Aesthetics across Cultures: Intertextuality, Intermediality and Interculturality [1 ed.] 1032435178, 9781032435176

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Aesthetics across Cultures

This book critically examines the “mutual illuminations” between literature, religion, architecture, films, performative arts, paintings, woodworks, memes and masks cutting across time and space. Architecture is a good example where the eventual success of a project depends on the harmony between physical sciences and aesthetics, design and planning, knowledge of building material, the local climate and awareness of cultural sensibilities. This volume affirms that aesthetics and arts are deeply linked through existential issues of who I am. The chapters in this volume present diverse discursive structures highlighting the in-between spaces between various art forms and mediums, such as: • • • • • • • •

Architecture, literature and memory Kafka in SoHo; Kafka and Bernhard Kirchner’s woodcuts; pictorial and stage representations of E.T.A. Hoffmann Hesse’s fairy tales; translations of Pañcatantra Nietzsche, ritual arts and face masks; martyrdom in La chanson de Roland Goethe and Hafiz; Indian thought in Martin Buber Rhythms of the “Third” across cultures Dadaism and contemporary memes

This book examines these sublime linkages in a comparative and interdisciplinary way. Engaging and intersectional, this volume will appeal to students and scholars of arts and aesthetics, literature, philosophy, architecture, sociology, translation studies and readers who are interested in cultural, intertextual, intermedial and comparative studies. Rosy Singh is Professor of German literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her research interests include literature, arts, translation and semiotic studies. She has worked extensively on Kafka, Rilke, Thomas Mann and Peter Handke and in the South-Asian context on Shah Hussain and Manto. She is the author of Rilke, Kafka, Manto: The Semiotics of Love, Life and Death (2001), Tagore, Rilke, Gibran: A Comparative Study (2002), Autobiography: Fact and Fiction (ed.) (2009), Franz Kafka and Literary Criticism: “The Metamorphosis” and “The Burrow” (2010) and Essays on Contemporary German Literature (2017).

Aesthetics across Cultures Intertextuality, Intermediality and Interculturality

Edited by Rosy Singh

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Rosy Singh; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rosy Singh to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders and secure permissions. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-43517-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-45595-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-37773-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003377733 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

In memory of Anita Narwal

Contents

List of Figures x Contributors xii Preface xv

Introduction

1

ROSY SINGH

PART I

On the Concept of Intersectionality and Comparative Research

3

1

5

Intermediality or “Mutual Illumination of the Arts”? WOLFGANG BRAUNGART

PART II

Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory

29

2 Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon

31

BABU THALIATH

3

Beauty, Arts and Artists in Hermann Hesse’s Fairytales

48

SADHANA NAITHANI

4

Aestheticisation of Martyrdom in La Chanson de Roland

60

ABHIMANYU SHARMA

5

Dadaism and Internet Meme: Aesthetics of Nonsense

70

VAIBHAV SHARMA



viii Contents PART III

Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas 6

“Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”: Goethe’s Discourse on Poetry and Religion in the Poem Open Secret of the West-Eastern Divan

79

81

HAMID TAFAZOLI

7

Indian Thought in Martin Buber’s I and Thou

100

CHANDRIKA KUMAR

8

A Secular Pañcatantra and Its Religious Journey

113

PRIYADA PADHYE

PART IV

Literature, Film and Intertextuality 9

How Franz Kafka’s “Mann vom Lande” Sneaks into Thomas Bernhard’s Der Diktator

131 133

ROSY SINGH

10 Kafka in SoHo: An Analysis of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) 146 SYED HABEEB TEHSEEN

11 The Intersection of Visual Arts and Literature: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Woodworks of Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte

162

MERCY VUNGTHIANMUANG GUITE

PART V

Performing and Fine Arts

181

12 Rhythms of the “Third” across Cultures – A Study of Performance Aesthetics

183

ANURADHA GHOSH

13 To Play the Puppet: Intermediality in Robert Wilson’s Stage Adaptation of ETA Hoffmann’s The Sandman THOMAS WORTMANN

204

Contents  ix 14 Intermedial Study of Stuart Patience’s Paintings and ETA Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816)

222

SAHIB KAPOOR

Index 233

Figures

1.1 Baroque Hall in Bückeburg Castle (Great Festival Hall, 1894–1898) 1.2 “Loos House”, Vienna, 1909–1912; Adolf Loos (1870–1933). Thomas Ledl - Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 4.0 1.3 Adolf Loos House, Vienna, detail; Steve Tiesdell Legacy Collection; Aug 2000 (4), CC BY 2.0 1.4 Adolf Loos: Villa Müller, Prague, 1930 1.5 Heinrich Hübsch, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, 1837–1846 1.6 Bielefeld, Old Town Hall, 1903/04; postcard from 1910. To the Right of the Town Hall, the No Less Eclectic Theatre 1.7 Bielefeld, New City Hall (1979–1988) 2.1 Carnival in Konstanz, Germany 2.2 Hooded Procession during Semana Santa in Toledo, Spain 2.3 Pulikali in North Kerala. 2.4 The Folks–Ritualistic Art Theyyam in North Kerala 2.5 Theppu (Facial Makeup) before the Kathkali Performance at Olappamanna Mana in Vellinezhi 2.6 Paccha Makeup/Mask for Krishna from a Kathakali performance at Olappamanna Mana 11.1 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte (1915) 11.2 The Sale of the Shadow 11.3 Illustration by George Cruikshank 1861 11.4 The Beloved 11.5 Pangs of Love 11.6 Schlemihl Alone in His Room 11.7 Schlemihl’s Meeting with the Little Gray Man on the Country Road 11.8 Schlemihl Tries to Seize the Shadow in Vain 13.1 Nathanael as an Artist 13.2 Scream of Fear 13.3 Mother/Son 13.4 Sandman as a burning man 13.5 Family Constellation



10 11 12 13 15 15 16 43 44 44 45 45 46 164 165 166 168 169 171 173 175 208 209 211 213 214

Figures  14.1 Now to Our Work 14.2 Spellbound 14.3 Spin Round Wooden Doll! 14.4 There You See the Eyes

xi

225 227 228 229

Contributors

Wolfgang Braungart is Professor Emeritus at Bielefeld University, Germany. He studied German language and literature, art history, fine arts, art pedagogy and philosophy in Gießen, Zürich and Braunschweig. His main research interests are history of literature: Early Modern Period, Enlightenment, Classicism and Romanticism, Biedermeier (Droste-Hülshoff, Gotthelf, Mörike), Symbolism (Stefan George), literature since 1945; history of tragedy; Utopia research; literature and popular culture; literature and visual arts; literature and religion; ritual studies. He has been a visiting Professor in several European countries, USA, India, China and Japan. Homepage and bibliography: https://www​.uni​-bielefeld​ .de​/fakultaeten​/linguistik- liter​aturw​issen​schaf​t/per​sonen​/wolf​gang-​braun​gart/​ Anuradha Ghosh is Professor in the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her areas of research are literature, cinema, translation studies, performance and cultural studies, folklore, philosophy, semiological studies and ecological studies. Her co-edited books are Politics of Imperialism and Counter Strategies, Aakar Books, New Delhi: 2004; Filming Fiction, Ray, Tagore and Premchand, Oxford University Press, New Delhi: 2012; and Premchand on National Language (Rashtrabhasha), Aakar Books, New Delhi: 2019. Mercy Vungthianmuang Guite teaches literature and culture studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her academic interests are intercultural literature and the intersection of the verbal and the visual arts. She is the author of Lengtonghoih. The Girl Who Wanted the Brightest Star (2022). Her recent chapters in books include “Literatures of the Paite tribe of Manipur, Writings from the ‘periphery’: Folktales to other forms of literature – a critical approach” and “Staging slavery: Representation of stage “Blackness” in Theodor Körner’s Drama Toni” (1812), Routledge New York, 2023. Sahib Kapoor teaches German and German literature in Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His doctoral research is based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann and its book illustrations during the expressionist art movement. His research interests include romantic literature, visual arts, Holocaust and the partition of the Indian subcontinent. He has been the recipient of various prestigious scholarships including the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship.



Contributors  xiii Chandrika Kumar is Assistant Professor at Doon University, Dehradun, India. Currently he is pursuing his doctoral studies from the University of Mumbai. Martin Buber, Marshall Rosenberg and the languages of peace are his areas of research. He has published articles on literary and cultural studies as well as some literary translations and received fellowships from the University Grants Commission, New Delhi, the Weimar-Jena-Akademie, Weimar, the DAAD, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Goethe Institute. Sadhana Naithani is Professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She teaches literature, folklore and culture studies. She is the author of several research articles and books on subject of folktale and its adaptations in literature and has contributed to recent anthologies like The Fairy Tale World (Routledge, 2019) and The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairy Tale Cultures (2018). Her latest books are Folklore Theory in Postwar Germany (2014) and Folklore in Baltic History (2019). Sadhana Naithani is President of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research. Priyada Padhye is Assistant Professor at the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her areas of specialization are Specialized Translation and Methodology of teaching German as a foreign language. She co-ordinates translation projects and organizes workshops and lectures on translation. She has published chapters in Translation in India. India in Translation, edited by G.J.V. Prasad and contributed articles to translation journals like Translation Today. Abhimanyu Sharma graduated with a PhD in linguistics from the University of Cambridge in 2019 and joined the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) the same year as Assistant Professor in German. He is currently on leave from JNU to work as Teaching Associate at Cambridge where he teaches German linguistics and translation. Besides his respective MA and PhD in German and General linguistics, he also holds a degree in Medieval German Literature. Vaibhav Sharma is a research scholar in the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is writing his PhD on the intertextual connections between dadaism and memes. His research interests include popular cultures like slam poetry and the relationship between literature and technology. Rosy Singh is Professor in the Centre of German Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India. After PhD in Semiotic Study of the Works of Franz Kafka in 1997, she taught German Studies at the University of Delhi till 2016. Currently she teaches at JNU. She has several monographs on Kafka and Rilke and articles in journals such as Sprachkunst, Weimarer Beiträge and Wirkendes Wort. Hamid Tafazoli is a scholar of German Literature and Cultural Studies and teaches at the Department of German Literature of the University of Bielefeld, Germany. Tafazoli is interested in the intersections between literary theory, narratology,

xiv Contributors comparative studies, cultural and intercultural studies and philosophy. His work is mostly concerned with the German, French and Anglophone traditions from the eighteenth century through to the present. He is also interested in the intercultural relationship between the German and the Persian cultures in the literature of the classical period to the present. Syed Habeeb Tehseen completed his MA in German Literature from Jawaharlal Nehru University and is currently a graduate student in the Carolina-Duke Graduate Programme in German Studies at Duke University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research interests include contemporary German literature and cinema, media and film theory and intercultural literary studies. Babu Thaliath is Professor of philosophy and German studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Research interests: early modern philosophy of science, late medieval philosophia naturalis, historical transition from medieval aporetics to early modern axiomatics, and aesthetics. He pursued PhD in Philosophy at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg and at the University of Basel and he has completed several post-doctoral research projects in early modern mechanical philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Cambridge. He has been a visiting scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and at St Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, a fellow at the International Kolleg Morphomata, University of Cologne and a senior fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz. Thomas Wortmann is Professor of German Studies and Media Studies at the University of Mannheim. He received his PhD in 2012 with a study on Annette von Droste-Hülshoff at the University of Cologne. From 2013 to 2018, he was Assistant Professor at the Universities of Tübingen and Mannheim. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Zurich, the University of Waterloo and the University of Ljubljana. Since 2019 he is the co-editor of the E.T.A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, contemporary drama and theater, genre theory and film.

Preface

The book owes its existence to the international conference on “Aesthetics across Cultures” held online in Jawaharlal Nehru University on 17–20 November 2021. While the world was overwhelmed with COVID, the participants of the conference fought the pandemic in their own way by immersing themselves in the world of ideas. The concept idea of this conference took shape gradually. In February 2020, my colleague Mercy V. Guite and I organized a two-day conference on the “Intersection of the Verbal and the Visual”, which then paved the way for the next conference “Aesthetics across Cultures” with a much larger framework. The proceedings of the conference now appear in book form with 14 articles. Most of the articles are by established academics, and some are also, I am happy to say, by our students who will take our place tomorrow. I would like to express my gratitude to all participants who made this project possible. I am deeply indebted to Wolfgang Braungart, Bielefeld University, who believed in me and who has been steadfast in his support of my academic endeavours. I have known him for several years since my days at the University of Delhi. Acknowledgements are also due to Karl Acham, University of Graz, who helped me kick-start this venture. I would also like to thank Babu Thaliath who participated in the conference from Germany. We have worked closely in three conferences. I also thank him for initiating contact with Routledge. My colleague and friend Mercy V. Guite, who supports me through the ups and downs of academic and non-academic activities and Sadhana Naithani who in her own affectionate way, has always been there for me since I joined JNU deserve a special mention. The conference and this volume owe a lot to them. The book is dedicated to the JNU tradition that shaped me, and last but not least to my pillars of strength, Anil and Nikki. Rosy Singh 2023



Introduction Rosy Singh

Aesthetics is not to be understood in the narrow sense of theories of aesthetics; rather, it involves the larger study of literature and arts. Culture similarly encompasses a vast range of signification from the print and the oral cultures to the visual cultures. The book explores various intersections and interconnections in the world of ideas between literatures, of the same language and culture or other world literatures, literature and film, literature and architecture, literature and plastic arts, translations, philosophy and religion, performative arts, paintings, woodcuts, masks and memes – the list is indeed long. These linkages, apparent or concealed, cut across time zones and spaces, cultures and generations. For instance, Kafka in Prague, New York and Ayodhya suggest a specificity of time and space; at the same time, the Kafkaesque transcends time and space, reflecting a world that is ahistorical, free of geographical and cultural baggage, a world that is everywhere and nowhere. The semiotics of the past and the present, the old and the contemporary, the mixing, the diffusion and the churning taking place in the in-between spaces – all these present a unity of discourse that is the focus of the book Aesthetics across Cultures. Every creative work, be it in fine arts, literature, architecture, music, film, photography, advertising and fashion, invariably contains traces of borrowing, in bits and pieces, in a fragmentary kind of way, a phenomenon that is now commonly referred to in literary criticism as intertextuality, a term coined in the sixties by the Bulgarian–French semiotician Julia Kristeva. In his now-famous essay Art of the Novel (1988), Milan Kundera says with specific reference to literature that there is a spirit of continuity in the history of literature, that each work is an answer to preceding ones. Michel Foucault in his essay Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias remarks that “we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of far and near, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.” The juxtaposition, redistribution and realignment of the motifs in a different time and space emancipate the old signifiers, not completely but to some extent, from the old contexts and meanings, generating new or partially new significations. There emerge countless new permutations and combinations that cannot always be verified, and neither can they be empirically measured in terms of their impact and signification. Like languages, creative narratives charter their own trajectories. It could take the form of parody, pastiche or simply nostalgia for the past, as in retro narratives. It could also be intermedial and cross-cultural. There are no hard and fast rules in the aesthetics of semiotic mixing. The best example is the domain of architecture, where the DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-1

2 Introduction eventual success of an architectural project depends on the harmony between physical sciences and aesthetics, design and planning, knowledge of building materials and the local climate, awareness of cultural sensibilities and whatnot. That there is a deep connection between spaces and individuals, communities and nature and also functional needs of the city is not to be disputed. So many domains of knowledge meet and work together in unison to turn buildings into dwellings. In contrast, religious architecture tends to repeat itself; it openly imitates; it plays safe. But there too it is astonishing to come across structures where mixing and that too from other traditions abound. None of the terms mentioned above can adequately define these discursive structures of thought that quietly emerge at the plane of a highly abstract consciousness and memory. It should, however, be remembered that what is termed intertextuality today is not really a notion that originated in the twentieth-century postmodern world. The German Romantics were the first ones to give the clarion call for a Gesamtkunstwerk, a wholesome work of art where ideally the boundaries between various art forms melt, and their synthesis would produce a “complete or comprehensive work of art”. The romantics were and still are unfairly written off as dreamers, but the deep desire for a perfect work of art without boundaries was not just romantic daydreaming but a significant step to break down medial and academic hierarchies. This “cross-fertilisation” is today accepted by some critics as inspiration and influence, whereas others still tend to dismiss it as imitation, appropriation, recycling or plagiarism. It is my firm view that it is a creative act of high order. The collection of papers seeks to deliberate on this very creative act. It explores the continuity and the changes that accompany this creative process. Some of the questions discussed and debated are as follows: How does one theorise and deliberate upon the intellectual process of this bricolage of ideas? What transpires when one aesthetic form “illuminates” the other or “dips” into another? Can there be a meeting ground for high art and popular art or even kitsch? Some critics call this give-and-take a contamination; others call it enrichment. Does the purity of an idea get diluted and distorted or are pure, hermetically sealed systems anyways a figment of imagination? Following up and enlarging on these ideas, the chapters explore the path meandering between various mediums of artistic expression, literatures and translations, fine arts, cultures etc. They explore how myriad forms of art collaborate, making way for all sorts of fascinating and creative artistic endeavours that permeate artificially created academic boundaries. These collaborations are examined in the book from various angles of scholarship in a comparative and interdisciplinary way.

Part I

On the Concept of Intersectionality and Comparative Research



1

Intermediality or “Mutual Illumination of the Arts”?1 Wolfgang Braungart

To Hubertus von Pilgrim and Klaus-Heinrich Kohrs2

1.1 Some Remarks on the Title of My Chapter3 Media is many things; many indeed, but not everything. It may seem strange that in the weeks following the invasion of Ukraine, when this article was written, someone would want to qualify the importance of the media, and especially mass media, in contrast to that of the arts – as if it were not obvious what war propaganda in the media does, especially in consort between different outlets; and as if it were not just as obvious how necessary free access to media is. No one could or would seriously deny that. Besides, arts themselves have become media-like in the modern age, interacting with the (mass) media in diverse ways. My concern, however, is something else. In such times of crisis as ours, it is all the more crucial how we react and how it concerns us as human beings: our sense of responsibility, our truthfulness, our sense of reason and our willingness to understand each other across cultural differences. This cannot be outsourced to politics alone; this “we” is truly inclusive of world society. This is valid for all times, and of course, it also applies to our interaction with the media. Almost all of us are, as one says, “putting ourselves out there” in various social media (which, of course, often enough mutate into antisocial media; not that it’s really the media that are “antisocial”, but rather those who use them in an antisocial way!). Each one of us uses a mobile phone, a tablet, streaming services of all kinds and media platforms; uses printed media and e-books in conjunction as a matter of course; goes to movies, concerts, museums, the theatre, etc. That means each of us nevertheless uses the traditional institutions of art. We should be able to deal with the fact that media and its institutions draw on each other, that they quote each other and that they rival each other. Moreover, there can be no doubt at all that media and media institutions are increasingly working in tandem and that we ourselves communicate through the media. The question of what construes a medium is precisely thus becoming more and more complex, and it demands definitions that go beyond the logic of individual media (cf. Braungart 2004). Investigating intermediality in the media network is therefore not only a legitimate interest but scientifically imperative if science (also) DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-3

6  Intersectionality and Comparative Research sees itself as a critically reflective accompaniment of culture and society – which it should. Why, then, do I fit it into this strange, old-fashioned formula of the “mutual illumination” of the arts borrowed from the Germanist Oskar Walzel? With Oliver Jahraus, in contrast, one can say that literature is the medium through which subjectivity and subjective consciousness are articulated so as to be accessible for intersubjective communication in the first place (Jahraus 2003). This does not contribute all too much to the case for literature as art. The title of my article brings the issue sharply into focus: do we also want to see artistic expression primarily as an expression in media? We can, of course, do that; then it stands side-by-side with other, non-artistic media. Or do we want to see artistic expression from the perspective of art, that is, the artistic expression of people in their freedom and right to self-determination? As free, open, symbolically interpretable, aesthetic play? My chapter will leave no doubt as to which I choose, without denying the intermedia perspective its legitimacy. In times when authoritarian regimes all over the world deny people, sometimes in the most brutal and aggressive ways, the basic human rights of freedom and self-determination, it seems to me more urgent than ever before to stand up for art as art that follows its own rules, not only for art as a “medium” and part of the “media network”. One of the most famous “dicta” in the twentieth-century literature is the sentence from Brecht’s “Dreigroschenoper” (“Threepenny Opera”), which has long since taken on a life of its own: “First comes the food, then comes the moral”. This can be interpreted in more ways than one. The “food”, i.e., the elementary needs of our corporeality, can, of course, claim precedence over everything else. But then there is something else that also belongs to us and makes us who we are: “morality”; in more general terms, the cultural superstructure, the cultural needs. “Man does not live by bread alone” is another famous saying that has also become autonomous, this one from the Bible, which Brecht knew and used extensively (Mt 4.4). Brecht seems to have adjusted his dictum to it, for the Bible verse goes on to say, “but of every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God”. Translated into secular language, it signifies that man also has and can accept something great and truly significant that exceeds the elementary needs of his corporeality. This is what “man” lives from; this is what makes him! It is no coincidence that the idea of autonomous art emerges in the second half of the eighteenth century when the idea of the freedom and dignity of every human being is also developed. Autonomous art becomes the most important symbolic expression of this freedom and dignity. At present, the sciences of the arts must also become human sciences in a new and thoroughly political way if they are to do justice to this claim, which emanates from the arts themselves. They do not become human sciences primarily by interfering in and referring to all kinds of things in the political and social world. Of course, they can and should do this if they want to, of their own accord, and not because it is politically opportune, and they are told to do so by the public discourse watchdogs (“Diskurs-Wächter”). No, the sciences of the arts become human sciences when they argue in terms of the subject and his freedom, dignity and self-determination as they appear in people’s artistic

Mutual Illumination of the Arts  7 expressions. This is “political” because freedom and self-determination concern us all in the “world-polis”, especially today, and because we have to deal with them, in the interest of all. Of course, not everyone shares this emphatic notion of the subject that I only briefly refer to here.4 In matters of art, it is imperative. I believe, however, that it is imperative in all matters. 1.2 Some More Preliminary Theoretical and Methodological Remarks In the contexts of postmodern Nietzsche reception, the deconstructive thought paradigm and postcolonial theory, it has been said that the subject’s individuality is a Western invention. But what does this mean, and what conclusions are to be drawn from it? The wheel is an invention; printing is an invention; the various social self-organisations of people, for example, in entities called states, are an invention; medical care is an invention – in short: human culture is full of inventions. But all these inventions are also reality, and they constitute a reality of our cultural world. Of course, this says nothing at all about the significance and ranking of such inventions. That must be judged by another yardstick. It cannot be said often enough that Genesis and claims to legitimacy are two different things. Radical cultural relativisations, which contemporary research in social and cultural sciences likes to fall back on, do not change the reality of our cultural inventions and constructions at all. Whether we wish to grant them validity and moral legitimacy, however, is our responsibility. The idea that the community comes first is an invention; cassava for lunch is also an invention; celebrating with the deceased in cemeteries is an invention. And also, these cultural intentions of non-western societies constitute a reality and are reality. Their significance is not reduced by their cultural relativity. Descartes, the great French philosopher who stands at the beginning of the Enlightenment and European rationalism,5 said that one can cast doubt on everything and go infinitely far with this doubt. But Descartes also went on to say that one cannot doubt the existence of an entity that doubts. Therefore, Descartes’ core proposition “cogito, ergo sum” should rather be formulated as “dubito, ergo sum”. I doubt, therefore I am, or rather I know, at some point if I want to know at all, that I am – as a thinking being. This “res cogitans”, as Descartes calls the thinking being, this “thinking thing” or this doubting entity is unquestionable. One can phrase this in a broader sense: anyone who has ever experienced a general anaesthetic has experienced this transition into nothingness. There is then really nothing for the subject in its relation to itself, at least until one returns from the nothingness of the anaesthetic. As long as I am conscious, I cannot doubt that there is an entity in me that I would like to call “I”, that has a relation to and sense of self, that knows about itself in some form and that also places itself in a relationship to what it experiences in its life process in various contexts. In this respect, it also inevitably places itself in a relationship to what it constitutes out of its history. This is not to say that this way of relating to self is always well-considered, that it is wise, orderly, structured or even reasonable. Not at all. It can be pure chaos. But I do not want to go into the question of truth at all, although from my point of view, we cannot

8  Intersectionality and Comparative Research help but fundamentally hold on to the idea of truth and reason even in intercultural exchange. Or do we seriously want to culturally relativise – put down to cultural differences – what is currently being decided and executed by the Kremlin, and thus possibly justify it? What I am getting at, then, is something else: namely, that the model of “intermediality” is not sufficient for the subject when it experiences culture and perceives and acts within the framework of culture. Without a doubt, cultural experience, indeed world- and self-experience in general, accumulate in the consciousness of the subject; and with that, the subject continues to approach the world and the self, understands better or worse the world and the self, draws conclusions from it, shapes it or ignores it. On this basis, my first methodological proposal is as follows: I would like to think of the work of art, metaphorically speaking, as an individual in whom many experiences from culture and history are accumulated. By thinking of it in this way, I also think of it as the articulation of an author. Articulation means (I refer to the philosopher Matthias Jung, who in turn refers to Wilhelm von Humboldt and Jürgen Trabant, the linguist) “conscious expression” (Jung 2009). In the work of art, what accumulates as culture and history and what its creator seeks to express is articulated in an aesthetically conscious and determined way. The work of art is motivated and intentional, even where it caters specifically to the unconscious (as, for example, in the Informalist paintings of the 1950s). A small biographical recollection would make this a little more concrete: when I was about 15-16 years old, I, the author, the source of these reflections, began to take an avid interest in the history of Western architecture. Over the years, for example, I began visiting all the important baroque and rococo churches in southern Germany, the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, the important monasteries, the early modern castles and parks that were worth a visit and the art museums. Around the same time, I also became interested in the modern, functionalist architecture of the great French–Swiss architect Le Corbusier (1887–1965) and Bauhaus architecture in general. It fascinated me how an architect could think about human life, working, living together, recreation, etc., through architecture and functionally organise it in an architectural “Gesamtkunstwerk”. A great example for me was the housing machine “Unité d'Habitation” that Le Corbusier designed for Marseille. I could, and to this day still can, relate to both architectural concepts: the exuberant, decorative, representative ones of baroque and rococo and the functionalised, extremely matter-of-fact architecture of the Bauhaus architect. Why should I homogenise them? I see no reason to do so. For me, as heterogeneous as they are, they are not only historical phenomena of a bygone era (baroque) and of modern architecture, which Le Corbusier helped shape like few others. Rather, they were and are present for me as fundamental possibilities of human articulation in and through architecture, the functionally superfluous, decorative and ornamental of the baroque just as much as the objective, functional, completely controlled and thoroughly thought-through Bauhaus architecture. Second methodological suggestion: Let’s not think of this human individual (and with him, the individual work of art) as too homogeneous. That is not necessary.

Mutual Illumination of the Arts  9 Let us allow space for an inner heterogeneity of knowledge, experiences and feelings, both cultural–historical and those that come from daily life. And let us imagine that all these things, gathered in this heterogeneous inner world, can enter into relationships with each other in often surprising, unpredictable and erratic ways. In a sense, we are designed for inner, completely surprising, “emergent” synergetic effects, to use the term that has become common in the language of interdisciplinary sciences. In more fashionable terms, this is closely related to what today is often called serendipity. We are all familiar with the expressions: “I just happened to remember that…” “I can’t help but think about this or that thing that happened the other day…” etc. We don’t know how these inner synergy effects, as I would like to call them, come about. But there can be no doubt that they happen all the time. For neuroscience, this volatility, the spontaneous, incalculable, unpredictable cross-connections and erratic new insights that can suddenly appear, this constant inner creativity of the brain, are a great challenge: how to model them? Our brain, says the Heidelberg neuro-psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs, is an “organ of relations” (Fuchs 2013). That is a very successful metaphor. Our brain constantly establishes relationships internally; it constantly brings externally disparate things in our consciousness into surprising contexts, stimulating our consciousness. And it also constantly establishes relationships with our corporeality; it constantly positions us with ourselves, for ourselves, and in relation to our fellow human beings and the world we live in. Third methodological suggestion: Let us now imagine the individual work of art in exactly the same way: full of latent inner synergy effects that can unfold within us if we are sensitive, pre-educated, competent and open enough. One could also say, full of inner “resonances”. I owe this concept of resonances to the sociologist Hartmut Rosa (Cf. Rosa 2016). If we understand art in this way – as an individual subject – we gain hermeneutic insights that traditional literary–historical models, which understand works of art primarily as representatives of epochs and see their interpretation primarily in terms of assigning a work of art to epochs with their epoch-making characteristics, do not open up to us (cf. Braungart 2014). The work of art gives us a lot to think about, says Kant, and in such a way that we cannot stop thinking about it and can never find sufficient and adequate terms for aesthetic experiences. The question is, therefore, whether the arts in their inherent aesthetic logic are not also particularly anthropologically appropriate for us, beyond the ethical–symbolic dimension alluded to above. 1.3 Right in the Middle: Some Examples from the Architectural History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Anyone who sees this wonderfully arranged interior of the baroque banqueting hall in Bückeburg Castle (near Hanover; Herder was court preacher in Bückeburg), its rich stuccowork, the light, cheerful ceiling painting, the opulent furnishings with stucco marble, the moving two-story window front with the elegant little balconies: anyone seeing all this would probably argue in favour of a date around 1750 (Figure 1.1). But it is extremely skilfully crafted

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Figure 1.1  Baroque Hall in Bückeburg Castle (Great Festival Hall, 1894–1898). Photo Wolfgang Braungart, Bielefeld, 2021

neo-baroque work from the period between 1894 and 1898, even after the socalled Gründerzeit (Wilhelminian period). The German Empire had finally been founded (1871); Germany was now experiencing a tremendous modernisation drive that would make it one of the most advanced industrial nations in Europe in a few decades, partly as a result of Wilhelm II’s nationalist rearmament policy. What is the point of such an architectural re-enactment of the Ancien Regime in the castle of the Prince of the House of Schaumburg-Lippe? A message from a vanished world that will never appear again. The great Swabian poet Eduard Mörike resurrected the Ancien Regime in literary fiction in his grand narrative Mozart on His Journey to Prague (1855), without doubting for a single moment that this world is gone; the narrative is permeated with a deep melancholy. There is no trace of this in the Bückeburg Festival Hall. His re-enactment of the Ancien Regime is complete. One could also say that his ideological message is that under these new conditions of the new Wilhelmine Empire, a little Ancien Regime is still possible.

Mutual Illumination of the Arts  11 In the meantime, art-historical research on the nineteenth century has drawn attention on various occasions to the importance of the reception of the Rococo for Impressionist painting.6 Renoir’s art is hardly conceivable without the Rococo. The Impressionist avant-garde also overcame academicism, which indulged in history painting and mythological scenes by way of a productive appropriation of the Rococo. In contrast, there is no path leading from the Bückeburg Neo-baroque to architectural modernism. Now I contrast this baroque hall with a building that the Austrian architect Adolf Loos (1870–1933) built in Vienna in 1909–1912, just over a decade later (Figure 1.2). This building can be understood as an aesthetic expression, an aesthetic act performed in the context of pre-existing architectural expressions. The building completely changes the visual, aesthetic communication situation in this square. Quite obviously, the two-storey entrance area of the large house, clearly marked as a façade with an obvious claim to significance towards the square, stands in a tense relationship to the upper storeys. For this entrance area, the sublime architectural monumental form that has existed in European architecture since antiquity is used: the column, the architectural pathos symbol par excellence. But these columns here do not exhibit classical–antique elegance (the entasis of the column shaft), rather, they are massive, pillar-like. On the abacus of the four columns rests a dark beam with the lettering of the bank located in this building. The beam could be made of steel (I have not been able to confirm); in any case, it gives this impression. The contrast between the green marble of the monumental columns and the further

Figure 1.2  “Loos House”, Vienna, 1909–1912; Adolf Loos (1870–1933). Thomas Ledl Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons​.wikimedia​.org​/w​/index​.php​ ?curid​=45025142

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Figure 1.3  Adolf Loos House, Vienna, detail; Steve Tiesdell Legacy Collection; Aug 2000 (4), CC BY 2.0, https://commons​.wikimedia​.org​/w​/index​.php​?curid​=3585268

marble cladding of the walls is obvious: this is where a time-honoured architectural monumental form meets industrial modernity (Figure 1.3). The invention of the steel girder in the nineteenth century made it possible to build in a way that was previously unthinkable. Above this steel girder, which functions as a lintel, the gesture of sublimity now continues in rectangular pillars, between which a kind of modern mullioned window is set. Above this, also in green marble, is a mighty architrave with a profiled, continuous cornice, an almost too massive, almost demonstrative conclusion to this entire representative entrance situation. And this is where the façade breaks down. Above the oversized architrave rises a four-storey structure of almost brutal simplicity. At that time, too, it had been noticed. This façade provoked indignation: this in the middle of the city that derives its reputation so completely from its great Habsburg history and shows it so proudly in its historicism! The window openings look as if cut out of the wall; they lack any ornamentation or decoration. The only thing that enlivens these windows somewhat is their tripartite division. This cold, extremely matter-of-fact functionality of the upper floor can be understood as Bauhaus architecture before the historical Bauhaus. In fact, Loos later embraced the Bauhaus architectural idea completely. His Villa Müller in Prague, to cite a prominent example, dispenses with any form of decoration. The ascetic modernity of this cube is so rigorous that one might be tempted to assign it incorrectly to our present day (see Figure 1.4). Those who only saw the upper part of the Loos-Haus might perhaps consider it to be one of the many sins typical of a bad building, a Bauhaus fading form, so to speak, that one often finds in European cities from the sixties and seventies and

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Figure 1.4  Adolf Loos: Villa Müller, Prague, 1930. https://commons​.wikimedia​.org​/wiki​/ File​:Villa​_Muller​_099​.jpg​?uselang​=de

again today. The entire Loos building is set on the top of two triangularly converging streets and both the monumental ground floor, with its furnishings signalling power and wealth, and the upper floor extend into these streets to the right and left. They are well and truly spread out in comparison to the historicist surroundings. In the picture (Figure 1.2), one can now see a magnificent neo-baroque town palace on the left and a palace in Renaissance historicism on the right. Both buildings date from the second half of the nineteenth century. Adolf Loos’ modernist building also manifests itself as a commentary on the way almost the whole of Vienna’s city centre looks, especially the magnificent Ringstraße. This commentary can be summed up in one sentence: there is no gradual transition to be had – symbolically – from Vienna’s historicist pomp to modernism. Loos, incidentally, is not an isolated case in Viennese modernism. Architecture senses at various levels – public buildings, sacred architecture, housing – that fundamental change has to take place. And there are, of course, many interactions here with the modernist discourse in literature, visual arts and philosophy (cf. now Hackenschmidt et al. 2021). In 1908, Adolf Loos gave a lecture, or rather a manifesto or a pamphlet, frequently quoted even today with the famous title “Ornament and Crime”. The purism that Loos demands has two sides. One may well ask whether this explains the architectural desolation of our time. And could there be analogies in literature and

14  Intersectionality and Comparative Research music? Can we also understand the aesthetic purism that Loos demands, in the terms conceived by the famous English anthropologist Mary Douglas, namely that “purity” and “danger”, “Reinheit” and “Gefährdung”, are closely related (Douglas 1966)? Societies must establish orders; orders must be protected. No one will seriously question that. Particularly important orders manifest themselves in taboos, constantly reaffirmed in rituals. Modern societies understand their fundamental values and norms as rationally founded and politically legitimised; they protect them with laws. The extent to which they can also be subject to self-deception and self-exaggeration need not be discussed here. From here, Loos’ critique of ornament can be understood as a pruning of wild growth, as a plea for modern functionality. It becomes a symbolic action in which the central principle of modern society becomes transparent: functionality and efficiency. Two quotations may show how ambivalent Loos’ criticism is, particularly in the architectural context of Vienna: “Ornament is wasted labour and thus wasted health. It has always been like that. Today it also means wasted material, and both mean wasted capital” (Loos1962 [1908], 282 f.).7 According to Loos, the time freed by dispensing with ornamentation in production should ultimately benefit the worker. The ornament is unaesthetic and a sign of decadence. Tattoos are ornaments on human beings for Loos: the modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate. there are prisons where eighty percent of the prisoners have tattoos. the tattooed who are not in prison are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. if a tattooed man dies in freedom, he has just died a few years before he committed murder. (Loos 1962: 276)8 Have we not heard this discourse before? Indeed it is not far from the idea of the flawless, healthy body advocated by National Socialism. The ideal of the slender, the wiry and the streamlined, punishing those who deviate from it. On the other hand, it is also evident that Loos is observing something absolutely correct: that the architectural modernism of the nineteenth century is unable to find its own forms of expressing itself. It is at a loss as to how it should articulate itself and develop in a way that would be appropriate to modern times. In 1828, the German architect Heinrich Hübsch (1795–1863, a contemporary of Heine and Droste–Hülshoff) published his memorable paper “In welchem Stile sollen wir bauen” (“In which style should we build”). This writing calls for a departure from classicism; it seeks a modern style that could be appropriate to the new epoch of modernity. Hübsch himself tried to make his name as an anti-classicism architect with his so-called round arch style, through which he was formative and very successful in the nineteenth century. It can be seen implemented in many public buildings. Just one example: the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe (1837–1846) shows that the non-classical style that Hübsch demands is actually nothing but historicism and eclecticism (Figure 1.5). One last example, once again from architecture around 1900: the old town hall in Bielefeld, built between 1902 and 1907 (Figure 1.6). It shows a demonstrative traditionalism, and this on the most important public building in the city.

