt, am Ende ins Leere zu stoßen, weil das Schöne, auch wenn man es mit dem Nimbus der Religiosität umgibt, nie und nimmer zu einem Absolutum erhebbar ist und daher erkenntnisstumm bleiben muß). Broch, Hofmannsthal and his Time, 121; Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 154. 129 “Die Maler sind da, uns mit der Erscheinung auszusöhnen, der Erscheinung ihr Pathos zurückzugeben. Aber vielleicht gilt auch von ihnen wie von den Dichtern das Wort: wir sind nicht die Ärzte wir sind der Schmerz.” See Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 438. 130 Bamberg quotes Celan in reference to the Chandos Letter, but the phrase is perhaps even more appropriate in the context of “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” See Bamberg, Hofmannsthal, 262. Celan writes

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in his reception speech for the Bremen Literary Prize: “The poem is not timeless. True, it asserts a claim to infinity, it seeks to grasp through time – through it, not over and above it … It is the efforts of one who, overflown by the stars … approaches language with his being, wounded by reality, and seeking reality.” (Das Gedicht ist nicht zeitlos. Gewiß, es erhebt einen Unendlichkeitsanspruch, es sucht, durch die Zeit ­hindurchzugreifen – durch sie hindurch, nicht über sie hinweg … Es sind die Bemühungen dessen, der, überflogen von Sternen … mit seinem Dasein zur Sprache geht, wirklichkeitswund und Wirklichkeit suchend). Celan, “Ansprache,” 129. Celan’s vision overturns the idea of poetic ­elevation expressed by Baudelaire in Les Fleurs du mal. Incidentally, the manuscript of Celan’s acceptance speech for the Büchner Prize ­mentions Hofmannsthal several times. See the index (“Personenregister”) in Celan’s Der Meridian (The Meridian). For more on Celan’s ­reception of Hofmannsthal’s work, see Robert Vilain’s article, “Celan and Hofmannsthal.” 131 “ein bloßes Empfindungsgewühl, sage ich, ist ja nicht ein absolutes Nichts, es ist nur nichts, was eine dingliche Welt in sich konstituiert. Warum muß aber eine Welt existieren? Ich sehe in der Tat nicht ein, daß sie das müßte. Das betrifft die Welt im weitesten Sinn, einschließlich das Ich als Persönlichkeit und andere Ich … So kommen wir auf die Möglichkeit phänomenologischen Gewühls als einziges und letztes Sein, aber eines so sinnlosen Gewühls, daß es kein Ich gibt und kein Du gibt und daß es keine physiche Welt gibt.” Husserl, Thing and Space, 249–50; Vorlesungen über die Bedeutungslehre, 288. 132 “Offenbar wäre auch nicht ausgeschlossen, daß allmählich Regelmäßigkeit in Regellosigkeit überginge und sich die angesetzten Dingeinheiten wieder auflösten: in eine schöne Erinnerung und Phantasie, die sich nicht ­festhalten ließe.” Husserl, Thing and Space, 250; Vorlesungen über die Bedeutungslehre, 289.

C h apt e r T h re e    1 Hofmannsthal began working on his prose rendition of the events in 1908, and the first section, “Ritt durch Phokis” (“Ride through Phokis”) as it was previously called, was published the same year in Morgen (19 June 1908). For the German citations, I take the final (1923) version of the text, which includes all three sections (in ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe). Unless otherwise specified, the English citations refer to Tania and James Stern’s translation, printed in McClatchy’s The Whole Difference.

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  2 For a representative psychoanalytical approach, see Bärbel Götz, who interprets the encounter with the statues as a renewed experience of the mother-child unity that exists before birth, as well as a moment of the self’s sense of omnipotence. Götz, Erinnerung, 98. Erwin Kobel and ­Hans-Jürgen Schings highlight the mystical elements in the text, above all in Hofmannsthal’s presentation of universal connectivity. Schings in ­particular links Hofmannsthal’s text to the theological and mystical ­writings of Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, and Martin Buber. Friedmar Apel and Ernst-Otto Gerke are particularly interested in the text’s form; Gerke refers to Hofmannsthal’s composition as a “Gestaltungsakt” or “act of formation.” Gerke, Der Essay, 160.   3 “die Bilder des Lebens folgen ohne inneren Zusammenhang aufeinander und ermangeln gänzlich der effektvollen Komposition.” Hofmannsthal, Südfranzösische Eindrücke, 77.   4 Hofmannsthal will take up this travel experience yet again in his ­introduction to Hanns Holdt’s book of photography, Griechenland: Baukunst, Landschaft, Volksleben, published in 1923.   5 Christopher Meid explores in greater depth how Hofmannsthal refuses to offer even a semblance of objectivity. Both Hans-Jürgen Schings and Daria Santini, like Meid, identify the style of “Moments in Greece” as sui generis, something Hofmannsthal strove for in the context of c­ ontemporary travel writing, particularly about Greece. Gerhart Hauptmann’s very ­different Griechischer Frühling (Greek Spring), for instance, had been ­published shortly before Hofmannsthal’s “Moments in Greece.”   6 Cf. Gisbertz, “Zu einer Stimmungspoetik”; Wellbery, “Die OpferVorstellung”; and Heumann, “Stunde, Luft und Ort.”   7 In the last few decades Stimmung has become a keyword in philosophy and literary studies: Gernot Böhme, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and David Wellbery have all devoted several essays and books to the topic. Because Hofmannsthal often evokes different aspects of Stimmung in his writings, I keep the German term rather than choosing one or several of the English translations.   8 “Gesamtheit der augenblicklichen Vorstellungen, ist relatives Bewußtsein der Welt: je nach der Stimmung denken wir über das Geringste und Höchste anders, es gibt überhaupt keinen Vorstellungsinhalt, der nicht durch die Stimmung beeinflußt, vergrößert, verwischt, verzerrt, verklärt, begehrenswert, gleichgiltig, drohend, lind, dunkel, licht, weich, glatt, etc. etc. gemalt wird.” Hofmannsthal, ka 34: Reden und Aufsätze 3, 325.   9 Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. In a letter to Hofmannsthal (18 July 1908), Harry Kessler suggested striking

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this sentence because it was enigmatic, and because he thought the ­preceding sentence provided a more satisfying conclusion to the passage. See Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 703. Hofmannsthal did not follow Kessler’s advice. The penultimate sentence – “That was how this dialogue sounded” (So klang dieses Zwiegespräch) – must therefore be read in context of the concluding sentence. 10 I have slightly modified Tania and James Stern’s translation, which has: “We had been riding that day from nine to ten hours.” (Wir waren an ­diesem Tag neun oder zehn Stunden geritten). Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 80; “Augenblicke,” 180. 11 “So wirkte Natur auf mich und hier war etwas gemaltes. Hier war eine menschliche Sprache. In einem Blitz habe ich Function des Künstlers geahnt.” Hofmannsthal, ka 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, 438. 12 “und man schaute hinab und hinüber wie von einem Altan.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 81; “Augenblicke,” 181. 13 “In der Mauer zur Linken war eine kleine offene Tür; in der Tür lehnte ein Mönch.“ Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 81; “Augenblicke,” 181. 14 “Das schwarze lange Gewand, die schwarze hohe Kopfbedeckung, das ­lässige Dastehen mit dem Blick auf die Ankommenden, in dieser ­paradiesischen Einsamkeit, das alles hatte etwas vom Magier an sich.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 81–2; “Augenblicke,” 181. 15 E.g., the poem “Ein Traum von großer Magie” (A dream of great magic) and the character called “der Malteser” (which can be translated as “the man from Malta,” or the “Knight Hospitaller”) in the novel fragment Andreas. Robert Stockhammer observes that Hofmannsthal’s magicians are usually caught in a self-reflective and closed circle. Stockhammer, Zaubertexte, 129. 16 “Er war jung, hatte einen langen rötlich blonden Bart, von einem Schnitt, der an byzantinische Bildnisse erinnerte, eine Adlernase, ein unruhiges, fast zudringliches blaues Auge. Er begrüßte uns mit einer Neigung und einem Ausbreiten beider Arme, darin etwas Gewolltes war.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 82; “Augenblicke,” 181. 17 “gleich weit von Hast und von Langsamkeit … gleich weit von Klage und von Lust, etwas Feierliches, das von Ewigkeit her und weit in die Ewigkeit so forttönen mochte.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 83; “Augenblicke,” 181. 18 Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 181. 19 “Das Echohafte, das völlig Getreue jenem feierlichen, kaum noch menschlichen Klang, das Willenlose, fast Bewußtlose schien nicht aus der Brust einer Frau zu kommen. Es schien, als sänge dort das Geheimnis selber, ein Wesensloses.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 83; “Augenblicke,” 182.

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20 In his 14 November 1891 letter to Hermann Bahr, Hofmannsthal suggests Goethe’s Mignon represents a third gender, a stylized union of that which is good and beautiful in both male and female. Hugo und Gerty von Hofmannsthal and Hermann Bahr, Briefwechsel, 2:39. 21 Cf. Gregory Nagy’s definitions of myth and ritual: “Ritual is doing things and saying things in a way that is considered sacred. Myth is saying things in a way that is also considered sacred. So ritual frames myth.” Nagy, Ancient Greek Hero, 5. 22 Hofmannsthal, “Augenblicke,” 184. 23 On the relation between presence and Stimmung see Gumbrecht, Stimmung lesen, 7–34. 24 “Dies Zwiegespräch ist klein zwischen dem Priester und dem dienenden Mann. Aber der Ton war aus den Zeiten der Patriarchen … dies Unscheinbare, diese wenigen Worte, gewechselt in der Nacht, dies hat einen Rhythmus in sich, der von Ewigkeit her ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 184. 25 Hofmannsthal thus stands in a long tradition of what the nineteenth-­ century art historian Sulpiz Boisserée called, in referring to the brothers Grimm, the “Andacht zum Unbedeutenden” (devotion to the ­insignificant). Boisserée, Briefwechsel, 72. Such an appreciation for the importance of details and small things takes on a particular emphasis in the second half of the nineteenth century for people like Walter Pater; by the twentieth century, it becomes an indispensable point of orientation for Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Cf. Assmann, “Hofmannsthals Chandos-Brief,” 276. 26 “So klang dieses Zwiegespräch.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 185. 27 “Aus der Kirche drang mit den dunklen, weichen, tremulierenden Männerstimmen ein gemischter Duft von Wachs, Honig und Weihrauch, der wie der Geruch dieses Gesanges war.” (Together with the dark, soft, tremulous voices of the men, there came from the church a blended scent of wax, honey, and incense, like the redolence of song – my translation). Hofmannsthal, “Augenblicke,” 182. 28 “Stunde, Luft und Ort machen alles.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. 29 “Augen der Poesie, die jedes Ding jedesmal zum erstenmal sieht.” Hofmannsthal, “Gespräch,” 79. There is also a sense in which uniqueness functions as a life-changing moment; in the play Die Frau am Fenster (The Woman at the Window), this is implied as the moment of a ­maltreated woman’s self-assertion in the matters of love. Dianora loves

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a man other than her violent husband and defends herself before the latter by claiming she betrayed him only once – it was a unique incident. Hofmannsthal, Die Frau am Fenster, 112. The importance of singularity in repetition is a motif evoked throughout “Moments in Greece.” 30 “genug, es ist nahe.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 185. 31 “einer der seltsamsten und schönsten Gespräche, dessen ich mich ­entsinnen kann.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. 32 “Unsere Freunde erschienen uns, und indem sie sich selber brachten, brachten sie das Reinste unseres Daseins herangetragen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 33 “ernst und von einer fast beängstigenden Klarheit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 34 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 76. 35 “Gestalt auf Gestalt kommt heran, sättigt uns mit ihrem Anblick, begleitet uns, verfließt wieder.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 36 “andere, anklingend, haben schon gewartet, nehmen die leere Stelle ein, beglänzen einen Umkreis gelebten Lebens, bleiben dann gleichsam am Wege zurück, indessen wir gehen und gehen, als hinge von diesem Gehen die Fortdauer des Zaubers ab.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 37 “Indem sie vor uns lebten und uns anblickten, waren die kleinsten Umstände und Dinge gegenwärtig.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 87; “Augenblicke,” 186. 38 “scheinbar unbedeutende kleine Sätze.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186. 39 “und ihre Gesichter sind mehr als Gesichter: das gleiche wie im Ton jener abgebrochenen Sätze steigt in ihnen auf, kommt näher und näher gegen uns heran, scheint in ihren Zügen, im Unsagbaren ihres Ausdrucks ­aufgefangen und darinnen befestigt, aber nicht beruhigt. Es ist ein endloses Wollen, Möglichkeiten, Bereitsein, Gelittenes, zu Leidendes. Jedes dieser Gesichter ist ein Geschick, etwas Einziges, das Einzelnste, was es gibt, und dabei ein Unendliches, ein Auf-der-Reise-sein nach einem unsagbar fernen Ziel. Es scheint nur zu leben, indem es uns anblickt: als wäre es unser Gegenblick, um dessenwillen es lebe.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186. 40 While Friedrich Schopenhauer’s notion of suffering is omnipresent for the fin-de-siècle, Georg Büchner’s (purported) views on the subject were closer to Hofmannsthal’s. These are the words attributed to Büchner on his

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death-bed: “We do not have too many pains, we have too few, for through pain we reach God! We are death, dust, ash, how should we complain?” (Wir haben der Schmerzen nicht zu viel, wir haben ihrer zu wenig, denn durch den Schmerz gehen wir zu Gott ein! Wir sind Tod, Staub, Asche, wie dürften wir da klagen?) These words can be found in several places in Hofmannsthal’s notes. See Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 327. 41 “geometrischer Ort der inneren Persönlichkeit, so weit sie anschaubar ist.” Simmel, “Die ästhetische Bedeutung des Gesichts,” 39. See also DangelPelloquin, “Ah, das Gesicht!” 54. 42 Heraclitus, Fragments, 69. 43 “Wir sind wie zwei Geister, die sich zärtlich erinnern, an den Mahlzeiten der sterblichen Menschen teilgenommen zu haben.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186–7. 44 A re-evaluation of Hofmannsthal’s writings on the themes of propriety, tact, and custom (Sitte, Gebräuche, Taktgefühl) would benefit from a look into his understanding of the ancient Greek themis. 45 Gadamer, Die Aktualität des Schönen, 41; The Relevance of the Beautiful, 31. 46 Gadamer, Die Aktualität des Schönen, 42; The Relevance of the Beautiful, 31. 47 “der am unsäglichsten gelitten hat … Er ist arm und leidet, aber wer dürfte wagen, ihm helfen zu wollen, maßlos einsam.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 187. 48 “gegen den eigenen Dämon um ein Ungeheures … ein nicht zu Nennendes.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 187. 49 “er will steil hinab, ohne Weg, schnell. Unsagbare Auflehnung, Trotz dem Tod bis ins Weiße des Augs, den Mund vor Qual verzogen und zu klagen verachtend.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 187. 50 Wellbery, “Die Opfer-Vorstellung,” 301. 51 “Fast drohend blickte die Morgensonne auf die fremde ernste Gegend … Fremde Schicksale, sonst unsichtbare Ströme, schlugen in uns auf Festes und offenbarten sich.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 188. 52 “Stunde, Luft und Ort machen alles.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 86; “Augenblicke,” 185. 53 Schings, “Hier oder nirgends,” 377. 54 Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 110. 55 The dog in Andreas is another example of Hofmannsthal’s interest in the final equality of all beings and the consequences of failing to acknowledge that equality. In that novel-fragment, the dog is the object of twelve-yearold Andreas’s sadistic brutality (itself a manifestation of possessive