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Figure 1.5  Heinrich Hübsch, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, 1837–1846. .wikimedia​.org​/wiki​/File​:Kar​lsru​herK​unsthalle​.jpg

https://commons​

Figure 1.6  Bielefeld, Old Town Hall, 1903/04; postcard from 1910. To the Right of the Town Hall, the No Less Eclectic Theatre. https://commons​.wikimedia​.org​/wiki​/ File​:Bielefeld​-Eugen​-Felle​.jpg

16  Intersectionality and Comparative Research Around 1900, Bielefeld was a significant industrial town in eastern Westphalia. It is puzzling why the city was at that time not able to produce anything better. Is this supposed to be an appropriate symbolic representation through architecture? The echoes of early modern castle architecture are obvious. So, what does this mean for the inhabitants of the city? How do the city authorities and the municipal administration present themselves to the inhabitants? Here again, as with Hübsch: aesthetic eclecticism and syncretism, especially in the ornamental decoration that Loos had so critically targeted. The building imitates the formal language of the Weser Renaissance. But with what kind of symbolic added value would do justice to a modern industrial city? In many studies on Romanticism, Günter Oesterle, in particular, has shown the importance of the arabesque and the grotesque as symbolic forms for Romanticism (cf. Oesterle 2002, 2004, 2013, 2017). So what message are the new bourgeois lords of the castle in the city of Bielefeld sending when they decorate the town hall in this way? I leave this question open; it does make us ponder on the complexity of symbolic understanding. Next to this old town hall stands the new town hall (Figure 1.7). Both buildings together enclose a square, traditionalism next to functionalist modernism. In itself, this is a good idea. This building from the eighties in the twentieth century also raises the question of symbolic meaning. What does this building suggest? Perhaps something like this: dear citizen, here you are governed as per function, objectively, right down to the expression of the building in which this takes place. The façade of the new town hall consists of anodised aluminium panels that do

Figure 1.7  Bielefeld, New City Hall (1979–1988). https://commons​.wikimedia​.org​/wiki​/ File​:Bielefeld​_Neues​_Rathaus​.jpg (Fig. slightly cropped towards the bottom).

Mutual Illumination of the Arts  17 not age and, therefore, never need to be repaired. One panel is like any other. In its materiality, the building thus claims: nothing ages here; the pure objectivity and functionality are, as it were, superhistorical, a timeless political (in the “polis” sense) principle. 1.4 Caesura Consciousness in Art and Literature around 1900 At the beginning, I mentioned the concept of the synergy effect. It can also be applied to the social world: if we create favourable conditions for ourselves, for example, if we are relieved of the pressure of everyday business, of the necessities, and have sufficient “free” time, and if we are also fortunate enough to come together with stimulating, approachable, socially open people who have different cultural, intellectual, scientific and social preconditions than we do, then it can happen to us that in free exchange with each other, we suddenly come to insights that could not have been planned or foreseen. Individual and common understandings suddenly take a leap. (Realm of necessity, a realm of freedom: it is easy to see that I am moving within the philosophical horizon of Schiller, also Herbert Marcuse.) The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University (ZiF: Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung) aimed for precisely this when it was founded at the end of the 1960s and not in vain, as its success story shows.9 So let us now ask what happens in a wider historical context when my observations from the history of architecture in modernism are confronted with the literary history of the period around 1900. I once again summarise the issues that arise from what has been said so far: What is modern architecture, i.e., the applied and public art form of building? What historical aesthetic idea is revealed in it? How does it relate to its time? How much awareness of tradition does it have? How does it position itself in the historical forms of expression? If we now relate the arts to each other, can we recognise what the common symbolic forms, the symbolic signatures of an epoch are? Perhaps even what Hegel, in the famous, melancholy passage on “instructions” in the “Elements of the Philosophy of Right” of 1821 (“Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts”), calls the “shape of life” (“Gestalt des Lebens”), the aesthetic “shape of an age”? My reflections on the “mutual illumination of the arts” boil down to this question.10 As a method, it promotes the historical understanding of the aesthetic. For the time around 1900, the question is: is there an awareness in the arts of the transition to a new era; and in what way does this mould the aesthetic “shape” of this time? Formal reduction and functionalism, Bauhaus before the historical Bauhaus, aesthetic reflection on the meaning of tradition: this was an observation on architecture. The Fagus factory in Alfeld by Walter Gropius, important in architectural history and now a world heritage site, was built in 1911, same year the Loos House in Vienna was under construction!11 But, more generally, the “aesthetics of simplicity” has a much longer history that goes back to antiquity and is also evident, for example, in rhetoric. Detlev Schöttker recently presented this history of aesthetic simplicity in an excellent documentary (Schöttker 2019) and was thus able

18  Intersectionality and Comparative Research to make clear that “simplicity” is an old aesthetic idea and has long been a fundamental way of expressing oneself. 1.5 A Look at Literature around 1900: Stefan George’s “Blätter für die Kunst”: The Preface to the First Series (1892) Now, a quick look at a foundational work of Symbolism, Stefan George’s (1868– 1933) journal “Blätter für die Kunst” (Journal of Arts), which began appearing at irregular intervals in 1892. Around 1900, George was, along with Rilke, the most important lyric poet, in addition to being the most strident and, early on, the most controversial. He internationalised German poetry, which had barely emerged from the shadow of Goethe, by opening it up to European and especially French modernism. Through him, and especially through his translations, which are still exemplary today, the Baudelaire and Mallarmé reception in Germany got underway. The preface to the first series of these “Blätter für die Kunst” was published two years before the construction of the magnificent neo-baroque hall I presented above. This famous manifesto, unsurpassed in its rigorism and thoroughness, gave the clarion call for a radically new art: The name of this publication already states in part what it is supposed to do: serve art, especially poetry and writing, eliminating everything that is state and social. It aims for SPIRITUAL ART based on the new way of feeling and creating art for art’s sake – and therefore stands in contrast to that worn out and inferior school which sprang from a false conception of reality. It also does not concern itself with making the world a better place and dreaming of universal happiness where one sees the germ of all that is new at the present time, which are very nice ideas but belong in a domain other than poetry. We consider it an advantage that we do not begin with doctrines but with works that illuminate our will and from which the rules are later derived. Although we will also introduce the new trends in literature at home and abroad in an instructive manner, we will try to avoid al kind of buzzwords that appeared at ours and tend to confuse people. It should be emphasised that we are averse to any kind of feud: we distribute these papers in order to look for and attract like-minded people who are scattered and as yet unknown to us. Soon it will be communicated to our readers how this project (whether simple or large) pans out. One should also refrain from all quarrels and mockery about life, for – as Goethe says – not much comes of it. In art we believe in a glorious rebirth. (Journal for Arts, 1 f.)12

Mutual Illumination of the Arts  19 It is clear what is being programmatically formulated here. A new era must begin. The old is outdated and will be radically cleared away. Stefan George writes polemically and with biting irony (“dreaming of universal happiness … which are very nice ideas but”). A fundamental problem: this would also apply to many statements in contemporary art circles that conveniently want to profit from what is politically fashionable. When George began the project Journal for Arts, naturalism was celebrating its triumph in Europe. The very first sentence of this manifesto makes it quite clear that all external functions attributed to art, including political purposes and every direct, concrete reference to society, are to be radically rejected. George wants to renew the idea of art’s autonomy. Art derives its meaning and its legitimacy entirely on its own, not through any contribution to the so-called “improvement of the world”. But precisely by rejecting all instrumentalisation, it contributes to the “improvement of the world” (“Weltverbesserung”). This is very close to the aesthetics of Adorno, who manages to speak very emphatically of the “dream of a world […] in which things would be different” (Adorno 1957/1975: 78).13 This dream could appear in real poetry, as well as in autonomous art in general. Adorno held George in high esteem and, at the same time, sharply criticised him. He wrote a wonderful and sensitive interpretation of George’s poem “Im windes-weben” (Adorno 1957/1975, 97 ff.). In this manifesto, George avoids the term “literature”; it would be far too ordinary, far too common. His concern is “poetry” and “writing”. They have nothing to do with politics and society. Art for art’s sake, “l'art pour l'art”, is needed. The preface, however, does not prescribe normatively what this new artform should be in concrete terms. George trusts that there are “unknown” “like-minded people” who are “scattered” but who will now find each other through the Journal of Arts. Only when something like a poeto-social movement develops will it be possible to deduce from the works themselves what principles they follow. Johann Caspar Lavater, philosopher and writer and one of Goethe’s many acquaintances, had already said in the late eighteenth century that the genius makes his own rules. With George, the autonomy of genius is extended to the radical autonomy of art itself. Art has only its own aesthetic logic to follow, one that cannot and must not be prescribed from the outside. The final sentence, “In art, so we believe, in a glorious rebirth,” is formulated in the spirit of Nietzsche. It further implies that this rebirth is necessary. Art itself must be reborn because it had come to an end in the course of the nineteenth century. This rebirth can give us “all things new”. It is George himself who, in a sense, says: “Behold, I make all things new” (Revelation 21:6). It is he who claims to renew and rejuvenate poetry. One can see from this final sentence how, in the aestheticist–symbolist conception of art around 1900, the “old” art religion of the time around 1800 is “reborn”. George and his circle thus take up the idealistic idea of artistic autonomy again and radicalise it at a time when literature, with its naturalistic concept, and the visual arts, with their realist concept, are engaging particularly intensively with the process of modernisation and its consequences. When and under what historical

20  Intersectionality and Comparative Research and cultural circumstances do the voices become louder that art should engage with the politico–social process? And how does art then react to this? In the 1968 students’ movement, not only the students and the wider critical public but also art and literature were politicised, and in the 1980s and 1990s, literature resists precisely this constellation (Handke, Botho Strauß). George vigorously reintroduces the role of the author into aesthetic discourse around 1900; he is an author who sees himself as an authority and always speaks authoritatively. This can be seen clearly in the preface to the “Blätter für die Kunst”, briefly presented here. Keeping this in mind, his later turn towards cultural criticism (“Kulturkritik”) becomes more comprehensible. The poet as authority: this self-image need not be limited to poetry and can also turn to the social and cultural, but it is initiated by poetic authority (cf. Braungart 2020). But what does this mean for poetry itself? 1.6 Really a Song? Stefan George’s “An Baches Ranft” The poetic aspiration and demand to renew the art of poetry is never abandoned in George. The following poem, which will now be briefly explained, belongs to the internal cycle of “Lieder I-VI” in Stefan George’s 1907 volume of poetry “Der Siebente Ring”. This volume of poetry, however, is opened by the “Zeitgedichte”, some of which are rabidly critical of culture. How does this fit together: the most sensitive poetry and sharp cultural criticism? At the Brook’s Crust (An baches ranft) Alone so early The hazel blossoms. A bird whistles In the cool meadow. A glow touches Warms us gently And twitches and fades. The field is fallow – The tree still grey … Flowers perhaps Scatters the spring after us. (George 1907/1986: 138) An Baches Ranft Die einzigen frühen Die hasel blühen. Ein vogel pfeift In kühler au. Ein leuchten streift Erwärmt uns sanft Und zuckt und bleicht. Das feld ist brach

Mutual Illumination of the Arts  21 Der baum noch grau … Blumen streut vielleicht Der lenz uns nach. (George 1907/1986: 138) This is obviously a nature poem, a poem that speaks of pre-spring. Anton Webern set it ingeniously to music (Five Songs from “The Seventh Ring”, Op. 3: III. An baches ranft; these songs are a significant step in the history of new music!) – In the blossoming hazelnut bush, spring first announces itself: this season of love, of new beginnings, of hope, is sung in countless poems. A poem about spring would not be very original in principle, but to write one about the pre-spring could be. The first verse sends out a clear signal: this is about art! Whoever enters the poem enters a sphere of their own, set apart from the mundane world. What George calls for in his preface to Blätter in terms of literary history – to open up a new age of art – he expects of his own concrete poetical creation. Who knows the medieval word “ranft”! George repeatedly builds such archaisms, signals of strangeness and specificity into his poems. Sometimes this seems forced and pretentious but not here. Rhythmically and metrically, he could just as well have said “rand”. The rhyming counterword “sanft” (“gently”) is far enough away not to have demanded the use of “ranft”. The structuring power of the assonance “a” for the poem would nevertheless be preserved (au, sanft, das, brach, baum, grau, nach). The poem plays with the style of song but is not a real song, at least not a folk song. George, as previously mentioned, wishes to make everything new, including the song, the most popular of all lyrical genres. The hazelnut bush is an important motif and symbol in folk literature and in popular culture. The detailed article in the “Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens” (Dictionary of German Superstition) provides thorough information on how deeply this most popular of all European shrubs has been in the cultural history since prehistoric and early historic times: in many practical contexts because of its rods and sticks; in folk belief; as a symbol of love and fertility and in folk medicine. George even lures us with poetic popularity (as also with, “Warms us gently”) – and then turns us away. Verse after verse is consistently laconic, by no means “sanft” (gentle), and catchy, without any concession to any trivial springtime sentiments, but still easy to understand. The poem lacks embellishment of any kind; it foregoes all linguistic ornamentation. Adorno particularly appreciated these “songs” by George, especially the preceding “Im windes-weben”. The poem speaks of a time of the in-between, a not-yet and no-longer. The threatening past is still present (“twitches and fades”; “field is fallow”; “tree still grey”): so the “blossoming hazels” and the “whistling bird” are not to be trusted! Twice the iambic metre is broken, and the rhythm changes: first in the second verse, which contains an Adonaean, which George (like Hölderlin) likes to use (“einzigen frühen”; a dactyl is followed by a trochee; see the title of Hölderlin’s famous poem “Hälfte des Lebens”, cf. Pahmeier 2016/17). The iamb of the first verse immediately begins to swing; almost as if the poem wanted to swing towards spring right at its beginning. But the extent to which this is a poetic illusion becomes increasingly clear verse by verse, until the inversion of the rhythm occurs with the trochees of the penultimate

22  Intersectionality and Comparative Research verse: “Blumen streut vielleicht”. The disillusionment takes place in the rhythm itself. “Perhaps”? Whose decision is that if it is not under the authority of the poetic speaker? But he has already gone astray from the self-evidence of the natural seasonal progression of winter followed by spring. And now, please let us read it symbolically! “Flowers” are an old symbol for poetry; “flower-” or “blossom reading” (“Blumen-” oder “Blütenlesen”) are terms people like to use for poetry collections. Is there something new and fresh coming in the second half of this author’s and this literary concept’s lives? Or are the “flowers” that are “perhaps” being “scattered after us” already the harbingers of the autumn (of life)? Aren’t the signs of death and a deep melancholy inscribed in this early spring (“cool”, “fallow”, “pale”, “grey”, “scatters”)? “Maybe”? “Maybe” not. The few hints should suffice. Late modernity, in poetic and philosophical terms, the afterglow of Romanticism, Goethe epigonism: this is the mortgage that weighs on all nature poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And what does George do with it! He starts a new era precisely by getting involved in the most conventional genre of poetry, nature poetry. The way this is done cannot be called anything other than masterful. Intermedia approaches, even media-aesthetic approaches, cannot come close to characterising the aesthetic quality of such a poem. This requires differentiated literary hermeneutics that appreciates the lyrical work of art for what it is. Going back to Loos: he places his building in the historical ensemble; he furnishes the entrance area with materials that belong to the canon of architectural history: column, marble and architrave. But then there is the second building above it! Mutually illuminating, we see the same structure in the architectural art of Adolf Loos and in the verse art of Stefan George: a breakaway from the artistic and aesthetically highly reflective treatment of the traditional. 1.7 Oskar Walzel, Mutual Illumination of Arts Now I must return in more detail to the book to which I owe the title of my lecture. This book from 1917 harks back to a lecture by the Germanist Oskar Walzel (1864–1944, cf. Gossens 2003). To start with, Walzel reflects on the methodological state of literary studies and complains about the lack of conceptual precision in his discipline, which for him, lags far behind art history: With some modesty, every researcher who wants to increase the research resources of his/her discipline recognises that related disciplines make use here and there of tricks and techniques that have not yet been applied to his or her discipline, that these tricks and techniques promise advancement, that they make it possible to get beyond the inadequacies of one’s own research methodology. I have long held the representatives of art history in high esteem because of their excellent descriptions of works of art which the layman can only get a feeling for, for which he is unable to find suitable words. Poetry, on the other hand, does not seem to have been understood so well

Mutual Illumination of the Arts  23 and so accurately. In particular, it seems to me that the description of the artistic features of a poem is usually left more to the talent of the observer and thus to chance than the same in the domain of visual art. (Walzel 1917: 10)14 Literary hermeneutics, a young discipline at that time founded by Wilhelm Dilthey basically for the social sciences, was for a long time also considered the supreme method of analysis also in literary studies. It has, however, often been criticised for lacking a language that would lend intersubjective comprehensibility to the intuitive and the creative that is an inevitable part of every literary interpretation (one could also say: the specific individual talent of the interpreter), thereby making it more verifiable and easier to discuss. This dilemma, which Walzel diagnoses here, has not been solved to this day. Of course, it can be theoretically conceptualised in a hermeneutics of friendliness, benevolence, good-naturedness, equity and intellectual–aesthetic openness (cf. Braungart 2007, generally Kaul/ van Laak 2007). Literary hermeneutics implies important socioethical dimensions. It also, therefore, depends on the interpreter’s willingness to strive for an appropriate language. Oskar Walzel was strongly influenced by Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), who was one of the most important art historians of these decades. “Kunsthistorische Grundbegriffe” (1915, Basic Art-Historical Concepts) was Wölfflin’s most important work, cited even in contemporary times. According to Wölfflin, five formal– aesthetic oppositions are fundamental: linear/painterly; planar/deep; closed/open; unity/diversity; clear/unclear or moving. These oppositions are developed on the basis of his model epochs of the Renaissance and the baroque (for an introduction to Wölfflin, see Walter Paatz 2007). Wölfflin understands the history of art primarily as a history of form and style. He does not orient himself biographically or in terms of epochs. The reference to political, social and cultural history is clearly secondary to him. Today, inspired by Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, one would perhaps say: he already sees art studies as having its own, fully differentiated system of communication that should follow its own rules and, in the history of art, as I said above, its own aesthetic logic. Even Hölderlin postulated a “poetic logic” and referred to a “poetic calculus” – a point of intense discussion among researchers. Oskar Walzel sees no formal, conceptual apparatus in literary studies comparable to that in art studies. This is why he calls for “attempts to apprentice with art historians in order to borrow successful approaches from them for a better grasp of poetic creative possibilities” (Walzel 1917: 25). What the comparison of the arts can achieve when they are allowed to “mutually illuminate” each other can already be seen in Lessing’s Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (1766: Laocoon or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry), a text that remains fundamental for semiotics of arts to this day. The comparison between the arts is particularly productive for basic aesthetic– poetic concepts. For example, the concept of rhythm: do the rhythm of a series of columns and that of a verse have anything in common with each other? Or nothing, really?15 Walzel uses metaphors of architecture to describe Shakespeare. Sciences,

24  Intersectionality and Comparative Research including the natural sciences, need metaphors, otherwise, they cannot express themselves, and we cannot understand them; sciences also have their aesthetics and poetics (fundamental to this day: Lakoff/Johnson 1980; taken considerably further in cognitive linguistic metaphor theories and in the philosophical metaphor discussion). Now it is easy to continue the argument: what about the category of aesthetic sacrality around 1900? Keywords: Otto Wagner in the church building; the architecture of the anthroposophists; Ferdinand Hodler in painting (his landscapes, his figures!); Igor Stravinsky’s “Le sacre du printemps” (1913) as an example from music; and of course Rilke and again George. “The sacred” is again finding mention in the aesthetic play of the arts and is being used as an aesthetic mode even today. Or some other categories common in the arts of the twentieth century: fantasy and the surreal, expression and expressivity, popularity, etc. So can we and do we consider this programme, which I am only outlining here, as a possible model of comparative studies? Comparative studies have, so far, little to offer in terms of a “comparison between the arts”; as an inter-discourse of aesthetic modes in the history of human culture even less so. Therefore, we come to the guiding theoretical-methodological thesis of mine for this type of comparative studies: the arts form a large aesthetic system of communication (exemplified by the period at the turn of the century),16 in which a complex aesthetic “sense of relationship” continues to unfold (Japp 1980), in which there are many reflections and “resonances” (Hartmut Rosa: 2016); a sense of relationship that is thus always “in the making” (Friedrich Schlegel). All the categories I have already used here (awareness of epochs, of ends and beginnings thereof and of renewal), which would now have to be further developed for the art of modernity, should, therefore, first of all be understood as aesthetic. Everything I have in mind is aimed, on the one hand, at the aesthetic experience of the recipients and on the other at the aesthetic logic, the aesthetic “making” of the works (cf. Kurz 1999). George speaks of “making” in the preface of “Blätter für die Kunst” (Blätter für die Kunst: 1967); the problem of form and design remains fundamental throughout the history of modern poetics (Benn! Cf. Burdorf 2001). But what does “aesthetic” mean in this context? First of all, only this: our “aisthesis”, pertaining to our sensory faculties. Through our linguistic-conceptual work, we try to approach our “aisthetic” experiences. This will never be completely successful. An example that this “aisthesis” is, of course, not to be limited to the arts: a wine tasting and the comparisons that go into the absurd to grasp the taste experiences (“raspberry note”; “liquorice taste in the finish”). Or just try, as a nice exercise on a Sunday, to adequately describe a really good truffle praline in terms of its taste. A slightly less trivial example: no religion in the world can do without its specific aesthetics. These do not have to be images of the one who must not be depicted (Islam, Judaism; Dohmen/Wagner 2012). But without a specific architecture with its furnishings, without the performative arts and practices (prayer, chanting, processions, rituals), no religion anywhere can function. Religions have always been aesthetic discourses of human expression and self-understanding.

Mutual Illumination of the Arts  25 Art and religion have appeared together in the history of mankind from the very beginning.17 The “mutual illumination of the arts” ultimately amounts to a “mutual illumination” of various aesthetic concepts and their realisations in the various arts. Intermediality would have to be accompanied by an “inter-aesthetics” – if it is allowed to introduce this monster of a word. Notes 1 Regarding the original title of Oskar Walzels Book Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste, one should say: mutual and reciprocal illumination (see also below). 2 This essay is dedicated to Prof. Hubertus von Pilgrim and Dr. Klaus-Heinrich Kohrs in deep gratitude for all that they did for me during my student days in Braunschweig (especially at the Hochschule für bildende Künste). They were, in fact, the first to repeatedly and energetically encourage me to follow my path of 'mutual illumination of the arts'. 3 I would like to thank Rosy Singh for inviting me to the conference. My paper was delivered freely using a Power Point presentation. The written version formulated in February/ March 2022 attempts to retain the style of the oral presentation for reasons of comprehensibility and accessibility. In the summer semester of 2021, I gave a lecture series of fourteen double hours at Bielefeld University on the topic of “Mutual Illumination of the Arts”, the basic ideas of which I summarise here. I thank the participants for their openness and curiosity; I thank Luca Manitta and Noemi Beniers for their editorial help. Many thanks also to Lore Knapp and especially to Ben Davis for many helpful critical comments and checking the translation in English. 4 The various subject concepts are clearly sorted by Reckwitz 2021. Reckwitz is currently one of the leading German-language sociologists. 5 Who admittedly does not alone shape the European Enlightenment but is counterbalanced from the beginning by empiricism and sensualism; for basics: Kondylis 1981. 6 Just one example: In spring 2022, the Frankfurt Städel Museum held an exhibition entitled “Renoir - Rococo Revival. Impressionism and 18th Century French Art”, dealing convincingly with this epochal context. 7 “Ornament ist vergeudete Arbeitskraft und dadurch vergeudete Gesundheit. So war es immer. Heute bedeutet es auch vergeudetes Material, und beides bedeutet vergeudetes Kapital.” (Loos1962 [1908], 282 f.). – Fundamental to the critique of ornament cf. Müller (1977), esp. VIII, IV and X; see also Kroll (1987). 8 “Der moderne mensch, der sich tätowiert, ist ein verbrecher oder ein degenerierter. es gibt gefängnisse, in denen achtzig prozent der häftlinge tätowierungen aufweisen. die tätowierten, die nicht in haft sind, sind latente verbrecher oder degenerierte aristokraten. wenn ein tätowierter in freiheit stirbt, so ist er eben einige jahre, bevor er einen mord verübt hat, gestorben.” (Loos 1962, 276) 9 Cf. https://www​.uni​-bielefeld​.de​/ZiF​/Publikationen​/Veroeffentlichungen​/2018​/ Schalenberg​_50Jahre​.html 10 I can only make a general reference here to Ernst Cassirer’s “Philosophy of Symbolic Forms”, which of course inspires me very much. 11 Cf. https://de​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Fagus​-Werk. 12 “Der name dieser veröffentlichung sagt schön zum teil was sie soll: der kunst besonders der dichtung und dem schrifttum dienen, alles staatliche und gesellschaftliche ausscheidend. Sie will die GEISTIGE KUNST auf grund der neuen fühlweise und mache eine kunst für die kunst – und steht deshalb im gegensatz zu jener verbrauchten und minderwertigen schule die einer falschen auffassung der wirklichkeit entsprang. sie kann sich auch

26  Intersectionality and Comparative Research nicht beschäftigen mit weltverbesserungen und allbeglückungsträumen in denen man gegenwärtig bei uns den keim zu allem neuen sieht, die ja sehr schön sein mögen aber in ein andres gebiet gehören als das der dichtung. Wir halten es für einen vorteil dass wir nicht mit lehrsätzen beginnen sondern mit werken die unser wollen behellen und an denen man später die regeln ableite. Zwar werden wir auch belehrend und urteilend die neuen strömungen der literatur im in und ausland einführen, uns dabei aber so sehr wie möglich aller schlagworte begeben die auch bei uns schön auftauchten und dazu angethan sind die köpfe zu verwirren. Es sei hervorgehoben dass wir jeder fehde abgeneigt sind: wenn wir diese blätter verbreiten so geschieht es um zerstreute noch unbekannte ähnlichgesinnte zu entdecken und anzuwerben. Welche gestalt das unternehmen (ob einfacher ob vergrössert) gewinnt wird unsern lesern mitgeteilt. Enthalte man sich auch allen streites und spottes über das leben wobei – wie Goethe meint – nicht viel heraus kommt. In der kunst glauben wir an eine glänzende wiedergeburt.” (Blätter für die Kunst, 1 f.) 13 “Der Traum von einer Welt […] in der es anders wäre.” 14 “Mit einiger Bescheidenheit erkennt ja jeder Forscher, der die Forschungsmittel seines Faches mehren will, daß verwandte Fächer da und dort Kunstgriffe nutzen, die für sein Fach noch nicht angewendet worden sind, daß diese Kunstgriffe Förderung versprechen, daß sie ermöglichen, über Unzulänglichkeiten der eigenen Forschungsweise hinauszukommen. Mir flößen seit langem die Vertreter der Kunstgeschichte hohe Achtung ein wegen ihrer ausgezeichneten Mittel, Züge eines Kunstwerks sprachlich zu bezeichnen, die dem Laien nur gefühlsmäßig aufgehen und für die er keine Worte bereit hat. Dichtungen wiederum scheinen mir noch lange nicht so gut und so treffend in ihren künstlerischen Eigenheiten erfaßt zu sein. Besonders will es mir scheinen, als ob die sprachliche Festlegung der künstlerischen Züge einer Dichtung meist viel mehr der Begabung des Beobachters und damit dem Zufall überlassen bliebe als die gleiche Arbeit auf dem Feld der bildenden Kunst.” (Walzel 1917, 10). 15 To this difficult category Gibhardt (2020 and 2021). 16 Cf. once again Hackenschmidt et al. 2021 as an example. 17 With this I am hinting at a large, currently discussed problem area; cf. with further literature (cf. Braungart 2021.

Works cited Adorno, Theodor W.: Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft. In: Adorno, Theodor W. (Ed.): Noten zur Literatur I. Rundfunkvortrag von 1957, Frankfurt a. M., 1975, S. 73–104. Blätter für die Kunst. Begründet von Stefan George. Ed. by Klein, Carl August. 1892–1919. Abgelichteter Neudruck. Zum Jubiläumsjahr 1968, Düsseldorf – München, 1967. Braungart, Wolfgang: Irgendwie dazwischen. Authentizität, Medialität, Ästhetizität. Ein kurzer Kommentar. In: Frevert, Ute/Braungart, Wolfgang (Eds.): Sprachen des Politischen. Medien und Medialität in der Geschichte. Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, Göttingen, 2004, S. 356–368. Braungart, Wolfgang: Der brave Tuttlinger und der Limburger Käse: Johann Peter Hebels hermeneutische Parabel “Kannitverstan” (1809). In: Kaul, Susanne/van Laak, Lothar (Eds.): Ethik des Verstehens, Paderborn, 2007, S. 175–198. Braungart, Wolfgang: Das Kunstwerk als Individuum, der Autor als Subjekt. Versuch zur literarischen Moderne. In: Buschmeier, Matthias/Erhart, Walter/Kauffmann, Kai (Eds.): Literaturgeschichte. Theorien - Modelle – Praktiken, Berlin, 2014, S. 265–306.

Mutual Illumination of the Arts  27 Braungart, Wolfgang: Poetische Idealtypen – der Dichter als Autorität. Mit einem Blick auf Rilke und Hofmannsthal. In: Cultura Tedesca. Special Volume ‘Stefan George’. Nr. 59, 2020, S. 43–66. Braungart, Wolfgang: Theologie aus der Perspektive der Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften. In: Albrecht, Christian/Gemeinhardt, Peter (Eds.): Themen und Probleme Theologischer Enzyklopädie. Perspektiven von innen und von außen, Tübingen, 2021, S. 265–296. Burdorf, Dieter: Poetik der Form. Eine Begriffs- und Problemgeschichte, Stuttgart, 2001. Dohmen, Christoph/Wagner, Christoph (Eds.): Religion als Bild. Bild als Religion. Beiträge einer internationalen Tagung, Regensburg, 2012. Douglas, Mary: Puritiy and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. New York 1966. Reinheit und Gefährdung. Eine Studie zu Vorstellungen von Verunreinigung und Tabu, Berlin, 1985. Fuchs, Thomas: Das Gehirn – ein Beziehungsorgan. Eine phänomenologisch-ökologische Konzeption, Stuttgart, 2013. George, Stefan: Der Siebente Ring. Stefan George. Sämtliche Werke in 18 Bänden. Bd. VI/ VII. Bearbeitet von Ute Oelmann, Stuttgart, 1986. Gibhardt, Boris Roman (Ed.): Denkfigur Rhythmus. Probleme und Potenziale des Rhythmusbegriffs in den Künsten, Hannover, 2020. Gibhardt, Boris Roman: ‚Einzige Welle, allmähliches Meer‘. Rhythmus in der Literatur und Kunst um 1900. West – Ost, Göttingen, 2021. Gossens, Peter: ‚Artikel‚ Walzel, Oskar Franz‘. In: Internationales Germanistenlexikon 1800–1950. Ed. and introduction by Christoph König, Berlin – New York, 2003, S. 1980–1983. Hackenschmidt, Sebastian/Innerhofer, Roland/Schöttker, Detlev (Eds.): Planen – Wohnen – Schreiben, Wien, 2021. Jahraus, Oliver: Literatur als Medium. Sinnkonsitution und Subjekterfahrung zwischen Bewußtsein und Kommunikation, Weilerswist, 2003. Japp, Uwe: Beziehungssinnn. Ein Konzept der Literaturgeschichte, Frankfurt a. M., 1980. Jung, Matthias: Der bewusste Ausdruck. Anthropologie der Artikulation, Berlin, 2009. Kondylis, Panajotis: Die Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus, Stuttgart, 1981. Kaul, Susanne/van Laak, Lothar (Eds.): Ethik des Verstehens, Paderborn, 2007. Kroll, Frank-Lothar: Das Ornament in der Kunsttheorie des 19. Jahrhunderts, Hildesheim – Zürich – New York, 1987. Kurz, Gerhard: Macharten. Über Rhythmus, Reim, Stil und Vieldeutigkeit, Göttingen, 1999. Lakoff, George/Johnson, Mark: Metaphors we live by, Chicago – London, 1980. Loos, Adolf: Sämtliche Schriften, München 1962 (Ornament und Verbrechen, 1908), S. 262 ff.; hier zit. nach wikisource: abgerufen am 24.03.2022 unter: https://de​.wikisource​.org​/ wiki​/Ornament​_und​_Verbrechen). Müller, Michael: Die Verdrängung des Ornaments. Zum Verhältnis von Architektur und Lebenspraxis, Frankfurt a.M., 1977. Oesterle, Günter: Das Faszinosum der Arabeske um 1800. In: Hinderer, Walter (Ed.): Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik, Würzburg, 2002, S. 51-70. Oesterle, Günter: Zur Intermedialität des Grotesken. Vorwort zu Wolfgang Kayser: Das Groteske. Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung, Tübingen, 2004, S. VII–XXX. Oesterle, Günter: Von der Peripherie zum Zentrum: Der Aufstieg der Arabeske zur prosaischen, poetischen und intermedialen Reflexionsfigur um 1800. In: Busch, Werner/Maisak, Petra (Ed.): Verwandlung der Welt. Die romantische Arabeske.

28  Intersectionality and Comparative Research Ausst.-Kat. Deutsches Hochstift Frankfurt/Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, 1.12.201328.2.2014, Petersberg, 2013, S. 29–36. Oesterle, Günter: Das Groteskkomische. In: Wirth, Uwe (Ed.): Komik. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Stuttgart 2017, S. 35–42. Paatz, Walter: Artikel. Wölfflin, Heinrich. In: Betthausen, Peter/Feist, Peter H./Fork, Christine (Eds.): Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon. 210 Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2., aktualisierte und erweiterte Auflage, Stuttgart – Weimar, 2007, S. 515–520. Pahmeier, Markus: Sapphischen Tones. Der Adoneus in Stefan Georges Lyrik. In: GeorgeJahrbuch 11, 2016/17, S. 211–230. Reckwitz, Andreas: Subjekt. 4., aktualisierte Aufl. Bielefeld, 2021. Rosa, Hartmut: Resonanzen. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehungen, Berlin, 2016. Schöttker, Detlev (Ed.): Ästhetik der Einfachheit. Texte zur Geschichte eines BauhausProgramms, Berlin, 2019. Walzel, Oskar: Wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste. Ein Beitrag zur Würdigung kunstgeschichtlicher Begriffe, Berlin, 1917.

Part II

Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory



2

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon Babu Thaliath

2.1  Principium Individuationis as Mask In his early work The Birth of Tragedy (the original title: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geist der Musik), Nietzsche poses a fundamental question: What is an aesthetic phenomenon? In the beginning of this work, Nietzsche observes: “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.”1 This would be one of Nietzsche’s most cited dictums, and it refers to the intrinsic dimensions of human existence and the world on which individuation is built. Obviously, this first major work of Nietzsche arose from the spirit of Wagner’s music, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and above all, from pre-Platonic antiquity, which Nietzsche, as a young and blossoming classical philologist in Basel, seeks to radically reinterpret. In this early phase of his career as a philosopher, Nietzsche remained a disciple of Schopenhauer and a follower of Wagner, as he clearly expresses in the second major work, The Untimely Meditations (Die Unzeitgemäßen Betrachtungen). However, some of Nietzsche’s basic ideas – such as the Apollonian-Dionysian duality – clearly show an original deviation from traditional classical philology. Nietzsche also began to rehabilitate some of the foundations of ancient and medieval philosophy – such as the discourse on principium individuationis, as it was revived and rehabilitated by Schopenhauer in his system of philosophy – in rare contexts that had never been discussed before. As is generally observed, towards the middle phase of his philosophizing and in the course of his development as a free spirit (freier Geist), Nietzsche abandoned once and for all this early phase of philosophical and aesthetic affiliation. The main reason for such a departure and turning point was, as is well known, the break with Wagner after the Bayreuth Festival in 1876. On the other hand, I would like to shed light on the subtle but decisive persistence of this early phase in his later philosophy and show how it manifests itself as a persistence in masks and metamorphoses. In clear contrast with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche regards the principle of individuation, the principium individuationis, hardly as uniform or coherent – that is, as something that merely produces individuation – but as ambivalent in a duality of Apollonian Schein (illusion or appearance) and Dionysian inwardness and concealment (Innerlichkeit und Verborgenheit). Nietzsche’s aesthetic phenomenon is based on such a duality of opposing individuations and their equally opposing principles, i.e. between “appearing” and hiding behind appearances, between being DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-5

32  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory revealed and being veiled by a mask, between explication and implication, etc. In Geburt der Tragödie, Nietzsche refers to a higher degree of Schein in the artistic instinct – as illusion of illusion (Schein des Scheins). The interpretation of the primal being (das Ur-Eine) as the basis of existence inevitably requires such a dichotomy and gradation of the appearance itself, which seems to transcend or overcome the traditional conventional notion of the Apollonian Schein, which makes up the principium individuationis: For the more I become aware of those all-powerful natural artistic impulses and the fervent yearning for illusion contained in them, the desire to be redeemed through appearances, the more I feel myself pushed to the metaphysical assumption that the true being and the primordial oneness, eversuffering and entirely contradictory, constantly uses the delightful vision, the joyful illusion, to redeem itself; we are compelled to experience this illusion, totally caught up in it and constituted by it, as the truly non-existent, that is, as a continuous development in time, space, and causality, in other words, as empirical reality. But if we momentarily look away from our own “reality,” if we grasp our empirical existence and the world in general as an idea of the primordial oneness created in every moment, then we must now consider our dream as the illusion of an illusion, as well as an even higher fulfillment of the original hunger for illusion. For this same reason, the innermost core of nature takes that indescribable joy in the naive artist and naive work of art, which is, in the same way, only “an illusion of an illusion.” (Nietzsche 2008: 18–19) The Schein des Scheins, which in a certain respect surpasses the principle of the individuation of Apollonian existence – as represented in plastic arts – is, according to Nietzsche, hardly a superficial phenomenon; the appearance of appearances, Schein des Scheins, is a mask that is anchored in the depths of the primal being which seeks the necessary redemption in the principium individuationis. On the basis of an example, a painting by Raphael, which depicts the “depotentiation of the Schein to Schein”, Nietzsche shows how the Kunstsymbolik creates the masklike appearance that surpasses the traditional, conventional notion of the principium individuationis: Now, out of this illusion there rises up, like an ambrosial fragrance, a new world of illusion, like a vision, invisible to those trapped in the first scene – something illuminating and hovering in the purest painless ecstasy, a shining vision to contemplate with eyes wide open. Here we have before our eyes, in the highest symbolism of art, that Apollonian world of beauty and its foundation, the frightening wisdom of Silenus, and we understand, through intuition, their reciprocal necessity. But Apollo confronts us once again as the divine manifestation of the principii individuationis (the principle of individuation), the only thing through which the eternally attained goal of the primordial oneness, its redemption through illusion, takes place: he shows

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon  33 us, with awe-inspiring gestures, how the entire world of torment is necessary, so that through it the individual is pushed to the creation of the redemptive vision and then, absorbed in contemplation of that vision, sits quietly in his rowboat, tossing around in the middle of the ocean. (Nietzsche 2008: 19) From the outset, Nietzsche seems to view or rather reinterpret the Schopenhauerian conception of the world as will (Welt als Wille) in a fundamental duality between the Apollonian Schein, i.e. the principium individuationis, and the Dionysian primal being. This gives rise to other binary art genres, such as the static of plastic art and the intrinsic dynamic of the temporal art of music, which is contrasted with plastic art. Nietzsche’s plan, as it emerges in The Birth of Tragedy, is that this duality of arts or their polarity should be fused together in the principium individuationis. Nietzsche, therefore, often refers to the principle of individuation, which underlies Apollonian plastic art (this also relates to the Greek theatre, among others); however, he seems to morph some of the characteristics of the will and its objectifications, as Schopenhauer elaborates and explains in detail in his major work, World as Will and Representation. Art – especially music – as one of the highest and most perfect objectifications of the will, as Schopenhauer emphasises, undergoes further metamorphoses with Nietzsche, in that art is ascribed an aesthetic–existential individuation. The basic idea of the will and the world as its objectifications – in different modes and degrees – evidently evolved in Schopenhauer’s philosophy from his attempt to resolve the Kantian dichotomy or polarisation between noumenon and phenomenon, implied in particular in the distinction between appearance (Erscheinung) and “thing-in-itself” (Ding an sich). While in Kant the thing-in-itself forms a residue of a strictly transcendental–epistemological negation and reduction, in Schopenhauer – as with other Kantians – it became one of the premises or foundations of his philosophy. While in Kant the thing-in-itself, to which the knowing subject has no epistemic access, marks a limit of knowability, in Schopenhauer, it became the basis of the world of objects in general, which constitute different objectifications of one and the same metaphysical principle, the will. Schopenhauer equates the Kantian thing-in-itself – quite explicitly – with the Platonic idea and the medieval–scholastic concept of principium individuationis as well as with the notion of māyā in Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta. For Schopenhauer, the thing-in-itself as will, represented in its manifestations, is – unlike Kant – not subjectively inaccessible. Particularly in art or in aesthetic experience, the subject has direct access to the will, which is hidden from appearances. The aesthetic access to the metaphysicalprimordial phenomenon of the will also means the Ideenschau but at the same time tearing the veil, the māyā, which masks the multiplicity of appearances of the primordial phenomenon of the will, the manifestations of which make up the world of objects. Schopenhauer considers the sensory world that appears to us to be veiled, that is to say, a māyā – means a deceptive veil – which cannot be torn through a logical, but only through a pre-logical and purely aesthetic subject. The aesthetic deconstruction of māyā – as mask – which suggests a dismantling of the principium individuationis, manifests itself, according to Schopenhauer, in art – especially in

34  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory music – but also in all blind natural instincts (especially sexual instincts) in nature as well as in human beings. For Nietzsche, existential dualism was hardly an aporia, although he originally built his philosophy of aesthetics – his later philosophy in general – on the duality of Apollo and Dionysius. The traditional dualisms between what appears and what is hidden or immanent – such as the Thomistic existentia and essentia, Kantian Erscheinung and Ding an sich, or Schopenhauer’s representation and will – seems to be suspended in Nietzsche’s revised conception of Schein. While Schopenhauer defines the principium individuationis as the objectification of the blind will, which is quenched or satisfied in aesthetics and denied in asceticism and in voluntary death (of the ascetics), Nietzsche affirms the blindly acting will – as the essence of all existences – from the outset, in that the will is aesthetically legitimised or considered vital. “All pleasure strives for eternity”,2 that’s the Nietzschean dictum! The aesthetic here transcends every dichotomy and dichotomisation between appearance and thing-in-itself or between existentia and essentia. If in Schopenhauer the principium individuationis as a veil or māyā forms a mask of the first degree to the individuation of the phenomena, Nietzsche seems to refer to an aesthetic mask of the second degree in his reinterpretation of the Apollonian Schein as Schein des Scheins. This seems to suggest that for Nietzsche, the aesthetic phenomenon, only as that our existence and the world can be eternally justified, is ultimately an aesthetic individuation of the mask. In his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche began to regard the principium individuationis as an existential mask – in the context of his Dionysian Weltanschauung (worldview). There are numerous references to a certain individuation of the appearance as the individuation of the mask, which, however, is widely recognised in his middle phase of philosophizing – in works such as Beyond Good and Evil. In Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche refers several times to the Apollonian appearances of the masks, in which the Dionysian is objectified. The result, however, is not a calm, balanced and sublime appearance but a reflection of the primal pain, the recognition of the tragedy of existence. In the traditional staging of Greek tragedy, Nietzsche sees the lyrical–musical accompaniment of the choir as the expression of the Dionysian or the Dionysian-tragic inwardness that the characters attempt to mask. At this point, the aesthetic figuration is viewed as a certain masking. The Homeric and Sophoclean heroes as well as the tragic heroes from Greek mythology such as Oedipus and Prometheus, ultimately form figurations or individuations of Apollonian masks: The Apollonian illusions, in which Dionysus objectifies himself, are no longer “an eternal sea, a changing weaving motion, a glowing life,” as is the case with the music of the chorus, no longer those powers which are only felt and cannot be turned into poetic images, moments when the frenzied servant of Dionysus feels the approach of the god. Now, from the acting area the clarity and solemnity of the epic form speak to him; now Dionysus no longer speaks through forces but as an epic hero, almost with the language of Homer. (…) When we make a determined attempt to look directly at the

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon  35 sun and turn away blinded, we have dark coloured specks in front of our eyes, like a remedy, as it were. Those illuminated illusory pictures of the Sophoclean hero, briefly put, the Apollonian mask, are the reverse of that, necessary creations of a glimpse into the inner terror of nature, bright spots, so to speak, to heal us from the horrifying night of the crippled gaze. (…) It is an incontestable tradition that Greek tragedy in its oldest form had as its subject only the suffering of Dionysus and that for a long time later the individually present stage heroes were simply Dionysus. But with the same certainty we can assert that right up to the time of Euripides Dionysus never ceased being the tragic hero, that all the famous figures of the Greek theatre, like Prometheus, Oedipus, and so on, are only masks of that primordial hero, Dionysus. The fact that behind all these masks stands a divinity, that is the single fundamental reason for the frequently admired characteristic “ideality” of those well-known figures. (Nietzsche 2008: 33, 37) In this and other considerations in The Birth of Tragedy, the Apollonian and the Dionysian – as the dichotomy of existence – are hardly equated or balanced. In this early phase of Nietzsche, the Dionysian prevailed over the Apollonian. This, his first major work, emerged from some of Nietzsche’s previous essays dedicated to Cosima Wagner. During his short tenure as Associate Professor (Außerordentlicher Professor) of Classical Philology in Basel, Nietzsche was known to be a regular visitor to Richard Wagner and Cosima at their home in Lucerne. In particular, the essay Die Dionysische Weltanschauung was a propaedeutic to The Birth of Tragedy, which Nietzsche – with a foreword – dedicated to Richard Wagner. It was Wagner’s music that differed significantly from the traditional classical music of the Romantic period, which Nietzsche considered a true Dionysian art. Even after the break with Wagner, which marked the beginning of his middle phase of philosophizing – with the work Menschliches Allzumenschliches – Nietzsche could hardly get rid of his initial fascination with both music and his radical interpretation of Greek mythology. However, clear deviations from his original conception of music as Dionysian art, which overcomes the power of the Schein, the appearance of the Apollonian plastic arts, can be seen in his middle phase. In Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche attributes to music the potential and the function of overcoming the power of appearance, which is represented in the Apollonian plastic arts and in the Greek theatre as the power of masks, by depotentiating the Schein into a symbol: In his treatise Die Dionysische Weltanschauung Nietzsche asks: Who can overcome the power of appearance and depotentiate it into a symbol? The answer is music! Music – as an intrinsic Dionysian art – is opposed to the powerful appearance or Schein of the Apollonian plastic arts, represented in the static appearance of painting or sculpture or in the theatric figurations on stage. When music “appears”, it defeats the power of appearance and depotentiates it into a symbol. What is depotentiated here is clearly the appearance of appearance (Schein des Scheins), i.e., the previously mentioned second degree of appearance, which functions as a mask. Similarly, in Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche speaks of depotentiating appearances into appearances (Schein zu Schein). The depotentiation here,

36  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory which the Dionysian art of music accomplishes, is more or less an unmasking, in that the symbol as a depotentiated appearance shows a powerless mask. In this way, the depotentiation of the appearance is also a dismantling of the individuation of the mask, which essentially belongs to the Apollonian plastic arts. 2.2 The Legitimacy of Masks In his middle phase of philosophising, Nietzsche deviates significantly from this initial position. The reason for this was obviously his break with Wagner but also with Schopenhauer. From the work Human All Too Human, Nietzsche begins to fully autonomise himself as a philosopher by giving up Schopenhauer as an educator or teacher and also Wagner as a mentor. We can identify here the origins of the radical affirmation in Nietzsche’s philosophy: instead of negation, the affirmation of the will, instead of Schopenhauer's Mitleid, Mitfreude, instead of Wagner’s music as a true Dionysian art that can renew and save Western – especially German – art, Wagner as disease (Krankheit) and decadence. Still, some of the theoretical and aesthetic foundations of his early works – especially Birth of Tragedy – were tacitly maintained, as I indicated earlier. Among other things, they are principium individuationis as a mask and the symbiosis of Apollonian and Dionysian arts. However, both residual ideas experienced decisive metamorphoses, which was best represented in his legitimation of the masks as an aesthetic but also as a lifesustaining – as such an ethical–moral –phenomenon. Principium individuationis as a mask remains a basic concept for Nietzsche. Now the individuation of the mask is extended from an aesthetic phenomenon into a pragmatic matter that is necessary for life. The idea of mask as a pragmatic matter can already be recognised in The Gay Science (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), as closely illustrated in Nietzsche’s consideration of the Greeks in antiquity: “Those Greeks were superficial – out of profundity” (Nietzsche 2001: 9). Here the surface is a mask-like appearance that masks and maintains the Dionysian depth, that is, the intrinsic horror of existence. Nietzsche also regards the exaggerated inclination of the Greeks for sport as a mask-like, pragmatic and vital strategy to cope with the intrinsic and insoluble tragedy of existence. With the increasing importance of the mask in the middle phase, Nietzsche does not leave his initial position, the individuation of the mask as an aesthetic phenomenon. However, he appears to replace the dismantling of individuation, which for Schopenhauer is the calming of the will in aesthetics and at the same time the negation of the will in life, by the preservation and maintenance of the individual. In the synthetic mode of existence, the Dionysian no longer dominates; instead it is veiled by a growing mask: Everything profound loves masks; the most profound things go so far as to hate images and likenesses. Wouldn’t just the opposite be a proper disguise for the shame of a god? (…) A man with something profound in his shame encounters even his fate and delicate decisions along paths that few people have ever found, paths whose existence must be concealed from his closest

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon  37 and most trusted friends. His mortal danger is hidden from their eyes, and so is his regained sense of confidence in life. Somebody hidden in this way – who instinctively needs speech in order to be silent and concealed, and is tireless in evading communication – wants and encourages a mask of himself to wander around, in his place, through the hearts and heads of his friends. And even if this is not what he wants, he will eventually realize that a mask of him has been there all the same, – and that this is for the best. Every profound spirit needs a mask: what’s more, a mask is constantly growing around every profound spirit, thanks to the consistently false (which is to say shallow) interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he displays. (Nietzsche 2002: 38–39) The negation of the principium individuationis as the negation of the will gives the impression that Schopenhauer here – also as a loyal Kantian and a great admirer of Platonic philosophy and Advaita Vedanta of Sankara – thinks more within the framework of a theory of existence. Such a negative tendency seems to have a genealogy in modern epistemology. For the very first negation and marginalisation of the principle of individuation occurred historically in Cartesian philosophy itself or in the Cartesian introduction of the method of negation and separation of all secondary qualities from the object. The individuation principle, the principium individuationis, was a predominant discourse in medieval scholasticism that lasted for several centuries. In the sixteenth century, with the rise of modernity, this discourse disappeared abruptly, as Kenneth Barber observes: Some philosophical problems, by virtue of their importance relative to a philosophical system, are widely discussed by those safely within the parameters of a system – solutions are contested, distinctions are generated, and the promise of eventual resolution is entertained by all. Once the system comes under attack, however, leading either to its piecemeal or even wholesale rejection, those problems formerly of consummate importance may reduce to minor irritants mainly of antiquarian interest. (…) One issue constituting the theme of this volume apparently shares the same fate, namely, the problem of individuation (or, more accurately, the cluster of related problems discussed under that heading) whose contending solutions were debated with much vigor during the medieval era, but to which only passing reference is made by philosophers in the early modern period. Thus, while Francisco Suárez in 1597 devotes 150 pages to the problem of individuation in his Disputationes metaphysicae, the seminal work in early modern philosophy appearing a mere forty-four years later, Descartes´s Meditations, not only fails to advance Suárez´s discussion but refuses to acknowledge the existence of the problem. Although this neglect is rectified to an extent elsewhere in Descartes and in the later Cartesians, the problem of individuation is never restored by the Cartesians to the place of prominence it formerly held in medieval philosophy. (Barber 1994: 1) Descartes is able to overcome the prevailing discourse on individuation with his method of epistemological negation. The completely subjective negation and

38  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory separation of the qualities from the object, from which an empty entity, res extensa, remains, was in reality a strictly epistemological dismantling of the principle of individuation. Since Descartes, the method of negation, which many Cartesians of the early modern period methodologically used in their philosophies, established itself as the most important tool of epistemology. When Kant at the very beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason, in the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements, applies the method of epistemological negation again and extends it in the apriorisation of space and time, it clearly marks the culmination of a historical transcendentalism that began with Descartes in early modernity. In Schopenhauer’s division of the world – world as my or subjective idea and at the same time as a purely objective or objectified will – the epistemological seems to be clearly separated from the ontological. But in the equation of the Kantian thing-in-itself (Ding an sich) and will (Wille), the epistemological negation tacitly reappears. For the Kantian thing-in-itself is ultimately the ‘residue’ that remains objectively of a strictly epistemological negation of all sensory qualities and attributes – including space and time – from the object (Gegenstand) perceived by the subject. In his basic idea of the material objectification of the will, which underlies the embodiment of all objects in nature, Schopenhauer tries to rehabilitate the epistemologically negated qualitative and quantitative entities within the framework of the principium individuationis. But the negation of the will in Schopenhauer, which results in the dismantling of individuation, clearly points to the persistent power of negation, which the philosophies of early modernity appropriated like a habitus – initiated by Descartes and perfected by Kant. Nietzsche opposes precisely this historical tendency towards epistemological negation. Nietzsche is fully aware of the power of cognition that negates existence. Therefore he pleads – in contrast to the Zeitgeist of modernity – not for the unlimited appropriation of knowledge in life, but he asks how much truth one can endure3 or: how much knowledge one needs for life. For Nietzsche the knowledge that does not affirm and promote life is an undesirable factum. This attitude towards knowledge, on which Nietzsche’s famous critique of knowledge (Erkenntniskritik) is based, also forms the motivation for his characteristic reversal of Platonism. Accordingly, Nietzsche cannot rejoice at the waking up and the enlightenment through knowledge, instead he feels jealous of those who sleep peacefully in deep deception and dream beautifully, and urges those who know or have the ‘true’ knowledge, i.e. the philosopher, to refrain from waking them up from their peaceful and vital sleep. Directly or indirectly, Nietzsche polemicises against the predominant transcendental epistemology of Kant, which in the Kantian system of philosophy tends to create the basis of his ethics or the strictly ethical–moral ideas. Nietzsche identifies a long genealogy of epistemology and the claim of truth from Plato to Hegel. “I, Plato, am the truth”,4 remained more or less the fundamental philosophical claim that almost all philosophers after Plato made. As is well known, Nietzsche began to criticise knowledge and truth very early in his philosophically productive life. In his early work, On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense, Nietzsche viewed truth as a linguistic matter or problematic, namely as a worn, anthropomorphised

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon  39 and therefore conventional metaphor. We can derive from this observation: the conceptuality as the basis of truth is a mask that masks the metaphor, more precisely the metaphoricity of language. According to Nietzsche, terms or concepts are “graveyards” of intuition;5 as such, they mask the vivid metaphor – like a burial ground, which mostly looks like a park with many graves in which the deceased are buried. When the poet revives the masked or buried metaphor in poetry and legitimises it as such, Nietzsche sees in it a complete renewal of language and accordingly the knowledge and truth that is expressed in language. Here Nietzsche clearly sees language primarily as an aesthetic phenomenon that remains masked or even buried in the strictly logical–scientific columbarium of concepts (Columbarium der Begriffe6), but is resurrected in poetry. According to Nietzsche, the claim to truth, as represented in the logical–conceptual transparency, is an illusion. Concepts are inadequate to express the truth of what is known, because they belong to another sphere of existence, namely the sphere of the subject.7 In addition, they mask the metaphor that, according to Nietzsche, emerges in the course of the cognitive process and that alone can most closely approach the truth. As an aesthetic phenomenon, language ultimately owes its function as a carrier of knowledge and truth to its individuation as a mask. In his conception of the process of thinking and cognition, Nietzsche radically opposes the predominant transcendental epistemology of Kant. The hegemonic autonomy of the transcendentally knowing subject – both in the transcendental analytics and in the transcendental synthesis – is, according to Nietzsche, a delusion. It is the thought, and not the transcendental–subjective thinking, to which Nietzsche ascribes existential autonomy and therefore epistemological priority over thinking. According to Nietzsche, a thought comes when it wants, not when I want.8 That would mean: one cannot think or consciously think one’s thoughts. In other words: Thoughts are not thought! If the subject cannot think the thoughts or cannot develop them through a conscious process of thinking, it cannot achieve the status of a transcendental subject – as granted by Kant – and consequently cannot claim transcendental apriority and apodicticity. The autonomisation and prioritisation of thoughts over thinking points to an essentially different, non-transcendental origin of thoughts in the subject. With this, Nietzsche radically inaugurated a school of thought which, as is well known, flourished in Freudian psychologism in the twentieth century. Nietzsche clearly states that the thoughts do not originate in conscious thinking, but on a deeper level of the subject, of which we are not aware. With such a stratification of the subject, Nietzsche became the forerunner of psychologism, which established itself as a paradigm towards the end of the nineteenth century. In his middle phase Nietzsche often points to the fact that behind me or behind my “I” there is a larger but unknown “I” that prompts me to every act of thinking and to volition.9 However, Nietzsche’s stratification of the knowing subject differs from the stratification of the psyche – as id, ego and superego – in the context of the Freudian psychoanalysis, in that Nietzsche’s analytics hardly develop into a diagnostics. As is well known, Nietzsche is called a cultural diagnostician – Kulturdiagnostiker. The diagnosis of the psyche leads to insights that a person is not aware of and that usually seems unbearable. Here Nietzsche deviates significantly in his attitude towards

40  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory psychological diagnosis, which leads to unpleasant and unbearable knowledge. For Nietzsche, knowledge – thus truth – has the primary function of making life bearable. With such fundamental reappraisals, Nietzsche does not prove himself to be a diagnostician who brings the unconscious to consciousness or lets it emerge in consciousness. Rather, Nietzsche seems to act like an anti-diagnostician who tries to existentially mask the unconscious despite its surfacing in the consciousness. Even if a person does not become aware of the depths of his psyche and all the anomalies that are present in these depths, he does not need to diagnose them as long as these unrecognised depths of the subject promote and affirmatively advance life. In Also Sprach Zarathustra Nietzsche gives a parable of the tree, whose beautiful appearance and growth on earth – with branches, leaves, flowers, fruits etc. – presupposes the deep penetration of the invisible roots in the abyss or in the equally invisible underground depths (Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, 2013a: 55). The reference to Dionysius as a subterranean deity is also implied here. When Nietzsche says that the Greeks were too superficial from the depth, he is simultaneously defending existence with a surface and the awareness of the depths; now he glorifies existence with a mask-like surface, i.e., with a “persona” (which originally – in Latin – means mask), which necessarily veils all the horrors that emerge from the unconscious depths in the consciousness. 2.3 Persistence of Mask as Aesthetic Phenomenon How does the persona relate to the principium individuationis, which turns out to be a mask in its primordial state? The persona here seems to be a second-degree mask that differentiates the existence of an individual from other existences. In this respect, personification – as the emergence of the persona – is a principle of individuation, in which the uniqueness and difference of the individual arises and is conserved. Accordingly, persons and their personalities are based on the differences of individuation, which most closely characterises the principium individuationis. Persona as a mask of the individual is also characterised by its plasticity or plastic appearance, the perfection or finality of which constitutes personality – as a characteristic of individuation. According to Nietzsche, however, the Apollonian plastic Schein to which individuation unfolds is an expression of power that Dionysian art can depotentiate into a symbol. Nietzsche places the de-potentiation of the mask-like appearance not only in art, but also in the culturally primordial folk festivals, namely in the ancient Bacchanalia or Bacchus festivals and their cultural–historical persistence in carnivals in Europe. Art and festival as cultural practices therefore have the function of freeing individuals from the individuation or persona in which they are entangled. In Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche views such liberation as redemption from the individual will, the manifestation of which is the principium individuationis itself. In the performing arts, the artist does not merely represent an artistic form in a conventional manner, instead the artist as subject has already been redeemed from its individual will and, consequently, transforms into a medium,

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon  41 through which it – as the truly existing subject – “celebrates its redemption in appearance (Schein)”. Insofern aber das Subjekt Künstler ist, ist es bereits von seinem individuellen Willen erlöst und gleichsam Medium geworden, durch das hindurch das eine wahrhaft seiende Subjekt seine Erlösung im Scheine feiert. (Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 2013b: 275) In these basic ideas, “artist as medium” and the subject celebrating “its redemption in Schein (appearance)”, Nietzsche’s reference to Schopenhauer, whom he considered his teacher and educator in the early phase of his philosophically productive life, can be seen. At the same time, however, they reveal his tendency to deviate from the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Art, especially music, in which the will is most perfectly manifested, is for Schopenhauer an ideal path to the redemption from the principium individuationis. But artist’s transformation into a medium of art, in which he celebrates his redemption in appearance, points to the festive affirmation of life in existence, which for Nietzsche is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon. Redemption in appearance is first and foremost expressed in the antique cultural practice of Bacchus festivals. The dismantling of the principium individuationis, which brings about the hierarchical modes of existence both in the animal world as well as among human beings as “persons”, takes place through a dehierarchialisation of individuals under the influence of “narcotic drinks”: Under the magic of the Dionysian, not only does the bond between man and man lock itself in place once more, but also nature itself, no matter how alienated, hostile, or subjugated, rejoices again in her festival of reconciliation with her prodigal son, man. The earth freely offers up her gifts, and the beasts of prey from the rocks and the desert approach in peace. The wagon of Dionysus is covered with flowers and wreaths; under his yolk stride panthers and tigers. If someone were to transform Beethoven’s Ode to Joy into a painting and not restrain his imagination when millions of people sink dramatically into the dust, then we could come close to the Dionysian. Now the slave a free man; now all the stiff, hostile barriers break apart, those things which necessity and arbitrary power or “saucy fashion” have established between men. Now, with the gospel of world harmony, every man feels himself not only united with his neighbour, reconciled and fused together, but also as one with him, as if the veil of Maja had been ripped apart, with only scraps fluttering around in the face of the mysterious primordial unity. Singing and dancing, man expresses himself as a member of a higher community: he has forgotten how to walk and talk and is on the verge of flying up into the air as he dances. The enchantment speaks out in his gestures. Just as the animals now speak and the earth gives milk and honey, so something supernatural also echoes out of him: he feels himself a god; he himself now moves in as lofty and ecstatic a way as he saw the gods move in his dream. The man is no longer an artist; he has become a work of art. (Nietzsche 2008: 13)

42  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory Veil as Māyā is closely related to the “persona” here, for both demonstrate the exteriority of individuation, which differentiates human beings from one another and thereby subjects them to a hierarchical order. Interestingly, in Bacchanalia the solemn dismantling of all differences and hierarchies that the principium individuationis establishes among human beings and between humans and nature does not result in an unmasking of the persona (towards which Freud and other psychologists in their psychoanalysis would have aspired), but precisely in a renewed masking itself. While in the mythological Bacchus festival the narcotic intoxication overcomes the differences and hierarchies of individuation and balances them out, this function is primarily taken over by the facemasks in the traditional carnivals and masquerades during spring in European cities and provinces. Similar facemasks worn by the participating women and men disguise their faces – the persona’s most important expression – balancing thereby people’s personalities. The mythological Bacchus festivals live on in the current spring festivals, like carnivals, “Fasnacht” or masquerades, in a higher gradation of masking the persona. This also proves the irony of individuation, as discussed previously, that it is not the unmasking or unveiling of what is hidden in individuation, but the renewed masking of the persona – which itself is an inseparable part of individuation – that makes the existence bearable. As the image (Figure 2.1) from one of the carnivals in Europe shows, hard or inflexible facemasks are used in the processions, having the function of partially or completely veiling the faces. However, facemasks in such festivals – both in the Occident and in the Orient – vary in their solidity and opacity from the very flexible face painting to hard and inflexible masks that partially or completely veil the faces. At medieval Christian rituals such as the well-known hooded processions during Semana Santa in Toledo, Spain (Figure 2.2) opaque hoods cover the whole face, except the eyes that are visible, and thereby reveal the hidden persona to some extent. Here, however, the visibility of the eyes seems to develop a dialectic relationship with the opacity of the rest of the face. In the folk art of Pulikali (Leopard Game) in Kerala (Figure 2.3), traditionally played on the fourth day of the harvest festival Onam, participants wear facemasks of leopard or tiger, but their bodies, i.e. abdomens and chests, are painted with larger and flexible faces of leopards – also tigers or lions. The faces are painted in the ancient folk-ritual art Theyyam in North Kerala (Figure 2.4), whereby gods and demons are represented closely to the masses. While Theyyam, as a folks-ritualistic art or Kavu Kala, is performed for the masses on the street and in the vicinity of temples (but also in lonely paths in fields and forests), Kathakali is a more sophisticated narrative theatre and forms a Kshetra Kala, a temple art which is played inside the temple. In Kathakali faces of the artists are painted in different ways and remain flexible. However, there are some parts of inflexible masks that are fixed to artist’s face, partially veiling it. The construction of the Kathakali mask therefore begins with an elementary face painting, called “Theppu” (Figure 2.5), followed by different colours painted on parts of the face. The dominant face colour represents the character of each actor on the stage: Paccha (green) for noble gods and warriors like Krishna (Figure 2.6), Arjuna or Nala; Kari (black) for demons etc. In

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon  43

Figure 2.1  Carnival in Konstanz, Germany. Source: Author.

comparison to the folks-ritualistic arts like Theyyam, in Kathakali stories – mostly from the epics Mahabharata or Ramayana – are recited, i.e. lyrically narrated on stage, while the actors play the narration solely through hand gestures (mudras) and facial expressions (bhavas). In order to represent different bhavas effectively, i.e. to let them appear instantaneously on the face, it is necessary that the face should largely be painted and thereby made flexible while acting. The basic principle of artistic representations in Theyyam is apparently not mimesis, but trance. That is, in such ritual arts, artists transform into the depicted art figures in a trance and little through conventional mimesis. Kathakali tries to maintain the mimesis as an art of acting, it borders on trance, in which the artist individuates afresh. The flexible and inflexible facemasks contribute significantly to this trance-formation. That the artistic subject celebrates its redemption in appearance (Schein) – as Nietzsche conceives of artist’s transformation – seems to

44  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory

Figure 2.2  Hooded Procession during Semana Santa in Toledo, Spain. Source: Author.

Figure 2.3  Pulikali in North Kerala. Source: Author.

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon  45

Figure 2.4  The Folks–Ritualistic Art Theyyam in North Kerala. Source: Author.

Figure 2.5  Theppu (Facial Makeup) before the Kathkali Performance at Olappamanna Mana in Vellinezhi. Source: Author.

46  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory

Figure 2.6  Paccha Makeup/Mask for Krishna from a Kathakali performance at Olappamanna Mana. Source: Author.

be accomplished more perfectly in these metamorphoses than conventional theatrical mimesis. Hence the drama uses – albeit moderately – the flexible facemasks or painted faces to achieve a higher degree of artists’ transformation into art figures on the stage, such as the painted face of Gustaf Gründgens in Faust, which paradigmatically established the theatrical appearance of Mephistopheles. The individuation of the artist or the artistic subject is hardly alienated here compared to the individuation of the art figure on the stage, as the principium individuationis overcomes the dichotomy between the real and the mimetic in the mask-like metamorphoses. By having the persona appear in masks, the conventional dichotomy between artist and art seems to be erased and consequently sublated in a unified aesthetic phenomenon. Notes 1 “nur als ästhetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt” (Nietzsche, Geburt der Tragödie, 2013b: 275). 2 “Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit” (Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, 2013a: 111). 3 “Wie viel Wahrheit erträgt, wie viel Wahrheit wagt ein Geist? ” (Nietzsche 1969: 257). 4 “ich, Plato, bin die Wahrheit” (Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, 2013c: 195). 5 “An dem Bau der Begriffe arbeitet ursprünglich, wie wir sahen, die Sprache, in späteren Zeiten die Wissenschaft. Wie die Biene zugleich an den Zellen baut und die Zellen mit Honig füllt, so arbeitet die Wissenschaft unaufhaltsam an jenem großen Columbarium der Begriffe, der Begräbnisstätte der Anschauungen, baut immer neue und höhere Stockwerke, stützt, reinigt, erneut die alten Zellen und ist vor allem bemüht, jenes ins

Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Phenomenon  47

6 7 8 9

Ungeheure aufgetürmte Fachwerk zu füllen und die ganze empirische Welt, das heißt die anthropomorphische Welt, hineinzuordnen” (Nietzsche, Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, 2015: 30). ibid. ibid, p. 24-25. … ein Gedanke kommt, wenn “er” will, nicht wenn “ich” will (Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 1968: 24-25). ibid.

Works cited Barber, Kenneth (1994), Individuation and Identity in Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Kenneth Barber & Jorge J. E. Gracia, State University of New York Press, New York. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1969), Ecce homo, Nietzsche Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Bd. III, eds. Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari, Walter de Gruyter & Co, Berlin. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2001), The Gay Science, transl. Josefine Nauckhoff, ed. Bernard Williams, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2002), Beyond Good and Evil, transl. Judith Norman, eds. Rolf-Peter Horstmann & Judith Norman, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2008), The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, transl. Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University, British Columbia. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2013a), Also sprach Zarathustra, Basler Ausgabe, eds. Ludger Lüdkehaus & David Marc Hoffmann, Stroemfeld Verlag, Basel. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2013b), Die Geburt der Tragödie. Philosophische Werke in sechs Bänden, Bd. I, ed. Claus-Artur Scheier, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2013c), Götzen-Dämmerung. Philosophische Werke in sechs Bänden, Bd. VI, ed. Claus-Artur Scheier, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2015), Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinne, ed. Kai Sina, Reclam, Stuttgart. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1968), Jenseits von Gut und Böse, in: Nietzsche Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, eds. Giorgio Colli & Mazzino Montinari, Walter de Gruyter & Co, Berlin.

3

Beauty, Arts and Artists in Hermann Hesse’s Fairytales Sadhana Naithani

The relationship between justice and beauty is an enigmatic one and Hermann Hesse explores its many dimensions in the genre of the fairy tale. At times this relationship between justice and beauty is the very plot of the story, at other times, it is in the human being’s relationship with the environment – social and political. Hesse’s fairy tales enable an engagement with the questions: is justice beautiful and is beautiful just? As a genre, the fairy tale has always focused on the issues of justice/injustice and right/wrong, but Hesse’s fairy tales are an expression of his modern consciousness of legal, environmental and spiritual justice. He is deeply concerned with achieving both justice and beauty and therefore, this is an analysis of Hesse’s fairytales with the concept of justice proposed by philosopher John Rawls and the notion of aesthetics developed by Jacques Rancière. Placing Hesse’s stories between Rawls concept of justice and Rancière’s aesthetics lets us decode the recurrent themes of beauty and justice in Hesse’s fairytales. These – justice and beauty – are also the themes that define the genre of the fairytale in general, and the notion of poetic justice is based upon this combination. Poetic justice occurs when virtue wins and vice is punished. While poetic justice can occur in reality, yet, the concept is rooted in poetry and storytelling. “The term was coined by the English literary critic Thomas Rymer in the 17th century, when it was believed that a work of literature should uphold moral principles and instruct the reader in correct moral behaviour” (https://www​.britannica​.com​/art​/poetic​-justice​-literature). I would argue that poetic justice, particularly in Hesse, is not so much about providing instruction as about redressing injustices that are often not addressed in real life or are normalised as normal and legal behaviour. Hesse presents the world or the social order in which the story unfolds as an unjust world, not legally, but ethically, universally and spiritually. Many of his other stories would speak to current ecological, environmental, inter-species and multi-species concerns in literary theories, especially with reference to justice. Aristotle saw justice as a part of the overall ethics and considered the state to be responsible for justice (Edor 2020, 183). In theory, some of the forms of justice are (1) distributive justice, that is, how are the available resources distributed amongst the people; (2) social justice, that is, how can society be organised in a manner that it is just to all; (3) occupational justice; (4) environmental justice, whose meaning is changing constantly from protection from environmental factors to protecting the environment from humans; (5) natural justice, that is justice determined by DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-6

Beauty, Arts and Artists  49 natural law and (6) poetic justice, which of course means the way justice is dealt with in storytelling but is based on the belief that good deeds are rewarded and bad deeds are punished. The primary difference between premodern and modern concepts of justice is that in the former justice is seen as a moral virtue of the individual, particularly the rulers, in the latter focus has shifted to a just society. John Rawls is a modern theorist who connects justice not with virtue but fairness. It might seem at first sight that the concept of justice and fairness are the same, and that there is no reason to distinguish them, or to say that one is more fundamental than the other. I think that this impression is mistaken. (Rawls 1958, 164) He proceeds from a hypothetical situation where notions of justice are being decided upon by equal and free citizens and assumes that they would want those notions to be fair to all. The intuitive idea is that since everyone’s well-being depends upon a scheme of cooperation without which no one could have a satisfactory life, the division of advantages should be such as to draw forth the willing cooperation of everyone taking part in it, including those less well situated. (Rawls 1971, 3) Based on this assumption the modern democratic society needs to be fair to all, that is, even inequalities follow logic and are agreed upon by all (Rawls 1958, Rawls 1971, Edor 2020). In general, justice is seen as legal justice, that is, justice as per a given law; and, as justice in a larger, universal sense. The second category includes natural justice (which is recognised by law), poetic justice (which is more an aspiration of the law) and extra-legal justice (which is often the way poetic justice works). Poetic justice also includes justice in a spiritual sense: for example, one may not have committed any crime in the eyes of the law, but might still be guilty of committing injustice. While it is clear how legal justice functions – through the institutions of law and justice – extra-legal or poetic forms of justice function through formal and informal cultural structures, through unwritten codes and through religiously defined morality and through universal and local codes. Extralegal justice also functions by individuals taking the law into their own hands and meting out justice to the wrongdoers. One of the most widespread discourse of extra-legal justice is the poetic discourse, since forever. It is in and through songs, stories, drama and epic that the idea of justice has most widely been spread and openly discussed. In orature and in classical literatures the complexities in the idea of justice have been explored. ‘Justice’ is anything but straightforward: justice for one may mean injustice to another, or, execution of justice may break down the established social structures, and many other dilemmas that occur in differentiating justice from injustice. Folktale often expresses disappointment with the legal systems or tries to achieve justice through the creation of just and truthful kings. It has done this so much that folktale is often considered unrealistic, and if one believes in goodness being rewarded, people say,

50  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory “oh, don’t tell me a fairytale” or “such things happen in a fairytale”. Fairytale justice operates in the extra-legal realm as an antidote to the inherently unjust social systems. Hesse’s tales are concerned with almost all forms of justice, but those analysed here relate to the forms of social, environmental, natural and poetic justice. Hermann Hesse takes poetic justice to another level when he narrates stories centred on non-human animals and the environment. At this level, injustice can exist as legally justified. It is deeply connected to what is considered pleasant and beautiful to human eyes. Two of Hermann Hesse’s Märchen will be in this discussion with reference to Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (first published in 1795) and philosopher Jacques Rancière’s The Distribution of the Sensible Politics of Aesthetics (2011). While Schiller’s text was written a century before Hesse’s stories, Jacques Rancière’s text is written a century after Hesse’s stories. So, we have Schiller’s thoughts on aesthetics and beauty from the late eighteenth century, Hesse’s tales from the early twentieth century and Rancière’s philosophy from the early twenty-first century. The relationship between Schiller’s and Rancière’s text is that Rancière acknowledges and develops Schiller’s ideas. In my reading, Hermann Hesse’s stories can be related to both these as they almost seem to illustrate Schiller’s theoretical reflections through stories. Hesse himself did not make this connection, nor is it known whether he was influenced by Schiller. Yet, the influence of Romanticism on Hesse is well-known and Schiller’s influence on Romanticism is well established. Uncanny as it seems, I find Hesse’s stories to illustrate Schiller’s aesthetics. Jacques Rancière’s works help us place both Schiller and Hesse in the modern history of European aesthetics. Rancière is discussing the way aesthetics as in art and literature have been perceived in the European Tradition. His focus is on modern times, but he elucidates that with reference to the Greek and the premodern. Literary aesthetics is compared with history writing and with politics. Plato saw art and literature as nothing but serving a purpose: that of having a lesson for the recipients. If it did not add to ethos, then it had no right to exist. By extension, artisans and artists had no say in the city/republic (Rancière 2011, 15). Aristotle, with his concept of mimesis gave literature a representational character and value and freed it of its utilitarian concept. By mimesis artists could represent reality, make it visible and felt by the recipients. His concept of aesthetics was social– hierarchical in nature and was expressed in his definition of genres: tragedy for the king, comedy by the ordinary, lowly etc. (Rancière 2011, 16). In contrast, Rancière argues, the Modern concept of aesthetics emphasised the artistic nature of art, that art has its own logic which is neither to be useful nor to be representational. This logic is the logic of storytelling, of arts (Rancière 2011, 23–24). Rancière considers Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man to be the unsurpassed text in this line of thinking (Rancière 2011, 27). Schiller and German Romantics were emphasizing this logic of art. Schiller’s text is in the context of response to the French Revolution: that human beings cannot change by political revolution; that the unchanged human being cannot change society. Change in human beings is a process of aesthetic education. Aesthetic education is not a pedagogical plan, but a creation of conditions in which every human being is able to experience the

Beauty, Arts and Artists  51 aesthetic through art and literature. Rancière explains it as the moment when a recipient just watches a work of art for its beauty, for its form. It is that moment which is the experience of the aesthetic, of art. He calls the modern concept, beginning with Kant and Schiller “the aesthetic movement”, as different from the Aristotelian “representation movement”. On these lines, Rancière analyses the concept of art for art’s sake: that these movements tried to free the art from the burdens placed upon it in earlier times. The logic of art is by itself a way of seeing, showing and experiencing “the sensible”. Rancière defines his concept of the sensible as: I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. (Rancière 2011, 12) The sensible is “reality”, but not only empirical, and therefore, art cannot be mimetic, but has its own logic to find ways of expressing what can be sensed. In his second letter on the aesthetic education of man, Friedrich Schiller says “if we are to solve that political problem in practice, follow the path of aesthetics, since it is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom” (Rancière 2011, 25). In other words, Schiller gives precedence to Beauty over Freedom: Beauty leads to Freedom and not the other way round. Schiller proposes that this path from Beauty to Freedom is via the Arts. The problem here is what would be that path where Beauty is “experienced” as Schiller would have it, and freedom is achieved through the Arts? To put it more polemically: can a course in art appreciation lead to the aesthetic education of man and generate the experience of Beauty and Arts? Aesthetic education is not the rational decoding of the principles and techniques of arts, not even learning to practice those principles and create art. The keyword for Schiller’s aesthetic education of man is “experience of Beauty”. Arts are supposed to be capable of generating this experience of beauty, but this experience of beauty is not to be confused with a rational decoding of the principles of art. Aesthetic education of man is a political programme at one level, but it defies the notion that this political programme can be achieved through a representational logic of the arts. Building on Schiller’s thought, French philosopher Jacques Rancière reflects on Romantic art and says of it: This model disturbs the clear-cut rules of representative logic that establish a relationship of correspondence at a distance between the sayable and the visible. It also disturbs the distinction between pure art and the ornaments made by the decorative arts. (Rancière 2011, 15) Jacques Rancière brings Schiller’s ideas to the modern context and believes that Schiller’s ideas are unsurpassed.