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jealousy). The boy’s actions come back to haunt him later in life, both in his desire to return to that time, when “das Unendliche” (the infinite) touched him, and in his desire for a canine companion, which he knows he could never again have. Notably for the context of “Moments in Greece,” the dog approaches Andreas with an incomprehensible humility. This is different from Kafka’s image of the dog as an animal laden with shame: in The Trial, K.’s final words describe his own death: “‘Like a dog!’ he said, and it was as if the shame should outlive him” (“‘Wie ein Hund!’ sagte er, es war, als sollte die Scham ihn überleben.”) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 70; Kafka, Der Process, 1.11: 25. There are other examples in Hofmannsthal’s work of inflicted suffering or sacrifice associated with extraordinary sensation. One particularly disturbing image is that of the crucified sparrow-hawk in the opening of “Dämmerung und nächtliches Gewitter” (“Dusk and Nocturnal Thunderstorms”). Wellbery argues convincingly that the sacrifice is part of what lends such fascination to those special moments in Hofmannsthal’s work. Wellbery, “Opfer-Vorstellung,” 298. The artist is, like the dog or the sparrow-hawk, a victim of intense suffering; but in that suffering there is also pleasure: “For he [the poet] suffers from all things and insofar as he suffers from them, he enjoys them” (Denn er [der Dichter] leidet an allen Dingen und indem er an ihnen leidet, genießt er sie). Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 138. In general, it might be argued that Hofmannsthal’s images of sacrifice move from sacrifice of the other to ­sacrifice of the self; yet in all of these, there is a tangling of existences. This is why it is such a powerful trope for the symbol in “The Conversation about Poems.” See also Renate Böschenstein’s “Tiere als Elemente von Hofmannsthals Zeichensprache” and Kári Driscoll’s “Die Wurzel aller Poesie: Hofmannsthals Zoopoetik.” 56 Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 90; “Augenblicke,” 188. 57 The term (“der Schiffbrüchige” in German) conjures the image of someone who has escaped from a sinking ship. It recalls the “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” in which the merchant has exchanged his place at sea for a nauseous life on land. Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 92; “Augenblicke,” 190. The word also evokes Rimbaud’s famous verse poem of the sinking (or “drunken”) boat, “Le Bateau ivre.” 58 “Sonderbar unwirklich dies, wie er so mit Schweigen auf seinen Tod ­zuging.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 191. 59 “mit Anstand und Ehrerbietung.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 92; “Augenblicke,” 189. 60 Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 109–10.

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61 Katrin Scheffer notes that this image of water in its capacity to join ­disparate things is present early on in the travel essay “Sommerreise” (“Summer Trip”). Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 263. 62 “Sein Gesicht blickte mich an, wie früher jene Gesichter mich angeblickt hatten; ich verlor mich fast an sein Gesicht, und wie um mich zu retten vor seiner Umklammerung, sagte ich mir: ‘Wer ist dieser? Ein fremder Mensch!’ Da waren neben diesem Gesicht die anderen, die mich ansahen und ihre Macht an mir übten und viele mehr.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 92–3; “Augenblicke,” 190. 63 Cf. Murray, again referring to that quality the ancient Greeks called αἰδοῖος: (aidoîos) “It was an emotion, the keener because it was merely instinctive and was felt by a peculiarly sensitive people; an emotion of shame and awe, and perhaps something like guilt, in meeting the eyes of the oppressed of the earth; a feeling that a wrong done to these men is like no other wrong; that what these men report of you ultimately in the ear of Zeus will outweigh all the acute comments of the world and the gratifying reports of your official superiors.” Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 110. 64 “und war wie doppelt, war Herr über mein Leben zugleich, Herr über meine Kräfte, meinen Verstand, fühlte die Zeit vergehen.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 170. 65 “Ein Knabe, an dem Gesichter von Soldaten vorüberziehen, Kompagnie auf Kompagnie, unzählig viele, ermüdete, verstaubte Gesichter, immer zu vieren, jeder doch ein Einzelner und keiner, dessen Gesicht der Knabe nicht in sich hineingerissen hätte, immer stumm von einem zum andern tastend, jeden berührend, innerlich zählend: ‘Dieser! Dieser! Dieser!’ indes die Tränen ihm in den Hals stiegen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 66 “Wer ist dieser? … Ein fremder Mensch!”; “Wer bin ich?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 190, 191. 67 “Wir sehen uns umgeben von schönen Formen und Farben. Genießen auf den ersten Blick vielfaches Gebilde der Natur und der Menschenhand … ‘Kunstfreund’ ein gefährliches Wort, nicht ohne dämonischen Inhalt. Hier scheinen wir etwa in Gefahr, uns selber zu verlieren: großer Irrthum! Hier werden wir erst geweckt, uns selber zu besitzen: denn wir schaffen ja den unsterblichen Inhalt dieser Gebilde, indem wir sie lebendig ­nachfühlen.” Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 255. 68 As the editors Konrad Heumann and Ellen Ritter have pointed out in their commentary to the critical edition, Hofmannsthal had at the time been assimilating into his own work the hypothesis raised by Freud and Breuer in Studies on Hysteria, namely that memory is organized as a structure

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of stratified layers. Hofmannsthal uses this image then to explain how an encounter with a work of art can have a – necessarily limited – (self-) revelatory effect on the viewer. Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 253. 69 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note from 4 January 1894, inspired by Ernst Mach: “We are no closer to our ‘I’ of ten years ago … Eternal physical continuity” (Wir sind unserem Ich von Vor-zehn-Jahren nicht näher … Ewige physische Kontinuität). Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen und Tagebücher, 107. 70 “Da, im Augenblick des bangsten Staunens, kam ich mir wieder, der Knabe sank in mich hinein, das Wasser floß unter meinem Gesicht hinweg und bespülte die eine Wange, die aufgestützten Arme hielten den Leib, ich hob mich, und es war nichts weiter als das Aufstehen eines, der an ­fließendem Wasser mit angelegten Lippen einen langen Zug getan hatte.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 71 In Die Frau ohne Schatten, for instance, the golden water is referred to as “the water of life” (das Wasser des Lebens.) See also Çakmur, Hofmannsthals Erzählung, 206. 72 Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 73 “Das Gedächtnis gehört nur dem Körper: er reproduziert scheinbar das Vergangene, d.h. er erzeugt ein ähnliches Neues in der Stimmung. Mein Ich von gestern geht mich so wenig an wie das Ich Napoleons oder Goethes.” Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen und Tagebücher, 93. 74 Cf. the “Address,” where Hofmannsthal asks with reference to the works of art: “Who amongst us can say: ‘Of what concern are they to me?’ Who could carve them out from his feeling and thought any more easily than a piece of flesh from his body?” (Wer ist unter uns, der sagen könnte: ‘Was gehen sie mich an?’ Wer könnte sie aus seinem Fühlen und Denken leichter herausschneiden als ein Stück Fleisch aus seinem Körper?) Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8. 75 “Verwandtschaft der schönen Dinge in der Zeit, und tiefer Sinn davon: die Bilderbücher von Crane Verwandtschaft derer von verschiedenen Zeiten … So umschweben uns die parallelen Gebärden der Unzähligen, unzählige Gesichter beugen sich mit uns Wasser [zu] trinken.” Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen aus dem Nachlass, 391–2. 76 “Jedes dieser Gesichter ist ein Geschick, etwas Einziges, das Einzelnste, was es gibt, und dabei ein Unendliches, ein Auf-der-Reise-sein nach einem unsagbar fernen Ziel.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 88; “Augenblicke,” 186. 77 “Da, im Augenblick des bangsten Staunens … und es war nichts weiter als das Aufstehen eines, der an fließendem Wasser mit angelegten Lippen einen langen Zug getan hat.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191.

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78 “Die Berge riefen einander an; das Geklüftete war lebendiger als ein Gesicht; jedes Fältchen an der fernen Flanke eines Hügels lebte: dies alles war mir nahe wie die Wurzel meiner Hand. Es war, was ich nie mehr sehen werde. Es war das Gastgeschenk aller der einsamen Wanderer, die uns begegnet waren.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 79 “genug, es ist nahe.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 85; “Augenblicke,” 185. 80 “Einmal offenbart sich jedes Lebende, einmal jede Landschaft, und völlig: aber nur einem erschütterten Herzen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 81 “Gastgeschenk aller der einsamen Wanderer” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 93; “Augenblicke,” 191. 82 “Aber mich verlangte nicht, noch weiter daran zu denken. ‘Gewesen,’ sagte ich unwillkürlich und hob den Fuß über die Trümer, die zu Hunderten hier umherlagen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 191. 83 “vom Alter verwesten [sic]” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. 84 “mit meinem Atemzug fühlte ich auch ihren Kontur sich heben und ­senken … Ohne mein Zutun wählte mein Blick.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. 85 Ending as a fragment, the poem (Sappho 31) links physical dissociation with poverty. In the translation by Anne Carson: “and cold sweat holds me and shaking / grips me all, greener than grass / I am and dead – or almost / I seem to me. / But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty.” Sappho, If Not, Winter, 63. 86 “Aber auch um sie spielte in dem Abendlicht, das klarer war als ­aufgelöstes Gold, der verzehrende Hauch der Vergänglichkeit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. 87 The most well-known expression of this is the play Jedermann (Everyman), which is performed every year at the Salzburg Festival. The play is based on the medieval tale of a rich man whose love of wealth has led to a sinful life. In Hofmannsthal’s version, responsibility towards ­others becomes an equally important theme. 88 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note: “The poet a reverse Midas: all lifeless things he touches he brings to life” (Dichter ein umgekehrter Midas: was er Erstarrtes berührt, erweckt er zum Leben.) Hofmannsthal, Aufzeichnungen und Tagebücher, 93. For a detailed treatment and ­contextualization of this relation, see Mayer, “Midas statt Pygmalion,” 302–3. 89 With reference to the 1896 poem “Manche freilich,” (“Some, indeed,”) Judith Ryan states quite perceptively: “poetic utterance and what Pater

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called the ‘hard gem-like flame’ of passionate engagement in the present moment are not at all sufficient. The poet’s privileged position does not permit him to forget the problem of social class, illustrated at the ­beginning of the poem by the image of an ancient galley in which the free enjoy the vast perspectives of life above deck while the slaves toil away to their death below.” Ryan, Vanishing Subject, 122. “De cet égout immonde, l’or pur s’écoule. C’est là que l’esprit humain se perfectionne et s’abrutit, que la civilisation produit ses merveilles et que l’homme civilisé redevient presque sauvage.” De Tocqueville, Journeys, 107–8; “Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande,” 504. Morris, “The Socialist Ideal,” 257–8. “Ich wollte hinübergehen zu ihr; es trieb mich, um sie herumzugehen. Ihr Schatten strömte zu ihren Füßen auf den Boden hin; die abgewandte Seite, dorthin, gegen den Untergang der Sonne, diese schien mir das eigentliche Leben zu enthalten.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Der um Geld zu ringen meinte, um Geld, um Geld, und gegen den eigenen Dämon um ein Ungeheures ringt, ein nicht zu Nennendes.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 89; “Augenblicke,” 187. “Diese Griechen, fragte ich in mir, wo sind sie? Ich versuchte mich zu ­erinnern, aber ich erinnerte mich nur an Erinnerungen. Namen schwebten herbei, Gestalten; sie gingen ineinander über, als löste ich sie auf in einem grünlichen Rauch, darin sie verzerrten.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Form gewordene Willkür.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 8. Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Daß sie längst dahin waren, darum haßte ich sie, und daß sie so rasch dahingegangen waren.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95; “Augenblicke,” 192. “Er haßte seinen vorzeitigen Tod so sehr, daß er sein Leben haßte, weil es ihn dahin geführt hatte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 55; “Das Märchen,” 30. “Schon war ja alles nicht, indem es zu sein glaubte! Und darüber ­schwebend die ewige Fata Morgana ihrer Poesie; und ihre Götter selber, welche unsicheren vorüberhastenden Phantome … Götter, ewige? Milesische Märchen, eine Dekoration an die Wand gemalt im Hause einer Buhlerin.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95; “Augenblicke,” 192–3. “da traf mich ein Blick; tief und zweideutig wie von einem Vorübergehenden. Er ging und war mir schon halb abgewandt, ­verachtungsvoll auch dieser Stadt, seiner Vaterstadt. Sein Blick ­enthüllte mir mich selbst und ihn: es war Platon. Um die Lippen des Mythenerfinders, des Verächters der Götter, spielten der Hochmut und

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geisterhafte Träume. In einem prunkvollen, unbefleckten Gewand, das ­lässig den Boden streifte, ging er hin, der Unbürger, der Königlicher; er schwebte vorüber, wie Geister, die mit geschlossenen Füßen gehen. Verachtend streifte er die Zeit und den Ort, er schien vom Osten ­herzukommen und nach dem Westen zu entschwinden.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 95–6; “Augenblicke,” 193. 101 Hofmannsthal, “Einem, der vorübergeht,” 60. 102 Baudelaire, Die Blumen des Bösen, 137. 103 “Dichten ist ein Übermut, / Niemand schelte mich!” The lines come from the poem “Derb und tüchtig.” Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 16. 104 Cf. lines 4185–8 in Goethe’s Faust: “Sie schiebt sich langsam nur vom Ort, / Sie scheint mit geschloßnen Füßen zu gehen. / Ich muß bekennen, daß mir deucht, / Daß sie dem guten Gretchen gleicht.” (How slowly she moves now, / As if her feet were fastened somehow! / And as I look, it seems to me, / It’s poor dear Gretchen that I see!) Goethe, Faust, 131; Faust Part One, 132. 105 “Habe doch Mitleiden mit deinem Fusse! Speie lieber auf das Stadtthor und – kehre um!”; “‘wo man nicht mehr lieben kann, da soll man – ­vorübergehen! –’ … Also sprach Zarathustra und gieng an dem Narren und der grossen Stadt vorüber.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 176, 178; Also sprach Zarathustra, 221. 106 “Verachtend streifte er die Zeit und den Ort, er schien vom Osten ­herzukommen und nach dem Westen zu entschwinden … und meine Schuld lag am Tage. Es ist deine eigene Schwäche, rief ich mich an, du bist nicht fähig, dies zu beleben. Du selbst zitterst vor Vergänglichkeit, alles um dich tauchst du ins fürchterliche Bad der Zeit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 96; “Augenblicke,” 193. 107 See in particular Hofmannsthal’s essay “Shakespeare’s Kings and Noblemen”: “And now he, the reader, is nothing but an instrument: now the book plays on him.” (Und nun ist er, der Leser, nur ein Instrument: nun spielt das Buch auf ihm.) The reader must adopt the receptive attitude of the artist. Like Keats’ “negative capability,” Hofmannsthal’s poetic receptivity undermines the subject-object hierarchy. Hofmannsthal, “Shakespeare’s Kings,” 115; “Shakespeare’s Könige,” 81. 108 Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 109. 109 “‘Gewesen,’ sagte ich unwillkürlich und hob den Fuß über die Trümer, die zu Hunderten hier umherlagen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 94; “Augenblicke,” 193. 110 In André Gide’s 1898 play Philoctète, the protagonist is portrayed as a writer. Little has been written on Hofmannsthal and Gide, but Chryssoula