52  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory Hesse was born in 1877 and died in 1962. Hesse’s father was a German from Estonia, and his mother was born in India where her parents were Christian missionaries. Hermann Hesse was himself deeply influenced by Hinduism and Buddhism. “Hermann Hesse’s fairy tales are not really fairy tales in the traditional sense of the term, and yet, they are deeply embedded in both the western and the Oriental traditions of fairy tales” (Hesse 1995, ix). The stories discussed here were written by Hesse in the early twentieth century. In spite of his fame across the world Hesse’s fairy tales are relatively lesser known. And yet, this is the genre that he first wrote and continued to write in throughout his life. He wrote his first fairytale at the age of ten, and then throughout his career as novelist. The present discussion of Hesse’s fairytales is with reference to the idea of justice/injustice and aesthetics. There are two reasons for focusing on the idea of justice/injustice in Hesse’s fairytales: one, it is an explicitly and implicitly important idea in Hesse’s fairytales; and two, justice/injustice is the axis along which most of the genre of the fairytale itself moves. Hesse started writing towards the end of the nineteenth century and was witness to extensive industrialisation, urbanisation and finally the two world wars. As a humanist and a spiritually inclined author, he was deeply troubled by the reality around him. His resistance to regimentation of life already started in school. During the wars, he belonged to the pacifists, but otherwise, resisted being part of any political movement or being aligned to an ideology. Hesse is a keen observer of the human condition, in terms of its material and external reality, as also the invisible layers of reality that exist as people’s experiences, inner selves and as reason for doing what they do. Hesse’s fairytales are like philosophical abstractions. I have selected three of Hesse’s tales: two of them are cited in English translation by Jack Zipes (1995) and one in German with my translation. Hesse’s fairytales would be categorised under the category “literary fairytale”. Literary fairytale is a genre that connects literature and folklore in an aesthetically complex manner. The adjective “literary” replaced the term “folk”, because both the terms implied very different modes of production of the tales. While “folk” implied that there was no known author of the tale and that it existed amongst the people in many variants and orally, the adjective “literary” implied that it had been authored by an author of literature and was thus part of the literary corpus, not the folk tradition. The difference went deeper as the involvement of an author meant that the tale was representative of the author’s literary abilities and perceptions of reality. As such the genre did not represent the folk, but the individual authors, as did all other genres of literature. The term fairytale, however, was a different story. It not only came from oral and folk storytelling but also signified a certain art and craft of storytelling. So, the term denoted both its origin and its aesthetics. The aesthetics of the fairytale was defined by its fantastic nature and by the use of magic and wonder (Röhrich 1991; Lüthi 1976). The word “fairy” denoted a supernatural feminine character at the outset, but it also denoted the use of other forms of supernatural, wondrous characters. Magic worked in the movement of the story and in the creation of completely fantastic landscapes, journeys, objects and beings. And yet, in spite of its fantastic nature, fairytale spoke of the basic human nature, of lived realities and experienced desires, and very often, even had a lesson

Beauty, Arts and Artists  53 for its recipients. This mysterious combination – of fantastic construction and realist impact – captivated literary authors. The impact of the fairy tale broke barriers of age and ethnicity and held its recipients spellbound. In essence, to achieve this impact is the dream of every storyteller. No wonder then, that literary authors since the beginning of the nineteenth century have written fairy tales in their own styles. They have borrowed from the folktale traditions of their own contexts and that of others. For example, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Salman Rushdie, Günther Grass, Angela Carter and Marina Warner. The literary combination of the fantastic and realistic gave rise to the stylistic term “magical realism”. The fairytale is a genre of folk narrative that continues to be used, adapted, interpreted and reformed. The transformation of the fairytale is ongoing in the twenty-first century, as analysed by Cristina Bacchilega in her 2013 book Fairy Tales Transformed? In this riveting analysis of contemporary literature, films, media and popular culture, Bacchilega posits and answers two questions: “How and to what uses are fairy tales being adapted in the twenty first century, and, What are the stakes, and for whom, of adapting fairy tales in the twenty first century? (Bacchilega 2013, ix )”. In seeking answers to these questions, Bacchilega shows that the art and craft of Indo– European folk fairytale has been put to new uses by new players across the world. From the capitalist business world to the postcolonial literary authors, the tool of magic and wonder enables new stories to create the same strong impact. I will adapt Cristina Bacchilega’s questions to understand Hesse’s literary fairytales and ask: how does Hesse relate with the folk fairy tale and what does he achieve by creating counter-narratives? 3.1 Social Injustice and Poetic Justice The first fairytale of Hesse that we take up for discussion is titled The Dwarf, written in 1904. The story starts with a scene of oral storytelling “One evening down on the quay the old storyteller Cecco began telling “the following tale” (Hesse 1995, 1). “The following tale” starts again as in oral tradition: “If it is all right with you, ladies and gentlemen, I shall tell you a very old story” and then he lists the elements of the story “about a beautiful lady, a dwarf and a love potion, about fidelity and infidelity, love and death, all that is at the heart of every adventure and tale, whether it be old or new” (Hesse, 1995, 1). With all the elements of a folk fairytale, Hesse’s story starts by introducing the beautiful daughter of a nobleman in Venice. The description of her beauty is detailed, and we are also told how the people of Venice were enamoured of her beauty and how many poets had composed poems and songs in her praise. However, she was too vain to notice these praises. Her clothes are described not merely as “beautiful” but identified by the name of the expensive materials they are made of. Her wealth is then elaborated with details of the house, precious objects of display and possessions. On the other hand, is the life of the parrot, the dog, and the dwarf who are “owned” by the lady for her entertainment. The dwarf is introduced as having a small body and large head and is identified as “small and ugly” (Hesse, 1995: 3). The people in the story, belonging to the same class as the lady, find the dwarf’s appearance amusing. The most remarkable

54  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory thing about him is his dog who has one crooked leg. The dog was a gift to the vain heroine but had an accident which broke his leg, so she wanted to have him killed, but the dwarf begged to keep him. The dog and the dwarf love each other. The parrot entertains the lady in his own avian fashion and the dwarf is her storyteller. In short, the dog, the parrot and the dwarf are expected to exist as animate objects for the pleasure of the lady. There is a twist in the tale: the dwarf is very wise, sensitive and well-read. The fictional storyteller Cecco tells us that inside herself, the lady is cold as stone. Soon a cavalier enters the story and steals her heart with a display of emotion connected to the display of wealth. She is taken in and the start of this relationship is the distancing of her from her parrot and the dwarf. The cavalier is very handsome, like a hero, but also equally cruel and morally corrupt, like a villain. Soon he kills the parrot. The dog and dwarf try to keep their distance from him, but one day the dog gets in his way, and he kicks him into the canal. The dwarf cries to save the dog, begs the princess who keeps quiet and begs the prince who laughs as the dog drowns. The dwarf is heartbroken and angry but has an aim now: revenge for the dog. After a few days decides to hide his emotions and keep his relationship with the lady. As the romance between the cavalier and lady grows she becomes aware of his debauchery and consequently, and consequently insecure. The dwarf now manipulates her emotions with a story and without her knowledge, plans to poison the prince. At the last minute, the prince becomes suspicious of the dwarf and asks him to drink the wine he is being served. The dwarf does, even though he knows he will die because his aim is to kill the prince as revenge for the killing of the dog. The prince and the dwarf both die, and the lady goes mad and lives long in that state. People see her as looking into the canal and shouting “save the dog, save the dog”. No happy ending to this fairytale. Upturning the folktale aesthetics becomes an exploration of inner and external beauty, as also of the dark aspect of socially legitimate inequalities that is resolved in the story through a kind of dark fairness. In the tale about the dwarf, Hesse actually lays out the structure of the dwarf’s tales. We are told that the dwarf often recites tales from the orient, “for he had learned the art of storytelling in the Orient, where storytellers are highly regarded. Indeed, they are magicians and play with the souls of their listeners as a child plays with his ball”. The influence of the oriental fairytale is evident in the story, particularly in the description of the heroine’s beauty and wealth. Hesse constructs the dwarf as an oriental storyteller, that is, a magician who always began with something close and contemporary. (…) The story floated naturally and slowly from the balcony of the palace into the boat of the trader and drifted from the boat into the harbor and on to the ship and to the farthest spot of the world. (Hesse, 1995, 5–6) In describing the dwarf and his storytelling, Hesse reveals both his awareness of the folktale as a genre, its typical content and in contrast, the structure of his own stories. Like the folktale, Hesse’s story starts in a normal, day-to-day reality, be it of a feudal society or of the modern one. We see the characters as they live on

Beauty, Arts and Artists  55 regular days, but then something happens and the story lands in another reality. This is exactly how a folktale starts and then enters the magical world. In the end, folktales return to reality, and so do Hesse’s stories. Most folktales would end in the resolution of the conflict and a happy ending. But not Hesse’s tales. Hesse uses elements and the structure of the folktale, and yet, narrates essentially modern stories. His style has a complex relationship with the folktale that requires closer reading. In The Dwarf not only the end, but the entire story is a subversion of the fairy­ tale on the one hand and subversion of the principles of Aristotelian aesthetics on the other. Hesse not only creates an anti-fairytale but seems to be on a mission to reveal what remains hidden in the folk fairytale. For example, not only the social class of the characters, but he depicts the characters of royalty as beautiful on the outside with the means to decorate themselves, but as mean, exploitative and cruel persons. These are their class attributes. Their wealth is evidence of social exploitation and that same feature guides their relationships. The cavalier is not only cruel to the parrot, dog and dwarf but also dishonest to the lady. In Hesse’s tale – the most marginal, the underdog and the comic figure, the dwarf, turns the story around by taking revenge. Interestingly, the revenge is taken with the help of a fantastic tale. Justice is served even at the cost of personal destruction. While the cavalier is punished by death, the lady is punished by life as an insane woman. In her insanity, however, she is as sane as she should have been. Her cry “save the dog” shows that insanity is a state of mental clarity. She understood what the dwarf did and why. That understanding crashed her mental world and all that she took for granted. Like many modern readers, Hesse was probably disturbed by the sympathetic portrayal of the class of people who in reality exploited the people, and his fairytale turns that world upside down. For Hesse reality is not only what is there outside, but the reality of mind, or the state of mind. Hesse turns not only the fairy tale upside down but also challenges the Aristotelian aesthetic principles. In Aristotele’s aesthetics, a dwarf or an ordinary person can only be the hero of comedy, not tragedy; the hero of the tragedy is a person of nobility. Hesse’s dwarf is a character with no physical attributes of a hero and is an anti-hero in this regard. His mental abilities are that of a wise man and he does not fit the role of a romantic hero. Hesse makes him a tragic hero who has qualities of the traditional hero: loyal to his friend, the dog and achieves his goal at any cost to himself. The cavalier is the villain, and the heroine too is cold and heartless. The atypical hero and heroine are punished like the villains in Hesse’s story. The heroine is left at the end as a tragic figure for whom no one would cry but only feel that she deserved it – the classic case of poetic justice. Hesse thus turns the Aristotelian aesthetics upside down to express the modernist aesthetics of his times and twists the fairytale in a manner that in spite of having all the elements of the fairytale, it tells a counter story. 3.2 Normative Injustice and Poetic Justice Sanity and insanity are issues in Hesse’s fairytales, just as they were in his own life. He battled with severe depression and spent time in appropriate institutions

56  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory several times. Another of his stories, called A Man by the name Ziegler deals with the idea of normal and abnormal through the use of one element of the folktale – human beings who understand the language of other animals. In this story, Ziegler is a man who is described as “He was one of those young men whom we meet every day time and again, but we never really notice his face because it resembles everyone else’s, like a collective face” (Hesse 1995, 36). After this beginning, the author takes almost two pages to tell us how Ziegler was a normal man. Ziegler did everything that such people always do and was just like them. He was not talented, but also not untalented. He loved money and entertainment, loved to wear nice clothes, and was just as cowardly as most people. (…) At the same time he had many honorable qualities and was in general, all things considered, a delightfully normal man who thought of himself as very nice and important. (Hesse 1995, 37) This normal man tried to distinguish himself by paying close attention to his clothes. One Sunday, like everybody else, he goes for an outing. First, he visits a museum and then, after lunch in between, he visits the zoo. In the museum of history, he constantly feels superior to the people of the former times and the way they lived. He sees an alchemist’s workshop and stops to look at the things displayed. He has seen the sign that visitors should not touch anything, but curiosity gets the better of him when he is alone in the room, and he picks up a globule. Someone enters the room at that moment, and feeling embarrassed he puts the globule in his pocket. Outside the museum, he smells it and finds it pleasant. During lunch, he looks at it again and in his childlike curiosity checks its taste by eating it. After lunch, he goes to the zoo, and the moment he enters he realises that, as a result of eating the alchemist’s globule from ages ago, he is suddenly understanding the language of the animals. The story has entered the space of the fairytale. The ape asks him how he is, but he feels horrified and turns away, and hears the ape say of him “The guy’s is still proud. Flatfoot! Idiot!” Ziegler moves on, but cannot help hearing and understanding the animals. He sees the majestic appearance and the sadness of the elk and hears with what dignity a puma talks to its cub. “He looked the blond lion straight in the eye and learned how large and wonderful the wild world was where there are no cages or human beings” (Hesse 1995, 42). In short, he sees and hears animals and their sadness in captivity. Seeing through their eyes he sees that human society is “nothing but a pretentious, lying, ugly society of creatures who seemed to be a preposterous mixture of different types of beasts” (Hesse 1995, 42). He tries to listen to human beings and their conversation for consolation but only feels more ashamed of himself. He threw off his fashionable walking stick, hat, boots and tie and “pressed himself sobbing against the fence of the elk stable” (Hesse 1995, 42). As such “he caused a great sensation, was taken into custody, and eventually brought to an insane asylum” (Hesse 1995, 42). That’s the end of the story of a normal man, who accidentally becomes aware of perspectives other than those of the human people.

Beauty, Arts and Artists  57 A man with the name of Ziegler makes one ask – What is justice in a story about normal life and normative practices? Indeed, it is a story about the normal and the normative, and no crime seems to have been committed. This is exactly the problem with the normal and normative, that certain acts of crime and injustice become normalised, and thus, invisible; this is what Hesse wants to make his readers aware. Countries keeping zoos and people visiting the zoo, for example, are activities considered not only legitimate but also educative and entertaining. It hides the fact of the gross injustice done to those who are behind bars for no crime that they have committed. In fact, keeping them behind bars would be seen as a crime from any other perspective except those of human beings. Hesse’s protagonist Ziegler, a very normal member of society, following all normative practices with belief and commitment, is locked up in an asylum just because a magic globule makes him see the zoo from the perspective of non-human animals. Locking him up is locking up that new perspective. It is necessary so that the unjust normative world may continue its normative injustice. The author Hesse uses an element very popular in the folktale, that the hero touches or eats something with which s/he is able to see reality from another perspective. In the folktale also, the hero is an ordinary person or even an underdog, and the use of magic is a liberating experience and enables the hero to achieve her/his goal. Hesse’s hero is an ordinary man of modern society, which controls the mind of its members while seeming to provide independence of thought. Being “normal” is not a choice, but a compulsion. Being “normal” is to accept the unjust world as normative and not question it. Being “normal” means not to be a hero, and that’s what Hesse’s protagonist is – a non-hero, a pathetically normative person who can at best be overwhelmed by a non-normative perspective, but can do no better. What the story seems to be saying is that in modern society, there is no place nor desire for a hero. 3.3 Poetics of Environmental Justice Der geheimnisvolle Berg (The Mountain Full of Secrets) is the story of a mountain and a young man, first published in 1908 (Hesse 2006, 38–47). The mountain stood “unknown and unloved” (Hesse 2006, 38. My translation) amongst many beautiful and famous mountains. “It remained without fame and respect, but was also spared by roads, cottages, wire cables and mountain track railways” (Hesse 2006, 38. My translation). So, it has no roads or inhabitants, to say nothing of any other type of things created by human beings. The cyclical course of nature in terms of weather could proceed on this mountain uninterrupted. “But there is nothing in the world which the human greed does not finally notice” (Hesse 2006, 39. My translation). In the village at the base of the mountain lived a young man, the son of a watchmaker. He was trained as a watchmaker, worked, earned money and spent on summer trips with his friends. Once he decided to explore the neglected mountain. As there were no pathways, he had to find his own way. His curiosity grew into fondness and he returned for the second summer too. The mountain had started feeling like a friend to him, but then his feelings changed and he wanted to own, control and conquer the mountain. He returned earlier the next year, in

58  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory spring. The mountain was still under the influence of winter with wet foliage. It was difficult to climb at the moment. The young man returned with a friend to hike. Along the way, he slipped at a corner and disappeared. The friend could not find him and went back to the village to get more men. They came back by the evening, called for him, and set up camp for the night. The young man was lying down below with his legs broken and many other painful wounds. He answered the calls of his friends as best he could, but they did not hear him and finally went away. The young man was certain that they would not leave him there and lay quietly. As he lay, he thought of his life, his beloved, his passions and his friends. Most of it seemed distant. Then he thought of how he came to wander in this mountain; he somehow turned his painful neck and looked at the mountain and was filled with the love he had initially felt for it. The mountain was majestic and peaceful in its loneliness. The young man saw the night falling, the morning light ascending and heard the sounds of water, wind, birds and other beings that lived on the mountain. Looking with his dying eyes at the mountain’s peak he realised how all these and he were connected with one thread, and that his life was no more important than all those others. “And he, who had been lifelong unsatisfied (…) heard for the first time with his surprised soul the harmony and the eternal beauty of the world, and was at peace with death. (…) The mountain kept him to itself and he could not be found” (Hesse 2006: 47. My translation). He even smiled, which could seem sadistic, but was not. In the village below there was much sorrow that he was not found and could not be buried properly. The young man rested in peace in the mountain and was no worse for it. The Mountain Full of Secrets is a story of pure poetic justice. Living between the two world wars Hermann Hesse was deeply aware of the environmental destruction of his time. Locating its essential cause in human greed, Hesse is clearly proposing that another form of relationship between nature and human beings is possible only through a change of perspective. This change of perspective would not only let the human being appreciate the harmony and beauty of nature but also be at peace with themselves. The mountain in the story is portrayed as a sentient being and the young man is representative of the general human being but achieves a transformation. This transformation seems tragic from a social perspective, but is a poetic resolution whereby the human being comes to be at peace with nature even at the cost of loss of life. It is the sublimation of the self through the cognition of beauty and harmony. There is no winner or loser at the end, none right or wrong, as the young man accepts the justice of the mountain. 3.4 Conclusion Placing Hesse’s fairy tales between concepts of justice and aesthetics allows for an understanding of Hesse’s poetic justice. As an observer of social, environmental and other forms of injustice prevalent not only in society but also in the art of storytelling, Hesse sets out to correct those injustices in his stories. This correction in stories has the potential to transform the readers’ perspective. While he abstracts the injustices to a level where they lose local and particularistic identity in favour

Beauty, Arts and Artists  59 of an abstract and universal identity, justice and beauty entangle themselves into a singular entity. Works Cited Edor, Edor J. (2020). John Rawls Concept of Justice as Fairness. Pinisi Discretion Review, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 179–190. Hesse, Hermann (2006). Die Märchen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Hesse, Hermann (1995). The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse. Translated and with an Introduction by Jack Zipes. New York, Toronto: Bantam Books. Lüthi, Max (1976). Once Upon A Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tale. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rancière, Jacques (2004 [2011]). The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated with and Introduction by Gabriel Rockhill. Norfolk: Continuum International Publishing Group. Rawls, John (1958). Justice as Fairness. The Philosophical Review, vol. 67, no. 2, pp. 164–194. Rawls, John (1971). Justice​-As​-Fairness​.p​df. https://eportfolios​.macaulay​.cuny​.edu​/ thorne15​/files​/2015​/03​/rawls​-justice​-as​-fairness​.pdf. Röhrich, Lutz (1991). Folktale and Reality. Translated with an Introduction by Peter Tokofsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schiller, Friedrich (1795 [1954]). On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Translated with an Introduction by Reginal Snell. New Haven: Yale University Press.

4

Aestheticisation of Martyrdom in La Chanson de Roland Abhimanyu Sharma

4.1 Introduction Portrayals of martyrdoms and sacrifices constitute integral components of mediaeval literature. The reason for this lies in the inherent religious character of mediaeval literature. The idea of fighting and suffering for religion was innate to the mediaeval world-view, and literature was instrumentalised as a means to promote and facilitate this idea.1 This chapter aims to examine the representation of martyrdom in literature. Precisely, it focuses on the forms of the aestheticisation of martyrdom in mediaeval European literature. The work that this chapter investigates is an eleventh-century Old French text La Chanson de Roland (also known in English as the Song of Roland), which has been “long considered a radical illustration of crusader ethos” (Kablitz 2011: 116). The poem takes the historical Battle of Roncesvalles (Roncevaux) in 778 CE as its subject (Britannica 2014). Though this encounter was actually “an insignificant skirmish” between Charlemagne’s army and Basque forces, the poem transforms Roncesvalles into a battle against Saracens and “magnifies it to the heroic stature of the Greek defence of Thermopylae against the Persians in the fifth century BC” (ibid.). In Brunner’s view (1997: 136), the world appears as a battlefield between God and the pagan devil in the Song of Roland. As Brunner (ibid.) describes, the task of the Christian fighter is either to destroy the pagan or to win them over to the kingdom through baptism. Anyone who dies in the service of God goes to Paradise as a martyr (ibid.). Roland, the central figure or the hero of this work, dies whilst fighting for the Christian side and ascends to heaven as a martyr. In this chapter, I analyse the scenes or the passages portraying the death of Roland. The key question is whether one can speak of “aestheticisation” in the context of Roland’s death as described in La Chanson de Roland. To find an answer to this question, I first briefly look at the concepts aesthetics and aestheticisation and try to outline the terminological nuances. Drawing on an intellectual history of these concepts, I examine the passages describing the martyrdom of Roland and try to assess to what extent this representation of martyrdom in the above-named work can be viewed as aestheticisation. Moreover, I also briefly discuss whether one can approach this text using modern understandings of the aestheticisation of death.

DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-7

Aestheticisation of Martyrdom  61 4.2 On Aesthetics and Aestheticisation In order to assess aestheticisation in the Song of Roland, it is important to gain an understanding of the terms aesthetics and aestheticisation. The term aesthetics comes from the old Greek word aisthetike which means “sensory perception” (Zima 2006: 25). The understanding of this term underwent a fundamental change in the course of time, as in antiquity it was mainly associated with “beauty”, whilst in modern times this term remains closely related to art. For example, Plato defines aesthetics as the theory of beauty and names eros as the craft which instils in one the enthusiasm for beauty, truth and goodness (Zima 2006: 25). Plato does not appreciate works of art much because he argues that due to their mimetic character, they create illusions and varied opinions rather than producing ideational knowledge and truth (Zima 2006: 25). Aristotle understands art in a much different way than Plato. For him, art means productive behaviour based on knowledge (Scheer 1997: 20). Whilst both Aristotle and Plato subscribe to the idea of mimesis being central to aesthetics, they disagree in how they understand mimesis: Plato sees it as an “emulation of reality”, whereas Aristotle understands it as “emulation of an acting human being” (Zima 2006: 25). One must note that not all theories of aesthetics are mimesis oriented. Zima (ibid.) notes that modern theories of aesthetics do not view aesthetics as mirroring reality, but rather as constructing reality. The dichotomy of mimesis vs. constructivist approaches has sometimes been compared to Produktions- vs Rezeptionsästhetik. The Produktionsästhetik focuses on the author and how a work of art came into existence, whereas the Rezeptionsästhetik examines how the readers perceive it. It will be an aim of this chapter to find out to what extent the aesthetics of martyrdom in La Chanson de Roland mirror or construct reality. One of the ways to approach the concept of aesthetics as used in La Chanson de Roland is to investigate the usage of this term in the historical context in which this work emerged. There are two contrasting views regarding the theory of aesthetics in the Middle Ages. On the one hand, as Zima (2006: 26) argues, the mediaeval understanding of aesthetics was influenced by the mimetic theory of Aristotelian poetry. On the other hand, Lieberg (2011: 17) posits that one can hardly speak of an independent mediaeval discourse on aesthetics because ensuing from the idea that art is an autonomous field, one can argue that the Middle Ages did not bring forth any original aesthetics. According to Lieberg (ibid.), a possible reason for the claim that the Middle Ages did not produce any original aesthetics could be that the important mediaeval philosopher Thomas Aquinas did not write any treatise on art or the nature of beauty. A third possible view could be that works written before the Enlightenment era were bound by, to borrow Reiss’ (1989: 658) words, “shackles imposed by theology”. Following Reiss (ibid.), it will be analysed to what extent the Song of Roland is bound by theological aesthetics. In the post-enlightenment era, the understanding of aesthetics started developing with the works of the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (1714– 1762). According to Baumgarten, “the concern of aesthetics is with the perfection

62  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory of sensuous knowledge as such, that is, with beauty” (aesthetices finis est perfectio cognitionis sensitiuae, qua talis […] haec autem est pulcritudo, Reiss 1989: 659). There can be no perfection without cognition; however, Baumgarten also calls intuitive or sensuous cognition an inferior kind of knowledge in comparison to logical, rational or intellectual knowledge (Reiss, ibid.). Whilst logic, mathematics and science seek to achieve distinctness and clarity, aesthetics deals with phenomena that are indefinable (Reiss, ibid.). Sensuous cognition is not restricted to feelings but is intellectual in character as well (ibid.). It is both an art and a science or rather “an art raised to the level of science”. Kant’s (2008) conception of aesthetics differs from that of Baumgarten in the sense that for Kant the “judgement of taste” – in Kant’s words, the faculty of estimating the beautiful – is not a cognitive judgement and thus, not logical. For Kant, the judgement of taste is aesthetic and by that, he means that the reasons for judgement can be none other than subjective. The Baumgarten–Kant debate suggests that the post-enlightenment concept of aesthetics is twofold. The first aspect concerns objective aesthetics, whilst the second one focuses on subjective aesthetics. Objective aesthetics does not deal with the concept of beauty; rather it deals with the concept of art. Therefore, at this level mainly the formulaic style which shapes the artistic character of the work will be analysed. Subjective aesthetics is concerned with the concept of beauty as well as the concept of truth and their interaction. At this juncture, it is to clarify that this chapter distances itself from the idea of an absolute demarcation between objective and subjective aesthetics. Whilst one might want to differentiate between logic and beauty, they are intertwined with each other, especially as they both are concerned with the idea of truth. Drawing on the debate outlined here, the chapter will examine the intertwining of objective and subjective aesthetics in La chanson de Roland. Finally, in modern-day usage, the terms aesthetics and aestheticisation are fairly commonplace.2 However, such usage might seem entirely different from what has been discussed so far. A telling example of such usage is Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Benjamin (1963: 48) uses this term in a political context and speaks of an “aestheticisation of politics” and postulates that all efforts attempting at aestheticisation of politics lead to war. Benjamin’s understanding of aestheticisation means that one ignores the negative aspects of an event or idea and portrays them as harmless. Such portrayals are imbalanced because they highlight only certain aspects, whilst ignoring others. This chapter also examines whether Benjamin’s conceptualisation of aestheticisation as an imbalanced portrayal stands true in the case of La Chanson de Roland. 4.3 Analysis of the Martyrdom Scene in La Chanson de Roland The scene portraying Roland’s death and martyrdom encompasses verses 2259– 2396. Whilst fighting for the Christian side, Olivier, Turpin and other warriors fall in the war. Roland is mortally wounded and can sense that he is nearing death (v. 2259). The next passages unfold the end of this tragic warrior. Due to an enormous loss of strength, he swoons (v. 2270) and on getting back to his senses, he feels that he has lost his eyesight (v. 2297). The Song of Roland contains elements

Aestheticisation of Martyrdom  63 of the magical, especially in the passages concerning Roland’s sword Durendal. Durendal is not portrayed as a common sword; it carries the essence of Christianity in it: there are many relics in its golden hilt e.g., Saint Peter’s tooth, the blood of Saint Basile, some of the hairs of Saint Denise and some of the robe worn by Saint Mary (V. 2345–2348). As he notices that his rivals want to rob his sword (v. 2284), he futilely tries (thrice) to destroy it (v. 2301, 2312 and 2338), but the sword proves to be almost indestructible. Instead of being crushed into pieces, it keeps on leaping back into the air (V. 2341). The indestructibility of Durendal cannot be said to mirror reality. Rather it is constructing the image of a supernatural element, which is due to the Christian values and powers that the sword carries. In this example, we see that the constructivist theory of aesthetics merges with the theological one, as these passages describe how religion can create supernatural powers. For Pensom (1982: 158–159), the indestructibility of the sword is a metaphor for the “indestructibility of Christianity”. As Pensom (ibid.) argues, the sword emerges as “a symbol of the indissoluble unity of the temporal and the transcendent”. It is the gift of the king who himself, as the Holy Roman Emperor, embodies the marriage of Church and State (ibid.). Pensom (ibid.) notes that the readers are confronted by a triad of symbolic equivalences, in the state, the man and the sword, each of which represents the immanence of God in the world. Pensom (ibid.) interprets that “the sword, like the Christian state, will survive its living members to confront the dangers of the unknown future”. An analysis of Roland’s martyrdom scene must also pay due attention to the contradictory nature of Roland’s lamentations. On the one hand, he laments the death (i.e., the perishability) of his fellow warriors, on the other hand, in Durendal’s case, he laments its indestructibility, as he does not want his sword to land into the hands of heathens. These descriptions once again underline the importance of theological aesthetics in the Song of Roland. Moreover, it is hard to speak of logic here, since Durendal’s portrayal does not match reality. As Roland realises that his death is near, he hurries beneath a pine tree under the shade of which he dies (v. 2356): Ço sent Rollant de sun tens n’i ad plus. Devers Espaigne est en un pui agut; A l'une main si ad sun piz batud: «Deus, meie culpe vers les tues vertuz De mes pecchez, des granz e des menuz Que jo ai fait des l’ure que nez fui Tresqu’a cest jur que ci sui consoüt!» Sun destre guant en ad vers Deu tendut: Angles del ciel i descendent a lui. (V. 2366–2374) But Rollant feels he’s no more time to seek; Looking to Spain, he lies on a sharp peak, And with one hand upon his breast he beats: ‘Mea Culpa! God, by Thy Virtues clean

64  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory Me from my sins, the mortal and the mean, Which from the hour that I was born have been Until this day, when life is ended here!’ Holds out his glove towards God, as he speaks Angels descend from heaven on that scene. The first impression one gets from this passage is that the representation of death is influenced by religious motifs. Roland strikes his chest with his hands – a confession ritual that has been in existence since the times of St. Augustine (Steinsieck 1999: 357) – and begs God for forgiveness. It remains unclear, however, what sins he has committed. This can be viewed as an inconsistency of the text because, on the one hand, Roland is presented as a brave hero who fights for the faith, and thus, cannot be called a sinner and on the other hand, he is portrayed as confessing his sins. If Roland were a sinner, he could not be considered a martyr from the Christian point of view. Therefore, one cannot speak of aestheticisation in the sense that the portrayal becomes balanced by considering the virtues and flaws of Roland, whereas in order to aestheticise one must focus on glorifying certain aspects, whilst ignoring others. Owen (1962: 390–391) postulates that Roland is a sinner because it is not Christian to act in a recklessly proud manner, as he lacks “the Christian grace of mesure; on the contrary, he invites divine retribution for his display of desmesure, which conventional mediaeval morality regarded as a social and spiritual sin”. However, Vance (1970: 60) represents an altogether different opinion by trying to prove Roland’s religious uprightness with the following words: Does Roland repent of his démesure, as some critics believe? […] Perhaps a clue to Roland’s conception of himself is to be found in his allusions to God’s salvation of Lazarus and Daniel: Lazarus represents resurrection, and Daniel is an example of defiant faith; both were innocent men when they died. However, whereas Roland’s words reveal a little of his state of mind, his last gestures reveal a great deal. From his face turned towards the enemy (Spain) we know that he dies unvanquished in spirit; from his position on his side, striking his chest, we know that he dies penitent; from his memories, we know that he dies a loyal Frenchman; from his joined hands and extended glove, we know that he dies a true Christian and a true vassal of God. Saints Gabriel and Michael, each a patron saint of chivalry, descend and bear his soul up to Paradise. Contrary to Owen, Vance does not consider Roland to be a sinner because Roland proves his innocence by referring to Lazarus and Daniel. Roland’s comparison of himself with them implies that he does not see himself as a sinner. The question arises, therefore, why he begs God to forgive his sins when he is not a sinner from his own perspective. A possible solution would be to conceive Roland’s act of confession as conformity to a certain (religious) behavioural paradigm and not as a serious plea for forgiveness. This hypothesis is confirmed by another act of

Aestheticisation of Martyrdom  65 confession by a Christian warrior: This time by Turpin who confesses his sins even though he is not a sinner and wishes himself a place in heaven (v. 2239–2242). It is difficult to describe Roland as a sinner because, in addition to comparisons with Lazarus and Daniel, the text also contains elements of imitatio Christi: Sun destre guant a Deu en puroffrit; Seint Gabriel de sa main l’ad pris. Desur sun braz teneit le chef enclin; Juntes ses mains est alet a sa fin. Deus tramist sun angle Cherubin, E seint Michel del Peril; Ensembl’od els sent Gabriel i vint. L’anme del cunte portent en pareïs. (V.2389–2396) His right-hand glove, to God, he offers it Saint Gabriel from’s hand hath taken it. Over his arm his head bows down and slips, He joins his hands: and so is life finish’d. God sent him down His angel cherubin, And Saint Michael, we worship in peril; And by their side Saint Gabriel alit; So the count’s soul they bare to Paradise. The gesture of offering the glove finds its origins in the contemporary feudal law, according to which the vassal begs his master for pardon upon making a mistake (Steinsieck 1999: 357). One must note the striking similarity between this scene and popular representations of the ascension of Christ. Roland’s soul is carried into heaven by angels just as in the ascension of Christ, and this can be understood as an attempt to portray Roland as a martyr. From this perspective, it can be said that the text represents a case of imitatio Christi. A possible objection to this would be that Roland’s confession as a sinner cannot be compared to Christ, but this objection contradicts itself, as sinners do not find a place in heaven. Further attempts of imitatio Christi are to be found in Roland’s portrayal as an exemplary benevolent man. Roland’s demonstration of huge compassion for other warriors (only for Christians though) has drawn from time and time comparisons to Jesus Christ as is obvious in the following statement by Uitti (1973: 12): This sense of Roland’s humanity is essential to the tragic implications of the events immediately subsequent to Olivier’s death. About a tenth of the poem – some four hundred lines – follow the loss of Olivier and precede Charlesmagne’s arrival at Roncevaux. Apart from a number of verses that describe the death of Gautier de l’Hum and, especially, of Turpin, the entirety of these laisses is dedicated to Roland: to a Roland who has taken leave of Olivier, i.e. of earthly friendships, and who fights on, knowing that he too must die, probably before his emperor returns. He is a completely sympathetic