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Kambas mentions Gide’s acquaintance with Hofmannsthal (through Harry Kessler) around 1900. Kambas “Walter Benjamin,” 135. 111 “ohne Philoctetes selber die Stadt nicht fallen kann.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 96; “Augenblicke,” 194. 112 Like Gide’s character, the poet in Hofmannsthal’s essay “Der Dichter und diese Zeit” (“The Poet and Our Time”) is a figure whose presence is not desired; domiciled under the stair of his own house, he experiences suffering and pleasure, yet his presence remains unobserved. Hofmannsthal, “The Poet,” 41; “Der Dichter,” 137. 113 “Hier, wo ich es mit Händen zu greifen dachte, hier ist es dahin, hier erst recht.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 114 “Ich hob den Fuß, um die gespenstische Stätte des Nichtvorhandenen zu räumen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 115 “Kostbarkeiten … die aus dem Schutt der Gräber kommen: sie haben der Gewalt der Zeit widerstanden, für den Augenblick wenigstens, sie sprechen nur sich aus und sind von vollkommener Schönheit.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 116 “Was die Dinge auszeichnet, dieses Ganz-mit-sich-Beschäftigtsein, das war es, was einer Plastik ihre Ruhe gab; sie durfte nichts von außen verlangen oder erwarten, sich auf nichts beziehen, was draußen lag, nichts sehen, was nicht in ihr war.” Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 42; Sämtliche Werke, 5:159. 117 Rilke, Briefe aus den Jahren 1902 bis 1906, 112. 118 Cf. Mallarmé’s influential distinction: “To name an object is to ­suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which is intended to be divined bit by bit: to suggest it, there’s the dream. It is the perfect usage of this mystery which constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object, little by little, in order to reveal a state of the soul, or, conversely, to choose an object and to release from it a state of soul through a process of ­decryption.” (Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite de deviner peu à peu : le suggérer, voilà le rêve. C’est le parfait usage de ce mystère qui constitue le ­symbole : évoquer petit à petit un objet pour montrer un état d’âme, ou, ­inversement, choisir un objet et en dégager un état d’âme, par une série de déchiffrements.) Mallarmé, Sur l’évolution ­littéraire, 700. 119 “Ein Becher gleicht der Rundung der Brüste oder der Schulter einer Göttin. Eine goldene Schlange, die einen Arm umwand, ruft diesen Arm herauf.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 194. 120 “Sie trug den Becher in der Hand – / Ihr Kinn und Mund glich seinem Rand.” Hofmannsthal, “The Both of the Them,” 28; “Die Beiden,” 50.

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121 “die dunklen Köpfe aber mit dem bösen Mund von Schlangen, drei wilden Augen in der Stirn und unheimlichem Schmuck in den kalten, harten Haaren, bewegten sich neben den atmenden Wangen und streiften die schönen Schläfen im Takt der langsamen Schritte.” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44–5; “Das Märchen,” 20. 122 The gaze of Medusa works both ways: in the merchant’s son’s case, the snakes are part of the hair of the servant girl, fixing the viewer in their presence; on the other hand, the image of the Medusa-stare is “fixed” by “The Tale” itself, and thus by the reader’s aesthetic “gaze.” In the final section of “Moments in Greece,” a similar double gaze will be an ­important part of the aesthetic moment. 123 Schopenhauer makes a similar remark in identifying seemingly ordinary things as potential sites for the aesthetic experience. Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, 1:298. 124 “In diesem Augenblick geschah mir etwas: ein namenloses Erschrecken: es kam nicht von außen, sondern irgendwoher aus unmeßbaren Fernen eines inneren Abgrundes: es war wie ein Blitz: den Raum, wie er war, viereckig mit den getünchten Wänden und den Statuen, die dastanden, erfüllte im Augenblicke ein völlig anderes Licht, als wirklich da war: die Augen der Statuen waren plötzlich auf mich gerichtet, und in ihren Gesichtern vollzog sich ein völlig unsägliches Lächeln.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97–8; “Augenblicke,” 195. 125 “die Form gewordene Willkür der zusammentretenden Farben und Schattirungen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 48; “Ansprache,” 7–8. 126 Plato, Timaeus, 1254–5. 127 Cf. Gregor Streim, Das Leben in der Kunst, 208–9, and Grundmann, Mein Leben, 117. 128 “Socrate n’est pas khôra mais il lui ressemblait beaucoup si elle était quelqu’un ou quelque chose … Cette place introuvable, Socrate n’occupe pas mais c’est elle depuis laquelle, dans le Timée et ailleurs, il répond à son nom. Car il faut toujours, comme khôra, ‘l’appeler de la même façon.’” Derrida, “Khōra,” 111; Khôra, 281. 129 “Deprived of a real referent, that which in effect resembles a proper name finds itself called an X which has as its property (as its physis and as its dynamis, Plato’s text will say) that it has nothing as its own and that it remains unformed, formless (amorphon). This very singular impropriety, which precisely is nothing, is just what khōra must, if you like, keep; it is just what must be kept for it, what we must keep for it.” (Privé de référent réel, ce qui en effet ressemble à un nom propre se trouve aussi appeler un X qui a pour propriété, pour physis et pour dynamis dira le texte,

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de n’avoir rien en propre et de rester informe (amorphon). Cette très ­singulière impropriété, qui justement n’est rien, voilà ce que chôra doit, si l’on peut dire, garder, voilà ce qu’il faut lui garder ce qu’il nous faut lui garder.) Derrida, “Khōra,” 97; Khôra, 271. 130 “den Raum … erfüllte … ein völlig anderes Licht, als wirklich da war.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97; “Augenblicke,” 195. 131 Cf. Roberta Ascarelli, who in exploring the performative qualities of this “scene” in the museum notes how Hofmannsthal sets the statues in motion in a kind of auratic theatre. Ascarelli, “La danza,” 64. 132 Braegger notes the connection to the “Address” as well and traces this back to Lafcadio Hearn’s 1896 Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life, which Hofmannsthal had read in 1901. Later, he wrote the introduction to the German translation. Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 118–21. See also Freny Mistry, “On the Notion of ‘Präexistenz’ in Hofmannsthal.” 133 “C’est à cette profondeur que nous ferait trembler la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas.” Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” 82; “Violence et métaphysique,” 122. 134 “L’œuvre ne réussit pas – est mauvaise – lorsque elle n’a pas cette ­aspiration à la vie qui a emu Pygmalion. Mais ce n’est qu’une aspiration. L’artiste a donné à la statue une vie sans vie. Une vie dérisoire qui n’est pas maitresse d’elle-même, une caricature de vie. Une présence qui ne se ­recouvre pas elle-même et qui se déborde de tous côtés, qui ne tient pas en mains les fils de la marionnette qu’elle est.” Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 138; “La réalité et son ombre,” 182. 135 “Ne parlez pas, ne réfléchissez pas, admirez en silence et en paix – tels sont les conseils de la sagesse satisfaite devant le beau … qui ont des bouches, mais qui ne parlent plus.” Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 141. “La réalité et son ombre,” 787. 136 “L’infini se présente comme visage dans la résistance éthique qui paralyse mes pouvoirs et se lève dure et absolue du fond des yeux sans défense dans sa nudité et sa misère … Parler à moi c’est surmonter à tout moment, ce qu’il y a de nécessairement plastique dans la manifestation. Se manifester comme visage, c’est s’imposer par-delà la forme, manifestée et purement phénoménale … Dans le Désir se confondent les mouvements qui vont vers la Hauteur et l’Humilité de l’Autrui.” Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 200–1; Totalité et Infini, 174. 137 “Zugleich wußte ich: ich sehe dies nicht zum erstenmal.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 138 Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 193; Breier, “Zwischen Gewesenem und Gegenwärtigem,” 15.

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139 For the importance of the face and physiognomy in Hofmannsthal’s texts (especially as a reception of the work of Rudolf Kassner and Georg Simmel), see Dangel-Pelloquin’s article, “Ah, das Gesicht!” While DangelPelloquin’s study focuses on the faces of people, “Moments in Greece” demonstrates that Hofmannsthal’s interest in physiognomy extends to the inanimate (memories, landscapes, and art). 140 Pater, The Renaissance, 67, 79. 141 “in irgendwelcher Welt bin ich vor diesen gestanden, habe ich mit diesen irgendwelche Gemeinschaft gepflogen und seitdem habe alles in mir auf einen solchen Schrecken gewartet, und so furchtbar mußte ich mich in mir berühren, um wieder zu werden, der ich war.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 142 “In diesem Augenblick geschah mir etwas”; “es kam nicht von außen, sondern irgendwoher”; “in irgendwelcher Welt”; “irgendwelche Gemeinschaft.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 97–8; “Augenblicke,” 195. Emphasis mine. 143 For extended discussions of Hofmannsthal’s use of the term “präexistenz,” see Freny Mistry’s “On the Notion of ‘Präexistenz’” and Walter Jens’s chapter on Hofmannsthal’s Ad me ipsum in Hofmannsthal und die Griechen. 144 “Irgendwo geschah eine Feierlichkeit, eine Schlacht, eine glorreiche Opferung: das bedeutete dieser Tumult in der Luft, das Weiter- und Engerwerden des Raumes – das in mir dieser unsagbare Aufschwung, diese überschwellende Geselligkeit, wechselnd mit diesem rätselhaften Erbangen und Verzagen: denn ich bin der Priester der die Zeremonie vollziehen wird – ich vielleicht auch das Opfer, das dargebracht wird: das alles drängt zur Entscheidung, es endet mit dem Überschreiten einer Schwelle, mit einem Gelandetsein.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 145 Claudia Bamberg notes that both the third “Augenblick” and Rilke’s poem “Wendung” (“Turn”), written in June of 1914, treat in similar ­fashion the question of “Schauen” (seeing). I would add here another point of ­commonality – that of sacrifice (Opfer). Printed above Rilke’s poem and below the title is a quote attributed to Rudolf Kassner: “Der Weg von der Innigkeit zur Größe geht durch das Opfer” (The way from interiority to greatness leads through sacrifice). Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, 2:82. 146 “Dichter und Priester waren im Anfang eins.” Novalis, Blüthenstaub, 441. 147 “Von jeher und zu allen Zeiten sind die Empfindungen, Gemütsbewegungen und Leidenschaften der Menschen auf ihre Religionsbegriffe gepfropfet, ein Mensch ohne alle Religion hat gar keine Empfindung (weh ihm!), ein Mensch mit schiefer Religion schiefe

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Empfindungen und ein Dichter, der die Religion seines Volks nicht ­gegründet hat, ist weniger als ein Meßmusikant.” Lenz, “Remarks,” 72; “Anmerkungen,” 35. 148 “Da verlischt schon dies in ihre versteinernden Gesichter hinein … nichts bleibt zurück, als eine totbehauchte Verzagtheit. Statuen sind um mich, fünf, jetzt erst wird mir ihre Zahl bewußt, fremd stehen sie vor mir, schwer und steinern, mit schiefgestellten Augen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195 149 Cf. Charles Baudelaire’s preface to the works of Edgar Allan Poe: “This primitive, irresistible force is the natural perversity that causes man to be simultaneously homicidal and suicidal, murderer and executioner, ­constantly” (Cette force primitive, irrésistible, est la Perversité naturelle, qui fait que l’homme est sans cesse et à la fois homicide et suicide, assassin et bourreau). Baudelaire, “Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe,” v. 150 “Stehe ich nicht vor dem Fremdesten vom Fremden? Blickt nicht hier aus fünf jungfräulichen Mienen das ewige Grausen des Chaos?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 151 “Aber, mein Gott, wie wirklich sind sie. Sie haben eine atemberaubende sinnliche Gegenwart.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 152 “Ihre Feierlichkeit hat nichts von Masken: das Gesicht empfängt seinen Sinn durch den Körper.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 98; “Augenblicke,” 195. 153 Pater, The Renaissance, 128, 129. 154 “Sie nehmen an Dingen teil, die über jede gemeine Ahnung sind”; “Wie schön sie sind!” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 155 In older versions of the text, the narrator contemplates gazing upon the urns and goblets of the past which suggest but also subdue the power of eternity, resulting in the calm enjoyment of beauty without the disturbing, sublime element: “The meander with which they are ornamented brings the motif of the infinite before the soul, but so subjugated that (1) our ­disquiet is not awakened (2) / it does not threaten (1) us (2) our interiority / . In the delight of the eye (1) the senses satisfy themselves (2) the senses are contented (3) the senses content themselves / and their striving towards infinity (1) lulled to sleep (2) drops off. (Der Mäander, mit dem sie verziert sind, bringt das Motiv der Unendlichkeit vor die Seele, aber so unterjocht, dass (1) unsere Unruhe nicht erwacht (2) / es (1) uns (2) unser Inneres / nicht gefährdet / . In der Ergötzung des Auges (1) befriedigen sich die Sinne (2) sind die Sinne befriedigt (3) geben sich die Sinne zufrieden / und ihr Streben nach Unendlichkeit (1) eingeschläfert (2) schläft ein /). Hofmannsthal, ka 33: Reden und Aufsätze 2, 674.