66  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory figure. Even those scholars who had found him guilty of desmesure speak, in this connection, of his repentance and regeneration. In addition to such personal traits, even the deictic settings of Roland’s death have been used to draw comparisons between him and Christ. Roland dies alone and far from the battleground. Roland’s solitude in his last moments is significant because, for the first time in the whole text, a figure is portrayed as being alone. Pensom (1982: 158) interprets it as the autonomy of his being. It is noteworthy that he does not die of an attack by the enemy, but due to the stress caused by blowing his war horn. The motif of imitatio Christi is strengthened by the geographical setting which the narrator creates for this incident. Rütten (1970: 46) describes it using the following words: Der sich hier andeutende typologische Bezug zwischen Christus und Roland wird noch verstärkt durch den Hügel, auf dem der Held stirbt, die vier Marmorblöcke und zwei Bäume, die sich auf dem Hügel befinden: die Steinsymbolik [...] weist auf eine Omphalosvorstellung, in welcher das Symbol des Steines als Zentrum der mythischen Geografie gedacht wird, als komische Mitte, als Nullpunkt der Erde, an dem sich die Welten der Toten und der Lebenden, der Menschen und der Götter überschneiden, an dem das Transzendente sich in das Immanente einfügen kann und somit Ort der Auferstehung wird. [The typological relation indicated between Christ and Roland is strengthened by the hillock on which the hero dies, the four marble stones and the two trees present on the hillock. The stone-symbolic refers to omphalos in which the symbol of the stone is thought to be centre of the mythical geography, as cosmic centre, as point-zero of earth where the worlds of dead and living, of human beings and Gods intersect and where the transcendental incorporates itself in the immanent, thus making it the place of resurrection]. The passages discussed above suggest that one can speak of various forms of aestheticisation in the Song of Roland. It contains elements of mimesis-oriented aestheticisation, as the figure of Roland is compared to Jesus Christ by drawing parallels to Jesus Christ’s ascension to heaven. At the same time, it is constructing reality in the sense that it is describing Christianity as a true religion. If we look at the historical context in which this text emerged, we find out that it is trying to create a reality that was aligned with the political and religious ideology of Europe at that time. Therefore, the text contains elements of both Produktions- and Rezeptionsästhetik. 4.4 Stylistic Analysis Aestheticisation of Roland’s martyrdom is also evident at the stylistic level, especially in the substantial use of laisses similaires, a stylistic device which refers to

Aestheticisation of Martyrdom  67 the continual repetition of an act or incidence (Woods 1950: 1247). The central idea here is numerological symbolism. One can, for example, consider the number “three” in this case. Anyone reading La Chanson de Roland carefully would notice the importance associated with the number “three”: Roland attempts thrice to break his sword. He does not strike the sword against the same stone; he tries breaking it on three different stones. He strikes his chest thrice with his hand. He is carried to heaven by three angels. He is the third important warrior that falls in battle. These are some of the most important incidents related to the number “three”. Whilst engaging himself with the same motif, Woods (1950: 1261) concludes that the poet of La Chanson de Roland was sensitive to numbers, that he used them in accordance with a definite plan, and that he attached a Christian symbolism to his use of the number three. Woods might be trying to indicate that the repetitive use of the number “three” could be related to the Holy Trinity. Moreover, this numerological symbolism could have an aesthetic function. Pope (1915, cited after Woods 1950) posits that “whatever the origin of the laisses [similaires] may be, their function in the Chanson de Roland is aesthetic”. By describing the successive movements of crisis, by elaborating symmetrically the plaints over the dead, the poet has found an unequalled means of heightening the crisis, of emphasising the emotional significance of the scene (ibid.). 4.5 Conclusion Based on an analysis of the passages discussed above, it can be concluded that in the Song of Roland, various forms of aestheticisation are present. For example, one can speak of objective aestheticisation in view of the stylistic devices used in the martyrdom scene. The artistic character of the scene is created using the stylistic device laisses similaires whereby numerological symbolism is brought to the fore. An example of subjective aestheticisation can be found in the motif imitatio Christi. As discussed earlier, according to Plato, a work of art should unify beauty, truth and goodness. He sees the goal of beauty in the search for the truth. From the viewpoint of Christian theology, Christ represents truth and goodness and therefore, a work of art would become beautiful when it tries to imitate Christ, as it implies the imitation of truth and goodness. Moreover, the comparison of Roland with Christ is an example of mimetic aesthetics. At the same time, magical elements such as Roland’s ascension to heaven or the indestructibility of his sword Durendal inform us that the Song of Roland is based on constructivist aesthetics that aims to construct a reality that would portray Christianity as the true religion, whilst describing the non-Christians as representing the opposite of truth. In light of the discussion conducted above, it emerges that La Chanson de Roland is shaped by different forms of aesthetics and aestheticisation, including theological, objective, subjective, mimetic and constructivist. Finally, if one is allowed to apply modern approaches to mediaeval texts, one can find two kinds of approaches. The first concerns Benjamin’s idea of “aestheticisation of politics” that criticised imbalanced portrayals i.e., portrayals that glorify certain aspects whilst ignoring others. Whilst one can find glorification of Roland’s martyrdom in La

68  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory Chanson de Roland, such glorification is not absolute, as the text also contains passages that talk of his “sins”. The second approach concerns critical voices such as Jay (1992: 44) who questions “the grotesque impropriety of applying criteria of beauty to deaths of human beings”. Whilst Jay’s critique is valid in the sense that death should not be glorified, the point to be noted here is that Jay’s concept of aesthetics is based on beauty, whereas the taxonomy of aesthetics outlined in this chapter indicates that one needs to take a more nuanced approach when talking of aesthetics or aestheticisation. Eventually, it should be best left to the readers to interpret a work, as long as the historical context is not ignored. Notes 1 According to Weigel (2007), the early Christian martyrs presented themselves as figures of suffering. The word “martyr”, which is related to the Greek word μάρτυς (witness), means that the early Christian martyrs played the role of a witness to the passion of Christ. In this worldview, the martyr placed himself as the successor to the archetype of the sacrifice made by Christ and even at the price of persecution, he sticks to his confession. It was only with the Crusades that the image of the Soldier of Christ emerged. 2 Since this chapter speaks of both aesthetics and aestheticisation, it is useful to offer a brief definition of the latter. By aestheticisation, I refer to the process by which a work of art is lent an aesthetic character, be it subjective or objective.

Works Cited Primary texts Das altfranzösische Rolandslied 1999. Translated and commented by W. Steinsieck, Stuttgart: Reclam (=RUB 2746) The Song of Roland 1995, Produced, Edited and Prepared by D.B. Killings. Based on Translation by C.S. Moncrief 1919. https://www​.sacred​-texts​.com​/neu​/roland​/index​.htm Secondary texts Benjamin, W. 1963: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit [1936]. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp (=edition suhrkamp 28). Benjamin, W. 1998: The Work of Art in Age of its Technical Reproduction. Translated by Andy Burdan. http://itp​.nyu​.edu/​~mp51​/commlab​/walterbenjamin​.pdf Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. 2014, April 14: La Chanson de Roland. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www​.britannica​.com​/topic​/La​-Chanson​-de​-Roland Brunner, H. 1997: Geschichte der deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Stuttgart: Reclam. Jay, M. 1992. ‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology; Or, What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics? Cultural Critique, 21, 41–61. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/1354116 Kablitz, A. 2011: Religion and Violence in the “Song of Roland.” MLN, 126(4), S115– S158. http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/41300869 Kant, I. 2008: The Critique of Judgment [1790]. Translated by James Creed Meredith, Adelaide: University of Adelaide. http://ebooks​.adelaide​.edu​.au​/k​/kant​/immanuel​/k16j/ Lieberg, G. 2011: Ästhetische Theorien der Antike, des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit. Darstellungen und Interpretationen. Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer.

Aestheticisation of Martyrdom  69 Owen, D.D.R. 1962. The Secular Inspiration of the Chanson de Roland. Speculum, 37(3), 390–400. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/2852360 Pensom, R. 1982: Literary Technique in the Chanson de Roland. Genf: Librairie Droz. Pope, M.K. 1915: Four “Chansons de Geste”: A Study in Old French Epic Versification. The Modern Language Review, 10(3), 310–319. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/3712622 Reiss, H. 1989: The Rise of Aesthetics from Baumgarten to Humboldt. In Rawson, Claude et al. (eds.): The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume 4, the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 658–680. Rütten, R. 1970: Symbol und Mythus im altfranzösischen Rolandslied. Braunschweig: Georg Westermann Verlag. Scheer, B. 1997: Einführung in die philosophische Ästhetik. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Uitti, K.D. 1973: Story, Myth and Celebration in Old French Poetry 1050-1200. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vance, E. 1970: Reading the Song of Roland. Hoboken: Prentice-Hall. Weigel, S. 2007: Schauplätze, Figuren, Umformungen. Zu Kontinuitäten und Unterscheidungen von Märtyrerkulturen. In Weigel, Sigrid (ed.): Märtyrer-Porträts. Von Opfertod, Blutzeugen und heiligen Kriegern. München: W. Fink Verlag, pp. 11–37. Woods, W.S. 1950. The Symbolic Structure of la Chanson de Roland. PMLA, 65(6), 1247– 1262. https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/459732 Zima, P.V. 2006: Ästhetik. In: Brunner, Horst & Moritz, Rainer (eds.): Literaturwissenschaftliches Lexikon. Grundbegriffe der Germanistik. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, pp. 25–28.

5

Dadaism and Internet Meme: Aesthetics of Nonsense Vaibhav Sharma

The present generation of millennials is enjoying the highest level of material and infrastructural comfort compared to any other previous generation. Transportation, health sector, education, data archaisation and information-sharing facilities are way better than in previous decades. With the onset of the internet and digital media, communication and information exchange technology have upgraded in unprecedented ways. On the other hand, the same generation of millennials comprising white-collar and blue-collar workers is facing severe economic and professional uncertainty and is often living what is termed by the economists as a “precarious” existence. This paradox of the present times, coupled with the internet-fuelled isolation, is reflected in the creative processes that the present generation is experimenting with. With the facility of computer tools such as Photoshop and video editors, the users are equipped with highly advanced tools that allow their creativity to manifest itself in ways that were never possible before. Due to digital media’s tremendous capability of sharing content with people worldwide in no time, artists and other literary authors enjoy a sense of empowerment, as they no longer have to rely upon publishing houses or art museums for public appreciation of their works. This also decentralises the power and authority of the already established mainstream artists. In the backdrop of these tremendous developments that have been brought into the world by the internet and digital technology, this chapter deals with the contemporary digital art forms of meme creation and their transmission into the digital ecosystem via social media platforms, and it also attempts to trace its historical roots in the Dada movement and how the Dada ideas and concepts of art like the “readymades” find their way as intertextual strands into digital art. 5.1 Meme Culture The term Meme was first introduced by Richard Dawkin in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976. The word “Meme” originally comes from the Greek word “mimema”, which means that which is imitated. According to Dawkin, “meme” is a cultural parallel to biological “gene”. The way “genes” are transmitted biologically and play a vital role in determining one’s behaviour and developmental patterns on a biological level, in the same way, a Meme is a cultural unit that may emerge in a single mind and then be mimicked by many others. According to Dawkin, tunes, DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-8

Dadaism and Internet Meme  71 ideas, catchphrases and clothing styles are all examples of memes. However, back in 1976, while theorising cultural memes, Dawkin had no idea that in the near future something like “internet memes” would emerge and become globally popular. The onset of the internet meme has been the major cause of revolutionising the human approach to textual language. The invention of the printing press in the late fifteenth century revolutionised communication, learning and the exchange of information. After five centuries, with the advent of the internet, one can notice a distinct shift from text-based to image-based communication. The images in the internet meme could be either still photographs/pictures or moving videos. The outspread popularity of social network websites such as Instagram and TikTok and the layout of video-sharing websites like YouTube and Vimeo, where the content is shared exclusively in the form of videos, is a testimony of the overpowering of video/image-based communication over text-based communication. These websites, moreover, have prepared the ground for a new category of people called “influencers”, who use digital memes and other viable mediums to make others imitate what they find worth sharing. Considering these aspects, internet memes can be defined broadly: [as] a remixed, iterated message that can be rapidly diffused by members of participatory digital culture for the purpose of satire, parody, critique, or other discursive activity. An internet meme is a more specific term for the various iterations it represents, such as image macro memes, GIFs, hashtags, video memes, and more. Its function is to posit an argument, visually, in order to commence, extend, counter or influence a discourse. (Wiggins, Bradley E. 2019: 11) Memes seem to be a small slice of culture, typically a joke which gains influence through online transmission. They can be seen as little creative artefacts emerging from a highly participatory digital culture. Kate M. Miltner, a digital media scholar, refers to memes as a cultural representation of vernacular creativity that exhibits a fine amalgamation of folk practices such as storytelling with contemporary media-savvy skills. They reflect the anxieties and concerns of various social groups across national boundaries like a “funhouse mirror” for culture and society (Miltner 2017: 413). The current form of internet memes has their origins, posits Linda Börzsei, a theorist of digital technology, in emotions which were created by combining different letters and characters such as “:-)” Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines a meme as an “image, a video, a piece of text etc., that is passed very quickly from one internet user to another, often with slight changes that make it humorous”. For the purpose of our research, I would like to emphasise on the latter part of this definition, wherein it states that it passes off to another user with a slight or a moderate change to an original piece of work. It is eventually adding up a witty or humorous value to it. This is exactly what Marcel Duchamp did to a portrait of the Mona Lisa on a cheap postcard in 1919 and before that, Eugene Bataille had tried something similar

72  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory in 1883. Duchamp scribbled a little goatee, a moustache and captioned a cheeky wordplay LHOOQ to one of the world’s most famous faces from the Renaissance period creating a witty version of an LGTBQ Mona Lisa. Many art critics of that time were horrified, calling it a joke in poor taste, an act of vandalism. Many dismissed it as buffoonery. At the same time, it was hard to ignore. Another artwork of his, Fountain, caused a sensation in the world of art as the presentation of a urinal as an artwork posed a formidable challenge to the very idea of originality and the concept of art as such. Such artworks by Duchamp provoked and scandalised the puritans. Undeterred by the harsh criticism, Duchamp continued with his ideas. He called his artworks “Readymades” as if he were openly acknowledging that he was working with readymades, and he did not need to be apologetic or ashamed about it (Cabbane 2009: 48). This juxtaposition is today universally acknowledged by art critics as a creative act. Such artistic experimentation, which was practised by artists who called themselves Dadaists and propounded Dadaism as an art movement, with already existing and highly celebrated artistic works, would be termed by youths of today, who are also generally referred to as GenZ, as meme-making or doodling. 5.2 Dadaism Dadaism was essentially a protest movement expressed through art that began in the political backdrop of World War I. Some European artists, disappointed and frustrated with the senselessness of the war, moved to Zurich in Switzerland, a place that was politically neutral to the war. The movement took birth in the city of Zurich, and since its very inception the movement declared its radical opposition to the cold bourgeois reason and logic that were unable to stop the War. As a matter of fact, the Dada movement is said to have begun symbolically on 5 February 1916 at a little-known nightclub in Zurich, appropriately and provocatively named Cabaret Voltaire. The gathering, mainly comprising raucous men who came to drink and see young, pretty girls dancing, was shown instead an unusual performance by the German poet and theatre director Hugo Ball presenting his poem Karawane (1917), a concoction of nonsensical sounds: 5.2.1 Karawane

jolifanto bambla o falli bambla grossiga mpfa habla horem égiga goramen higo bloiko russula huju hollaka hollala anlogo bung blago bung blago bung bosso fataka

Dadaism and Internet Meme  73 ü üü ü schampa wulla wussa ólobo hey tatta gorem eschige zunbada wulubu ssubudu uluw ssubudo tumba ba- umf kusagauma ba - umf (Huelsenbeck 1920: 53) Only the title of the poem is in German. The rest of the poem is quintessentially a “caravan”, a combination of sounds, that do not exist in a dictionary of any known language. Purists would call it incomprehensible and nonsensical. Dadaists thought differently. From their point of view, nonsense is the only way to fight power structures because it confuses the rulers. Aesthetically, the sounds give the impression of a musical ensemble, but the sounds are not from traditional musical instruments or even parts of human speech. Jarring typewriter sounds for example are integrated. African sounds are placed next to European sounds. Put together it produced an invented language that assigns a variety of sounds a central role in rhythm, recitation and performance. It is akin to that of an infant’s uncorrupted sound speech with the same logic as that of a child’s world. Going by the essence of such sound poems, they are primarily oriented towards performance and are not meant to be read silently. Ball called such poems Lautgedichte or “sound poems” that are “verses without words” (Ball 1996: 70). According to George Steiner the author of After Babel, this phenomenon is of extreme interest to both literature and linguistics (Steiner 1998: 203). As the Dada artists aimed to portray a lunatic, nonsensical world going nowhere, nonsense was the best way to go about it. But it was not easy to illustrate the nonsense and the absurdity of the world using already existing conventions and grammar of a particular language. Dada artists innovatively designed a new language, which rejected established languages as another form of subjugation and control. Ball explains in his diary of 1927 Die Flucht aus der Zeit (The Flight from the Times): I don’t want words that other people have invented. All the words are other people's inventions. I want my own stuff, my own rhythm, and vowels and consonants too, matching the rhythm and all my own. If this pulsation is seven yards long, I want words for it that are seven yards long. (Ball 1996: 221) Ball’s Karawane is a fine example of this newly invented language. The performance created a trance-like atmosphere in the pub, captivating the audience. And even Hugo Ball himself, being both the performer and reciter of the poem, was so intensely involved and charged with his act that he collapsed at the end of it and had to be literally carried off the stage. Enthralled by this weird performance of the “sound poem” the gentry of drunken men responded with big applause and the

74  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory event became a roaring success. The poem draws its strength from its performative aspect, in which Ball’s costume and appearance play a vital role. Ball describes in his diary that he prepared himself a unique dress for the occasion. His legs were in a cylinder-shaped shiny blue cardboard which came up to his hips and made him appear like an obelisk. Above that, he wore a huge coat collar cut out of cardboard, scarlet inside and gold outside. This was tied around the neck in such a way that it gave an impression of winglike movement by raising and lowering his elbows up and down. Also, he wore a high, blue-and-white striped witch-like doctor’s hat (Ball 1996: 70). This also resembled a clerical member and became thus an allegory of disdain for the established world order. Every Dada artist had his/her own unique style of creativity, and they followed no specific school of art, as they rejected the very notion of schooling the art within the limits of any particular style or genre. As a result, there was no clear single style of work by Dadaists, and they claimed their artistic freedom by rejecting cultural standards and values. Fractured poems, collages, assemblages and everyday objects were used as a form of art to critique the dominating high art and the public understanding of what art is or should be. Dada artists embraced essentially nonsense as a motif and an attitude. They were also influenced by Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious and free association that was developing in Vienna during the so-called Wiener Moderne. They tried to devise methods to liberate the unconscious from the mental censoring mechanism of conscious thoughts. These artists would write down every thought that surfaced in their conscious mind along with the feelings that occurred on an emotional level without censorship. These practices of Dada artists went to a point where they eventually appeared to be completely whimsical and nonsensical. According to David Hopkins, an art theorist, Dada deliberately “sought to overturn traditional bourgeois notions of art” (Hopkins 2004: 1). Dadaism spread from Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich to Berlin, Hannover, New York and Paris. It eventually became an international art movement with a motley group of artists who were writers, painters, sculptors, journalists, songwriters and singers. Similarly, considering the artistic approach of Dada artists, their works do not limit themselves within the boundaries of intertextuality. They go beyond and explore the possibilities of being intermedial by fusing various artistic mediums into each other. The basic underlying principle that brought Dada artists together was disagreement and negation of every form of regulation or principle, including even the Dada Manifesto. Such intense disagreement with everything possible paved the way for the movement’s disintegration. Also, because the Dada artists came from various cultural backgrounds and ethnic roots, disagreements among its proponents were inevitable. Though Dadaism as a movement had a very short life span, it left a deep mark on the art scene and its influence is distinctively visible in many of the art forms that emerged later such as Surrealism, Pop-Art, Graffiti, Slam Poetry, Remixes and of course the internet memes. In the year 2016, hundred years of Dadaism was celebrated worldwide in different museums and art institutions, and also in Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich where it all started.

Dadaism and Internet Meme  75 5.3 Art vs. Non-art Through their unusual forms of art, Dadaists challenged the distinctions made by scholars between art and non-art. In the spirit of experimentation with various forms and creativity, there is also an element of playfulness in their works that mocks the established structures of art and their institutionalised forms. By playing around with the already existing pieces of art or with banal and mundane objects, Duchamp was not only able to challenge the idea of established high art and low art but also the idea of originality, whereby the rearrangement and realignment made all the difference. These works were intended to develop a whole new concept of art based on the clever mixing of the old and the new. The highly celebrated Renaissance art placed in world-famous museums was no longer considered exclusive and sacrosanct. Dadaists turned it into popular art that the masses could relate to. The most famous of his works apart from Mona Lisa LGBTQ are Bicycle wheel, The Fountain-urinal, Bottle Rack and Ice Shovel. These “Readymades” did not have the seriousness of European Dada works, which were more political in nature. Duchamp’s Fountain (an upside-down urinal with the title mocking the Barock fountains) was in fact rejected initially by the jury as it was not considered original. This juxtaposition of images and objects is today acknowledged by art critics as a creative act. At first sight, it may give the impression of being easy and trivial, but, in reality, it is a creative act of high order as it requires enormous talent, genius and humorous playfulness. No wonder Dadaists were sometimes called pranksters and sometimes subversive: Dada for pleasure: There is no avant-garde movement of the 20th century that has so consistently focused on laughter and ridicule, fun and mockery, cynicism and clowning, irony and self-irony as Dadaism. This gave it such a powerful, long-lasting, creative impulse that it continues to have an effect to this day. (Korte 2005: 18) (author’s translation) Such playfulness and mixing of the old with the new in the form of light mockery of high art can be witnessed in the creation of contemporary internet memes as well. A popular meme from the pandemic portrays Mona Lisa with a cheap surgical mask that ends up covering her enigmatic smile. But there is no doubt that the lady in the frame is none other than Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Even the most wellknown face in the world is forced to hide behind the protective mask in COVID times. It is now the turn of the viewer to smile at the new combination. The heavy transmission of a meme within the internet ecosystem is a testimony of their success and popularity in everyday life among the masses. In addition to this, such alterations in the image or video offer a challenge to our traditional approaches of photography. Such rearrangements and realignments of multiple pre-existing images and photos within a single frame was started as an experiment also by one of the female Dada artists, Hanna Höch. She used photographs and images from popular publications, illustrated journals and fashion magazines with which she created collages and photomontages that juxtaposed each other and they were re-contextualised in

76  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory a dynamic and layered style. According to Höch, the so-called waste material of written and printed matter can be used for pictorial collages and photomontages. Höch was one of the many woman artists based in Berlin in the turn-of-the-century Europe who struggled to make a space for herself in the male-dominated art scene. Women were for the first time visible as artists and not just as subjects of art. She was more political than her counterparts in Zurich criticizing the right-wing tendencies in Germany that ultimately led to fascism. Likewise, contemporary memes make use of photographic images to evoke a visual disposition in a narrative technique introduced 100 years ago by the Dadaists. By employing such strategies in contemporary visuals in digital culture, the creators of the meme render themselves knowingly or unknowingly to a “sort of Dadaesque stunt” (Innes 2011: 88–89). 5.4 Linkages between Meme and Dadaism Meme culture and Dadaism exhibit not only visual similarities with each other but also share common cultural and psychological roots. The renowned Dada artist Tristan Tzara once said that the beginnings of the Dada movement came not out of a desire to make art but out of a profound disgust with the world. In a similar line of thought, meme culture also emerged out of a rejection of mainstream art with humour and irony as narrative strategies. Both stem from the rejection of societal norms and seem to have much the same purpose of addressing the disillusionment of their respective generations. The way Dada art form that originated after World War I, was a medium to express protest, so is disillusionment unequivocally voiced by millennials through meme culture: Every man must shout: there is a great negative destructive work to be done. To sweep to clean. […] I proclaim the opposition of all cosmic faculties to that blennorrhoea of a putrid sun that issues from the factories of philosophical thought, the fight to the death, with all the resources of— Dadaist Disgust. (Tzara 1918: 12–13) Like Dada art, meme is also ultimately a response to a harsh world. It is the artistic response of the current generation to the world of inequality around them. The creators of the internet meme edit already existing images in a quirky way with a couple of additions and deletions to make fun of or ridicule an individual or a controversial event. Engagement in such activity as a form of art, which is also sometimes called Shitposting, serves as a means to cope with the world and to vent out their frustration and dissatisfaction with the world through absurdity and nonsense. Just like Dada artists in the twentieth century, they also do not care whether they are considered artists in a conventional way as they do not engage with any form of traditional art but are producing pieces that are not typically seen as ‘art’ according to the societal conventions. For them, such forms of creativity is not for the pleasure of the eye but for the engagement of the mind. Engaging the mind through the outrageous use of images via juxtaposition is a display of a spirit of continuity

Dadaism and Internet Meme  77 which began with Dada works of art where “provocative, incongruous, nonsensical images were used that deceive the audience expectation in order to create laughter” (Forbes 2017: 199). 5.5 Conclusion The chapter illustrates various ways in which internet memes of the twenty-first century can be seen as a resurgence of the Dada form of art. Both art techniques use the same concept, which is of creating something new out of something old, creating something unique from something that has been replicated before. The creativity of such artistic forms lies in recontextualising and remixing of images and characters that are already familiar to the masses in funky, amusing and unexpected ways. The internet meme acts as a catalyst in contemporary societies that are inclined to receive information through looking rather than reading. With their highly engaging but deceptive simplicity in visual form, they are ideally best suited for entertainment and communication related to political and marketing phenomena. Because they are created in different formats and for different purposes, they amalgamate various artistic mediums to create a fresh piece of art which eventually makes them truly intermedial. It was Dada artists who began to democratise art and make it accessible to the masses. The process of democratisation of art is viable for internet memes as well, as the meme artists need no formal schooling or institutional training. The psychological and behavioural roots of internet memes can be traced back to the era of Dadaism. Though art stirs human sentiments, those feelings are often difficult to describe as language has its limitations. Eventually, it is totally upon the artist’s discretion to express the inexpressible thoughts and emotions either verbally, in writing or by any other means. In this regard, the artistic piece of work is merely a physical embodiment of the artist’s state of mind. And the artist may choose any medium according to his natural inclinations, such as painting, poetry, collage, music or dance. Though the advocates of Dada had an anti-art inclination, a century later, paradoxically, they are credited with extending the frontiers of art. Many forms and strategies of contemporary art display traces and reverberations of Dadaism. The temporality of Dada extends beyond the boundaries of space, time and culture. In this way, each artwork and movement is an answer to the preceding ones, thereby reflecting a spirit of continuity in the history of art and literature. Works Cited Ball, Hugo. Flight out of time: A Dada Diary by Hugo Ball, John Elderfield (ed.), trans. Ann Raims, California: John Hopkins University of California Press, 1996. Börzsei, Linda. “Makes a Meme Instead: A Concise History of Internet Memes.” New Media Studies Magazine, 2013. Cabbane, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, London: Da Capo Press, 2009.

78  Art, Artistry and Aesthetic Theory Forbes, Adam. “Nihilistic Light Entertainment and Metamorphic Linkages: Dada and Contemporary Comedy.” Comedy Studies, 8, 2017, pp. 197–216. Huelsenbeck, Richard (ed.). DADA Almanach, Berlin: Erich Reiss, 1920. Hopkins, David. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Innes, Randy. “‘The Day Nobody Died’, War Photography, and the Violence of the Image.” Revue d’art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review, 39(2), 2014, pp. 88–99. “‘Dada—unsterblich’ (Vorwort)”. In Dada zum Vergnügen, edited by Hermann Korte and Kalina Kupezynska, Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005, p. 18. Miltner, Kate M. “Internet Memes.” In J. Burgess, A. Marwick, and T. Poell (eds.), Handbook of Social Media, London: Sage, 2017, pp. 412–428. Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 3rd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Tzara, Tristan. “Dada Manifesto (1918).” In: Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. Barbara Wright, London: Cadler, 1992, pp. 3–13. Wiggins, Bradley E. The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics and Intertextuality, New York: Routledge, 2019.

Part III

Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas



6

“Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen” Goethe’s Discourse on Poetry and Religion in the Poem Open Secret of the West-Eastern Divan Hamid Tafazoli

With the words “imitation of what has already been there” (Goethe 2019: 450),1 Goethe reacts in Dichtung und Wahrheit on the relationship of poetry and truth by using the example of Ovid in Herder’s criticism. In his review of the Ancient Literature of Greece and Rome, Goethe mentions that we find neither Greece nor Italy in the poetry; he acts from the assumption that poetry is the imagination of the culture (Schmitzer 2001: 196f.). Thus, poetry becomes a medium of consciousness of the World and the Self. The power of poetry in the sense of the relationship of the human and the world that bears, construes and constitutes meanings can be seen in the encounter of Goethe and Hafez in the West-Eastern Divan. The poem Emulation in the Book of Hafiz is a distinct example of those moments of encounter. Goethe wrote the Book of Hafiz at the beginning of his reception of Hafez in the second decade of the eighteenth century. Hence, the Book of Hafiz can be understood as a programmatic writing project that finally flows into a collection called the West-Eastern Divan. There are many aspects that shape Goethe’s encounter with Hafez. According to the Book of Hafiz, religion is the main aspect of self-identification in poetic words. In no other book is the relationship of poetry and religion explained so precisely as in the Book of Hafiz. In this book, the poem Open Secret (Goethe 1998: 67) is significant.2 According to its title and content, Open Secret is an example of Goethe’s preference for oxymoronic phrases and content. This article focuses on the analysis of this poem, discussing open – or in other words apparent – and secret, firstly in general terms of Goethe’s writing and then a close reading in the specific context of the Divan. I argue that Goethe’s Divan-Poem opens up a plethora of meanings of the oxymoron apparent and secret that we are already familiar with in Goethe’s writing as an intercultural and interreligious discourse. Goethe created a rhetorical figure as a poetic technique3 that already exists in Hafez’s poetry. The relevance of the rhetorical figure for the interpretation of the oxymoron apparent and secret stems from the fact that the figure addresses the relationship of poetry and religion and ascribes certain meanings to this relationship. The third part of the article discusses how Goethe’s rhetorical figure acts similar to Hafez’s figure Rend.4 In Goethe’s and Hafez’s writing, the rhetorical figure advances to become a voice of identification that enjoys the freedom denied to the human. The intercultural and interreligious approaches indicate the methodology of my analysis. My article proceeds comparatively. It investigates how Goethe transfers DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-10

82  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas in his reflections on the relationship of poetry and religion the differences into a discourse on the relationship of differences and similarities discussed in the second section of this paper. The Divan creates and demonstrates the culmination of intercultural encounters. At the same time, it requires a reader who is able to interpret the intercultural relationship with regard to differences as well as similarities. Such a reading will allow a contemporary understanding of the dynamics of culture in the sense of the practice of comparison (Beacker 2000: 26). 6.1 Apparent versus Secret The semantically contradictory expression “Geheimnisvoll offenbar” (mysteriously evident) can be traced back to the hymn Harzreise im Winter written in December 1777 and first published in 1789 in the eighth volume of Goethe’s work. Around 40 years before the Divan was published, Goethe used apparent and secret with the symbolism of something being visible and incomprehensible at the same time (Goethe 1987: 324). His reference is not directly to God, but rather to a divine authority (Stein 2007). Harzreise im Winter reflects in addition to the Roman mythology a biblical background that – as so often in Goethe’s work – is pantheistical recast. Another example of the supposedly opposite as a philosophical worldview is provided by the poem Epirrhema, written in 1819.5 The lyrical narrator demands of the audience that it should receive the “Heilig öffentlich Geheimnis” without “Säumnis” and it should enjoy the real appearance because “Kein Lebend’ges ist ein Eins,/Immer ist’s ein Vieles” (Goethe 1988: 498). In the concluding verses, the poem constructs a view on interlocking, differentiation and multidimensionality of individual and life. Epirrhema alludes to diversity as the creative principle. Four years earlier, Goethe expresses the idea of being One and More at the same time in the poem Gingo biloba in the Book of Suleika: “It is not my songs’ suggestion/That I’m one and also two?” (Goethe 1998: 261) Figuration of engaging, differentiation and multidimensionality is also encountered in Wilhelm Meister Wanderjahre where the protagonist recognises the divine in nature: In gesprächiger Hinderung auf die wechselnden Herrlichkeiten der Gegend, mehr aber noch durch konzentrierte Nachahmung, wurden ihm die Augen aufgetan und er von allen sonst hartnäckig gehegten Zweifeln befreit. Verdächtig waren ihm von jeher Nachbildungen Italienischer Gegenden gewesen; der Himmel schien ihm zu blau, der violette Ton reizender Fernen zwar höchst lieblich doch unwahr und das mancherlei frische Grün doch gar zu bunt; nun verschmolz er aber mit seinem neuen Freunde auf’s innigste, und lernte, empfänglich wie er war, mit dessen Augen die Welt sehen, und indem die Natur das offenbare Geheimnis ihrer Schönheit entfaltete, mußte man nach Kunst als der würdigsten Auslegerin unbezwingliche Sehnsucht empfinden. (Goethe 1989: 499f.)

“Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”  83 Nature and art as its interpreter reveal the mysteries of creation but without really revealing the secret of the creation. The unwavering position of Mephistopheles towards Faust in questions of creation can be traced back to Goethe’s view of nature. In the fourth act of the tragedy, Mephistopheles narrates the natural historical catastrophe and concludes with the remark: “Ein offenbar Geheimnis wohlverwahrt/ Und wird nur später den Völkern offenbart” (Goethe 1995: 393). These verses are among the countless references that Faust’s poetry makes to the Bible (Epheser 6, 12). In the fairy tale of the sixth and last part of the Recreations of the German Emigrants, the golden king asks the old man how many secrets he knows: “Drei, versetzte der Alte – Welches ist das wichtigste? fragte der silberne König. – Das offenbare, versetzte der Alte. – Willst du es auch uns eröffnen? fragte der eherne. – Sobald ich das vierte weiß, sagte der Alte” (Goethe 1992: 1089). The trinity is surpassed by a fourth; but the most important secret remains as the “offenbare”. On the basis of the cited examples, the terms apparent and secret effect a bipolar perspective and allude to a clear but impenetrable sphere that has a transcendental effect by suggesting a divine authority. The Open Secret reflects the expansion of the impenetrable sphere. While Goethe formed the symbolism of apparent and secret on the basis of the New Testament and Christianity, he uses in the Divan a different area of reference that he derives from his interaction with the Persianlanguage poetry and the writings of Islamic jurisprudence. It is remarkable that Goethe constructs a rhetorical figure who is able to polarise the relationship of poetry and religion on behalf of the lyrical narrator. By employing polarisation as a literary technique, the interaction of the transcendental sphere and the human word is thrown out of balance in favour of the human word. Thus, Goethe’s technique in the construction of the oxymoron apparent and secret not only proves a criticism of religion but also an intercultural and interreligious reading and opens a comparative perspective of interpretation. Several studies on Divan have highlighted the poetic conversation between Goethe and Hafez. However, it is less known, that Goethe constructs a rhetorical figure in Hafez who reflects Hafez’s rhetorical figure Rend. Therefore, this literary artifice causes a double reflection: Like Rend, Hafez depicts in Goethe’s Divan the figure that carries the voice of the lyrical narrator in the discourse on the relationship of poetry and religion. In reflections on these figurations, both poets invent their own ego (Tafazoli 2007: 517–539). As the poetic discourse on the relationship of poetry and religion mirrors Goethe and Hafez as well as Christianity and Islam, the possibility of comparative interpretation must be explored. Beyond its undisputed success in a receptive and productive contention with Persian literature, the Divan emerges as a work of an extremely attentive and farsighted poet who teaches us a critical approach to the religious issues of the present. The Divan should be considered as a work in the theoretical context of contemporary aesthetics that highlights the independence of literature as an aesthetic subject area with the intention to determine more consciously and precisely how to think about literature under the influence of media, economic and social conditions of the present (Baßler/Drügh 2021: 10). “Gegenwärtigkeit”

84  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas implies a kind of intensity that is experienced for an important, even social or political oppressed or threatening situation (ibid.: 16). The aesthetic approach towards Divan means maintaining distance from some conventional and traditional debates. In almost all discussions of religious allusion, the Divan is idealised. However, Goethe’s critical treatment of religions in general and of Islam specifically speaks against idealisation. With a comparative analysis of the relationship of poetry and religion, my article aims to sharpen the critical discourse on religion in literature with the example of the Book of Hafiz. Goethe’s Poet and Hafez’s Rend reiterate that literature eludes the pragmatic reality coding of language and submits to a self-generated agreement on images that are partly included within a traditional system of images and are partly characteristic in each work. We are well aware of the traditional system of images produced by the professionalisation of literature and the reading habits that takes place through the interaction of aesthetic and cultural alterity in the period before, around and after 1800. Three examples should be mentioned for a better understanding: Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779) negotiates in Jerusalem the illegitimate exclusion of Judaism and Islam from Europe’s self-image and converts cultural differences based on religious justification into similarities that are solely based on biological kinship and not on beliefs derived from experiences. Montesquieu’s epistolary novel Lettres Persanes (1721) discusses in 161 letters historical, political and philosophical influences of religion in society. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800/1802), Novalis radically demands the individual right to self-interpretation against the background of infinite possibilities of interpreting history, future development possibilities and in view of the wealth of meaning offered by intercultural similarity relations that became unmanageable at the beginning of the nineteenth century. My view goes beyond the conventional system of alterity. With regard to Christianity and Islam, my article considers Goethe’s Divan as an interreligious discourse of literature that creates differences and similarities in the sense of intellectual cultural discourse. In this context, Goethe’s Divan merits special mention and attention in theories of contemporary aesthetics. The Book of Hafiz allows a discussion beyond intercultural theories reduced to the application to cultural entities such as “Orient” or “Occident”. It opens up the perspective to the dynamics of literary creation of differences and similarities as an important aspect of literary discourses of culture. 6.2  “Die Seel’ zur Seele fliehend”: Poet-Interlocutions Translations from modern Persian poetry into German motivated Goethe to imitate and adapt genres and motifs in his Divan (Nicoletti 2002). First and foremost was the translation of Hafez’s collection of poems by the Austrian diplomat and orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856) in 1814.6 Hafez’s Diwan was for Goethe a source of inspiration that had a receptive and productive effect on him. This effect is particularly reflected in literary conversations (Henckmann 1975) between the Poet-Figure in Divan. Goethe’s quoted verse “[d]ie Seel’ zur Seele

“Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”  85 fliehend” (Goethe 2010: 217) could be understood as a symbolic expression of the propinquity in poetry. The Divan has provoked several controversies. In the time period from the 1960s to the 1980s, the literary studies address the Divan through questions that primarily pursue historical perspectives.7 With the expansion of cultural studies (Benthien 2002, Schößler 2006), the research perspective on Divan changes from an exclusively work–historical focus to discussions on approaches to poetry (Manger 2003, Mommsen 2012, Falaki 2013, Porra 2017). The shift in research emphasis effectuates understanding cultural spaces in the Divan as intercultural constructions of individual and cultural self-reflection in poetry (Frühwald 1998, Tafazoli 2012, Tafazoli 2013). While conventional research deduces from the Divan theoretical concepts of one or the other Orientalism (Said 1978, Polaschegg 2005), the intercultural approaches insist that the Divan can no longer be viewed merely as a literary testimony of cultural representations of the Own and the Other (Cami 2019).8 Exemplarily, Goethe’s Divan provides evidence that literary studies distance themselves from the understanding of culture as an ontology (Voßkamp 2008). Accordingly, interpretations of cultural spaces in the Divan as per se Persian or German, Oriental or Occidental, Jewish or Arabic, Islamic or Christian became obsolete (Gutjahr 2010). The examination of literary constructions of culture using the example of the Divan looks beyond the dichotomisation and considers attempts at individual and cultural self-reflection in poetry. This shift of perspective seems to be quite fruitful. Orientalism, Postcolonial Studies and theories of alterity cling to the criterion of difference and can consequently hardly overcome the dichotomous hurdle. However, questions of constructions, modifications and techniques of cultural relationships in literature make it possible to direct the perspective beyond difference and to focus it on modalities of the relationship of differences and similarities. Hence differences, as well as similarities will be the object of my discussion (Bhatti 2011, Tafazoli 2019: 64–67). The Book of Hafiz exemplifies how we could understand the relationship between differences and similarities in the literary reflection on culture. In this book, the Divan-Poet and the Poet-Figure enter into a relationship that is different and similar at the same time. Goethe speaks about “characterisation”, “appreciation” and “admiration” of Hafez in the announcement in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände (1816) following a description of the Book of the Singer and concludes that Hafez is unattainable in emulation (Goethe 2010: 979). Nevertheless, the poems in the Book of Hafiz testify to Goethe’s intentions and attempts at imitation. Hafez is appreciated by Goethe, particularly for his unorthodox attitude towards religion that takes place in the traditional problematic of profane or spiritual interpretation of Hafez’s Diwan. Goethe’s characterisation of Hafez is the main object of the Book of Hafiz and it unfolds in several conversations. Therefore, The Book of Hafiz not only stands out as Goethe’s first attempt at imitation and adaptation but also as a poetic space of modelling of conversations. Conversations take place where judgements are missing. In the poem Open Secret, such judgements and their effectiveness are the focus of the conversation between both the Poet-Figures. This conversation is modelled

86  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas by the construction of a rhetorical figure who rises up in the poet’s name against the orthodoxy and the religious appropriation of poetry. This figure is regarded as the speaking authority in Goethe’s as well as in Hafez’s poems and helps to determine the position of the poet in the relationship between poetry and religion. With regard to the Book of Hafiz and Open Secret as a conversation piece, the question arises as to what extent a semantic field of poetic reflections is generated in the figure Hafez that counteracts the interpretive sovereignty of orthodoxy over poetry and constitutes poetry against orthodoxy. However, I do not understand the dialogue in the romantic and fantastic sense (Aurnhammer 2002, Kamaluldin 2009) but as a rhetorical meaning of conversation (Bergmann 1981). Dialogue forms the basis of the concept of Dialogicity in the works of the cultural semiotician Mikhail Bachtin (Bachtin 1979, Bachtin 1990) and is applied as a literary–theoretical term to the competing polyphony of literary texts in particular. Accordingly, incompatible points of view are expressed in the same text. The interference of two ways of speaking or voices creates the ambiguity of words or utterances (Imo 2016). When Goethe’s Divan is discussed as an outstanding example of intertextuality in literature, the discussions about intertextual references can be proceeded by expanding Bachtin’s concept in Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality (Kristeva 1971, Kristeva 1972). Assuming intertextuality as a literary technique (Pfeister 1994), this chapter explores the competing and correlating polyphony in the Book of Hafiz by asking two questions: How are conversations between the Divan-Poet and the Poet-Figure modelled on the object of poetry and religion? How do both figures recognise themselves in the relationship of poetry and religion? With regard to Goethe’s poetic technique, I argue that the poem Open Secret reflects the dispute that Hafez already designed in his rhetorical figure Rend. The semantic fields of poetic reflections constitute the focus of my analysis. The opening poem of the Book of Hafiz demonstrates what poetic reflections mean to Hafez and Goethe: Let the word be called the bride, Bridegroom the spirit’s name; You know this wedding sanctified If Hafis you acclaim. (Goethe 1998: 51) With the erotically tinged allegory of the marriage of word and spirit, Goethe alludes to the profound content of Hafez’s poems. Goethe found the template for this quatrain in Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s (1774–1856) translation of Hafez’s Diwan: Keiner hat noch Gedanken, Wie Hafis, entschleiert, Seit die Locken der Wortbraut Sind gekräuselt worden. (Hafez 1812: 369f.) Goethe reflects, through this allegory, on the tender and sometimes erotic love songs already highlighted in the Song of Solomon (Bohnenkamp 2004). However,

“Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”  87 the allegory undergoes a transformation in the Book of Hafiz. Hafez speaks with an erotic intention of – so literally – combing the locks of the brides of words through the ghazal and of unveiling the face of thoughts through himself (Hafez 1812: 367f.). According to Hendrik Birus, Goethe misunderstood Hammer’s new word formation “Wortbraut” for “Brides of the Word” (Goethe 2010: 981). Hammer, Birus continues, reproduces later in a note correctly his translation but answers the obvious question of the bridegroom according to the New Testament couple “the spirit and the bride” in Revelation of John (22, 17).9 Anke Bosse adds that Goethe expands the wedding motive without a model of Hafez (Bosse 1999: 166). The imitation shows that Goethe reinforces the intention of the quatrain by positioning the concise Trochaic quatrain as the motto for the entire book on the one hand and gives, on the other hand, Hafez’s allegory a religious undertone through the Old and New Testament colouring. The opening poem of the Book of Hafiz draws on this technique and elevates the lyrical narrator to a similar position. According to Boisserée’s diary entry of August 3rd, 1815, the poem Sobriquet, written on June 26th, 1814, reflects a dialogical visualisation of Hafez who knows the Koran by the Divan-Poet who in turn knows the Bible. In Goethe’s technique, Sobriquet advances to become a religious cypher in the conversation between two poetic figures. In the original handwritten version, Sobriquet is still called “Zwiegeschpräch ” (Goethe 2010: 982). Religious associations act as a frame in the characterisation of the Poet-Figure and offer a mask for the poetic emulation technique of the Divan-Poet (Krolow 1982). It is here that Hafez’s name in the second stanza in the verse “Radiant vision of belief” (Goethe 1998: 53) becomes significant. The Divan-Poet suggests a conscious distance from the pious clergy in the poem Accusation. Accusation is also closely related to the next two poems Fetwa and The German Gives Thanks. These three poems lead the poetic discourse of a kind of “court proceedings” (Goethe 2010: 988). Accusation speaks from the perspective of a devout Muslim who considers the poet’s world of thought to be dubious: Yet they will let his song remain Though it speaks against the Koran’s concept. Teach us now, you men who know the laws, Learned all in wise and pious saws, What for faithful Moslems is firm precept. (Goethe 1998: 55) In the relationship between poetry and religion, this stanza emphasises the inseparability of poetry and religion but grants the poet an exception to the rule. The answer to the question asked in the last verse of the indictment “Tell us, what is one to make of this” (Goethe 1998: 55) follows in Fetwa that refers directly to Hafez in the first verse: “In his poetry Hafiz has inscribed/ Undeniable truth indelibly” (Goethe 1998: 57). Fetwa is inspired by a passage in Hammer’s Preface and reports on the dispute between Ottoman Koran scholars about the appropriate interpretation of Hafez’s poetry. A legal opinion by Mufti Ebusuud puts an end to this dispute (Hafez 1812: XXXIIIf.). Even more notable is Hammer’s commentary

88  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas on Ebusuud’s report. The translator praises the mufti for his subtle way of avoiding orthodoxy and notes that Hafez’s poems seem to be mostly intoxicated and erotic in content (Hafez 1812: XXXIIIf.). With the structurally coordinated context of the content, Goethe seems to be following a programmatic plan in the Book of Hafiz. Accusation and Fetwa prefigure the poet in his prominent role by naming and canonizing the mufti Ebusuud. In the poem The German Gives Thanks, it is not the religious but the poetic word that counts as sublime: Thus the aging poet still can hope That in Paradise the Houris’ welcome Will receive him as a youth transfigured. Holy Ebusuud, you’ve hit it! (Goethe 1998: 59) The stanza refers to the sixth and seventh stanzas of Hegira in the Book of the Singer where the poet announces that he joins the company of Hafez: Holly Hafiz, you shall guide me, Be at wells and inns beside me, When my love unveils, caresses, Strewing scent from amber tresses. Yes, the poet’s whispered yearning Even starts the Houris burning. If your envy this despises Or belittles precious prizes You should learn that poet’s diction Is no commonplace of fiction, Hovering soft by heaven’s portal It seeks life that is immortal. (Goethe 1998: 7) The dispute over the relationship between poetry and religious orthodoxy is finally settled in the second Fetwa poem. The immediate source of this poem is an anecdote in Knebel’s letter to Goethe on January 25th, 1815 about the Turkish poet Misri Afendi who was suspected of not being a real Muslim because of his poems. The mufti pronounced the following verdict after reading Afendi’s poems: “So whoever speaks and believes like Misri Afendi shall be burned; except for Misri Afendi: for no fatwa can be pronounced on those who are filled with enthusiasm”.10 The exceptional position of the poet and the judge’s declaration of his inability to condemn the poetic word are transformed by Goethe in the second Fetwa poem: “For Allah gave each poet talent” (Goethe 1998: 61). According to Birus, if Accusation describes the poet as someone “whose every move is an act of madness” (Goethe 1998: 55), the resulting poetic furore should not be understood as insanity but as God’s gift to the poet (Goethe 2010: 1002). Fetwa concludes that the poet and his word are beyond human judgement. Neither the poet is a saint nor his word and worldview are accessible to human discernment. When the DivanPoet addresses his Poet-Figure in the poem Hegira with the title Saint Hafiz, he

“Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”  89 does not ascribe to him the status of a holy believer but declares his veneration. At the same time, he highlights that the poet is responsible for his words only in front of divine authority. The two Fetwa poems declare the poet to be on equal footing with this authority. The Divan-Poet claims a special position for himself as well when he seeks to compete with Hafez in the poems Unlimited and Emulation. The fact that the poet separates himself from the social masses and faces the divine authority alone, enjoys veneration and his word eludes human and religious judgement is highlighted in the poem Open Secret. Open Secret was written on December 10th, 1814 and is therefore one of the core poems of the Divan. It still bears the title “Mystische Zunge” (Mystic Tongue) in the Wiesbadener Register.11 Goethe used two sources for his poem: Hammer introduces Hafez as “mystical tongue and the interpreter of secrets” whose poems contain “many secret teachings and profound truths” (Hafez 1812: XII). According to his diary entry from December 8th-10th, 1814, Goethe read William Jones’ Poesis Asiatica again and studied Jones’ remarks on Hafez’s poems. Jones introduces Hafez with a reference to the Persian original as Lessan garib (Jones 1777: 86–106, 87). Goethe uses Lessan ol-ghaib (hidden tongue) instead of the incorrect translation Lessan garib and translates the correct form in his poem Open Secret: The ones who are learned in letters Have called you the mystical tongue, And yet thy do not know the value Of the word and of what you have sung. Mystic is what they call you Since in you their own nonsense they’ve sensed And their own wine that’s impure They’ve called by your name and dispensed. You[r] thought[s] are mystically pure Because they can’t rightly read And see that, without being pious, you’re blessed! For you that’s something they won’t concede. (Goethe 1998: 67) The first stanza can be divided into a statement (in the first two verses) and a criticism (in the last two verses). The second stanza deepens the poetic transformation before the lyrical narrator addresses Hafez in the narrator’s perspective in the third stanza. The second stanza draws on Hammer’s commentary. The translator considers Hafez and his poetry in the tension between orthodoxy and mysticism. According to Hammer, the first group rejects Hafez’s poetry with the accusation of “heavy sensual lust and forbidden doctrine”; the second group declares “the sensual images for supernatural allegories, and the whole language of Hafisens for mystical language” in order to save the honour of the poet (Hafez 1812: XXXIIf.). The translator follows his commentary with the anecdote of Ebusuud’s Fetwa. The third stanza not only puts an end to the dispute between orthodoxy and mysticism but also positions the Poet-Figure. The expression “mystically pure” in the

90  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas first verse and the connection “without being pious, you are blessed” in the third verse of the third stanza produce and constitute meaning. The combination “mystically pure” has been the source of some controversy. Ursula Wertheim discusses “mystically pure” on the basis of a comparison of the orthographic variations in different manuscripts with Goethe’s fair copy and emphasises the close connection between “mystical” and “pure”. Furthermore, she suggests that “because” in the verse that follows should not be understood causally but temporally. However, Wertheim does not really solve the problem by basing her conclusion on the mystical interpretation of Hafez’s poems.12 Wertheim’s interpretation is well in line with traditional interpretations. As Hammer and Jones have already pointed out, the interpretation of Hafez’s poetry in general and of the phrase “mystically pure” specifically, is a matter of the commentators and not of the poet himself. Hendrik Birus is a little more specific. He refers to Wertheim’s argument and supplements it insofar as he speaks against understanding mystical as an adverbial definition to purely or interpreting purely as an adverb for “merely”.13 Birus regards “mystically pure” as an “equal merging of two adjectives” that contrasts with foolish (närrisch) and unfair (unlautern) wine in the second stanza (Goethe 2010: 1018). The composition of “mystically pure” would indicate the difference between the foolish and unfair mysticism of Hafez’s interpreters. Consequently, the contrast of poetic words and the interpretation of it means that Hafez’s mysticism does not require a projection surface of unfolding based on experience, prior knowledge, belief and interpretation. My reading understands “purely” in Kant’s sense as an activity of reason that does not fall back on experience (Kant 1998: 11–19). This reading would be confirmed in a more precise interpretation of the poem Open Secret based on Goethe’s understanding of mysticism on the one hand and his interpretation of mysticism in the intercultural conversation between the PoetFigures on the other hand. Goethe adopts a critical and ambiguous attitude towards the mystical interpretation of religion: He rejects the “intricate-overshadowed” (verworren-verdüsternd) mysticism in Sprüchen in Prosa (Goethe 1994: 407) and criticises the “abstruse mysticism” of the Indians in the section Recent and Recent Travelers of the Divan (Goethe 2010: 269). At the same time, Goethe describes mysticism in the Book of Parables in the section Future Divan as “union with God already in this life” (Goethe 2010: 228). As a reader of travelogues, the author of the section Recent and Recent Travelers is familiar with the “defects of a strange constitution and unfortunate religion” (Goethe 2010: 269) in the Orient; however, he recognises in poetry the only medium that serves the poet in order to circumvent that condition: “In poetry,” Goethe remarks in the same passage, “the salvation of mankind remains preserved”; he emphasises “the glory of poetry in that pure humanity, noble custom, glory and love take refuge” (Goethe 2010: 269). Even when Goethe takes an apparently positive attitude towards mysticism, he explains the expressive side of mysticism that he mentions in Sprüchen in Prosa.14 Goethe’s interest does not apply exclusively to mysticism understood in a religious sense. The poet seems to be richer in the mysticism that emerges in poetry. Finally, mysticism is an object of poetry not of religion.

“Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”  91 Goethe reflects in the first two stanzas of Open Secret on the connection between poetry and mysticism and he develops his understanding with references to Hafez’s poetry and to religious mysticism. According to Birus, “because” in the second verse of the third stanza could be understood as causal or as an adversative conjunction (Goethe 2010: 1019). The double possibility of interpretation puts a stronger emphasis on the polarisation between the poet and the “word scholars”: The Divan-Poet describes Hafez as “mystically pure” and sees himself as a connoisseur of Hafez’s poetry. At the same time, Goethe denies “word scholars” any competence in the interpretation of the poet’s words. In Open Secret, the DivanPoet retrospectively confirms the special status of the poet in both the Fetwa and in the poem Hint where the poetic word and its ambiguity prevail over any religious and political appropriation. This high status of poetry is reflected in the literary technique of contrasting that culminates in the verse “without being pious, you’re blessed!” Piousness means in Goethe’s worldview “comfort”; conversely, a life without piousness means making more effort and discovering the own ego (Goethe 1988: 737). In the prose section on Hafez in Besserem Verständniss, a life without piousness means the rejection of religious practice according to the rigid pattern of orthodoxy (Goethe 2010: 175) and thus also the exit from “comfort”. In contrast to pious, Goethe uses the adjective blessed. This adjective plays a key role in the Divan as we know in the poem Blessed Longing in the Book of the Singers (Goethe 1998: 47). Blessed and longing enter into an ambiguous relationship based on Hafez’s poems (Goethe 2010: 968f.) that is expressed in divine and earthly love. Only the “sages” (Goethe 1998: 47) could reveal the secret of this love. In the relationship of the poetic and the divine word, the poet and the sages build one side, the “word scholars” and the “pious” the other. The poem Open Secret reflects the grandeur of the poetic word and the poet’s freedom by taking responsibility for the poet’s thoughts and words. This is also the aesthetic value of poetry, at least if this value is understood in terms of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics. Goethe marvels at Hafez’s poetic grandeur and constructs with the Poet-Figure the imitation of the meanings that are familiar to us in Hafez’s rhetorical figure. Goethe touches on the core problem of interpretation of Hafez’s poems and positions his own rhetorical figure accordingly. In his polarisation, the “sages” and “who are learned in letters” build the one side, “mystically pure” and “without being pious, you’re blessed” on the other side. In this dynamic relationship, the ambiguity of the poetry outweighs the monosemantical religious task. 6.3 The Figuration of a Worldview Literary techniques of self-identification in reflections of a rhetorical figure in the Book of Hafiz can also be found in Hafez’s poetry in the figure Rend. Goethe does not mention Rend at any point in the Divan. However, the composition of “mystically pure” and “without being pious, you’re blessed” strongly suggests that Goethe was certainly inspired by Rend as a figure of ambiguity and self-identification. The semantics of Rend that Goethe must have encountered in the translations

92  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas of Hafez’s speak in favour of this assumption. According to Hammer and Jones as well as a large number of interpreters, Hafez constructs through Rend a figure with different levels and layers of meaning. The question of whether Hafez opens up religious, Sufi or mystical perspectives cannot be answered unequivocally. Although Gertrude Bell and Annemarie Schimmel for example refer to an unmistakable undertone of mysticism, they point out that we cannot look at Rend through a reductionistic perspective of a strictly mystical exegesis (Bell 1995: 51–54, Schimmel 1975: 288). This scepticism is to some extent valid. In contrast to scholarly studies on Goethe, in research on Hafez, we only have access to his Diwan as a source. Hafez’s poems contain motives, allegories and allusions that can only be interpreted in a polysemic and open manner. The conventional insincerity or politeness of Ghazel and the need for veiled criticism of sociopolitical and religious circumstances (Rypka 1968: 85) make the interpretations of Hafez’ poetry more difficult. The poetic technique of Hafez for expressing sociopolitical and religious criticism allows us to see in Rend a figure that develops semantics of an individual worldview on the collective and cultural topics that couldn’t be spoken openly in public. Rend advances to become a borderline figure: Rend is located in the network of sociopolitical and religious conditions on the one hand and separates itself from the conventional horizons of thought and action on the other. In order to understand the polyvalence in the relationship between Hafez’s Rend and Goethe’s Open Secret, it would be necessary to gain an overview of the figurations of competitive relationships in Hafez’s poetry. Daryoosh Ashouri highlights in his book Mysticism and Rindi (2000) a number of interdisciplinary approaches which doubt the understanding of Hafez’s figure Rend as purely mystical or absolutely profane. But more than Ashouri’s hermeneutical approaches, it is Franklin Lewis’s text-immanent reading that opens up the discourse of Rendi in Hafez’s writing (Lewis 2012). Lewis notes that figures in Hafez’s writing often appear in pairs and he recognises a technique of meaning construction that places figures in a correlative, competitive or contradictory relationship of meaning to each other. Lewis constitutes Rend as a figure that describes the controversial relationship of authority and individuality, hypocrisy and authenticity, duplicity and honesty. Following Lewis, Rend evokes in Hafez’s poetry a rhetorical figure as well as a terminus technicus. Lewis’ conceptual analysis derives exclusively from the figures in Hafez’s poetry. Zahed-e żaherparast is the figure of the hypocritical ascetic and Zohd-e riā (hypocrisy of asceticism) the semantic field of his action. Hafez uses them to address a paradox of human action: Zahed-e żaherparast teaches the public religious and moral precepts, privately, however, he violates his own teaching. He is the contradictory figure of so-called scholars who preach water but drink wine. The criticism of authorities finds expression through the figure of the preacher (wāʿeẓ) as an egregious example of hypocrisy. The poet sees the true aim of those who preach repentance not in healing souls but in restraining the freedom-loving individual with compulsive obligations (Hafez 1812: 233). According to Hafez, such preachers live pseudo-pious, are hypocrites and are smug about their influence

“Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”  93 in society. With a sip of wine (Hafez 1812: 12), the poet not only discovers the true face of the hypocritical ascetic; he also recognises in wine what the Zahed-e żaherparast claims to achieve through religion (Hafez 1812: 12). In addition to the ascetic (zāhed) and to the preacher (wāʿeẓ), Lewis describes the market and moral officials (moḥtaseb), the priest (šayḵ), the law enforcement officer (faqih), and the judge (qāżi) as other figures of pseudo-piousness. He mentions that Hafez even includes Sufis in this group. According to Lewis, Hafez constructs a position opposite to pseudo-pious authorities by using groups of beggars, qalandars and those who haunt the ruins (ḵarābāt). The ruins are scenes of illicit amusement, in which drunkards, wine sellers and wine servants (sāqi), the Magian elder (pir-e moḡān), the Magian ephebe (moḡ-bačča) and the beloved (šāhed, delbar, maʿsuq) could be met. Hafez uses this anti-establishment group to construct the figurations of self-doubt and authenticity. The presented groups are actors who represent different and opposite spheres of thoughts and actions. Hafez constructs a third group of characters and addresses the interpreters who recognise in his poetry a kind of mystical piousness. The Sufi group of Malāmatiyān regards themselves as those who do not fear the guilt of a guilty. In their way of thinking, Hafez criticises complacency as the greatest pitfall in the spiritual quest. In Lewis’s understanding, Hafez prefers to be an object of blame in order to gain sincerity. In the interweaving of these groups of characters, Rend can be considered a rhetorical character. Unlike all of the above characters who subordinate their lives to the authority of faith and feel accountable to them, Rend embarks on his own life path based on principles of search and knowledge (Hafez 1813: 156). Rend, therefore, has the autonomous ability to shape its world according to its own views. With variable semantics of Rend in contrast to other figures, Hafez reflects on life and pleads for an individualistic and progressive way. Rend is connected Hafez’s life ideal (Hafez 1813: 424). Rend proves to be an ambassador of Hafez’s philosophy of life, seeking recognition, not favour of the establishment. Anyone who thinks of holding Rend accountable for subservience is wrong (Hafez 1813: 214). Lewis’ characterisation of Rend as “the very antithesis of establishment propriety” (Lewis 2012) supports the understanding that Hafez creates with Rend a figure who distrusts and condemns orthodoxy, sham piety and hypocrisy. The contrastive positioning of Rend against the orthodox establishment makes Rend an irreligious figure with a consciousness intended to protect the poet from the hypocritical selfrighteousness of religious authority. The ambiguity of this complex figure results from the fact that Rend interferes in the double game of morality and free action and condemns the hypocrisy at the same time. What distinguishes the Rend from all other groups of characters is his sincerity, honesty, freedom of thought and action. Rend alone is accountable to the creator for his actions and words (Hafez 1812: 216). In addition, Rend is also a figure of Eros, wine and youth. Turning away from orthodox prohibitions and turning towards love, drinking, sociability and peace as human needs, characterise Rend as a figure who is eager for truths of creation (Hafez 1812: 7, 175). Rend opens up a world of individual freedom. In contrast to

94  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas other figures, Rend derives its function, meaning and legitimacy from the critical stance of the lyrical narrator in confronting societal, religious and cultural grievances. Rend is the figuration of critical rhetoric against social, religious and political constraints and norms and for the liberation of the individual on his way to self-identification. Rend is like a popular rebel, giving a voice to outcasts, outlaws, and anyone who rises up against political and religious conformity through a form of civil disobedience (Hafez 1812: 140). With Rend, Hafez tries out a character who should demonstrate that every transformation is possible with humanity, individuality and freedom. Rend is the ambassador of Hafez’s worldview who acts as a figure of self-identification (Hafez 1813: 205). Hafez’s conversations with Rend are personal and allow the poet to construct a world in that the poet maps his own understanding of humanity to a range of symbolic meanings (Ashouri 2000: 208– 213). Individuality and freedom as fundamental principles of Rend’s worldview open up a wide range of possibilities for the poet to find nonorthodox answers to the question of creation and the creator (Ashouri 2000: 346–354). Jones’ and Hammer’s circuitous comments on the ambiguity of Hafez’s figure have provided Goethe with insights into Rendi as a worldview that is recreated in the Divan by the opposite position of establishment figures on the one hand and the poet on the other. The figuration of opposite semantics mirrors in the Book of Hafiz, mainly in the poem Open Secret and is reflected in Goethe’s knowledge of Hafez’s interpretation of the relationship of poetry and religion as well. Following Hafez’s technique, Goethe produces similar rhetoric when he negotiates the boundaries between clergy and poets. From the perspective of both poets, the negotiation of boundaries of poetry and religion takes place through conversation. Just as Hafez develops the character Rend into a conversation partner, Goethe tests the design of such a figure through Hafez. The paradox that arises in Hafez’s poetology of Rend and in Goethe’s constructions of the Poet-Figure turns out to be a rhetorical device for shaping the conversation and is supported by Socrates’ understanding of the conversation. Socrates calls his understanding Maieutic and sees paradox as a technique that is intended to help the individual to gain knowledge on his own by asking specific questions (Birnbacher 2002). 6.4 Conclusion My article focused on the analysis of the poem Open Secret by referring to open, i.e., apparent and secret in Goethe’s writing and in the Divan. It argued that Goethe’s poem extends the meaning of the oxymoron apparent and secret which is undeniably crucial to Goethe’s intercultural and interreligious discourse. With regards to Goethe and Hafez, the discourse is shaped by the creation of a rhetorical figure as a poetic technique: Rend in Hafez and Hafez in Goethe. These rhetorical figures are absolutely important in the exploration of the uneasy relationship of poetry and religion. Both figures, Rend and Hafez, are the voices of the lyrical narrator on the relationship of poetry and religion with poetry dominating. The poetic universe of Goethe and Hafez describes the individual worldview under the condition of seeing and recognizing oneself in the other. According to

“Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”  95 this worldview and to conversation as a possible concept of its creation, we realise a polyperspective and polysemantic view of the world that goes beyond the monoperspective interpretation of clergy. In the figure Rend by Hafez and in Poet-Figure by Goethe, we recognise the figuration of the worldview to the creation and the creator in the poetic design. The process of indirect reflection serves at the same time selfproduction and is presented by Goethe consistently in his Hafez portrait. Figurations of conversations in the Book of Hafez suggest individuality as human liberation from the frame of religious orthodoxy and are in line with the critical attitude towards the Christian–Islamic restrictions on life. Christianity and Islam, German and Persian initially give the impression that the Divan would emphasise cultural differences through the motive of religion. But by considering poetry as an individual place of decision in Hafez’s symbolism, the Divan transfers differences into similarities and makes the relationship between poetry and religion appear more complex. In the face of ideological affinities, which are reflected in poetry, interreligious differences lose their sovereignty of interpretation. Goethe’s literary technique in composing the Book of Hafez shows a process of aesthetic and cultural alternation as a criticism of religion by negotiating the relationship between poetry and religion. The path of the individual to knowledge and self-consciousness in poetic conversation, as tested by Hafez through Rend and by Goethe through Hafez, culminates in Muhammad Iqbal’s Payam-e-Mashriq (1923) at the turn of the century. Hafez, Goethe and Iqbal are prominent examples of a cultural–theoretical paradigm that thinks of differences and similarities not side-by-side but together. In Divan, this togetherness is symbolised by the ginkgo leaf (Goethe 1998: 261). Goethe’s symbolism can be understood as an admonition of narrow and categorical, homogenizing and reductionist standards for otherwise, the individual will succumb to that comfort that prevents him from any kind of transformation. Notes 1 “Nachahmung des schon Dagewesenen”, English translation by HT. Unless otherwise mentioned, English translations of Goethe’s quotes are provided by HT. 2 I would prefer Apparently Secret (see Tafazoli 2006). 3 For poetic creation and meaning of the rhetorical figure see Brandstetter and Peters 2002.. 4 As a rhetorical figure, Rend is always written in italics. Hafez, i.e. Poet is only written in italics when the rhetorical figure constructed by Goethe is meant. 5 The poem addresses the life as diversity rolled into One and reflects “in scheinbaren Paradoxien” (Wilpert 1998: 276) a central aspect of Goethe’s view on the nature. 6 Several contexts provide commentaries on Divan editions, mainly Goethe 2010; see also Lemmel 1987, Bosse 1999, Schwieder 2001. 7 See representative researches Mommsen 1961, Abdel-Rahim 1969, Mommsen 1988, Golz 1999. 8 Intercultural approaches are confirmed by the historical fact that Persia does not have a postcolonial history that is mentioned by Said. 9 See Hammer’s note in Hafez 1812: 368, Footnote 4. 10 “ Wer also redet und glaubt wie Misri Afendi, der soll verbrannt werden; Misri Afendi ausgenommen: denn über diejenigen, die mit der Begeisterung eingenommen sind, kann kein Fetwa ausgesprochen werden.” (Goethe 2010; 1001).

96  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas 11 See Goethe 2010: 455, Register-Number 82. 12 “[…] mystisch oder nicht mystisch ist also in zweifacher Weise aufzulösen. Hafis bedient sich der traditionellen sufischen Symbolik, die eine formkünstlerische Bedeutung und zugleich verhüllende Funktion hat, das heißt, er bedient sich formal der gleichen Mittel wie die ,Mystiker‘. Was den Gehalt seiner dichterisch manifestierten Weltanschauung betrifft, so ist sie pantheistisch im Sinne einer ,linken Mystik‘. Da aber Mystik nicht gleich Mystik, Sufismus nicht gleich Sufismus zu setzen, ist Hafis sowohl ,Mystiker‘ als auch Nichtmystiker.” (Wertheim 1983: 112). 13 See also Schaeder: 1938, 176, footnote 24. 14 See Goethe 1994: 120, No. 2.10.1, No. 10.2.

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98  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas Lewis, Franklin: „Hafez and Rendi“, in: Encyclopaedia Iranica, [XI/5, pp. 483-491], 2012. https://iranicaonline​.org​/articles​/hafez​-viii, last seen June 20, 2022. Manger, Klaus: Goethe und die Weltkultur, Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. Mommsen, Katharina: Goethe und Diez. Quellenuntersuchungen zu Gedichten der DivanEpoche, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1961. : Goethe und die arabische Welt, Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1988. ———— : „Orient und Okzident sind nicht mehr zu trennen“. Goethe und die Weltkulturen, ———— Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. Nicoletti, Antonella: Übersetzung als Auslegung in Goethes “West-östlichem Divan” im Kontext frühromantischer Übersetzungstheorie und Hermeneutik, Tübingen et al.: Francke, 2002. Pfeister, Manfred: „Intertextualität“, in: Borchmeyer, Dieter et al. (ed.): Moderne Literatur in Grundbegriffen, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1994, pp. 215–218. Polaschegg, Andrea: Der andere Orientalismus. Regeln deutsch-morgenländischer Imagination im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005. Porra, Véronique et al. (ed.): Orient - zur (De-)konstruktion eines Phantasmas, Bielefeld: transcript, 2017. Rypka, Jan et al.: History of Iranian Literature, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968. Schmitzer, Ulrich: “Goethe und die Literatur der frühen Kaiserzeit”, in: Tagungsakten des Kongresses Pontes, Innsbruck 30.9. - 2.10. 1999, Innsbruck 2001 (Comparanda 1), pp. 194-208. (Online by Propylacum. http://archiv​.ub​.uni​-heidelberg​.de​/propylaeumdok​ /174​/1​/Schmitzer​_Goethe​_und​_die​_Literatur​_der​_fruehen​_Kaiserzeit​_2001​.pdf). Schößler, Franziska: Literaturwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft. Eine Einführung, Tübingen et al.: Francke, 2006. Said, Edward W.: Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978. Schaeder, Hans Heinrich: Goethes Erlebnis des Ostens, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1938. Schimmel, Annemarie: Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975. Schwieder, Gabriele: Goethes „West-östlicher Divan“. Eine poetologische Lektüre, Köln et al.: Böhlau, 2001. Stein, Malte: „Johann Wolfgang Goethe: ,Harzreise im Winter‘“, in: Schönert, Jörg et al. (ed.): Lyrik und Narratologie. Text-Analysen zu deutschsprachigen Gedichten vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin et al.: De Gruyter, 2007, pp. 75–97. Wilpert, Gero von: Goethe-Lexikon, Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998. Tafazoli, Hamid: “,So lange das nicht ins Absurde geht erträgt mans auch gern.‘ Ambivalenzen einer Goethe-Rezeption in Persien“, in: Hölter, Achim (ed.): Komparatistik. Jahrbuch der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Heidelberg: Synchron, 2006, pp. 55–70. : Der deutsche Persien-Diskurs. Zur Verwissenschaftlichung und Literarisierung des ——— Persien-Bildes im deutschen Schrifttum von der frühen Neuzeit bis in das neunzehnte Jahrhundert, Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2007. : “Heterotopie als Entwurf poetischer Raumgestaltung”, in: Tafazoli, Hamid; Gray, ——— Richard T.: (Hg.): Außenraum – Mitraum – Innenraum. Heterotopien in Kultur und Gesellschaft, Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2012, pp. 35–59. : „Formen des literarischen Ich- und Weltentwurfs in Goethes West-östlichem ——— Divan“, in: Kemper, Dirk et al. (Hg.): Ich, Individualität, Individuum. Kulturelle Selbstvergewisserung in der Literatur, Frankfurt a.M. et al.: Lang, 2013, pp. 207–211. . Narrative kultureller Transformationen. Zu interkulturellen Schreibweisen in der ——— deutschsprachigen Literatur der Gegenwart, Bielefeld: transcript, 2019.

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7

Indian Thought in Martin Buber’s I and Thou Chandrika Kumar

7.1 Introduction This chapter seeks to study the Indian thought in the monumental work I and Thou of the twentieth-century Austro-German Israeli philosopher, Martin Buber (1878–1965). Though there are multiple concepts of Indian origin that find mention in Buber’s work, it is (1) Buddhist scriptures and (2) the Upanishads – the ancient scriptures of Hinduism – that find special mention in his texts. Although Buddha and his teachings stayed with Buber for a long time, the Upanishads and other scriptures do not find an echo in his later writings after the first publication of Ich und Du (I and Thou) in 1923. While the relation between the Upanishads and Buber’s thoughts has been studied in detail by some scholars, the same does not seem to have happened in the case of Buddha. Other than the historical, religious and literary encounters with India, Buber also happened to have real encounters and discourses with his Indian contemporaries. One was with the prominent poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore, the 1913 Indian Nobel laureate for literature and the other was a politician of world repute who practised philosophical principles of truth and non-violence in his personal and political dealings, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. With the latter Buber never met in person, but he engaged intellectually with him. His essay titled Gandhi, Politics and We (1930) and few years later his letters to Gandhi clearly show the position Buber is taking on Gandhi’s principled concept of non-violence. Buber shared a much warmer relationship with Tagore and they met thrice in real. In this chapter, a humble endeavour has been made to show that Indian thought has a critical presence in I and Thou. Even prior to this treatise, Buber had engaged intellectually with Indian thought for a significant duration. Therefore, this chapter is making an attempt to put Buber’s Indian thought in perspective by briefly illustrating the intellectual history behind Buber’s dialogical principle. It begins with a brief biography of Martin Buber and goes on to assert that I and Thou is an example of philosophical cross-cultural conversation and aesthetics across cultures. 7.2 Meetings and “Mismeeting” in Buber’s Life One of the important twentieth-century writers of German literature, Hermann Hesse, who himself got the Nobel prize in literature, had nominated Martin Buber DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-11

Indian Thought in Martin Buber’s I and Thou  101 for the same prize in the year 1949. Hesse in a letter to a friend explains his nomination of Buber: Martin Buber is in my judgment not only one of the few wise men who live on the earth at the present time, he is also a writer of a very high order, and, more than that, he has enriched world literature with a genuine treasure as has no other living author – the Tales of the Hasidim (…) Martin Buber (…) is the worthiest spiritual representative of Israel, the people that has had to suffer the most of all people in our time. (Friedman 1955: 6) Maurice Friedman, one of the experts on Martin Buber who got to know and write on Buber during the latter’s lifetime, finds it important to mention Hesse’s rich assessment of Buber in his book titled Martin Buber, The Life of Dialogue. Martin Buber was born on 8 February 1878 in Vienna. His parents got separated when he was just three; as a result, he was raised by his paternal grandparents. He got to spend time with his father, but throughout his childhood, he missed his mother and was often told that he would never meet her again. Buber mentions this in his Autobiographical Fragments titled Meetings that he made up the word “Vergegnung” – meaning “mismeeting,” or “miscounter” – “to designate the failure of a real meeting” (Buber 2002: 22) with his mother. But he goes on to say that he met his mother once after at least three decades when she had come to visit him, his wife and children. This too was a brief meeting and after that, they probably never met again. Raised by his grandparents, they left a profound impact on him. His grandfather was a famous Jewish scholar of his time. Thus, Buber’s early life and thoughts received significant inputs and impulses from his grandfather. Even his grandmother was a woman of letters who ran the family business quite efficiently. Buber writes about his grandparents and the impact they left behind in his Autobiographical Fragments: “My grandfather was a true philologist, a ‘lover of the word’, but my grandmother’s love for the genuine word affected me even more strongly than his: because this love was so direct and so devoted.” (Buber 2002: 24f) He joined school relatively late as compared to other pupils of his age. After the school, he studied at the Universities in Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig and Zurich between 1896 and 1902. There he attended lectures and seminars on Art History, Literature, Philosophy and Psychology, but among these disciplines, philosophy and literature were the ones he studied the most. At the end of it all in 1904, he successfully defended his dissertation on the “History of the Problem of Individuation: Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme”. He did not publish his dissertation; neither did he pursue further studies to be considered as a teacher at the university. Instead, he chose to be a freelance writer and got associated with a journal on Jewish religious studies and mysticism. He had a lifelong writing career. His writings have a distinct nature of being literary, philosophical and religious at the same time. On the one hand, he is attached to mysticism; on the other hand, he shows political activism which suited the spirit of his time.

102  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas While Buber experienced his parents’ separation at an early age, he was fortunate to find a lifelong partnership with his wife, Paula Winkler. They met in 1899 at the University in Zurich and started living together. Their marriage took place in 1907; it was then that she converted to Judaism and took the name Buber. Both Paula and Martin had a deep understanding of each other, and this reflects well in their correspondence between 1899 and 1904. A study by Nassrin Elisabeth Sadeghi (2015) shows that Paula continued to work together with Martin Buber and throughout his life she provided him with steady support. Meetings, encounters and interactions with people play an important role in Buber’s life and work. This probably builds the foundation on which Buber develops his dialogical principle which is also famous as his philosophy of dialogue. As an editor, at large as a scholar and friend, he interacted with many intellectuals, poets and writers of his time and established great personal and professional rapport. Gustav Landauer, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rudolf Kassner and Franz Rosenzweig are just a few names that find a special place in his personal and professional dealings. While he worked with so many of his contemporaries on various subjects, such as on the translation of the Bible with Franz Rosenzweig, he himself produced several original monographs. Most prominent among those is I and Thou (1923). This work not only builds the foundation for the philosophy of dialogue but also plays an important role even in the contemporary theories of communication. Buber chose to be a writer after his studies. In this regard, Bernd Witte, the Director of the office at Heinrich Heine University where the most recent Martin Buber bibliography has been compiled, says in an interview with the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Chatzoudis 2015) that Buber initially wanted to become a creative writer, he even wrote some poems in the early 1900s and got them published in Die Welt. At the same time, he was also a politician; however, he withdrew himself officially from political affairs and dedicated his time to study mystical aspects of Eastern Judaism. Eventually, he started taking a lot of interest in religious–philosophical matters and wrote about the same. He was an editor, a political activist and a professor of religious philosophy and thus contributed in his own way to the rich German Jewish intellectual tradition. 7.3 Traces of Indian Thought in Buber’s Early Writings As early as 1908 Martin Buber wrote The Legend of the Baal Shem. This book is according to Neal Rose (1974) a legendary biography of the Baal Shem and it is part of the Chassidic legends. In this book, Buber introduces some new elements. What is however worth mentioning here from the Indian perspective is that Buber writes in the introduction to this book: Die chassidische Legende hat nicht die strenge Macht, in der die Buddhalegende redet, und nicht die innige, die die Sprache der Franziskuslegende ist. (Buber 1908: 1f) The Chassidic legend does not have the strict power in which the legend of the Buddha talks; is not as intimate as is the language of the legend of the Francis. (author’s translation)

Indian Thought in Martin Buber’s I and Thou  103 Buber is juxtaposing several legends while writing the biography of the Baal Shem. Among them, the legends of Buddha feature prominently. Clearly, Buber was already aware of the legends of Buddha by this time. In the year 1909, Buber published an anthology entitled Ekstatische Konfessionen (Ecstatic Confessions) (Buber 1996). This is a highly acclaimed book. Buber begins this anthology with the chapter “India” where he enlists several names who are prominently important from the point of view of mysticism and how they are at the heart of mysticism. He writes about the Mughal Prince Dara Shekoh, the Ascetic Baba Lal, Ramakrishna and Persian Sufi mystics like Bayezid Bistami, Hussein al Halladj, Ferid ed din Attar, Jalal al-din Rumi, Tevekkul-Beg and their followers. Towards the end of this book, he provides a supplement and writes about ancient India, to be precise “From the Mahabharatam” apart from his observations about the Chinese, Jewish and Christian mysticism. In 1913/14 Buber wrote a small essay on Buddha which later becomes part of his other work titled Events and Meetings, and it was first published in 1917. In this essay, Buber himself informs the readers that his source of information was Karl Eugen Neumann’s Die Reden Gotamo Buddhos. But more importantly, in this essay he shows his reverence for Buddha and writes that “historically and logically Buddha is not a theory. He expands the realm of Vedanta not with new ideas, instead with action” (Buber 2001: 248) (author’s translation). Buber explains that Vedanta stands for the end to the Vedic era and finds its elaboration in the various Upanishads. In this essay, Buber goes on to state that “Buddha is the Prometheus of Indians” (Buber 2001: 249). Buber explains that in Greek mythology Prometheus was a rebel who challenged the gods and had brought divine rarities from the gods to the earth and so was Buddha whose teachings triggered a movement of social change in the society of that time. Buber found the Vedanta and Buddha’s position on Vedic rituals, knowledge and literature interesting and went on to opine that as an Asian/Indian Prometheus who stood against the Chief Greek God, Zeus, Buddha challenged Brahma and his teachings. Buddha and Buddhist thoughts influenced Buber considerably. Another important scholarly work that Buber had read was an impressive study on India by Rudolf Kassner entitled The Indian Idealism (1903). This is clear from the correspondence that Buber had with Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the year 1906 (Bohnenkamp 2020). Such exposure to Indian thought had a profound impact on Buber and it stays for several years and finds expression in his other works, particularly in his prominent work I and Thou (1923). In the third part of this book, Buber mentions Buddha nine times in different contexts, which shows how much Buddha matters to Buber. He uses Buddha to compare, to give examples as well as to illustrate; clearly Buddha is a figure that Buber seems to admire, and he allocates a higher position to Buddha in his thoughts. Several years later in a lecture delivered in the year 1951 Buber once again invokes Buddha along with Epicurus to elaborate on the “difficulty in making a radical distinction between the spheres of philosophy and religion”. This lecture was published in 1952 with the title Religion and Philosophy. He writes there:

104  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas The difficulty of making a radical distinction between the spheres of philosophy and religion, and, at the same time, the correct way of overcoming this difficulty, appear most clearly to us when we contrast two figures who are representative of the two spheres – Epicurus and Buddha. (Buber 2016: 20) In another work titled Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum (The Spirit of Orient and the Judaism) which Buber starts to think about writing as early as in 1912, he mentions the Vedas, Vedanta, Upanishads, Buddha and India among many other points related to the Oriental world. On the one hand, Buber praises the developments that took place in the Orient thousands of years ago, he laments on the other hand the subjugation Asian countries have had to undergo in modern times. Through this work, Buber tries to position Judaism with respect to the Orient. But one can already trace the themes he highlights from the Oriental world, particularly from India. An important theme of Indian origin that we can find in Buber’s writings is the Upanishad. While referring to Vedanta in his essay on Buddha, Buber had already mentioned the Upanishads, stating that they contain literary and religious essence in the post-Vedic era. He does not name the Upanishads or quote his source, but there is an excerpt from the Chandogya Upanishad available in I and Thou (1923): One of the Upanishads tells how Indra, the prince of the gods, comes to Prajapati, the creative spirit, in order to learn how the Self is found and recognised. For a hundred years he is a pupil, is twice dismissed with insufficient information, till finally the right information is given him: “If a man, sunk in deep sleep, rests dreamlessly, this is the Self, the Immortal, the Assured, the Universal Being.” Indra departs, but soon a thought surprises him. He turns back and asks: In such a condition, O Exalted One, a man does not know of his Self that “This is I,” and that “these are beings.” He is gone to annihilation. I see nothing propitious here. – “That,” replies Prajapati, “is indeed so.” (Buber 1923/2020: 62) Here the reference is being made to the conversation between Indra and the Prajapati. Indra went to his Guru Prajapati in the quest for knowledge about the self and how the Prajapati makes him realise the essence of self. Though the word Upanishad is mentioned only twice in I and Thou, there is a strong relation between these two works. Upanishads are full of dialogues between various characters, the purpose of these dialogues is teaching, a lesson meant for the pupil by the teacher. Thus, teaching and education through dialogue form characteristic features of the Upanishads. Other than this, tat tvam asi, meaning “thou art that” is one of the main statements of the Chandogya Upanishad which is said several times by the father Aaruni while teaching his son Shvetketu. Since Buber refers indirectly to the Chandogya Upanishad in his monumental work, an important question arises if the Chandogya Upanishad left any particular impact on Buber and his philosophy of dialogue.

Indian Thought in Martin Buber’s I and Thou  105 There are few more concepts of Indian origin, other than Buddha, Indra, Prajapati and the Upanishad, which are also present in I and Thou; these words are Mana, Karman, Brahma/n, rebirth and Sandilya. Even these words and their meaning and importance deserve a contextual interpretation. The whole book can be revisited from a new perspective. There is an exceptional study entitled Oriental Themes in Buber’s Work by Robert E. Wood that stipulates: “Buber entered into dialogue with the East very early in his career and maintained contact with it to the end of his life […]” (Wood 1984: 325) and highlights Hinduism and Buddhism among other oriental themes in Buber’s work. A more recent study by Vikas Baniwal reflects on Martin Buber’s approach to Upanishads and Vedanta and critiques the way Western scholarship has tagged the Upanishads under one particular kind of philosophy which is monism. Baniwal argues that Upanishads which form the Vedanta School of Indian philosophy are of diverse kind. They are not all advocating monism. Among the Upanishads one can find monism, dualism as well as a very special kind of monism which sees unity in diversity. Due to the monistic understanding of the Upanishads, Buber according to Baniwal finds himself disagreeing with the Upanishads when it comes to the philosophy of dialogue (Baniwal 2020: 124). This particular argument gives a new perspective to interpreting Buber’s thoughts on the philosophy of dialogue. Another interesting study that draws a comparison between his earlier work Daniel from the year 1913 and later one I and Thou (1923) on the aspect of mysticism taking it further to dialogic philosophy is by Israel Koren, who in his 2002 study highlights the dual nature of human existence and relationships; further he goes on to draw a comparison between the mystic Buber who at the time of Daniel seems to be a monist and an advocate of the dialogical principle that he becomes by the time he writes I and Thou. An important question that would need to be answered and an area that would need to be investigated are more or less the same as to what is the relation between Buber’s dialogic principle and the Upanishads which are basically texts of Vedanta School of Indian philosophy. Once the relation is established, it would be worthwhile to show what the two have in common and where they differ. There is no doubt that Buber emerges as a philosopher of dialogue who asserts that humans can claim their I only on the basis of how they deal with Thou. On the various philosophies of dialogue that have emerged in the twentieth century, there is a fine work titled “Der Mensch wird am Du zum Ich”; Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Dialogphilosophie des XX. Jahrhunderts by Magdalena Anna Wojcieszuk (2010). This work does a fair assessment of Buber’s contribution, however, without making any reference to the Upanishads. So, the question arises as to why Buber himself mentions the Upanishads in some of his works. Walter Kaufmann writes on the religious significance of Martin Buber which is very relevant in this context: That there will ever be a very large audience to hear Buber’s Hasidim with an open heart is unlikely; but, before long, these stories will, no doubt, become part of the repertoire of educated people who have now begun to read selections from the Buddha’s speeches and the Upanishads, and a free version of the Bhagavad-Gita, in huge popular editions. (Kaufmann 1967: 681)

106  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas Kaufmann is pointing at the importance of Indian thought present in Buber’s work and advocating for its adequate dissemination among potential readers. 7.4 Intercultural References and Dialogue in I and Thou I and Thou is a profound text. It is profound and intertextual at the same time as it juxtaposes various religions and systems. This is evident from the following passages mentioned in the third part of this work: The doctrines of absorption appeal to the great sayings of identification, the one above all to the Johannine “I and the Father are one”, the other to the teaching of Sandilya: “The all-embracing, this is my Self in my very heart”. (Buber 1923/2020: 59) While talking about the contemplative or meditative teachings Buber gives two examples, of John the apostle – the Johannine community and tradition are based on his thoughts  – from the Christian tradition and of Shandilya from the Hindu tradition, making it clear that in the state of meditation or contemplation, one has to seek identification with the higher self. While John says that I and the Father are the same, thereby stating that there is no difference between him and God; Shandilya, a sage mentioned in several Upanishads, expresses it somewhat differently by claiming that the whole universe is my own self and resides within me. According to him the ultimate resting place of the individual lies in the highest universal principle, the Purusha or the Brahman. This argument is carried further by Buber when he says: The Christ of the Johannine tradition, the Word that once became flesh, leads to the Christ of Eckhart, perpetually begotten by God in the human soul. The coronation formula for the Self in the Upanishad, “This is the real, the Self, and Thou art the Self,” leads in a much shorter space to the Buddhistic formula of dethronement, “It is not possible to lay hold of a Self and a Selfappertaining in truth and in reality.” (ibid.: 59f) In the tradition of John, the apostle, the word Jesus Christ acquires mystic dimensions as Meister Eckhart saw it. God is eternally present in the human soul. The Chandogya Upanishad puts it a bit differently by stating that it is Thou who is the actual self. This is stated even more differently by the Buddhist teachings where the self and something belonging to the self cannot be really and truly understood. Buber has truly understood the problem of individuation; this is an age-old problem. He dealt with this problem complex in his dissertation too. He is a philosopher who advocates more for a world of relationships which is possible only through the fundamental word I-Thou than the world of experiences caused by another fundamental word I-It. It is these fundamental words or pair of words which make the self or the subject see the world in two distinctly different ways. Buber also says

Indian Thought in Martin Buber’s I and Thou  107 that Thou is not conditioned by space and time, whereas It is always conditioned by space and time. The I manifests itself differently as part of these two-word pairs. The I is not the same when it is with Thou or with It. When I is with Thou only then an encounter or meeting takes place. It is not surprising that Buber titled his Autobiographical Fragments as Begegnungen (Meetings). He argues that actually, life is a meeting or an encounter. “All real living is meeting” (Buber 1923/2020: 9). He goes on to say that a human being becomes an I only in an encounter with a Thou. “Through the Thou a man becomes I” (ibid.: 20). As opposed to several other positions with regard to word or act, Buber says: “In the beginning is relation” (ibid.: 13). Relationship according to Buber is always in the beginning. He illustrates this further by saying: “In the beginning is relation – as a category of being, readiness, grasping form, mould for the soul; it is the a priori of relation, the inborn Thou” (ibid.: 19). This inborn Thou in each one of us allows the relationship to happen and manifest. Buber argues that “the relation with man is the real simile of the relation with God” (ibid.: 72). He brings us from various different spaces and times to here and now. It is in the present, in this life and in this world that our relationship with other fellow human beings must be humane. While pointing at the problem of individuation, it is here that for Buber every actual relationship is rooted in. He says if this individuation is bliss, then only different sets of people would be able to recognise each other. However, if this distinction of the individual poses some sort of a limit, then knowing someone completely or at all being known by someone would be rendered impossible. Buber explains that in a consummate relationship my Thou encompasses my own self, without being an It; that is when my limited cognition realises the potential of being known limitlessly. Every real relation in the world rests on individuation, this is its joy – for only in this way is mutual knowledge of different beings won – and its limitation – for in this way perfect knowledge and being known are forgone. But in the perfect relation my Thou comprehends but is not my Self, my limited knowledge opens out into a state in which I am boundlessly known. (ibid.: 69) He goes on to suggest that in a pure relationship, the latency is only a fresh breath of actuality where the Thou remains present. The eternal Thou by its nature is something we desperately require to draw it in the world of It. But in pure relation potential being is simply actual being as it draws breath, and in it the Thou remains present. By its nature the eternal Thou is eternally Thou; only our nature compels us to draw it into the world and talk of It. (ibid.: 69) In I and Thou Buber talks about three different spheres of relationship. The first of all is living with nature; here the relationship adheres to the threshold of language.

108  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas The second sphere of relationship is with humans, which is where the language is constantly in use. And the third sphere of relationship is with spiritual creatures. Here though the relationship is void of any language, still it gives a sense of language. Buber says that the second out of the three spheres, i.e., the life with human beings is the most significant one as it is here that the language has to be used in the form of speech and counter-speech. It is here that our formulations in words find an answer. The fundamental word I-Thou is constantly in use, and languagebased interaction is alive. Here I and Thou are not just in a relationship, rather they are constantly exchanging thoughts with each other, talking to each other. In this sphere, we come across moments of encounter and relationship. I and Thou are bound by the element of language and they plunge together in it. The Thou is fully manifested in its reality. It is only here that the inalienable reality of looking and being looked at, knowing and being known, and loving and being loved are simultaneously present. The moments of relation are here, and only here, bound together by means of the element of the speech in which they are immersed. Here what confronts us has blossomed into the full reality of the Thou. Here alone, then, as reality that cannot be lost, are gazing and being gazed upon, knowing and being known, loving and being loved. (ibid.: 71) The positioning of language in the second sphere of relationships or life paves the way for the actual dialogical principle which further leads to a theory of communication. However, the spheres of the relationship as we know them can also be void of language and that is where the question of meta-language emerges. Since the fundamental word I-It is also there and Buber argues that one cannot live without the world of It; because it is essential to sustain life. So, it is possible that someone constantly switches between the world of Thou and It. Buber says the following regarding the case of such people: Life cannot be divided between a real relation with God and an unreal relation of I and It with the world – you cannot both truly pray to God and profit by the world. He who knows the world as something by which he is to profit knows God also in the same way. His prayer is a procedure of exoneration heard by the ear of the void. He – not the “atheist,” who addresses the Nameless out of the night and yearning of his garret-window – is the godless man. (ibid.: 74f) It is said that one cannot divide life between a real relationship with God and an unreal I-It-relationship with the world, i.e., to pray truly to God and exploit the world at the same time. Someone who knows the world as something to be exploited doesn’t know God any differently. His prayer is actually just a relief process which falls on deaf ears. It’s such a person, not the proclaimed atheist, who calls for the nameless from the night and yearning of his house window, who

Indian Thought in Martin Buber’s I and Thou  109 is godless. God is actually an eternal Thou who can never become It. By nature, according to Buber the eternal Thou can never be placed in any kind of measurement or limits, not even in the measurement of immeasurable or in the limit of the limitless, because it cannot be subsumed in a sum of qualities, not even as a limitless sum of sublime qualities. Thus, the actual dialogue is possible only between I and Thou. A Thou that is not conditioned by time and space, but is present in here and now. The moment a subject tries to exploit or experience another subject, it does not remain a subject anymore, albeit it becomes an object of experience. It is actually only in the relationship of I and Thou that an actual dialogue is possible. In this relationship an actual encounter between the two happens and language assumes its role. In the coming together of I and Thou, a real encounter happens and a dialogue takes place. 7.5 Intertextuality and Cross-cultural Conversation in I and Thou Oliver Bidlo, an expert on Martin Buber and specialist in communication studies and sociology, gives a detailed account of the historical and intellectual background of Buber’s dialogical principle. He argues that in the beginning of the twentieth century, the transcendental philosophy which worked on the basis of subject–object logic transforms itself into an existential philosophy which works on the logic of I and Thou. The existential philosophy takes the form of a philosophy of dialogue which was prompted by two different kinds of crises brewing at this time. The two factors which contributed towards this were the loneliness of the subject or I and the withdrawal of the Thou. Because of this the subject, i.e., I did not remain the focal point of departure for thinking and experiencing. The I combined with the Thou in a we paving the way for a new philosophical movement. This movement started with the assumption or knowledge that from the beginning human beings are not alone, instead, they always have an encounter with each other (Bidlo 2006: 26). This philosophical movement had its roots in some of the poignant yet not-sopopular thoughts rooted in the eighteenth century. Thoughts that challenged the enlightenment project vis-à-vis thinking pattern. Bidlo quotes a line from Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s letter where he had written: “Ohne Du ist das Ich unmöglich”. / “The I is impossible without the Thou”. This position emphasises that the existence of human beings is possible and meaningful only through the existence of others. Jacobi’s thoughts suggest social togetherness where humans have to communicate with each other which leads to the principle of intersubjectivity. Along with Jacobi, Hamann and Herder are the pioneers of the romantic era. According to Hamann, it is in the language that human being become human beings (In der Sprache wird der Mensch zum Menschen). On the other hand, Herder says that through language humans become humans (“Der Mensch wird durch die Sprache zum Menschen.”) Thus, language – the means of communication – plays an important role where human beings need to exist together.

110  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas These thoughts left a deep impact on Buber’s thinking when he was moving away from mysticism and becoming an advocate of the dialogical principle. Apart from Jacobi, Hamann and Herder, there were few other thinkers in the nineteenth century that according to Oliver Bidlo left a deep impact on Buber’s thoughts. Some of the most prominent names among them are of Ludwig Feuerbach, Wilhelm von Humboldt, also Kant, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He had studied these philosophers at the university. But the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer is significant as his writing prompted Buber to choose the problem of individuation as the topic for his dissertation. Individuation is a topic that he addresses even in I und Thou. While talking about Buber’s Ich und Du which is a product of a new philosophical movement in the early twentieth century, it needs to be said that it has drawn inspiration from many sources, spread across centuries, cultures, religions, traditions and texts, hence, it is an intertextual, yet an original philosophical work. While foregrounding the three simple personal pronouns in the three persons, it develops a philosophy of dialogue. The positioning of I or the subject with the two different kinds of objects offers the readers two distinctly different worldviews. It stresses the fact that human beings can become actual humans only if the innate Thou is allowed to persist. I or the subject can fully manifest only in its interactions with the Thou which is not conditioned by space or time. While proposing the three spheres of relationship, this work makes it amply clear that life with other human beings is the most significant one as it is in this sphere where language finds its maximum and most meaningful use. The three parts of this work in a way are the three stages of reflection where the agents of dialogue play their roles. By bringing together examples from so many texts and contexts, this work elevates itself into a monumental work. How for example John and Shandilya are put in the same frame to explain how different systems or traditions propose ways of identification with the other or the supreme being when it comes to contemplation, immersion and meditation, shows that this work has facilitated a dialogue between different systems and traditions. This what we seek to identify ourselves with is the eternal Thou. Very striking is the way this work uses the teachings of Gautam Buddha, but more importantly it is the examples from the Upanishads, particularly the Chandogya Upanishad (तत् त्म् असि ) meaning “thou art that” – a prominent saying from the Upanishads that dwells a lot of significance when it comes to the presence of Indian thought in Buber’s I and Thou. Other than that, how the conversation between Indra and Prajapati has been placed in this work to show the meaning of the self is no less important. Though these thoughts do not form the crux of this philosophical work, they do play an important role in this work and contribute in their own way to the dialogical principle. While for Paul Mendes-Flohr the intent of dialogue is “to foster cross-disciplinary conversation” (Mendes-Flohr 2015: 5), Martin Buber by bringing together the Indian thought along with other Western thoughts in I and Thou is promoting a cross-cultural conversation. Thus, these thoughts stand

Indian Thought in Martin Buber’s I and Thou  111 in a somewhat dialogic relationship with their counterparts and show the aesthetics across cultures. Works Cited Baniwal, Vikas. “Reflections on Martin Buber’s Approach to Upaniʂads and Vedānta.” In: Comparative Literature: East and West, 4(2), 2020, pp. 118–136. Bidlo, Oliver. Martin Buber; Ein vergessener Klassiker der Kommunikationswissenschaft? Marburg: Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag, 2006. Bohnenkamp, Klaus E. “Rudolf Kassner und Martin Buber, Eine fast vergessen Beziehung.” In: Hofmannsthal Jahrbuch. Zur europäischen Moderne, 28, 2020, pp. 95–212. Buber, Martin. „Buddha.“ In: Ereignisse und Begegnungen. Band 1 Frühe kulturkritische und philosophische Schriften 1891–1924, edited by Martin Treml, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2001, pp. 247–249. Buber, Martin. “Daniel Gespräche von der Verwirklichung”. In Band 1 Frühe kulturkritische und philosophische Schriften 1891–1924, edited by Martin Treml, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2001, pp. 183–245. Buber, Martin. „Der Geist des Orients und das Judentum“. In Band 2.1 Mythos und Mystik: Frühe religionswissenschaftliche Schriften, edited by David Groiser, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013, pp. 187–203. Buber, Martin. Die Legende des Baalschem. Frankfurt am Main: Rütten und Loenig, 1908. https://warburg​.sas​.ac​.uk​/pdf​/agh375b2921009​.pdf [05-08-2021]. Buber, Martin. Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism, collected and introduced by Martin Buber; edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr: translated by Esther Cameron. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Buber, Martin. Ich und Du. Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1923. Buber, Martin. Meetings. Autobiographical Fragments, 3rd edition. Edited and introduced by Maurice Friedman. London/New York: Routledge, 2002. Buber, Martin. I and Thou, 2nd edition. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith (1958), London/ New York/Oxford/New Delhi/Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, Reprint 2020. Buber, Martin, and Leora Batnitzky. “Religion and Philosophy.” In: Buber, Martin, Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation between Religion and Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 20–38. Chatzoudis, Georgios. “Martin Buber und die Werkausgabe; Zu Gast bei L.I.S.A. mit Bernd Witte.” (Interview taken on 27.04.2015) https://lisa​.gerda​-henkel​-stiftung​.de​/buber​ _werkausgabe [03-08-2021]. Friedman, Maurice S. Martin Buber; The Life of Dialogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Kassner, Rudolf. Der indische Idealismus; eine Studie. München: F. Bruckmann, 1903. Kaufmann, Walter. “Buber’s Religious Significance”. In The Philosophy of Martin Buber, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, editor. La Salle: Open Court; London: Cambridge University Press, 1967, pp. 665–685. Koren, Israel. “Between Buber’s ‘Daniel’ and His ‘I and Thou’: A New Examination.” In: Modern Judaism, 22(2), 2002, pp. 169–198. Mendes-Flohr, Paul. Dialogue as a Trans-Disciplinary Concept: Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue and Its Contemporary Reception, Berlin/Munich/Boston: De Gruyter, 2015.

112  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas Rose, Neal. “Factor Analysis of Martin Buber’s ‘The Legend of the Baal Shem’”. Hebrew Abstracts, Vol. 15, 1975, pp. 128–130. Wojcieszuk, Magdalena Anna. “Der Mensch wird am Du zum Ich“; Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Dialogphilosophie des XX. Jahrhunderts. Freiburg: Centaurus Verlag & Media UG, 2010. Wood, Robert E. “Oriental Themes in Buber’s Work.” In: Haim Gordon & Jochanan Bloch (ed.), Martin Buber, A Centenary Volume, New York: Ktav, 1984, pp. 325–349.

8

A Secular Pañcatantra and Its Religious Journey Priyada Padhye

The popularity of any work is a barometer of its appeal and aesthetic value. Walter Ruben in his book Das Pañcatantra und seine Morallehre gives an idea about how widely popular the Pañcatantra has been. Quoting Friedmar Geissler with regard to the fact that the Pañcatantra has been translated into more than 60 languages of the world he goes on to say: In terms of a work, that has been most widely translated, the Pancatantra stands third after the Bible and the Communist Manifesto. (Ruben 1959: Introduction 5) (Author’s translation) The German scholar Johannes Hertel, who reconstructed this ancient Sanskrit work, describes the success of the Pañcatantra in the preface to his book Das Pañcatantra. Seine Geschichte und Verbreitung as follows: Dieses Buch behandelt die Schicksale eines Werkes, welches von seinem Heimatlande aus, einen unvergleichlichen Siegeszug über den Erdball, so weit er von Kulturbevölkern bewohnt ist, angetreten und mehr als 1 ½ Jahrtausende lang Junge und Alte, Gebildete und Ungebildete, Reiche und Arme, Hohe und Niederige erfreut hat und noch erfreut. Selbst die stärksten Hindernisse, die der Sprachen, der Sitten, der Religionen, vermochten seinen Siegeszug nicht zu hemmen, diesen Zug, der es nicht nur von Indien aus in die fernsten Fernen, sondern von da aus auch wieder rückläufig nach Indien führte. Bis in unsere Tage wird es wieder und wieder bearbeitet.1 (Hertel 1914: Vorwort vii) The German word “bearbeitet” which can be translated as “re-worked” has been the key factor in the Pañcatantra’s global spread through the medium of translation. The work has not only had a lot to offer to the myriad cultures of this world but also proven to be extremely malleable in the hands of its numerous translators, so as to be modified to suit the target cultures into which it has been translated, thus ensuring the original, a rich after-life and its translations an iconic status in the respective literatures of its target readers. The Pañcatantra, written sometime between the third- and the fifth-century CE, is an ancient Sanskrit work of stories which uses anthropomorphic characters. The DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-12

114  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas original2 has been re-worked innumerable times in the past 1500 years of its existence. As the name suggests, Pancha means “five” and tantra can be translated as “a case of good sense”; it is a book that comprises five books. The translations of this work are, what one may call, works in progress. It is a work which continues to be translated through the ages, till today. The various translations can be broadly divided into two phases: The first phase may be referred to as the “medieval translations of the Pañcatantra”, and the second phase may be termed as “the modern translations of the Pañcatantra”. The first phase would include all those translations that have been done from the beginning of its known history, till the end of the fifteenth century, and the second phase would include all those done after the fifteenth century till today. The two phases are distinct from one another in that, most of the translations done in the mediaeval phase were undertaken essentially with the help of relays, using a filter language, whereas the modern ones were, and are being undertaken, directly from the Sanskrit original. The fifteenth-century German translation of Anton von Pforr for example, is a German translation of a Latin translation, which was translated from a Hebrew translation, which used an Arabic translation of a Persian translation as its source text. As a result, the German translation is a translation, many times removed from the Sanskrit text. In contrast, the translations done in modern times are mostly done from the Sanskrit original. If one compares this fifteenth-century German translation of the Pañcatantra to the nineteenth-century translation by Theodor Benfey or the twentieth-century translation by Richard Schmidt, both done from the Sanskrit, one sees that the translation by Pforr is more of a transcreation rather than a translation. Pañcatantra translations have the distinction of being classics in their respective host cultures. They have contributed immensely to the growth of their languages and literature. A case in point is the Arabic translation by Abdallah ibn al-Moquaffa who is credited with the intellectual and literary development of Arabic prose. His translation enjoyed great popularity and is considered a masterpiece of Arabic narrative literature. The same is the case with the translations in the Indian languages. The ten translations of the work in the Marathi language, which were done between the twelfth and the sixteenth century, contributed immensely to the development of the Marathi language (Padhye 2019: 152). The following quote from the Israeli translation scholar, Itamar Even-Zohar, sums up this role of translation in the literary polysystem of the host culture very aptly: Translated literature not only brings in a whole new model of reality to replace conventions no longer effective, but also a lot of other features as well, such as a new poetic language, new matrices, techniques, intonations. (Even-Zohar 1990: 23) The focus of this chapter is the German and English translations of the Pañcatantra that were carried out in the mediaeval period. These translations are being investigated here because it is with every new mediaeval translation that

A Secular Pañcatantra  115 the original work was modified. It shed its intended “message”, form, content, style and genre, to adorn new clothes, initiate a new narrative and disseminate a new reality. This article limits its investigation to how this work metamorphosed from a secular text to a religious one with special reference to the first German translation from Latin by Anton von Pforr called Bidpai Buch der Beispiele der alten Weisen and the English translation, by Keith-Falconer titled Kalilah and Dimnah or The Fables of Bidpai, who used the later Syriac translation as its source. Anton von Pforr’s translation plays a key role because it functions as the gateway for the translation in other European languages, like the Dutch (1623), Danish (1618) and Icelandic (time unknown) (Hertel 1914: 398). For the purpose of this chapter, I use Hans Wegener’s edited version of Anton von Pforr’s translation. Though the focus of this chapter is the metamorphosis of a secular Pañcatantra to a religious one, there is a need to discuss why this change is significant, especially for a work of this nature. Hence a discussion on the nature of this work, as understood by many scholars, by me and by their translators is unavoidable. The chapter is divided into four sections. Since the article has the modifications of a secular Pañcatantra to a religious one at its core, I dedicate the first section to the general modifications undertaken by significant translators. Some of these modifications are at the level of form, some at the level of content forced by the translator’s search for equivalence and some are of an interventionist nature. I call this section “Translatorial Modifications”. Here, modifications will be illustrated with the help of some examples from the translations of its initial journey across the three continents: Asia, the Arab world and Europe. The second section is called “Aesthetics across Cultures – The many faces of the Pañcatantra”. In this section is discussed the nature of the Pañcatantra by various researchers. In other words, this section gives a brief overview of how many different faces or masks this work has had in the course of its journey, courtesy of its numerous interpretations at the hands of its translators and researchers. Depending on the translation brief given to the translator, the translator’s own experiences, the social, religious and political situation in which the translation came to birth and also the narrative and aesthetic tradition of the host culture, the same work took on a new face in a new culture. This resulted in the Pañcatantra being accorded different genres by different people. These new faces of the Pañcatantra leave one wondering, whether it is at all possible, to unveil the real face of the Pañcatantra. Towards this aim is dedicated the third section. The third section is called “The Pañcatantra – Crack the Puzzle”. In this section, I engage deeply with the form of this work, its author and the content of the stories and try to put all this together to arrive at the “Leitmotiv” of this work. I seek to establish the central theme which runs through all the stories. This pursuit will also assist in proving that there is nothing even remotely religious about the original work. In the last section which is titled “The Religious Journey” I seek to prove how the secular nature of the work is often sacrificed and made into a religious work, whereby the original, robbed of its very spirit, is infused with a new and alien soul.