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156 “Ihre Körper sind mir überzeugender als mein eigener … Ich habe nie zuvor etwas gesehen, wie diese Masse und diese Oberfläche. War nicht für ein Wimperzucken das Universum mir offen?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 157 “Indem man von der Wirklichkeit irgend etwas Zusammenfassendes ­aussagt, nähert man sie schon dem Traum, vielmehr der Poesie.” Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, 45. 158 “es ist das Geheimnis der Unendlichkeit in diesen Gewändern.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 159 The idea of formal adequacy is developed in Hegel’s introduction to Aesthetics. 160 “Wer diesen wahrhaft gewachsen wäre, müßte sich anders ihnen nahen als durchs Auge, ehrfürchtiger zugleich und kühner. Und doch müßte ihm sein Auge dies gebieten, schauend, schauend, dann aber sinkend, brechend wie beim Überwältigten.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 161 “Mein Auge sank nicht, doch sank eine Gestalt über die Knie der einen Priesterin hin, jemand ruhte mit der Stirn auf dem Fuß einer Statue. Ich wußte nicht, ob ich dies dachte, oder ob dies geschah.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 162 “Willst du sicher gehn, so mußt du wissen / Schlangengift und Theriak zu sondern.” Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 22. 163 “Schlangengift und Theriak muß / Ihm das eine wie das andre scheinen.” Ibid. 164 “da doch Schönheit erst entsteht, wo eine Kraft und eine Bescheidenheit ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Der neue Roman von D’Annunzio,” 235. 165 “Wenn das Unerreichliche sich speist aus meinem Innern und das Ewige aus mir seine Ewigkeit sich aufbaut, was wäre dann noch zwischen der Gottheit und mir?” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 100; “Augenblicke,” 196. 166 Breier, “Zwischen Gewesenem und Gegenwärtigem,”16; Schings, “Hier oder nirgends,” 388. 167 “Vielleicht erfassen wir eine ganze Gestalt, die in Marmor vor uns aufsteht, noch immer mit einem romantischen Blick. Vielleicht leihen wir ihr zuviel von unserer Bewußtheit, von unserer ‘Seele.’” Holdt, Griechenland, viii. See also Braegger, Das Visuelle und das Plastische, 110. 168 “Die Forderung, welche die Welt des Schönen an uns stellt, jenes dämonische Aus-uns-heraus-locken ganzer Welten des Fühlens, diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos gross ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns, die übereinander gethürmten Schichten der

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aufgestapelten überindividuellen Erinnerung.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 169 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 170 Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time, 119; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 153. 171 “Man muss das Tiefe verstecken. Wo? An der Oberfläche!” Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, 47; “From the Book of Friends,” 148. 172 “Es wäre ja undenkbar, sich an ihre Oberfläche anschmiegen zu wollen. Diese Oberfläche ist ja gar nicht da – sie entsteht durch ein beständiges Kommen aus unerschöpflichen Tiefen.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 173 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis from 11 May 1908: “This journey has given me for the first time in my life that feeling of really travelling. The foreign, the absolutely foreign, foreign light, ­foreign air, as when one strays from the path, foreign people – I am very happy to have finally become acquainted with this. This is the only spot in Europe where one still can.” (Diese Reise gibt mir zum erstenmal im Leben das Gefühl, wirklich zu reisen. Das Fremde, das absolut Fremde, fremdes Licht, fremde Luft, sowie man von der Straße abweicht, fremde Menschen – ich bin sehr glücklich, dies endlich einmal kennengelerntzuhaben. Dies ist wohl der einzige Fleck in Europa, wo man es noch kann). Hofmannsthal, Briefe 1900–1909, 321–2. 174 “Sie sind da und sind unerreichlich. So bin auch ich. Dadurch kommunizieren wir.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 175 “Auf die Gegenständlichkeit geprüft, ist die Gestalt gar nicht ‘da’; aber was wäre gegenwärtiger als sie? Und wirkliche Beziehung ist es, darin ich zu ihr stehe: sie wirkt an mir wie ich an ihr wirke.” Buber, I and Thou, 61; Ich und Du, 17. 176 “Das Plastische entsteht nicht durch Schauen, sondern durch Identifikation.” Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde, 73.

C hapt e r F o u r    1 “ihre eigene kritische Instanz.” Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time, 154; Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit, 154.    2 Ellen Ritter has explored this most comprehensively. See Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 270–82.   3 See Konrad, Studien, 148–9.

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  4 See Mann, Die Opern, 153.   5 See Werbeck, Richard Strauss-Handbuch, 211.  6 Mann, Die Opern, 169.   7 “es stecken sechs Jahre Arbeit in dem Buch, alle guten reinen Momente, die ich diesen finsteren Jahren entreißen konnte, und eine unsägliche Bemühung.” Quoted in Hofmannsthal, KA 28: Erzählungen I, 424.   8 Harry Seelig succinctly argues for the aesthetic improvements achieved in the prose version of the story: “by boldly going beyond the operatic substance of the original, Hofmannsthal succeeds not only in finding for the original a more satisfying aesthetic-ethical shadow, but also in jumping over his own.” Seelig, “Musical Substance,” 70.   9 See Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 181; and Schwarz, Orient – Okzident, 175–88. Ellen Ritter further notes the contrastive fates of the merchant’s son in “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two” and the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Ritter, “Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” 77. 10 “Das Leben, so meint es Hofmannsthal, läßt seiner nicht spotten. Verstoßen – wird es böse und rachsüchtig.” Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 175. 11 Ibid., 181. 12 The flawed narrative of Hofmannsthal’s sudden interest in social concerns persists in Hofmannsthal studies. See, for instance, the 2014 dissertation of Teona Djibouti. As I have shown, ethical and social concerns were ­central to Hofmannsthal’s writing from the beginning. 13 “Nach einem unglücklichen Krieg müssen Komödien geschrieben werden.” Hofmannsthal, “Die Ironie der Dinge,” 138. 14 “But true comedy places individuals into an intricately knotted relationship to the world, it puts everything in relation to everything else, and thus it sets everything in a relationship of irony. In just such a manner proceeds the war, which affects all of us, and from which we still have not extirpated ourselves, and perhaps will not for another twenty years.” (Aber die wirkliche Komödie setzt ihre Individuen in ein tausendfach verhäkeltes Verhältnis zur Welt, sie setzt alles in ein Verhältnis zu allem und damit alles in ein Verhältnis der Ironie. Ganz so verfährt der Krieg, der über uns alle gekommen ist, und dem wir bis heute nicht entkommen sind, ja ­vielleicht noch zwanzig Jahre nicht entkommen werden). Ibid.   15 “gewinnt einen klaren Geist und kommt hinter die Dinge, beinahe wie ein Gestorbener.” Ibid., 140. 16 The trope is a familiar one in fairy tales. Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story) by Adalbert von

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Chamisso (1781–1838) is probably the most familiar example of a ­character selling his shadow for personal gain. 17 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 109. 18 Cf. Pannwitz’s description of the “Reich der Zeugung” (The Realm of Conception) – the so-called “underworld” of the unborn children: “The closest kinship is with Plato’s world of ideas. Except that this is not actually a transcendence, but rather it is contained by the earthly realm. But it is indeed also a μέσον, a μεταξὺ, a unique in-between-world. What is tremendous and novel about it, is that this in-between-world, which is ­presented with such ineffable delicacy, inwardness, and sanctity, as only the world of the dead, the underworld, is presented, is in fact the world of life, the world of the original being-becoming, of pre-childhood and eternal youth, indeed, that it is not the counterworld, but the world itself, the world of conception.” (Die nächste Verwandtschaft ist die mit Platons Welt der Ideen. Nur, daß es keine eigentliche Transzendenz ist, sondern ganz dem Erdenreiche einbegriffen. Wohl aber ist’s auch ein μέσον, eine μεταξὺ, eine eigentümliche Zwischen Welt. Das Ungeheure und Neugeartete ist, daß diese Zwischenwelt, die mit solcher namenlosen Zartheit, Innigkeit, Heiligkeit, wie sonst nur die Welt des Todes, die Unterwelt dargestellt ist, die Welt des Lebens, des Urseiend-Werdenden, der Vorkindheit und ewigen Jugend ist, ja daß sie nicht die Gegenwelt, sondern die Welt selbst der Zeugung ist). Pannwitz, “Hofmannsthals Erzählung,” 377. 19 Kobel rightly argues that the Emperor prevents the Empress from growing into her adult role, but fails to see that Empress is equally complicit in the Emperor’s failure to grow into his; as much as he prevents her from becoming a mother, she has not made him a father. She wishes to hold on to the “Flitterwochen” just as much as the Emperor does, as becomes evident in her nostalgic rehearsal of the moment of their meeting. See Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 272. 20 Hofmannsthal used the metaphor in a letter to Strauss from 2 January 1914: “And I believe too that your path for composing these three acts will be exactly like Dante’s: out of hell, through purgatory, to heaven in the third scene.” (Ich glaube auch, daß Ihr Weg bei der Komposition ­dieser drei Akte genau der des Dante sein wird: aus der Hölle durchs Fegefeuer in den Himmel des dritten Aufzuges). Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, 256. 21 “Weh spricht: Vergeh! Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit – , will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit!” The verse is found in the “Mitternachtslied” in Thus Spake Zarathustra and features in Gustav Mahler’s third symphony, which ­premiered in 1902.

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22 “Der Kaiser trat leichten Fußes über den Leib der Amme hinweg, die ihr Gesicht an den Boden drückte. Er achtete ihrer so wenig, als läge hier nur ein Stück Teppich.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 110. 23 The Emperor’s explicit failure of visual and ethical recognition distinguishes him from the merchant’s son of “The Tale of Night Six Hundred and Seventy-Two.” 24 Schwarz, Orient – Okzident, 184. Helen Frink concludes that the “hunt almost always symbolizes a sexual relationship which is not a fulfilling one. The hunt depicts the initial encounter between the two partners, or shows that their acquaintance has not produced true intimacy and union.” Frink, “The Hunting Motif,” 691. We might extend this argument: In Die Frau ohne Schatten, both hunter (the Emperor) and hunted (the “Feentochter” before she becomes the Empress) are caught up in their active and passive roles respectively, but are both ultimately hindered by this repetition. Only later will they switch roles, such that the Emperor is rendered passive and the Empress becomes the agent. 25 “die Geschichte jener Jagd und ersten Liebesstunde kannte sie [die Amme] genau genug: dies alles war wie mit einem glühenden Griffel ihrer Seele eingebrannt.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 113. 26 “Warum sind Menschengesichter so wild und häßlich, und Tiergesichter so redlich und schön?” Ibid. 27 “Gesicht – Hieroglyphe. Es giebt keine hässlichen Menschen.” Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch und die Geschichte,” 56. 28 Pater, The Renaissance, 6. 29 “Ich will die Frist nicht wissen, vielleicht läuft sie in dieser Stunde ab, und ich könnte erstarren, wenn ich es wüßte … Hier und nicht anderswo wird der Weg angetreten, heute und nicht morgen, in dieser Stunde und nicht bis die Sonne höher steht … mir brennen die Sekunden auf dem Herzen.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 115–16. 30 Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, 147. 31 “trug große Flecken von dunkler Farbe dahin, die sich aus dem Viertel der Färber, das oberhalb der Brücke lag.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 118. 32 “C’est le Styx de ce nouvel enfer.” De Tocqueville, Journeys, 107; “Voyage en Angleterre et en Irlande,” 503. 33 “Das Fürchterliche in den Gesichtern der Menschen traf sie aus solcher Nähe, wie noch nie. Mutig wollte sie hart an ihnen vorbei, ihre Füße ­vermochten es, ihr Herz nicht. Jede Hand, die sich regte, schien nach ihr zu greifen, gräßlich waren so viele Münder in solcher Nähe. Die

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e­ rbarmungslosen, gierigen, und dabei, wie ihr vorkam, angstvollen Blicke aus so vielen Gesichtern vereinigten sich in ihrer Brust.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 118. 34 “Sie sind wie die Schatten, die den Odysseus umlagern und alle vom Blut trinken wollen, lautlos, gierig aneinander gedrängt, ihren dunklen hohlen Blick auf den Lebenden geheftet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 46; “Ansprache,” 7. 35 “Sie fassen uns dämonisch an: und jedes ist eine Welt, und alle sind aus einer Welt, die uns durch sie anrührt und anschauert bis ins Mark.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 50; “Ansprache,” 8–9. 36 “[Die Kaiserin] ging fast unter in einem Knäuel von Menschen, auf ­einmal war sie vor den Hufen eines großen Maulesels, der wissende, sanfte Blick des Tieres traf sie, sie erholte sich an ihm. Der Reiter schlug den Esel, der zögerte, die zitternde Frau nicht zu treten, mit dem Stock über dem Kopf. – Ist es an dem, daß ich mich in ein Tier verwandeln und mich den grausamen Händen der Menschen preisgeben muß? ging es durch ihre Seele und sie schauderte, dabei vergaß sie sich einen Augenblick und fand sich, vom Strome geschoben, am Ende der Brücke, sie wußte nicht wie.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 118–19. 37 See Hofmannsthal’s note from 15 August 1913 for Andreas: “True poetry is the arcanum that unites us with life, severs us from life. The severance – only through severance do we begin to live … but just as severance is imperative, so too is the union, the aurea catena homeri.” (Die wahre Poesie ist das arcanum, das uns mit dem Leben vereinigt, uns vom Leben absondert. Das Sondern – durch Sondern erst leben wir … aber wie das Sondern, so ist auch das Vereinigen unerlässlich, die aurea catena Homeri). Hofmannsthal, KA 30: Andreas, 107. 38 This also bears a strong resemblance to the aforementioned epigraph in “Moments in Greece”: εἰδὶ καὶ κυνῶν ἐρινύες (there is vengeance in heaven for an injured dog). 39 Referring to Freud’s The Uncanny, John Zilcosky notes: “No European reader would, in 1919, have related these disjointed, severed, shaking bodies solely with fairy tales.” Zilcosky, Language of Trauma, 153. Christina Fossaluzza makes the argument that the story had great contemporary relevance and offered subtle reflections on the war and the social mission of art in that era of transition. Fossaluzza, “Zwischen Leben und Geist,” 106–7. 40 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 120. 41 She is also later described as behaving like an “unwilliges Kind” – a stubborn child. Ibid., 123.

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42 “Mutter, Mutter, laß uns nach Haus / Die Tür ist verriegelt: wir finden nicht hinein.” Ibid., 125. 43 “Jeder hat am Dichterischen teil, der Dichter an Jedem. Das Inkognito ist seine Lebensform. Hofmannsthal geleitet den Dichter herab von seinem Elfenbeinturm in das Gewimmel der Märkte und der Gassen … Wie der heilige Alexius der Legende liegt er im Bettlergewand in seinem Hause, dem Hause der Zeit, unter der Stiege, dort wo er alle sieht und alle hört … Ein Heiliger Sebastian steht er unter dem unerbittlichen Gesetz: keinen Ding den Eintritt in seine Seele zu wehren.” Alewyn, Über Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 8–9. 44 Fickert and Celms, “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” 37. 45 “Der Efrit ergriff mit beiden Händen die Handgelenke der Färberin und zwang sie, zu ihm aufzusehen; ihre Blicke konnten sich des Eindringens der seinigen nicht erwehren … das beklemmende Gefühl der Wirklichkeit hielt alles zusammen.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 134. 46 “Durch seine zwei ungleichen Augen grinsten die Abgründe des nie zu Betretenden herein, ein Grausen faßte sie, nicht für sich selber, sondern in der Seele der Färberin, daß diese in den Armen eines solchen Dämons liegen und ihren Atem mit dem seinen vermischen sollte … Ein ungeheures Gefühl durchfuhr die Kaiserin vom Wirbel bis zur Sohle. Sie wußte kaum mehr, wer sie war, nicht, wie sie hierhergekommen war.” Ibid., 136. 47 “Er bemerkte es nicht, daß sie an den Bissen würgte und unter seinen Liebkosungen starr blieb wie eine Tote.” Ibid., 137. 48 “Bereich seines ersten Abenteuers mit der geliebten Frau.” Ibid., 144. 49 This is a variation on one of the central questions in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned”: Can the intensity of the first aesthetic encounter be repeated? 50 The quote is from Horace’s Ars poetica: “As is painting, so is poetry: some pieces will strike you more if you stand near, and some, if you are at a greater distance: one loves the dark; another, which is not afraid of the critic’s subtle judgment, chooses to be seen in the light; the one has pleased once the other will give pleasure if ten times repeated.” The quote can be read in context at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hor.% 20Ars%20381. Kierkegaard’s relation of love to aesthetics is a useful model for understanding the relationship between the Emperor and the Empress. 51 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 465. 52 “Was fruchtet dies, wir werden nicht geboren!” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 144. 53 “Er drückte die Hände über die Brust zusammen und verneigte sich … Der Knabe neigte sich vor dem Kaiser bis gegen die Erde und sprach kein

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Wort. Aber er wies mit einer ehrfurchtsvollen Gebärde auf den einen Sitz am oberen Ende der Tafel.” Ibid., 145. 54 “Es dauerte einen Augenblick, bis sich der Kaiser besann, daß es in jedem Fall an ihm wäre, die ersten Worte zu sprechen.” Ibid., 145. 55 “Sie ging langsam und mit Anstrengung, aber ganz aufrecht … von der Hüfte bis an die Schläfe reichten ihr die dunklen Göttinnen und lehnten mit ihrer toten Schwere an den lebendigen zarten Schultern … Eigentlich aber schien sie nicht an den Göttinnen schwer und feierlich zu tragen, sondern an der Schönheit ihres eigenen Hauptes mit dem schweren Schmuck aus lebendigem, dunklem Gold. ” Hofmannsthal, “The Tale,” 44–5; “Das Märchen,” 20. 56 “sie glitt mehr als sie ging auf den Kaiser zu … als ob sie mit geschlossenen Füßen auf ihn zugehe.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 145; 157. Mathias Mayer traces the image, which occurs in a number of Hofmannsthal’s texts. In the context of Die Frau ohne Schatten, it is used to depict the step into life (“Schritt ins Leben”) as well as the step into death (“Schritt in den Tod”). The Emperor, once petrified, has his feet in a sense bound together like those of the unborn children, but he does not move. Punning on the situation, Mayer notes that it is the Empress who takes the courageous step of sacrifice. Mayer, “Geschlossene Füße,” 59. See also Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 288–94. For Hofmannsthal, the challenges faced by ethical love have a counterpart in aesthetics, which he gestures towards in Ad me ipsum: “The danger, that the ego might unlearn love: in aesthetic terms, that the forms become rigid” (Gefahr, daß das Ego die Liebe verlerne: ästhetisch gesprochen, daß die Forme erstarren). Hofmannsthal, Ad me ipsum, 240–1. 57 “vergib, sagte sie, daß ich dein Kommen überhören konnte, vertieft in die Arbeit an diesem Teppich. Sollte er aber würdig werden bei der Mahlzeit, mit der wir dich vorlieb zu nehmen bitten, unter dir zu liegen, so durfte der Faden des Endes nicht abgerissen, sondern er mußte zurückgeschlungen werden in den Faden des Anfanges. – Sie brachte alles mit niedergeschlagenen Augen vor; der schöne Ton ihrer Stimme drückte sich dem Kaiser so tief ein, daß er den Sinn der Worte fast überhörte.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 145. 58 “Was für ein sonderbarer Traum ist ein früher Gobelin! Welche ganz gebundene, besondere Welt! … Es lebt für uns, es lebt durch uns. Es ist etwas in uns, das diesem Weltbild antwortet.” Hofmannthal, “Address,” 52; “Ansprache,” 9. 59 “Das Gewebe war unter seinen Füßen, Blumen gingen in Tiere über, aus den schönen Ranken wanden sich Jäger und Liebende los, Falken

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schwebten darüber hin wie fliegende Blumen, alles hielt einander umschlungen, eines war ins andere verrankt, das Ganze war maßlos ­herrlich, eine Kühle stieg aber davon auf, die ihm bis an die Hüften ging. – Wie hast du es zustande gebracht, dies zu entwerfen in solcher Vollkommenheit?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 147. 60 See the explanatory notes to Die Frau ohne Schatten in Hofmannsthal, KA  28: Erzählungen I, 431–2. The Pythagorean Theophron, a character in Wieland’s philosophical verse narrative Musarion, names beauty as the subject of love and proceeds to describe “the great art” as an act of ­stripping away the base material from the beautiful: “Die große Kunst”: “vom Stoff es [das Schöne] abzuschneiden.” Wieland, Musarion, 34. 61 “Ich scheide das Schöne vom Stoff, wenn ich webe; das was den Sinnen ein Köder ist und sie zur Torheit und zum Verderben klirrt, lass ich weg … Beim Weben verfahre ich, sagte sie, wie dein gesegnetes Auge beim Schauen. Ich sehe nicht was ist, und nicht was nicht ist, sondern was immer ist, und danach webe ich.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 147. 62 “Chaos des Nichtlebens.” Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 96; “Die Briefe,” 170. 63 As pointed out by Hans-Günther Schwarz, Orient – Okzident, 186. 64 “Ist das Haus nahe oder fern? … Ist das das Ende einer Reise oder der Anfang?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 148. 65 “falsch: jedes Kunstwerk als definitiv anzusehen; immer zu sagen: er hat das aufgegeben, er wendet sich jenem zu, er sieht nur das; er meint also das und das; / falsch das definitive / falsch: alle billigen Antithesen wie ‘Kunst’ und ‘Leben’, Aesthet und Gegentheil von Aesthet … / richtig: die Production als eine dunkle Angelegenheit zwischen dem Einzelnen und dem verworrenen Dasein anzusehen.” Hofmannsthal, “Diese Rundschau,” 234. 66 “New seeing” occupied writers and visual artists from Cézanne in ­painting to Rilke and Hofmannsthal in literature and August Endell in architecture. Ursula Renner summarizes the concept of “Neues Sehen” as a view that wants to see new things, as in the sciences, but above all it is about seeing things anew. Renner, Die Zauberschrift, 13. 67 “Deine Fragen sind ungereimt, o großer Kaiser, wie eines kleinen Kindes. Denn sage uns dieses: wenn du zu Tische gehst, geschieht es, um in der Sättigung zu verharren oder dich wieder von ihr zu lösen? Und wenn du auf Reisen gehst, ist es, um fortzubleiben oder um zurückzukehren?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 148. See also Hofmannsthal, Der Schwierige, 129.

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68 “Ich bin gewohnt, zu erreichen, was ich begehre!” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 149. 69 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 151. 70 Hearn, In Ghostly Japan, 182. 71 “Nur ein Gran von Großmut!” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 156–7. 72 “Er haßte die Botschaft und die Botin und fühlte sein Herz völlig Stein geworden in sich. Ohne ein Wort suchte seine Hand nach dem Dolch in ­seinem Gürtel, um ihn nach dieser da zu werfen, da er ihn nicht nach seiner Frau werfen konnte; als die Finger der Rechten ihn nicht zu fühlen vermochten, wollten ihr die der Linken zur Hilfe kommen, aber beide Hände gehorchten nicht mehr, schon lagen die steinernen Arme starr an den versteinten Hüften und über die versteinten Lippen kam kein Laut.” Ibid., 157. 73 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s note, where he has the children ask the Emperor: “do you not surrender yourself to the hunt, and when you see a beautiful woman, do you not desire to penetrate her middle like a murderous arrow?” (gibst du dich beim Jagen nicht hin und wenn du ein schönes Weib siehst, willst du nicht mitten in sie hinein wie der mörderische Pfeil?) Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 333. 74 “walkte er den Schmutz und das Blut aus dem Gewand eines Schlachters … Der Färber hatte das ausgetretene Gewand auf reine Bretter ausgebreitet und strich es aufs neue mit weißem Ton an. Die Kaiserin half ihm dabei. Das blutig gefärbte Abwasser rann aus dem umgestürzten Schaff in die Gosse. Die beiden arbeiteten eifrig und sahen nicht herüber.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 159–60. 75 One prominent production of the opera eliminates this element from Barak’s character entirely. In Claus Guth’s 2012 production for La Scala and Covent Garden, Barak is robbed of his defining work and made instead a tanner in order to highlight the misogynist undertones of the story. This alteration severely changes the character and the audience’s perception of the relationships portrayed in the opera. Losing his artist’s/ alchemist’s capacity for transforming matter (dying fabrics, infusing them with brilliance and new life), Barak is portrayed “stripping and gutting a gazelle that, in the person of the Empress, represents the feminine ‘other’ of which he remains oblivious.” Quantrill, “An elegantly staged subversion,” s.p. The ‘subversion’ here is forced and results from a depiction of the character that goes against both prose text and libretto. It also jars with the Empress’s positive assessment of Barak. 76 “Die Ceremonien die er macht … die Wege und die Vereinigungen, die seine gesegneten Hände bewirken, die Herrlichkeit der Farben und

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ihre Bescheidenheit, geleitet die Zauberkraft seines Gemütes: die Liebe zu seinen Werkzeugen: die Gelassenheit mit der er arbeitet und die fromme Sorgfalt auf ein Ziel: die Ehrfurcht vor sich selber und die Weg­ bereitung für ein Höheres … so künstlich arbeitet er. Wie hast Du mir nicht gesagt, dass die Menschen so gut sind?” Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 364. 77 Cf. Hofmannsthal’s letter to Strauss form 13 June 1913: “I dare not go beyond a certain boundary in concentrating the material, otherwise I’ll impoverish it, the characters will lose their appeal (which lies in their ­psychologically broken contours), they will become too schematic and the whole thing will be trivially operatic.” (Ich darf im Konzentrieren nicht über eine gewisse Grenze herausgehen, sonst verarme ich den Stoff, die Figuren verlieren ihren Reiz (der im psychologischen gebrochenen Konturen liegt), sie werden schematisch und das ganze trivial-opernhaft). Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, 233. 78 “Ehemals waren alle Kunstwerke an der grossen Feststrasse der Menschheit aufgestellt, als Erinnerungszeichen und Denkmäler hoher und seliger Momente. Jetzt will man mit den Kunstwerken die armen Erschöpften und Kranken von der grossen Leidensstrasse der Menschheit bei Seite locken, für ein lüsternes Augenblickchen; man bietet ihnen einen kleinen Rausch und Wahnsinn an.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 144; Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 122. 79 “Lohn? … Womit hätte der Elefant sich Lohn verdient?” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 162. 80 Ibid., 159. 81 “Sie war schön in diesem Augenblick und von ihrem jungen Blut ­durchströmt, daß sie glühte, und die Alte betrachtete sie mit Lust. – Nein, nein, rief sie plötzlich mit leidenschaftlichem Entzücken, er ist schön, achte doch nicht auf mich, du Närrin, er ist schön wie der Morgenstern, und seine Schönheit, das ist das Widerhaken an der Angel.” Ibid., 161. 82 At the beginning of the next chapter, the Dyer’s Wife cries: “O my mother … what powers you assumed I had when you gave me to him, whom you brought to me, to love forever! And why did you not give me those same powers along with him?” (O meine Mutter … welche Kräfte hast du mir zugemutet, da du mir auferlegtest, den, welchen du mir ­zugeführt hast, auf immer lieben zu können! und wo hättest du ­dergleichen Kräfte mir mitgegeben?) Ibid., 167. 83 Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, xviii. 84 “ihr Gesicht in Schmerz und Tränen schwamm, wie das einer sterblichen Frau.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 163.

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85 “der vertraute Laut ihrer Stimmen schien ihm an die Seele zu dringen.” Ibid., 165. 86 Ibid., 166. 87 The term was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to refer to “the epitome of all that makes humans morally and aesthetically superior to animals.” Curran, “Die schöne Seele,” 77. 88 “Schmutzig ist ein kleines Kind, und sie müssen es dem Haushund ­darreichen, um es rein zu lecken; und dennoch ist es schön wie die ­aufgehende Sonne; und solche sind wir zu opfern gesonnen. – Es war ein ganz seltsamer, fast singender Ton, in dem sie es sagte.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 168. 89 Hofmannsthal, “The Poet and Our Time,” 41; “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 137. 90 “ein … alte[s] Gesetz,” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 168. 91 Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 168–9. 92 “Fleißige Kinder”; “reinliche kleine Hände,” Ibid., 170. 93 “Wir nehmen die Farben aus den Blumen heraus und heften sie auf die Tücher, so auch aus den Würmern, und von den Brüsten der Vögel dort, wo ihre Federn leuchtend und unbedeckt sind.” Ibid. This evokes the West-Östlicher Divan poem “An Suleika.” Suleika’s perfume exists because of the sacrifice of thousands of roses. Goethe, West-östlicher Divan, 61. 94 In chapter 4 of the story, the unborn child speaks about how she weaves; in chapter 5, Barak works with the Empress, cleaning and dyeing fabrics. 95 Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, chapter 3. 96 “es ist die Zartheit der Wangen auf immer, und die unverwelklichen Brüste, vor denen sie zittern, die da kommen sollen, mich zu begrüßen.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 171. 97 “Ihre Lippen bewegten sich, und sie murmelte die Worte, aber es war, als wüßte sie es nicht; sie hob die Hand mit den Fischen über die Schulter und warf, aber wie im Schlaf; sie tat das Bedungene, aber so als täte sie es nicht: ihre Augen hefteten auf dem Färber und ihre Lippen verzogen sich wie eines Kindes, das schreien will … Sie tat ein paar unschlüssige Schritte, nirgend sah sie Hilfe und sie preßte den Mund zusammen und blieb stehen.” Ibid., 172. 98 “einer Hündin Geschick.” Ibid., 173. 99 “sie hatte das Gesicht an den Boden gedrückt, mit unsäglicher Demut reckte sie den Arm aus, ohne ihr Gesicht zu heben, bis sie mit der Hand die Füße des Färbers erreichte, und umfaßte sie. Der Färber schien sie nicht zu beachten … Jetzt schob sich die Liegende auf den Händen näher

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100 101

102 103

104

105

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heran und ihr Kinn drückte sich auf die Füße des Färbers. Ihre Lippen murmelte ein Wort, das niemand hörte. Dann lag sie in dieser Stelle wie tot.” Ibid., 174. “eine wunderbare und dabei unschuldige Schönheit … die ungeheure Angst verzerrte sie nicht, sondern verklärte sie.” Ibid. Cf. the description in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned” of ancient warriors. There, they are admired for their “steadfastness in the face of death” (“Todesfestigkeit,” in German). Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 78; “Die Briefe,” 162. Self-sacrifice and acceptance of mortality is by no means restricted to the female sex. Sigismund in Der Turm (The Tower), for instance, bears a striking resemblance to the Empress. Equally, the theme of sacrifice pervades and elevates even the mundane – as when the Marschallin in the opera Rosenkavalier gives up her dalliance with the young Octavian so that he might grow and find love. “in der Größe seines gewaltigen Leibes glich er einem Kinde, dem das Weinen nahe ist.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 174. Cf. Kobel, who writes of Barak’s encounter with his wife in a Heideggerian vein: Barak sees her for the first time not as something ­present-at-hand (“das Vorhandene”) or ready-to-hand (“das Zuhandene”), but rather in her ungraspable being. Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 277. “Mich dünkt, es ist nicht die Umarmung, sondern die Begegnung die eigentliche entscheidende erotische Pantomime. Es ist in keinem Augenblick das Sinnliche so seelenhaft, das Seelenhafte so sinnlich, als in der Begegnung … Hier ist ein Zueinandertrachten noch ohne Begierde, eine naive Beimischung von Zutraulichkeit und Scheu. Hier ist das Rehhafte, das Vogelhafte, das Tierischdumpfe, das Engelsreine, das Göttliche. Ein Gruß ist etwas Grenzenloses.” Hofmannsthal, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 155, 160. “Umarmung ohne Umschlingungen und einem Kusse, indem die Lippen sich weder berührten noch trennten.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 175. Hofmannsthal’s fictional dialogue “The Conversation about Poems” ­portrays the encounter this way: “Like the rainbow, unsubstantial, our soul spans across the inexorable plunge of existence … Enough, something returns. And there is an encounter within us. We are nothing more than a dovecote.” (Wie der wesenlose Regenbogen spannt sich unsere Seele über den unaufhaltsamen Sturz des Daseins … Genug, etwas kehrt wieder. Und etwas begegnet sich in uns mit anderem. Wir sind nicht mehr als ein Taubenschlag). Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 76.

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107 “Allein! Weh, ganz allein. Der Vater fort, / hinabgescheucht in seine kalten Klüfte. / Agamemnon! Agamemnon! / Wo bist du, Vater? Hast du nicht die Kraft, / dein Angesicht herauf zu mir zu schleppen? / Es ist die Stunde, unsre Stunde ist’s!” Hofmannsthal, Elektra, 117. 108 “rief … sehnlich, Vater, wo bist du? Das Wort verhallte.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 183. 109 “Sie rief gellend den Namen ihres Kindes, nichts antwortete, nicht einmal ein Widerhall.” Ibid. 110 “In seiner Unnahbarkeit fühlte sie ihn, auf ihrer Stirne leuchtete ein Abglanz von ihm.” Ibid., 184. 111 “Die Statue wurzelt im Boden, die Musik – und das abendländische Porträt ist Musik, aus Farbentönen gewebte Seele – durchdringt den ­grenzenlosen Raum. Das Freskogemälde ist mit der Wand verbunden, ­verwachsen; das Ölgemälde, als Tafelbild, ist frei von den Schranken eines Ortes. Die apollinische Formensprache offenbart ein Gewordenes, die faustische vor allem auch ein Werden.” Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 340–1. Emphasis in original. 112 “er trug ein Gewand von wunderbar blauer Farbe, nicht so, als hätte man ein weißes Gewebe in die Küpe gelegt, darin sich die Stärke des Indigo und des Waid vermischten, sondern so, als wäre die Bläue des Meeresgrundes selbst hervorgerissen und um seinen Leib gelegt worden.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 184. 113 Ibid., 170. In a later description, the allusion is even more direct: “a dress in splendid colours, as if they had been taken from the breast feathers of a bird of paradise.” ([E]in Kleid in herrlichen Farben, als wären sie von den Brustfedern eines Paradiesvogels genommen.) Ibid., 186. This also recalls Albrecht Dürer’s idea, discussed in chapter 2, that beauty is pulled out of nature. 114 “Schwarzblau, bevor die ersten Strahlen der Sonne den Himmel erhellen.” Ibid., 184. 115 Ibid., 168. 116 “von den zierlichen wie aus Wachs geformten Füßen bis zu dem dunklen wie Kupfer schimmernden Haar glich es der Färberin … auf dem grünen Grund heran wie auf Glas, mit geschlossenen Füßen, und keine Art sich zu bewegen hätte besser zu der Zartheit seiner Glieder und zu den Farben, in denen es glänzte, passen können.” Ibid. The children’s ­movement recalls the earlier description of one of the other unborn ­children before the Emperor: “as if she were moving towards him with her feet closed together” (als ob sie mit geschlossenen Füßen auf ihn zugehe). Ibid., 157.

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117 “Die Farbe schien aus der Ewigkeit her zu ihm zu kommen, so auch die Antworten, die langsam in ihm aufstiegen und zögernd den Rand seiner Lippen erreichten. – Wir bestellen nichts, wir verkünden nichts. Daß wir uns zeigen, Frau, ist alles, was uns gewährt ist.” Ibid., 185. 118 “Da und nicht da, Frau, wie es dir belieben wird! … und sein Gewand war wie Blut, das sich in Gold verwandelt; alle Bäume empfingen von ihm die Bestätigung ihres Lebens, wie vom ersten Glanz der aufgehenden Sonne.” Ibid. 119 “gleich einer Wolke am dunklen Abendhimmel … Nicht dir werden sie vorgeführt werden, Frau, sondern du wirst vorgeführt werden, und dies ist die Stunde.” Ibid. 120 “Dunkel war sein Gewand, wie der nächtliche Himmel ohne Sterne”; “Ich hab mich vergangen … Sie senkte die Augen und richtete sie gleich wieder auf ihn.” Ibid. 121 “Das muß jeder sagen, der einen Fuß vor den andern setzt. Darum gehen wir mit geschlossenen Füßen.” Ibid., 186. 122 “Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. Unmündigkeit ist das Unvermögen, sich seines Verstandes ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Selbstverschuldet ist diese Unmündigkeit, wenn die Ursache derselben nicht am Mangel des Verstandes, sondern der Entschließung und des Muthes liegt, sich seiner ohne Leitung eines anderen zu bedienen. Sapere aude! Habe Muth, dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! ist also der Wahlspruch der Aufklärung.” Kant, Was ist Aufklärung, 20. 123 “ihre Ehrfurcht vor ihm, der so mit ihr sprach, war nicht geringer als die seine vor ihr.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 186. 124 “Im Augenblick ist alles, der Rat und die Tat!” Ibid. 125 “Ein Gruß ist etwas Grenzenloses … Dante datiert sein ‘Neues Leben’ von einem Gruß, der ihm zuteil geworden. Wunderbar ist der Schrei des großen Vogels, der seltsame, einsame, vorweltliche Laut im Morgengrauen von der höchsten Tanne, dem irgendwo die Henne lauscht. Dies Irgendwo, dies Unbestimmte und doch leidenschaftliche Begehrende, dies Schreien des Fremden nach der Fremden ist das Gewaltige.” Hofmannsthal, “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 155, 160. 126 “Ach! kam über ihre Lippen, schamhaft und sehnsüchtig zugleich, und der klanggewordene Hauch aus ihrem eigenen Mund machte, daß sie erglühte von oben bis unten.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 188. 127 “die Säule gab, wie das Licht der Fackel sie berührte, einen schwellenden Klang, der ihr vor Süßigkeit fast das Herz spaltete.” Ibid., 189.

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128 “er schien lastend wie ein mitten in den Teich gebautes Grabmal aus Erz … unsäglich schön … aber unsäglich fremd.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 189. 129 “sie warf sich hinein in das goldene leise wogende Becken; wie ein Schwan mit gehobenen Flügeln rauschte sie auf den Geliebten zu.” Ibid. 130 The swan-maiden stories are listed in Antti Aarne’s tale type index under the general rubric no. 400, Supernatural or Magical Husbands and Wives. 131 The referenced instances appear in Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 176, 178, 187. 132 “es war die Gebärde des Sklaven, der sich völlig dahingibt, auf Leben und Tod … Sie fühlte, wie sie die Sinne verlieren und trinken würde.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 190. 133 “gräßlich und fremd wie aus der Brust eines Tiefschlafenden schlug aus der Tiefe ihrer eigenen Brust der Fluch an ihr Ohr … sie hörte innen ihr eigenes Herz schwer und langsam pochen, als wäre es ein fremdes. Sie sah mit einem Blick, als schwebe sie außerhalb, sich selber dastehen, zu ihren Füßen den Schatten des fremden Weibes, der ihr verfallen war, drüben die Statue. Das furchtbare Gefühl der Wirklichkeit hielt alles zusammen mit eisernen Banden. Die Kälte wehte zu ihr herüber bis ins Innerste und ­lähmte sie. Sie konnte keinen Schritt tun, nicht vor- noch rückwärts. Sie konnte nichts als dies: trinken und den Schatten gewinnen oder die Schale ausgießen.” Ibid. 134 Hofmannsthal’s interest in the dissociation of personality – especially his reception of Morton Prince’s 1906 study The Dissociation of a Personality – is well documented. See Ritter, “Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” 71. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) offer two other striking examples of ecstatic moments linked to pain, fear, and powerlessness. In Joyce’s text, Stephen Dedalus has just undergone the punishment of “pandying” – having his palms struck with a pandybat. The pain is excruciating, and Stephen briefly dissociates himself from the pain: “To think of them beaten and swollen with pain all in a moment made him feel so sorry for them as if they were not his own but someone else’s that he felt sorry for.” Joyce, Portrait, 51. Rilke, likewise, reflects on the uncanniness of hands: while drawing a knight, the young Malte drops his red pencil, which rolls under a desk. He creeps underneath in search of the pencil and observes his own hand: “I recognized in particular my own hand, with fingers outstretched … I remember clearly that I was watching it almost with curiosity; it seemed to me as if it was capable of things that I had never taught it, groping around down there independently with

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135 136 137

138

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Notes to pages 145–6

movements that I had never seen it perform before.” (Ich erkannte vor allem meine eigene, ausgespreizte Hand … Ich sah ihr, weiß ich noch, fast neugierig zu; es kam mir vor, als könnte sie Dinge, die ich sie nicht gelehrt hatte, wie sie da unten so eigenmächtig herumtastete mit Bewegungen, die ich nie an ihr beobachtet hatte.) Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 54–5; Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 78. See Martin Buber’s description of “das Phänomen Projektion” in Ekstatische Konfessionen, xxxi. “Ich will nicht!” Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 587–8. “so als würden sie gesungen in großer Ferne; sie hatte sie nur nachzusprechen. Sie sprach sie nach, ohne Zögern. – Dir Barak bin ich mich schuldig! sprach sie … und goß die Schale aus vor die Füße der verhüllten Gestalt. Das goldene Wasser flammte in die Luft, die Schale in ihrer Hand verging zu nichts.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 191. “From the earliest customs of nations it seems to come to us as a warning that in accepting what nature so bountifully provides we should eschew the gesture of greed. For there is nothing of our own that we are able to give back. It is fitting, therefore, that we should show reverence in the ­taking by restoring to nature a portion of every single thing we receive before taking possession of it as our own. Such reverence finds expression in the ancient custom of libation.” (Aus den ältesten Gebräuchen der Völker scheint es wie eine Warnung an uns zu ergehen, im Entgegennehmen dessen, was wir von der Natur so reich empfangen, uns vor der Geste der Habgier zu hüten. Denn wir vermögen nichts der Muttererde aus Eigenem zu schenken. Daher gebührt es sich, Ehrfurcht im Nehmen zu zeigen, indem von allem, was wir je und je empfangen, wir einen Teil an sie zurückerstatten, noch ehe wir des Unseren uns bemächtigen. Diese Ehrfurcht spricht aus dem alten Brauch der libatio.) Benjamin, One-Way Street, 64–5; Einbahnstrasse, 37–8. “sie fühlte sich hinabgerissen ins Bodenlose.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 192. “Vor unbegreiflicher Qual zerrüteten sich ihr die Sinne. Sie fühlte den Tod ihr eigenes Herz überkriechen, aber zugleich die Statue in ihren Armen sich regen und lebendig werden. In einem unbegreiflichen Zustand gab sie sich selbst dahin und war zitternd nur mehr da in der Ahnung des Lebens, das der andere von ihr empfing. In ihn oder in sie drang das Gefühl einer Finsternis, die sich lichtete, eines Ortes, der aufnahm, eines Hauches von neuem Leben. Mit neugeborenen Sinnen nahmen sie es in sich: Hände, die sie trugen, ein Felsentor, das sich hinter ihnen schloß,

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142 143

144

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wehende Bäume, sanften festen Grund, auf dem die Leiber gebettet lagen, Weite des strahlenden Himmels.” Ibid. “In der Ferne glänzte der Fluß, hinter einem Hügel ging die Sonne herauf, und ihre ersten Strahlen trafen das Gesicht des Kaisers, der zu den Füßen seiner Frau lag, an ihre Knie geschmiegt wie ein Kind … ihre Schatten ­flossen in eins.” Ibid. “Wie der wesenlose Regenbogen spannt sich unsere Seele über den unaufhaltsamen Sturz des Daseins.” Ibid., “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 76. Cf. n68 to Andreas, wherein Hofmannsthal identifies love as both ­universal binding agent and universal solvent: Solve et coagula. Hofmannsthal, ka 30: Andreas, 102. “Er drückte die Hände vor der Brust zusammen und neigte sich vor ihr. Wie ein Stein schlug sie vor ihm hin, ihre Stirne, ihre Lippen berührten seine Füße … wie dort die Färberin vor ihrem Mann warf er [der Kaiser] sich vor seiner Frau und verbarg sein zuckendes Antlitz an ihren Knien. Sie kniete zu ihm nieder, auch ihr war zu weinen neu und süß.” Ibid., Die Frau ohne Schatten, 194. Hofmannsthal’s continued insistence on mutual humility and respect from both men and women is usually ignored in readings that assume the work is misogynistic. Pia Janke writes, for instance, that at the end of the story, the women are bound up in a hierarchical masculine cosmos. According to Janke, the Empress and the Dyer’s Wife have near-death experiences so that they might fulfil their biopolitical destinies as ­mothers. Janke, “Schattenlose Frauen,” 267. This reading does not take into account the near-death experience of the Emperor, nor the madness of the Dyer, both of whom must become fathers. It also ignores the emphasis on mutuality in relationships: Janke mentions, for instance, that the Dyer’s Wife bows to her husband as a sign of female submission to the male, but does not seem to notice that the Dyer bowed to his wife first, or that the Emperor bows to the Empress. Similarly, Marlies Janz emphasizes the “Tortur der Frau” (torture of women) but ignores the ­terror of being ­buried alive (experienced by the Emperor). Janz likewise attributes to Hofmannsthal a certain pleasure in describing in detail in the Empress’s suffering. Janz, Marmorbilder, 188. Aside from the ­dubiousness of reading a particular emotion into the author, Janz does not back up the statement with evidence. On the contrary, the ­descriptions of the Empress’s suffering are vague, universalistic in ­portrayal, and correspond to the sufferings of poets, as Hofmannsthal elsewhere portrays them (in both male and female figures).

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146 “wie ihn niemand hatte singen hören.” Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, 195. 147 Ibid., 135. 148 “Unbegreiflich fanden zarte Worte, leise Töne den Weg aus dieser Höhe zu [ihr].” The Kritische Ausgabe seems to have an error here. The last phrases read: “aus dieser Höhe zu dir.” Ibid., 196, my emphasis. 149 “Wäre denn je ein Fest, / Wären wir insgeheim / Wir die Geladenen, / Wir auch die Wirte?” Ibid. 150 The phrase in the title of this section is taken from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wotton comments, “I should like to write a novel certainly; a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.” Wilde, Dorian Gray, 45. 151 Schneider, Verheißung der Bilder, 222. 152 Fickert and Celms, “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” 37. Somewhat confusingly, Fickert und Celms end their article on a more conciliatory note: “Confronting a world on the brink of destroying itself in a senseless war (a redundant phrase) over the maintenance of a mordant status quo, the creators of the opera The Woman without a Shadow turned Nietzsche’s plea for the revitalizing of all mankind into a somewhat bewildering but hopeful vision of a mythical world in which a union of the good and ­merciful (the province of morality) and the beautiful (the province of art) could prevail.” Ibid., 42. 153 Qtd. in Fickert and Celms, “Die Frau ohne Schatten,” 37. 154 “In diesen gräßlichen Wochen habe ich vielleicht das schönste Capital von dem Märchen geschrieben: wie der Kaiser zu den ungeborenen Kindern kommt … Eberhard sagte mir vor ein paar Monaten, wie wenig, wie nichts diese erträumten Harmonien doch mit dem Leben zu tun hätten, und wie über alles beglückend es doch wäre, daß sie da wären und immer welche entstünden.” Qtd. in Hofmannsthal, ka 28: Erzählungen I, 421. 155 “Inmitten all des Unerfreulichen, das – ausgenommen die glänzenden Taten unsrer Armee – dieser Krieg bringt, ist fleißiges Arbeiten die einzige Rettung. Sonst käme man um vor Ärger über die Tatenlosigkeit unserer Diplomatie, unserer Presse, des Kaisers Entschuldigungstelegramm an Wilson.” Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, 289.

C hapt e r F i ve    1 Although the accepted spelling of the novel fragment is “Andreas,” the notes and the fragment often use the spelling “Andres” (without the second “a,” an anagram of the word for anders, which means “other, different”).

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  2 Ellen Ritter gives slightly different dates: 1906 until his death in 1929. Ritter, “Hofmannsthal’s Narrative Prose,” 65.   3 Representatives of these views are summarized in Mayer and Werlitz, Hofmannsthal-Handbuch, 299–303.   4 “Hier bricht der Torso ab. Welch ein Werk! … Welche Fülle von Gestalten, welch wunderbarer Reichtum der Gegenüberstellung!” Hofmannsthal, “Wilhelm Meister in der Urform,” 33. See also Mayer and Werlitz, Hofmannsthal-Handbuch, 301.   5 “Das Halbe, Fragmentarische aber, ist eigentlich menschliches Gebiet.” See also Joachim Seng, “Das Halbe, Fragmentarische.”   6 “mit einer unendlichen Teilnahme, ja Liebe.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 90–1.   7 I use the term “fragment” to refer to the main section of the Andreas; when not referring to this larger text, I will use the term “Note” or the designation “N” followed by the note number.   8 Aurnhammer, “Hofmannsthals ‘Andreas,’” 278.   9 See Wolfgang Iser’s comments on the appeal of serial novels, in which he underscores the importance of gaps: “In view of the temporary ­withholding of information, the suggestive effect produced by details will increase, thus again mobilizing a new army of possible solutions. Such a technique arouses definite expectations which, if the novel is to have any real value, must never be completely fulfilled … this is clear evidence of the importance of indeterminacy in the text-reader relationship. Furthermore, it reveals the requisite degree of freedom which must be guaranteed to the reader in the communication act, so that the message can be adequately received and processed.” Iser, “Indeterminacy,” 16–17. 10 Scheffer refers to Mark W. Rien’s translation of Susan Sontag’s essay “On Style,” which uses a vocabulary strikingly similar to what I propose was Hofmannsthal’s understanding of the aesthetic encounter: “A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statement or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.” Sontag, “On Style,” 30. Qtd. in Scheffer, Schwebende, webende Bilder, 22. 11 “Sie sind da und sind unerreichlich. So bin auch ich. Dadurch kommunizieren wir.” Hofmannsthal, “Moments,” 99; “Augenblicke,” 196. 12 “So sind wir denn beim Leser angelangt, den in seiner Einbildungskraft mitzuschaffen die oberste gesellige Pflicht dessen ist, der ein Buch macht. Denn eine Gabe kann nicht dargereicht werden, ohne dass zum voraus des Empfängers gedacht werde.” Hofmannsthal, “Deutsches Lesebuch,” 174.

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13 Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 98; “Die Briefe,” 170. 14 The two texts have a complicated and connected genesis. See Hofmannsthal, KA 30: Andreas, 303–6. 15 “Gründe der Bildungsreise. Maler. Große Namen. Paläste. Sitten im Salon. entréegespräche. S c h e i n e n . G e f a l l e n .” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 7. Expanded spacing as in original. 16 In “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” the merchant gives a list of contrasting character types, culminating in a judgment that things are not quite right in society: “There are the people of high rank and the people of low rank, the arrogant and the humble, the learned and those who live from yesterday’s gazette; some who pummel others, and others who cower, some who regard themselves as something, and others who are bashful: but all of that gives not a pure sound.” (Es gibt Vornehme und es gibt Subalterne, es gibt Anmaßende und es gibt Demütige, es gibt Gelehrte und es gibt, die vom gestrigen Zeitungsblatt leben; und die einen Puffen, die andern ducken sich, die einen dünken sich was, die andern genieren sich: aber es gibt alles keinen reinen Klang.) Hofmannsthal, “The Letters,” 78; “Die Briefe,” 161. In Andreas: “the faces of acquaintances and ­relatives rose before him, among them were sardonic faces, bloated, ­indifferent and also friendly faces, but not one of them could have opened his heart.” (Die Gesichter der Bekannten und Verwandten tauchten vor ihm auf, es waren hämische und aufgeblasene darunter, gleichgiltige und auch freundliche, aber nicht eines bei dem ihm die Brust weiter geworden wäre.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 69. 17 “die Repräsentation und das Ansehen.” Ibid. 18 Waltraut Wiethölter gives a convincing portrait of Zorzi, saying that he belongs to that group of dangerous bringers-of-light which one might term fallen angels. Wiethölter, Hofmannsthal oder die Geometrie des Subjekts, 170. 19 “Nochmals hinauf zum Maler: Er zeigt mir Bild einer schönen Person (für dalla Torre). Verspricht mich zu ihr zu führen. Erzählt auf dem Weg die Geschichte der 2 Bilder des Herzogs Camposagrado … Wie die Brüder ihm das ihrige schicken lacht er unmäßig und weist seine Summe Geld an, damit sie ihm den Goya schicken die Tintorettos c­ opieren. Maler verspricht, mich dem Herzog vorzustellen etc.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 8. 20 This is also one of the main plot points in Hofmannsthal’s opera libretto Arabella and its prose precursor, Lucidor. Figuren zu einer ungeschriebenen Komödie (Lucidor. Figures for an unwritten comedy). Further, as discussed with reference to “The Letters of the Man Who Returned,” Hofmannsthal likewise found himself in the position of having to sell a

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number of his works of art when in a position of financial precarity. This was treated in the exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin entitled “Rodin – Rilke – Hofmannsthal: Der Mensch und sein Genius” (17 November 2017 to 18 March 2018). 21 “lässt sich gegen Magenschmerzen den Stein zum Farbenzerdrücken auf den Magen lagen.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 9. 22 “er liege oben und habe seinen Magenkrampf. Darauf hieß es, die Herren sollten nur hinaufgehen, den unnützen Menschen aus dem Zimmer zu ­entfernen.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 43. 23 In N85, another reason for the journey comes to light: “Reason to send him on the journey. Difficult, slow convalescence after an emotional ­crisis. Hints of anhedonia – of a loss of a sense of worth. Confusion of ­perceptions.” (Grund, ihn auf der Reise zu schicken. Schwierige ­schleppende Reconvaleszenz nach einer seelischen Krise. Spuren von Anhedonia – von Verlust des Wertgefühls. Verwirrung der Begriffe). Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 115. This bears a remarkable resemblance to the illness depicted in “The Letters of the Man Who Returned.” 24 “Sie fanden Fräulein Nina auf einem Sopha in einer sehr bequemen und hübschen Stellung: Alles an ihr war hell und von einer allerliebsten zarten Rundheit: ihr Haar war hellblond wie verblichenes Gold und sie trug es ungepudert: drei Dinge die in reizender Weise gekrümmt waren und ganz zu einander gehörten: ihre Augenbrauen ihr Mund und ihre Hand hoben sich mit dem Ausdruck von gelassener Neugierde u. großer Liebenswürdigkeit dem eintretenden Gast entgegen. Ein Bild ohne Rahmen lehnte verkehrt an der Wand: durch die Leinwand lief ein Schnitt wie von einem Messer.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 93. 25 Hofmannsthal, “Das Märchen,” 20. 26 “Das Bild war was ein grobes Auge sprechend ähnlich finden mochte: es waren Ninas Züge aber kalt, gemein. Ihre leicht nach oben gekrümmten Brauen waren darum so reizend, weil sie in einem fast zu weichen Gesichtchen saßen; ihre Hals hätte ein strenger Beurteiler zu wenig ­schlank finden können – aber wie der Kopf auf ihm saß gab es ein ­bezauberndes Ich weiß nicht was von frauenhafter Hilflosigkeit … Es war eines von jenen peinlichen Porträts von denen man sagen kann daß sie das Inventarium eines Gesichtes enthalten, aber die Seele des Malers verraten.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 93. 27 “Räum es mir aus den Augen … es erinnerte mich nur an Ärger und Brutalität.” Ibid. 28 “in einem Anfall von Wut und Eifersucht [hat Camposagrado] einen ­seltenen Vogel den ihr der jüdische Verehrer Herr dalla Torre tags zuvor

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geschickt hatte lebendig in den Mund gesteckt den Kopf ­abgebissen.” Ibid., 92. 29 “richtig: das Kunstwerk als fortlaufende Emanation einer Persönlichkeit anzusehen, als ‘heures,’ Beleuchtungen, die eine Seele auf die Welt wirft … Jeder einzelne vermag das, was er gemacht hat, wieder aufzulösen. Es ­wieder unendlich zu machen. Wir sind die, deren Mund nicht stumm ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Diese Rundschau,” 236. T.S. Eliot offers a contrasting view: “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 59. 30 Cf. N59, which sketches a conversation between Nina and Andreas: “On the fact that the man makes all portraits to resemble himself.” (Darüber daß der Mensch alle Porträts ihm selber ähnlich macht.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 37. The man (“der Mensch”) referred to is Zorzi. 31 N91 suggests that the aesthetic encounter is not out of Andreas’s reach. Sacramozo gives Andreas a copy of Ariosto’s work “for the wonderful ‘world’ therein … He understands the Maltese man’s comment, that ­nothing is past. Everything that exists is present, born in the moment. (The feeling when hearing Bach’s music).” (um der wunderbaren ‘welt’ welche darin ist … Er versteht die Bemerkung des Maltesers, dass es nichts Vergangenes gäbe. Alles was existiert, ist gegenwärtig, ja wird im Augenblick geboren. (Gefühl beim Anhören Bach’schen Musik).) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 116. 32 “Ich finde es recht ähnlich und recht häßlich.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 93. 33 N68 reads: “der geometrische Ort fremder Geschicke.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 102. 34 Cf. “The Conversation about Poems,” in which the genesis of the symbol is represented by a moment of identification between the sacrificial victim and the person making the sacrifice. 35 One of the titles Hofmannsthal considered for the main fragment was “Die Dame mit dem Hündchen” (The lady with the dog), evocative of Anton Chekhov’s short story of the same name, which ends famously without a resolution, but rather by indicating that the difficulties are just beginning. 36 “Die Demuth mit der es in ihm von ersten Begegnung an seinen Herrn erblickte, war unbegreiflich.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 70.

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37 “Die Wut stieg ihm auf, er rief das Hündlein zu sich. Schon auf zehn Schritte wurde es seine zornige Miene gewahr es kam kriechend heran, den zitternden Blick auf Andres [sic] Gesicht geheftet. Er schmähte es eine niedrige und feile Creatur unter der Schmähung kam es näher und näher: ihm war da habe er den Fuß gehoben und traf das Rückgrat von oben mit dem Schuhabsatz. Ihm war – das Hündlein gab einen kurzen Schmerzenslaut und knickte zusammen, aber es wedelte ihm zu. Er drehte sich jäh um und ging weg, das Hündlein kroch ihm nach, das Kreuz war gebrochen, trotzdem schob es sich seinem Herrn nach wie eine Schlange. Er blieb endlich stehen da heftete das Hündlein einen Blick auf ihn und verschied wedelnd. Ihm war unsicher ob ers gethan hatte oder nicht; aber es kommt aus ihm. So rührt ihn das Unendliche an.” Ibid., 71. 38 Cited in Adorno, “George und Hofmannsthal,” 206; and Norton, Secret Germany, 102. 39 Trampling the dog, who then creeps like a snake on the ground, evokes Biblical images of power, e.g., Psalm 91: “You will tread on the lion and the cobra; you will trample the great lion and the serpent”; and Luke 10:19: “I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.” Andreas’s bid for power, however, is in vain. 40 “Der Bühnenboden war uneben: der Vorhang an einigen Stellen zu kurz, Ritterstiefel kamen und gingen … zwischen dem Steg einer Baßgeige und dem Kopf eines Musikanten sah man die Füße eines Löwen, einmal einen himmelblauen Schuh mit Flitter bestickt. Der himmelblaue Schuh war wunderbarerer als alles – Später stand ein Wesen da, das diesen Schuh anhatte, er gehörte zu ihr, war eins mit ihrem blau und silber Gewand: sie war eine Prinzessin, Gefahren umgaben sie, dunkle Gestalten, Fackeln, ein Zauberwald … alles das war schön aber es war nicht das zweischneidige Schwert von zartester Wohllust und unseglicher Sehnsucht das durch die Seele ging bis zum Weinen, wenn der blaue Schuh allein unter dem Vorhang da war.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 46. 41 Sebald, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 76. 42 Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 59–60. 43 “es war die Katze der er einmal mit einer Wagendeichsel das Rückgrat abgeschlagen hat und die so lange nicht hatte sterben können: So war sie noch nicht gestorben nach so viel Jahren! … Es hilft nichts er muß über sie weg, den schweren linken Fuß hebte er mit unsäglicher Qual uber das Tier dessen Rücken in Windungen unaufhörlich auf und nieder geht, da trifft ihn der Blick des verdrehten Katzenkopfes von unten, die Rundheit des Katzenkopfes aus einem zugleich katzenhaften und hündischen Gesicht,

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erfüllt mit Wollust und Todesqual in gräßlicher Vermischung – er will ­schreien, indem schreit es auch drinnen im Zimmer.” Ibid., 64–5. 44 “Ein Blick den er als Knabe gefürchtet hatte wie keinen zweiten, der Blick seines ersten Katecheten, schoß durch ihn hindurch und die gefürchtete kleine feiste Hand faßte ihn an, das widerwärtige Gesicht eines Knaben der ihm in dämmernder Abendstunde auf der Hintertreppe erzählt hatte was er nicht hören wollte preßte sich gegen seine Wange und wie er diese mit Anstrengung zur Seite schob lag vor der Tür durch er jetzt Romana nach mußte ein Wesen und setze sich gegen ihn in Bewegung: es war die Katze.” Ibid., 64. 45 This confusion of experience is repeated in the confusion of persons, where dream-Romana takes on the abusive personality of Gotthelff: “What kind of a [woman] are you he yelled at her, astonished. This kind, she says and h o l d s her mouth up to him. No, this kind, she y e l l s as he is about to embrace her and s t r i k e s him with the rake. She hit him on the forehead there was a sharp bright chime, as against a glass pane. He started and was awake.” (Was bist den Du für eine rief er ihr staunend entgegen. So eine halt sagt sie und h ä l t ihm den Mund hin. Nein so eine – r u f t sie wie er sie umfassen will und s c h l ä g t mit dem Rechen nach ihm. Sie traf ihn an der Stirn es gab einen scharfen hellen Schlag, wie gegen eine Glasscheibe. Er fuhr auf und war wach.) Ibid., 73. Expanded spacing in original. 46 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 34. 47 “Ihm war unsicher, ob er es getan hatte oder nicht; – aber es kommt aus ihm. So rührt ihn das Unendliche an.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 71. 48 “Seine Sinne waren geschärft er konnte hören daß die Bäuerin unterm Reden ihr Haar flocht und zugleich wie unten der Hofhund tierig an etwas fraß. Wer füttert jetzt in der Nacht einen Hund dachte es in ihm und zugleich war ihm gepreßt zumut als müsse er nochmals zurück in seine Knabenzeit als er noch das kleine Zimmer neben den Eltern hatte und sie durch den in die Wand eingelassenen Kleiderschrank mußte abends reden hören er mochte wollen oder nicht. Er wollte auch jetzt nicht horchen und hörte doch.” Ibid., 60–1. 49 “der Hund stand mitten im Licht, hielt den Kopf sonderbar ganz schief, drehte sich in dieser Stellung immerfort um sich selber: es war als erduldete das Tier ein großes Leiden vielleicht war er alt und dem Tode nahe. Andres fiel eine dumpfe Traurigkeit an, ihm war unmäßig betrübt zu Mut über das Leiden der Creatur, wo er doch so glücklich war als werde er in diesem Anblick an den nahe bevorstehenden Tod seines Vaters gemahnt. Er trat vom Fenster Weg, nun konnte er an seine Romana denken.” Ibid., 62–3.

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50 The circular principle seems also to have been important for one of the ­discussions of poetry in Andreas. In N80, Sacramozo alludes to the idea of poetic circularity, and Hofmannsthal quotes the French writer Jacques Rivière: “And in effect, in a beautiful poem, there is no progression; the end is always on the same level as the beginning … everything is direct … The verses form a circle; they are turned towards each other, they regard each other, they lock us in their circle … The poetic emotion is a kind of eddy, through which a pool of eternity is formed in us, in the very midst of the flight of things.” (Et en effet, dans un beau poème, il n’y a jamais de progression; la fin est toujours au même niveau que le commencement … tout est de plain-pied … Les vers forment un cercle; ils sont tournés les uns vers les autres, ils se regardent, ils nous enferment dans leur ronde. … L’émotion poétique est une sorte de tournoiement par lequel se reforme en nous, au milieu même de la fuite des choses, une flaque d’éternité.) Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 111. The quote comes from Rivière’s 1913 text Le Roman d’aventure. Tropes of circularity, immediacy, the force of things, and even the pool of eternity with its connotations of Narcissus consumed by his own reflection present variations on the theme of “ideal art.” 51 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 27. 52 “I. er wohnte im Schloss. Ein Läuten. Hahnenschrei, Ein zweiter. Er steht auf blossfüßig. Er fühlt durch die Fussohlen [sic] alles bis hinunter in den Berg.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 103. Spacing as in original. 53 “Gegenüber aus der Bergwand treten silberne Ahnen, so schön dass er träumend ausruft: ich träume.” Ibid. 54 “diese Forderung ist nur so gigantisch, weil das, was in uns ihr zu ­entsprechen bereit ist, so grenzenlos groß ist: die aufgesammelte Kraft der geheimnisvollen Ahnenreihe in uns.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 55 “endlich war er [Andreas] sich selber entsprungen wie einem Gefängnis, er stürmte in Sprüngen dahin, er wußte nichts von sich als den Augenblick.” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 71. 56 “schon matten Fluges … Nun kräht der Hahn. Er weiss es ist zum dritten Mal und Weiss, er hat seinen Heiland verrathen.” Ibid., 103. 57 N148: “Was ist dies für ein Licht. Das klare durchsichtige: das Leben der Zweige in diesem Licht: die Ferne als ein beglückendes Gefühl. Er entledigt sich seiner Kleider und badet im Fluss. Ein ängstlicher Moment da er Boden unter den Füssen verliert.” N149: “er glaubt nackt ins Wasser steigend, Romana ebenso zu sehen Er erschrickt über sich. Indessen ist sie fort. Er verzichtet auf sie, so sicher ist er ihrer. / Er durchlebete einen der glücklichsten Tage seines Lebens u. er wusste es nicht.” N150: “Nach dem

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Bad und der Ohnmacht. ‘Er trug Schuh u. Strümpfe in den Händen und gieng mit blutenden Füssen über die Wiesen.’” Hofmannsthal, Andreas, 136. 58 “Um Kafkas Figur in ihrer Reinheit und in ihrer eigentümlichen Schönheit gerecht zu werden, darf man das Eine nie aus dem Auge lassen: es ist d ­ ie von einem Gescheiterten. Die Umstände dieses Scheiterns sind mannigfache. Man moöchte sagen: war er des endlichen Mißlingens erst einmal sicher, so gelang ihm die Inbrunst, mit der Kafka sein Scheitern unterstrichen hat.” Benjamin, “Some Reflections on Kafka,” 144–5; Gesammelte Briefe, 114. 59 “Denn ein solches Anrecht, aus unserem Innern sich zu nähren, räumen wir ihnen ein, indem wir sie ‘schön’ nennen. Es gibt kein stolzeres, kein gefährlicheres Wort. Es ist das Wort, das am tiefsten verpflichtet.” Hofmannsthal, “Address,” 56; “Ansprache,” 11. 60 “Wir fühlen den Sturz des Daseins. Wir setzen nichts voraus. Wir spinnen aus uns selber den Faden der uns über den Abgrund trägt, und zuweilen sind wir selig wie Wölkchen am Abendhimmel. Wir schaffen uns einer am Andern unsere Sprache, beleben einer den andern. Wir tragen in uns einen Blick, ein Leiden, ein Gesicht, einen Ton … Wir sind die, deren Mund nicht stumm ist.” Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 236.

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Index

abjection, 82, 134, 161–8 Adorno, Theodor W., 16, ­172–3n11, 178n15, 251n38; ­theory of engagement, 7, 173n12 aesthetic imperative, 7, 12, 21, 38–41, 166–7; blindness to, 117; and Martin Buber, 67–8; and the ethical demand, 144; and Rainer Maria Rilke, 9, 189n102 alienation. See labour Andrian, Leopold von, 15, 26, 31, 177n4 animals. See dogs anxiety, 18, 31–2, 104, 119, 182–3n48 Augenblick, 99–110, 137, 242n124, 250n31, 253n55 Bahr, Hermann, 3, 5–6, 177n5, 178n14, 214n20 Baudelaire, Charles, 120, 149, 195n29, 197n40, 227n149; Les Fleurs du mal, 10–11, 18–19, 25, 94, 211n130 Benjamin, Walter, 145, 174n15, 195n29, 214n25, 244n138; ­failure, 168, 254n58

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Bildung, 44, 155, 168 Bildungsroman, 44, 114, 151–2, 168 boldness, 109, 147 boredom. See ennui Broch, Hermann, 38, 110, 112, 190n104, 210n128 Büchner, Georg, 79, 98, 215n40 carpet, 23, 29, 34–7, 126–30, ­147–9. See also textiles colours, 54–8, 64–9, 128–31, ­139–42, 147, 149 communion, 40, 58–9, 80, 84, 104, 109–10 daimonic, 38, 40, 109, 120. See also demonic deities, bronze, 19–23, 31, 158 demonic, 7, 84, 95, 173n13. See also daimonic Derrida, Jacques, 100–1, 146, 196n38. See also khôra dialogical, 38, 58, 66–8, 111, 113, 159–60 dialogue, 5, 40, 64, 73, 77–8, 111, 113, 126 dilettante, 16, 29–30, 34, 178n14

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280 Index

dissociation, 48, 59, 100, 110–11, 145, 167, 220n85 dogs: and justice, 81–2, 216–17n55; and Odysseus, 33; as a symbol, 134, 161–7, 251n39 ekphrasis, 4, 9–10, 21, 98, 155, 157–8 Eliot, T.S., 12, 250n29 ennui, 15–60, 135 Erlebnis, 10, 22, 154, 158, 168 Erlebte Rede, 22, 158. See also free indirect speech face, 27–9, 78–87, 117–19, 133–7, 169; of the korai, 107; and Levinas, 101–3; of the petrified Emperor, 144–7; of Zorzi’s painting, 159 failure, 44, 151, 157, 168–9 feet, 17, 31, 136; and beauty, 19, 163, 166; locked or bound, 94–5, 126, 140–1; as a site of suffering, 96, 166–8 First World War, 8, 62, 173n14; and Die Frau ohne Schatten, 121, 150, 172n9 foreignness, 66, 68, 72, 106, 110, 160. See also other fragment, 6, 43–4, 146, 151–3 fragmentation, internal, 45, 161 free indirect speech, 21–2, 83, 146, 158–9 Freud, Sigmund, 68–9, 176n26, 188n95, 218–19n68 garden: in Algabal and “Mein Garten,” 11; as literary motif, 26–8, 86; as locus amoenus, 23, 181n33, 182n42, 182n47

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gaze: aesthetic, 14, 21–2, 36, 87–93; hierarchy of, 123, 164, 182n47; mutual, 133, 137, 143; phenomenological, 51; reversal of, 18, 35, 75–7, 83, 94, 101–2, 111, 120, 161 genre. See Märchen; Bildungsroman George, Stefan, 11, 26, 34, 36–7, 94–5; association with Hofmannsthal, 6, 95, 162 ghost, 47–9, 94–5, 126, 138 ghostly, 46–8, 50, 53, 97 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 33, 41, 108–9, 196n35; and poetry, 222n103, 228n162; ­sacrifice for beauty, 203n68, 239n93; theory of colours, 198n43, 201n57 gold, 89–92, 98–9, 140–5 guest, 87–8, 148. See also symbol guilt, 14, 34, 69, 84, 96, 137–41, 152, 209n121 Hardenberg, Friedrich von. See Novalis Hearn, Lafcadio, 129–30, 225n132 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 29, 107 Heidegger, Martin, 57–8, 63, 100, 157, 240n103 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, other works of: Ad me ipsum, 14, 16, 104, 182n42, 235n56; Ein Brief, 7, 9, 46, 177n7, 199n50, 209n123, 210n130; Buch der Freunde, 107, 110, 228n157, 229n171, 229n176; “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” 123, 134, 185n64, 203n68, 217n55,

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Index

223n112; “Diese Rundschau,” 160, 180n30, 250n29; “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” 25, 67, 77, 105, 146, 164, 196n35, 217n55, 240n106, 250n34; “Mein Garten,” 11, 26; “Der neue Roman von d’Annunzio.” 33–5, 109; “Poesie und Leben,” 10, 33; “Sunt animae rerum,” 5–6, 9; “Die Wege und die Begegnungen,” 137, 142, 174n21 hospitality, 80, 87. See also guest hubris, 40, 82, 95, 101–2 humility, 34–5, 37, 121, 133, 136, 148, 166, 245n145; in art and beauty, 18, 34, 37, 101–5, 109, 129–33, 147–8, 159, 168; and dogs, 161–2, 217n55 Husserl, Edmund, 14, 22, 70–1 innocence, 34, 69, 133–8. See also guilt justice, 96–7, 140, 164 Kant, 21, 23, 141 katabasis, 97, 110 Keats, John, 17, 19, 59, 222n107 khôra, 100, 146, 196n38 Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 125 korai, 99, 102–4, 124, 143 Kraus, Karl, 3, 172n9 labour, 52, 121, 123; and craft, 127–30; and devotion, 131–2, 141 landscape, 48, 75, 77–8, 87–9, 193–4n16 lists, 47, 51, 54, 248n16

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Mach, Ernst, 177n5, 219n69 magician, 75, 77 Mann, Thomas, 61, 76, 180n23 Märchen, 112–16, 148–50 Medusa, 21, 98, 102, 224n122 memory, 40, 67, 78, 80–9, 92, 109, 164, 175n26, 207n108 Midas, 89–90, 92, 98, 143 money, 45, 50, 53, 61–3, 71, 90, 156 Murray, Gilbert, 81–2, 96, 164 music, 7, 35, 76–7, 139, 145. See also opera; song Musil, Robert, 60, 193n12 Naturalism, 3, 34, 101, 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 33, 37, 53, 131–2 Novalis, 59, 67, 105, 114 obligation, 154, 189n102. See also aesthetic imperative Odysseus, 33, 35, 96–7, 119 Oedipus, 78, 82, 96 opera, 112–16, 122, 131, 138, 143–5, 149, 237n75 other, 7, 32, 38, 40–1, 59, 73–4, 82–4, 102, 111, ­134–7, ­159–60, 169. See also foreignness painting, 51–77, 139, 156–60 Pater, Walter, 27–8, 86, 103–7, 118, 220–1n89 Philoctetes, 96, 163, 222–3n110 piety, 52–8, 62, 69, 131, 141. See also reverence Plato, 7, 80, 92–6, 100–2 poverty, 29, 88–92, 99, 141, 156, 168

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282 Index

pre-existence, 104, 110, 128–9, 182n42 presence, 17–18, 46–7, 59, 66, 75–7, 88–92, 97–9 pride, 40, 95, 108, 121. See also hubris Pygmalion, 89–90, 101, 143 rebirth, 65, 128, 137, 142, 146, 154–5 repetition, 76–7, 116–18, ­123–5, 160, 166 reverence, 16, 82, 108–9, 129, 141, 244n138. See also piety Rilke, Rainer Maria, 9–10, 30–1, 54, 61, 97, 189n102 Rimbaud, Arthur, 80–2, 90, 92, 99, 217n57 rite, 105, 118, 165 ritual, 76–7, 104, 106–7, 116, 135–6, 145 river, 23–4, 34, 86–7, 119, 130, 146, 167. See also water rug. See carpet sacrifice, 25, 39, 54–9, 69–70, 104–5, 115, 134–5, 146 shame, 50, 83, 133, 142, 160, 166, 217n55, 218n633. See also guilt shoe, 161, 163, 167, 201n63

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Simmel, Georg, 50, 53, 60, 62, 69, 71, 79, 189n102 smile, 99–104, 143 song, 5, 75–6, 122, 124, 125, 134, 145, 148 Spengler, Oswald, 64–5, 139 statue, 99–111, 126, 139, 143–4, 149. See also deities, bronze Stimmung, 74–8, 81, 85 Strauss, Richard, 112–13, 131, 150 sublime, 22, 66, 74, 104 suddenness, 137, 173n13 symbol, 16, 25–6, 47, 52, 80, 87, 98, 105–6, 145–6 symbolism, 6, 8, 11, 98 textiles, 127, 130. See also carpet. theatre, 100–1, 163, 225n31 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 90, 119 trees, 47, 51–4, 58, 140 Van Gogh, Vincent, 54, 56–70, 157, 160 violence, 8, 88, 130, 152, 157, 159–66 water, 84–5 Wilde, Oscar, 93, 178n10, 178n14, 185n66, 246n150 wound, 55, 70, 96

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