116  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas This is done with the help of references from the German and English translations mentioned above. 8.1  Translatorial Modifications The translatorial modifications begin with the title itself. All mediaeval translations of the Pañcatantra shed the original title, thereby severing the ties with the original. The first time that the Pañcatantra was translated into a foreign language was in the sixth-century CE. This happened in Iran. The title was changed to Kalilah wa Dimnah. It was translated into Pahlavi, which is the old Persian language, by a physician Burzoe at the court of King Anushirvan. The title Kalilah wa Dimnah refers to the two jackals of the first book of the Pañcatantra called Mitrabhed.3 Their names in the original are Kartaka and Damanaka. The title of this first book of the Pañcatantra chooses to foreground the subject matter of the first book, which is “a rift between friends”, whereas the Pehalavi translation chooses to focus on the identity of the two jackals. Hence, the aesthetic value of a work is not a “given”, but rather depends on the beholder of its beauty, which varies with culture, time and situation. The title Pañcatantra in this new Pehalavi avatar is lost, but not before it inspired many other translations. The new title Kalilah wa Dimnah seems to stick with the work for the major part of its journey in the Middle East: first it is translated from the old Persian into the old Syriac language in 570 CE by a certain Christian called Bud. His translation carries the title Kalilag and Damanag. The next important translation is the one undertaken in Baghdad in 750 CE by a Zoroastrian who had converted to Islam. The translator goes by the name of Abdallah ibn al-Moquaffa. Moquaffa’s translation is titled Kalila wa Dimna. This translation played a key role in the spread of this work in Europe. It is important to mention here, that apart from the Pehlavi translation which is presumed to have been done from the original Sanskrit, none of the others, be it the Syriac or the Arabic, used the Sanskrit Pañcatantra as the original source. By the time the work reaches the Occident, the translations in European languages ranging from Latin, to English to German etc. flaunt different titles like Edition princeps, Pilpay, Fables of Bidpai, Morall Philosophie of Doni, Directorium vitae humanae, Bidpai – Das Buch der Beispiele alter Weisen to name but a few. The European translations change the work into a book of moral stories, a book on wisdom, a book on philosophy, a mirror of magistrates, etc. The focus, as reflected in the titles of the translations in European languages, seems to shift from the two jackals to the genre of the Pañcatantra. Ulrike Bodermann-Kornhaas’ quotation comes here to mind. She says: Die zwei Brüder Kalila und Dimna, vom indischen Pañcatantra bis zum arabischen Kalila wa-Dimna eindeutig aus einer Familie von Schakalen stammend, haben auf dem Weg ins Abendland einen Identitätsverlust erleiden müssen. (ibid)4 Even the translations of the Pañcatantra into Indian languages have titles like Anwar-i-suhaili, Iyāri-Dānish, Panchopākhyān, Bhāgwatisatish etc. All the

A Secular Pañcatantra  117 translations of the work into European languages and Indian languages are mainly translations of translations, which were translated from translations.5 Hence the reworking/adaptation of this work begins with the title itself. A work so widely translated into the most diverse languages of the world is bound to undergo many changes. In order to make it suitable for the host culture in the course of its journey, the Pañcatantra was modified, changed and tweaked by its translators to such an extent, that the work was even stripped of its oriental characteristics, a phenomenon that has been referred to as Entorientalisierung (Obermaier 2009: 86), which I would translate into English as “de-orientalisation”. One of the major modifications was that animals and plants not known in Europe were replaced by those of the host culture: the jackal was replaced by the fox or the wolf, a gazelle by a deer and a crocodile by a tortoise. A Hamsa was replaced in some translations by a duck, and in other translations by a generic term like water-bird. The same is the case with human characters. A Brahman became an ascetic in some translations, in others a magician and in some others a hermit. In stories like Mother Śāņdili's Barter of Sesame, the sesame changed to wheat or spelt (Obermaier 2009: 86–87). The Indian names of the protagonists undergo a change too. In the Sanskrit original the stories are being narrated by a wise old man called Visnusraman. This name is changed to Bidpai, Pilpay or Doni in the European translations. The two jackals Kartaka und Damanaka become Kalilag and Damnag, Kelila and Dimna. In the first story of the ox and the jackal, which is the one which was most popular in the Middle Eastern and European translations, the ox whose name is Sanjeevaka becomes Senesba. The Indian river Jamuna becomes in the German translation of Anton von Pforr a Sumpf, i.e., a swamp. As the work travels from one culture to another, from one century to another, the original work, which is comprised only of text and verse, also takes on new forms and formats. Alongside the textual aspect comes the visual aspect. Anton von Pforr’s German translation of 1471 is situated in a time when printing technology had been newly developed. This enabled multiple re-prints of the work. Between 1480/81 to 1592 the book was re-printed 17 times (Obermaier 2004: Introduction 1). The artists of Ulm and Urach, Conrad Fyner and Lienhart Holl respectively immortalised the scenes from the Pañcatantra stories in beautiful woodcuts. With the visual dimension being added to the manuscripts, the work became more dynamic. Each picture depicted the oriental culture in a way it deemed fit. The India as depicted in the woodcuts which adorned the re-prints of Anton von Pforr’s book, looks very non-Indian. The elephants look too thin, the visual depiction of the ladies in the woodcuts is very foreign to the Indian eye and the attire of the people, a mix of Arabic and European.6 The number of stories is changed and the form of the Pañcatantra, comprising of a frame story with multiple emboxed stories is either lost or diluted. A book so firmly grounded in Indian culture is bound to have references to practices and rituals which could not have been retained in the translation. Especially when analogies are drawn to prove a point in an argument, the translator cannot sanitise the text of those references but has to replace them with some other

118  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas equivalent analogies. In the first book of the Pañcatantra, for example, one finds Damanaka the ambitious jackal, making his case to Karataka, his confidante and friend, for wanting to play a bigger role in the court of the Lion King so that he can become a minister. Karataka, his friend, advises him not to meddle in the affairs of the court, as it was not their job, and to be contented with his lot, which was eating leftovers of the Lion. To this Damanaka says, one should fill one’s stomach in a noble way. Even the crows, who feed on the food offered to the dead at the funeral pyre, keep their hunger in this way at bay. But, is it a noble way to live? This refers to the ritual in the Hindu tradition of feeding the crows at the funeral pyre. This analogy could not have been retained because of its foreignness to a non-Indian target reader. So we find that in the German translation by Anton von Pforr Dimna says: aber der edle Mut eines vernünftigen Mannes denkt allerzeit ein Höheres, nur der kleinmütige kennt keinen Ehrgeiz, wie das Huhn nur über den Boden läuft, trotzdem es Flügel hat zum Fliegen. (Wegener 1925: 37)7 The translator changes the crow to a chicken, and the reference to the Indian ritual is replaced by another analogy, which preserves the logic of the argument in the original. This modification is unavoidable and in the interest of the target readers’ understanding of the text. Such changes are part and parcel of the translator’s craft. It is not such modifications that change the core and the spirit of the work, rather they assist in conveying it. But, if the translator intervenes in the translation in a way that he appropriates it to convey a message, alien to the original, then the work is modified in a way that the spirit of the original is compromised to give birth to a new text. The example of Mouqaffa’s translation of the Pañcatantra is a good case in point. When Mouqaffa was translating the Pañcatantra, he had been unjustly imprisoned. Since he felt injustice had been meted out to him, his search for justice made him change the end of the first book Mitrabhed. In the original story of Mitrabhed, the jackal Damanaka, who creates a rift between the Lion King and the ox is successful in bringing about the death of the ox at the hands of the Lion King. Hence the first book ends with the victory of the scheming jackal. Identifying with the victim’s fate, Mouqaffa, who is clamouring for justice, and probably unhappy with the end of the book, adds the chapter of “Dimna’s trial” to the first book, in which the jackal Damanaka, alias Dimna, is presented in court and pronounced guilty (Hertel 1914: 392). Since Mouqaffa’s version of the Pañcatantra was a major milestone in the spread of this work in the Occident, all European translations have this additional chapter. In the German translation of Anton von Pforr, this chapter is titled Dimnas Prozeß. How true was Mouqaffa’s interpretation? Did the first book really end in the victory of the jackal’s deceit? No. It only appears to be so. In reality, it upsets the jackal’s plans in spite of a certain success, because the Lion King, who loved his friend, the ox, dearly, repents his deed and leaves the forest. In the absence of the King, the kingdom is thrown into turmoil, and Damanaka’s plan to become a minister fails. This is

A Secular Pañcatantra  119 punishment enough for Damanaka, who also loses Karataka’s friendship. This lack of understanding of the end of the first book of the Pañcatantra or the wilful appropriation by Mouqaffa is probably the reason why the Pañcatantra stories came to be known as immoral stories in colonial India and were banned from school curriculum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Kulkarni 1953: 141). Though the translatorial compulsions which force the translator’s hand to modify content, whether superficially or more substantially, like in the case of Mouqaffa, are more or less tolerated and often at times also found to be necessary for the very success of the act of translation, the original work ends up having the fate of the game “pass the message” where the message is completely distorted by the time it reaches the last player. In the case of the Pañcatantra, with every successive translation, the spirit and the soul of the work changed, and it took on many masks. The next section deals with how the Pañcatantra became a glove that could fit any hand. 8.2 Aesthetics across Cultures – The Many Faces of the Pañcatantra Pañcatantra translations not only do away with some characters or replace them with others more familiar to the target cultures, as has been illustrated above. There were other radical changes, depending on the reason for the selection of the work for the purpose of translation, which ranged from its aesthetic beauty, which in translation terms could be the form, the message and the content, to its ability to serve a specific purpose of the commissioner of the translator. To cite Itamar EvenZohar once again: the very selection of the work to be translated is determined by the governing polysystem. The texts are picked according to their compatibility with the new approaches and their supposed role that they may assume within the target literature. (Even-Zohar 1990: 23) In the case of the Pañcatantra, this supposed role seems to have been as varied as its translations. When one researches how researchers and translators viewed this work, one gets many different and at times contrasting answers. Some researchers and translators are of the opinion that the Pañcatantra is some sort of a ready reckoner on governance, a Fürstenspiegel what Franklin Edgerton calls a “Mirror of Magistrates” (ibid., Chapter I: Purpose and results of this book 14). Arthur Ryder, views it as a textbook on “wise conduct of life” (Translator’s Introduction: 5). This view finds echo in Hans Wegener’s description of the work as a Standardwerk angewandter Philosophie (ibid., Afterword: 149) which translates as a “course book on practical or applied philosophy”. Then there are those like the English translator Edwin Arnold, who view it from the lens of a colonial master, reducing it to a mere “story book” (ibid., Preface: ix). Each translator seems to have viewed the work from one aspect alone and believes it to be the complete identity of the work. Let me elaborate on this point with a few examples:

120  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas Reading the following quote of Walter Ruben, one gets the impression that scholars like Walter Ruben believe it to be a book about class struggle. Hence, for them, it is some kind of a Communist Manifesto: The moral problems discussed in the Panchatantra will become history, only after there is an end to class-struggle. (my translation) (Ruben 1959: 6) The protagonists of the Pañcatantra stories are vulnerable, weak and helpless characters, up against mighty forces. So there are two classes: the oppressors and the oppressed. In the Pañcatantra stories, the oppressed unite their forces and take on the oppressors head-on. The second book Mitrasamprapti, which in Arthur Ryder’s translation is translated as “Winning of Friends”, is all about the above theme. The ideological lens of Ruben reduces it to class struggle. Arthur Ryder views it as a work that belongs to the genre of wisdom literature. This is not without reason, because the Pañcatantra advocates a very non-academic kind of intelligence, which can be termed also practical intelligence. In today’s terminology, one would call it “lateral thinking”. Ryder was so very taken in by this aspect of the Pañcatantra, that he refers to it in the introduction itself by translating an epigrammatic verse from the Pañcatantra, which aptly describes what he means Scholarship is less than sense, Therefore, seek intelligence (Introduction 1925 Year: 9). It is a book that unabashedly teaches strategies that help the protagonists in becoming successful in life, and by successful, I mean worldly success and not spiritual success. It propagates Lebensklugheit, a wise way of living, in other words, common sense and practical philosophy angewandte Philosophie as against bookish knowledge. In fact, the work pokes fun at Brahmins and their knowledge of the Shastras. The story of the three friends which is in the last book of the Pañcatantra is replete with references to Brahmins and their bookish knowledge. 8.3 The Pañcatantra – Crack the Code The previous section gives an overview of the various interpretations of this work. If we say that the Pañcatantra is not only a storybook, not only a mirror of the magistrates, not only a book on morals, not only a book on class struggle etc. then what is it actually? In this section, the “Leitmotiv” of this book will be discussed, by following the common thread that runs through this work. The Pañcatantra is believed to have been written by Chanakya when he was in his eighties, and the character Vishnusharman who becomes Bidpai and Pilpay in the European translations is none other than Chanakya himself. Though this is not a proven fact, on reading the Panchatantra, one realises that the content does reflect his political wisdom. In my opinion, the Pañcatantra is more of a Capitalist Manifesto rather than a Communist Manifesto. The opening paragraph in the first book narrates how the businessman Vardhamān is contemplating his life. He is quite wealthy, but he says that wealth needs to keep growing. It is wealth alone that gives a person status and recognition in society. He wonders how he can prosper more. Becoming wealthy

A Secular Pañcatantra  121 has its own benefits and one cannot stop amassing it because only if one has more, can one earn still more. The following German translation of a verse from the Pañcatantra expresses this perfectly. Money attracts money like elephants alone can trap elephants. A poor man can hardly practice a trade of his choice. (author’s translation) (Schmidt 1901: 5) Vardhamān’s extremely logical contemplations on the benefits of being wealthy, take up many pages in the Sanskrit versions and set the tone for the book. That is why I call it a Capitalist’s Manifesto. It is in total contrast to the Indienbild (the Indian image), of being a country of spirituality, which gained currency in the West, and where Verzicht und Entsagung, self-denial and renunciation, were considered the quintessential virtues associated with India. The Pañcatantra is also a manual on vertical mobility in society (Obermaier 2004: 171ff). Be it the jackal Damanaka who wants to be minister, or the indigo jackal who wants to be the king of the animals. Whether it is the barber who wants a statue of gold by hitting the Jain monk on his head or the doorkeeper Gorambha, who wants to be treated on par with the other royal guests: everybody wants to achieve and attain more in life. This striving for getting to a better station in life, is much in contrast to the then generally held belief that one’s station and place in life is pre-determined by birth, with no hope of change. The Pañcatantra is also a survivors’ manual. Most stories teach survival of the self and protection of one’s own home in this big bad world. The protagonists of practically all the stories are the underprivileged, the weak and the vulnerable who fight against the mighty and the privileged through sheer use of tricks and cunning for which the negative German word “List” has been often used which is somewhat misleading. I would prefer to refer to it as pragmatic behaviour. The conflicts in most of the stories revolve around the protection of one’s own space against mighty encroachers. Heimat und Vertreibung aus der Heimat (home and banishment from home), in today’s terms “forced migration”, “climate migration”, seems to be a continuous theme running through most of the stories. Be it the plover who refuses to leave her home on the seashore and fights the sea that washes away her eggs, the sparrow couple who stands their ground by tricking the snake who eats their eggs, rather than migrate to lay their eggs on some other tree, the hare who tricks the king of the elephants because his herd tramples their homes every time it visits a pond near their homes to drink water or the hare who tricks the lion who demands ready food every day to name just a few. The Pañcatantra champions the cause of the weak, the vulnerable and the helpless. The characters in many stories are, what in contemporary times are called “climate refugees”. Some believe Pañcatantra to be a book of moral stories. The word “moral” is not supposed to be understood as judging the acts of the protagonists as right or wrong. It is supposed to be understood as “what lesson can be learnt by the reader from the acts of the protagonists”.

122  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas After discussing the content of the Pañcatantra I come to the form of this work. The worth and value of this work lie also in its structure. The book has the classical structure of frame stories and emboxed or embedded stories. The book does not have a linear progression. It is cyclical. There is a lot of “back and forth” in the book, which demands a close reading on the part of the reader. The stories are, what one calls handlungsarm (Obermaier 2004: 268) in German. This means they lack action. The “doing” is not so important. It is the “narrating” which, for the perceptive reader, is the “act” itself, because it influences the “actions” of the protagonist. Hence the meaning of the action revolves around the narration. The narration between two consecutive emboxed stories, between the emboxed and the frame story, is crucial to put the emboxed story into perspective. The emboxed story simply supplies the reader with an explicit moral, which is the “offenbarer Sinn” (Obermaier 2004: 277ff), the obvious meaning. The lesson that the reader has to learn has to be derived from the lessons not learnt by the protagonist, a fact which is never explicitly mentioned in the book, what Obermaier refers to as “der verborgene Sinn” (Obermaier 2004: 277ff), the hidden meaning. The value of the work lies in what is left unsaid, unarticulated and left for the reader to piece together. That is why it is supposed to be a work that makes the reader wise. The introduction to the first Pehalavi translation refers to how the book must be read by drawing an analogy between the book and a herb that can raise the dead to life – in other words, wake up the reader from the sleep of ignorance to a life of wisdom. Hence the arguments in the book need to be studied properly. Let us have a look at how the book has been constructed, a word I use consciously because the architecture of the book is central to its “message”. The first book Mitrabhed, which has already been discussed earlier, has one main frame story and 23 emboxed stories. The second book Mitrasamprapti which is translated by Ryder as “Winning of Friends” has one frame story and seven emboxed stories. This book is about diplomacy, making pacts, developing friendly relations which can be used in times of threat and war. The third book is Kakolukeya which is the story of a war between crows and owls. It has one frame story and seventeen emboxed stories. This book teaches the reader how to prepare for a war, send spies to enemy camps, extract information and plant moles. The fourth book is Labdhapranash meaning “Loss of Gains”. It has one frame story and eleven emboxed stories. This book teaches how one can lose what one has acquired if one is not careful. The last book is called Aparikshitkarak which means “Ill-considered action”. This book has one frame story and 14 emboxed stories. Each story is a strategy to solve a given problem which is at the same time a part of, what one may call an overarching strategy embedded in the frame stories. As is common for Sanskrit literature, it is a puzzle which has to be solved. In other words, the moral of individual stories is not supposed to be taken at face value. The reader has to engage with every emboxed story and view it in the light of the frame story which sometimes contains multiple emboxed stories within it. The Leitmotiv lies in the strategies which one uses, sometimes, more importantly, does not use, in one’s fight against an established order. The form of the book assists the content, and together the two develop the reader’s skill in learning the lessons that will be applied in his or her life.

A Secular Pañcatantra  123 Having discussed what the Pañcatantra is actually about, let me now discuss why, it cannot be considered a religious book. Religious texts usually convey the message that if one serves or prays to God, is obedient to God and God’s will, all his / her problems will be solved. It involves turning to God for his mercy in times of trouble. Another characteristic is the presence of miracles, the fantastic and the supernatural. If the writer of the Pañcatantra envisaged this work to be a religious book, the problems of the protagonists would have been solved by simply praying for God’s help, mercy and blessings. There would have been no need to create the intricate web of strategies and sub-strategies through the cyclical frame story form of the book in a way, that what was “said” made space for the “unsaid”, and gave the reader room to read between the lines, words and stories. He could have written it like a Vratakathaa, which is a story read while observing a pious observance to invoke the mercy and blessings of the almighty for the success of a resolve. These stories have linear progression and are to be taken at face value. None of the characters in the Pañcatantra turn to God for help in their times of need. Instead, they may negotiate a deal, count on good friends, trap the adversary, trick the enemy, bank on the lack of brains of the adversary and unite as a whole against the mighty enemy, but not give up or pray to God in the hope of being saved. This is my first argument against the Pañcatantra being treated as a religious book. The only part of the book which can be said to be religious is the Katha̅ mukh which is the introduction to the book. In this introduction deities like Brahma̅, Vishnu, Varun, Yamra̅j etc. the four periods of time, Satya-, Treta̅-, Dwa̅pa̅r- and Kaliyug, important rivers, mountains, scholastic entities and seers like Manu, Śukra, Va̅caspati, Para̅śara, Vya̅sa, Cha̅nakya etc. are invoked for protection and for salutation: So here too one cannot say that only the names of the Gods have been mentioned. In the entire book, God is mentioned only in a few stories: One is the story of the two friends, one of whom falls in love with a princess, the other one is the story of the plover who fights the sea and is helped by Lord Vishnu, the third is the story of the mouse who is married off to a mountain and the fourth is the story of the weaver’s wife, who invokes the Gods to restore the nose cut by her husband in order to prove her innocence and chastity. No deity is mentioned in any of the other stories. But in some of its European translations, in every paragraph and on every page the protagonists are either asking for God’s mercy or praising Him for rescuing them. In comparison to such religious translations, the absence of the presence of the Divine in the Sanskrit original makes the book very secular. After introducing the reader to how this work has been received across the globe, tweaked for individual purposes and after attempting to inform the readers of my understanding of what the work actually is, I will show in this last section how this secular work has become now a religious work. I will discuss two Pañcatantra translations, which are replete with religious content in the following section. One is the English translation by Keith-Falconer and, the other is the German translation by Anton von Pforr.

124  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas 8.4 The Religious Journey of the Secular Work The following quote by the editor Joseph Jacobs of Thomas North’s new edition of the English translation of the Pañcatantra mentions that this work is secular: that it should have been accepted as a sort of secular Bible, if we may so term it, by men of so many different religions. There must have been something essentially human in this Buddhistic book that it should have been welcomed as a moral encheiridion by Zoroastrians, Moslems, Jews and Christians. (Fables of Bidpai xxxviii Introduction) It may seem to be a coincidence, but while drawing an analogy to the importance of this work, many writers and translators use the Bible as a yardstick to measure the success of this work. While Joseph Jacobs calls it a secular Bible, Keith-Falconer in his introduction refers to the number of readers of this work as next only to that of the Bible: “which has probably had more readers than any other except the Bible”. (Falconer Preface: ix) There are two Syrian translations of the Pañcatantra. The second translation was done by a Syrian priest who knew Arabic. Even this translation according to Hertel was made religious: “Das Buch wimmelt mit Zitaten aus der Bibel und Anspielungen auf Bibelstellen”.8 (Hertel: 1914: 404)9 Even Hans Wegener, whose edited version of Anton von Pforr’s translation was published in 1925 says in the afterword “er begnügte sich damit, der Auslegung ein christliches Gewand zu geben”. (151)10 A more convincing case would be made if the quotations and references to religious elements in the translations are mentioned. Though it is not possible to mention here all the places in the translations, a few quotations from each of the two translations, that were mentioned earlier, are provided below. 8.4.1 Anton von Pforr’s Translation

Let us take the case of the German translation by Anton von Pforr which was done in the second half of the fifteenth century. Anton von Pforr was known to be a political adviser, lawyer, priest as well as litterateur. The commissioner of the translation was Duke Eberhart of Wuerttemberg and his mother, and Pforr’s patron, Mechthild of the Palatinate. His translation was largely influenced by his profession making it a religious text.

A Secular Pañcatantra  125 wenn sie aber kommen, dann sollen wir mit ihnen streiten, vielleicht ist Gott barmherzig, dass wir nicht alle verderben.11 (Wegener 1925: 10–11) Vielleicht gibt uns Gott den Sieg.12 ( ibid.: 10) Er denkt daran, dass Adam der erste Mann war, der auf ein Weib hörte und betrogen ward, und dass es seitdem immer so gewesen ist.13 ( ibid.: 71–72) Ein vernünftiger Mann läßt sich mit Worten nicht betrügen, wenn ihm Gott seinen Feind in die Hand gibt.14 (ibid.: 20) Es war einmal ein Einsiedler, der Gott diente in Vollkommenheit, dass sein Gebet erhört wurde [...] bat er Gott das Mäuslein in einen Menschen zu verwandeln. Gott der Herr erhörte seine Bitte, und aus der Maus wurde sogleich ein hübsches Mägdelein.15 (ibid.: 24) Das Gute aber, was du mir antust, wirst du Gott zur Ehre.16 (ibid.: 26) In the latter part of the book, from the story of the bird Pynza onwards, the stories are not embedded in a frame story, rather they exist separately. The protagonists undertake nothing on their own but rely heavily on God’s mercy. In fact, even the following titles of two embedded stories sound like Christian tenets: “Wer da hat Gottvertrauen, das der Anfang aller Weisheit heißet, brauchet in der Not nicht zu verzweifeln.”17 ( ibid.: 28) “Was Gutes oder Böses den Menschen begegnet, kommt allein von Gottes Fügung nach ihrem Verdienst. Davon sagt die Fabel von dem Königssohn und seinen drei Gesellen also.”18 (ibid.: 29) In the story of the prince and his three friends, there are continuous religious references like the following: “Da bat der Könissohn mit Tränen Gott, daß er ihn nicht zu schanden werden lassen an seinen Gesellen”.19 (ibid.: 32) fleißige Sorgsamkeit, wohlgestaltete Jugend, umsichtige Vernunft und was Gutes und Böses den Menschen begegnet, ist alles von Gott allein bestimmt nach ihrem Verdienst […] Und lobte und dankte Gott für sein Glück und sprach: Diese meine Gesellen haben nicht geglaubt und erkannt, daß vom Gott bestimmt war, was ihnen begegnet ist.20 (ibid.: 33) The story ends with the prince telling the following to the people who are gathered around Nun müssen Sie an mir erkennen, daß mir mein Glück weder durch Umsicht, Schönheit, Arbeit noch durch Gewalt zugefallen ist. Ich habe auch seit dem Tag, an dem ich durch meinen Bruder verstoßen wurde, nie gedacht zu solchen

126  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas Ehren zu kommen anders als durch Gott den Allmächtigen allein, der mich als Pilger hierhergeschickt und zu einem mächtigen König gemacht hat. Da stand einer von dem Volk auf und sprach: Nun hören wir erst, daß du billig dieses Reiches würdig bist, da dir Gott so viel Weisheit und Vernunft verliehen hat, daß wir mit dir als weisen König versorgt sind zu unserem Nutzen. Und ein anderer sprach: Wir sind schuldig, Gott zu loben, der dich als König über uns gesetzt hat. Denn das ist alles durch seine Fügung geschehen.21 (ibid.: 34) The above quotations are totally contradictory to the very agenda of the Pañcatantra, as outlined in the third section of the chapter. After the story of the bird Pynza in this translation of Anton von Pforr, there is an absence of any strategy, planning, any application of one’s common sense, pragmatic thinking, to solving any of the problems confronted by the protagonists. Hence the message that was conveyed by the original Pañcatantra appears to have completely disappeared. The same is seen in Keith – Falconer’s English translation. To end this chapter, let us have a look at some quotations from this translation too. 8.4.2 Keith – Falconer’s English Translation: Kalilah and Dimnah or The Fables of Bidpai

This translation has been done from the later Syriac version into English by IGN Keith – Falconer who was an Assistant Lecturer at Clare College. The Syriac version was translated from Arabic sometime in the tenth or the eleventh century by a Christian priest. The following quote from the introduction to the translation tells us why this text too has references to Christianity throughout. Unfortunately, the translator was a bad one. He did not always understand the text before him, as we have seen; and he often gave a different turn to a passage in order to bring out a Christian sentiment. (Keith – Falconer 1885: Introduction ix). Here are a few excerpts. When Dimnah says that he would like to go to the Lion King to ask what he was scared of, his brother, Kalilah, who is against the idea says the following: May the Lord God establish your actions and level the hill before you, may He direct your steps in the paths that lead to joys, and effect for you and for us a safe and peaceful issue. (Falconer: 10) Again the sincerity of (a man’s) profession of faith in God the Exalted can only be shown by teachers who expound the truth and elucidate the doctrine. (ibid.: 11) When the lion grants his protection to the bull, the bull, whose name is Shanzabeh in the Syriac translation, speaks the following words in his praise:

A Secular Pañcatantra  127 May the Lord God who gives strength to the weak, and puts wisdom into the minds of the ignorant, and the word of knowledge into the simple, be the stablisher of your kingdom […] May you rejoice in all the good things of Jerusalem all the days of your life, flourish on the mountains like the cedars of Lebanon, and yield pleasant fruits seasoned with the salt of truth. (ibid.: 17) No one is so praiseworthy and great in the sight of God, and so laudable in the eyes of men, as he who reveals hidden things and manifests secret matters, and reproves and delivers the wicked and false to punishment and eternal destruction. (ibid.: 92) Such quotes continue through the entire translation up to the last part which is the trial of Dimnah. A quote from the end of the book where Dimnah says: For God, who loves the children of men, is acquainted with my uprightness and knows my oppression; and the king's heart is in the hands of God, who leads him as He pleases, nor is anything of the truth about my deeds hidden from our peace-loving king. (ibid.: 101) Here is one last one from the story of the prefect’s wife Nahdubahand and the bird trainer: Then the prefect’s wife said: “Glory be to Thee, O God, who in Thy righteousness and uprightness hast brought punishment on the liar”. (ibid.: 106) 8.5 Conclusion The religious journey of the secular Pañcatantra can be attributed to the translation brief given to the translator or his own understanding or lack of understanding of the text or the relays used for the translation etc. One thing is for sure: It is the potential of the original to encapsulate in itself, something for everybody, something worth tapping and lying in wait for the right moment to come. Waiting for the right social and historical, sometimes political and religious situation to emerge in the host culture, which beckons the translator to the text, and it is in his malleable hands, that he changes the original, to become sometimes, exactly the opposite of what the text set out to convey. Was the message whispered into too many ears? I think not. I am just glad that it keeps being whispered, giving the original a richer and fuller, albeit, a newer after-life. Notes 1 “This book is about the destiny of a work which embarked on an incomparable victory march, starting from its native country, to across the globe, to all those places wherever civilized people inhabit it. It entertained young and old, educated and uneducated, rich and poor, royals and slaves for more than 1500 years, and continues to do so. Not even the biggest hurdles like languages, customs, religions could break this journey. This

128  Religion, Mysticism and History of Ideas victory march starting from India to the farthest corners of the world also found its way back to its native country. From then till today, it has been and continues to be reworked” (my translation). 2 The original manuscript is lost. There are many versions of the work which can function as one of the many originals today. 3 Loss of Friends (Arthur Ryder’s translation). 4 The two brothers Kalila and Dimna from the Indian Pañcatantra to the Arabic Kalilawa-Dimna, both clearly belonging to the family of jackals, have had to suffer a loss of identity in their journey to the Occident. 5 For more on the spread of this work across the globe please refer to the book by Johannes Hertel. 6 Link for the book which has the above mentioned pictures.​https:/​/ia801405​.us​.archive​ .org​/31​/items​/ita​-bnc​-in2​-00000022​-001​/ita​-bnc​-in2​​-00000022​-001​.pdf 7/8/2018 7 but the noble courage of a sensible man always wants to achieve more. The ones who do not dare, know no ambition, like the chicken who just walks over the ground, although it has wings to fly (my translation). 8 The book is full of quotations and references from the Bible (my translation). 9 The book abounds with quotations from the Bible and references to passages from the Bible (my translation). 10 The value of the moral problems discussed in the Panchatantra will be history only after there is an end to class struggle (my translation). 11 When they come we will have to fight them. Let us hope that God is merciful and we all do not die (my translation). 12 Who knows, God may give us victory (my translation). 13 He thinks of Adam, the first man who listened to a woman, who betrayed him. Since then it has always been so (my translation). 14 A sensible person does not get fooled by words, especially when God delivers his enemy to him (my translation). 15 There was once a hermit, who served God with such utmost dedication, that God heard his prayers […] he requested God to turn the mouse into a human being. God granted his request, and the mouse immediately became a beautiful girl (my translation). 16 If you do me a good deed, it will be in honour of God (my translation). 17 The one who trusts in God, who is the beginning of the eternal truth, knows no fear in times of trouble (my translation). 18 The good and the bad in a man’s life is all an act of providence, depending on what he deserves (my translation). 19 Then the Prince begged to God with tears in his eyes, that He will not let him down in front of his friends (my translation). 20 Whether one gets good care, one is prudent and is good looking, it all is an act of providence depending upon what one deserves […] And thanked and praised God for his good fortune and said: These friends of mine did not believe nor accept, that all that befell them was destined by God (my translation). 21 Now, look at me and you will realize that this happiness has not come to me because I have common sense, beauty, hard work or violence. Right from the day that I was thrown out by my brother, I too never thought that I would get such honour. God Almighty alone sent me here as a pilgrim and made me a mighty king. Then a person from the crowd stood up and said: Only now do we realize, after listening to you, that you are truly worthy of this kingdom, since God has given you so much wisdom and understanding that we are well provided for with a wise and sensible king for our benefit. And another said: We owe it to God, to praise him, he who has made you king over us. It all happened through his providence. (my translation)

A Secular Pañcatantra  129 WORKS CITED Arnold, Edwin: The Book of Good Counsels. From the Sanskrit of the Hitopadesa. New Edition. London: W.H. Allen and Co., 1893. Bodemann-Kornhaas, Ulrike: Zwischen Mensch und Tier. Kalila und Dimna in illustrierten Handschriften und Drucken des Buchs der Beispiele der alten Weisen Antons von Pforr, 149–170. In: Mamoun Fansa; Grunewald Eckhard: Von Listigen Schakalen und törichten Kamelen. Die Fabel in Orient und Okzident. Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 2008. Edgerton, Franklin: The Panchatantra Reconstructed. Volume 2. Introduction and Translation. American Oriental Series Volume 3. New Haven: 1924. Even-Zohar, Itamar: ‘The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem’. Poetics Today, vol. 11, 23ff, 1990. Geissler, Friedmar: Das Pañcatantra. Wissenschaftliche Annalen III, 657ff, 1954. Hertel, Johannes: Das Pañcatantra seine Geschichte und seine Verbreitung. Leipzig und Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1914. Jacobs, Joseph (ed.): The Fables of Bidpai. Edinburgh and London: Ballantyne, Hanson and Co. Available at https://warburg​.sas​.ac​.uk​/pdf​/neh5070b2327739​.pdf Keith-Falconer, I.G.N.: Kalilah and Dimnah or The Fables of Bidpai: Being an account of their Literary History, with an English Translation of the later Syriac version of the same, and Notes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1885. Kulkarni, Krushnaji: Aadhunik marathi gaddyachi utkranti.Mumbai: Narayan Dattatrey Rege 1953. Obermaier, Sabine: Das Buch der Beispiele der alten Weisen Antons von Pforr, 85–98. In: Mamoun Fansa; Grunewald Eckhard: Von Listigen Schakalen und törichten Kamelen. Die Fabel in Orient und Okzident. Wiesbaden: Dr. Reichert Verlag, 2009 Obermaier, Sabine: Das Fabelbuch als Rahmenerzählung. Intertextualität und Intratextualität als Wege zur Interpretation des Buchs der Beispiele der alten Weisen Antons von Pforr. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004. Padhye, Priyada: Pan҃chopa̅khya̅ na: Fossilized Marathi Culture and the Translation lens. In Translation Today. Volume 13, Issue 2, Mysore: NTM CIIL, 2019 (141–175) Ryder, Arthur: The Panchatantra of Vishnu Sharma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925. Ruben, Walter: Das Pañcatantram und sein Morallehre. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1959. Schmidt, Richard. Das Pañcatantram (Textus Ornatior). Eine altindische Märchensammlung. Leipzig. Wegener, Hans (ed.): Bidpai. Das Buch der Beispiele alter Weisen. Berlin: Wegweiser Verlag, 1925.

Part IV

Literature, Film and Intertextuality



9

How Franz Kafka’s “Mann vom Lande” Sneaks into Thomas Bernhard’s Der Diktator Rosy Singh

Austrian literature has always maintained a strong sense of identity vis-à-vis the literature from Germany, something that is being acknowledged today even by the Germans: Österreich ist literarisch ein Unikum. Bei einem Zehnten der Bevölkerung Deutschlands hat es sehr viel mehr bedeutende Autoren hervorgebracht, als statistisch erlaubt wären. Ohne Österreich fehlten der Landschaft der Prosa die schönsten Seenplatten und Almhänge und Gipfelmassive.1 (Maar 2021: 308–309) Ein einziger Stadtteil von Wien hat ja mehr Genies hervorgebracht als ganz Niedersachsen, Schleswig-Holstein oder die Schweiz. Was hier an Genies herumläuft, ist ein Wahnsinn.2 (Klaus Peymann zitiert nach Michaelsen & Herwig 2021: 12) These grand tributes to the Austrian literary landscape, however, fail to take cognisance of the uneasy relationship Austria has with its authors, reflected poignantly in its love–hate relationship with Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989) respectively. After all, it was the Americans and the French who first “discovered” Kafka, not the Germans or the Austrians. Also, Kafka’s works were banned twice, first by the Nazis and then by the communists, for different reasons of course. For the Nazis it was enough that the writer, even if dead, happened to be a Jew; for the communists in East Europe, he was a decadent bourgeois writer who neglected the concerns of the working class. It is also well documented that Kafka’s writing, linguistically the Bohemian variety of German language, was considered in those times lowbrow compared to the “more coveted” (Sontag 2002: 9) standard German spoken in Germany and in Austria with Vienna as the epicentre and this was one of the reasons why writers from Prague were at a disadvantage in the publishing world compared to their counterparts in Germany. Interestingly, the same lowbrow German was high in the vertical hierarchy of languages within Prague, at that time part of the Austro–Hungarian Empire, that side-lined the Czech language despite it being the language of the majority. Kafka’s legacy has today paradoxically turned into a space of academic squabbling for appropriation between Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Israel. Likewise, Bernhard DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-14

134  Literature, Film and Intertextuality had to face in his lifetime a great deal of backlash in Austria as his writing, critical and contemptuous of the conservative and uptight sections of Austrian society, ruffled many feathers. Thomas Mann, stripped of his German citizenship in 1936 by the Nazis, stated unrepentant in a BBC radio broadcast to his countrymen from America that “no artist writes with the specific intent of doing his country and people proud” (Mann 1986: 47–48). That remark might as well have come from Bernhard. His will, explicitly stating that after his death none of his works should be “staged, published or even read out” within the boundaries of Austria and also that his literary estate, particularly letters should remain unpublished, expresses his angry final response, “eine schallende Ohrfeige”, a resounding slap (Opitz 2004) in the face of Austria: Weder aus dem von mir zu Lebzeiten veröffentlichten, noch aus dem nach meinem Tod gleich wo immer noch vorhandenen Nachlaß darf auf die Dauer des gesetzlichen Urheberrechts innerhalb der Grenzen des österreichischen Staats, […] etwas in welcher Form immer von mir verfaßtes Geschriebenes aufgeführt, gedruckt oder auch nur vorgetragen werden. Ausdrücklich betone ich, dass ich mit dem österreichischen Staat nichts zu tun haben will, und verwahre mich […] gegen jede Annäherung des österreichischen Staates […] in aller Zukunft. Nach meinem Tod darf aus meinem literarischen Nachlaß, worunter auch Briefe und Zettel zu verstehen sind, kein Wort mehr veröffentlicht werden. (ibid.) This testament reminds us invariably of Franz Kafka’s famous rather infamous testament in the form of two undated letters addressed to his friend Max Brod (they were found in the drawers of Kafka’s writing desk) that Brod later published in the epilogue of the first edition of Kafka’s Der Proceß. According to these letters, Kafka clearly states that after his death there should be “no posthumous publications” of his writings and his “diaries, manuscripts, letters, sketches” etc be “burned unread”, “without exception”: DEAREST MAX, my last request: Everything I leave behind me (that is, in my bookcases, chest of drawers, writing-table, both at home and in the office, or wherever anything may have got to, whatever you happen to find), in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people’s, sketches and so on, is to be burned unread and to the last page, as well as all writings of mine or notes which either you may have or other people, from whom you are to beg them in my name. Letters which are not handed over to you should at least be faithfully burned by those who have them. Yours, FRANZ KAFKA (Kafka 1986: 253) In the second letter, Kafka writes, among other things:

Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard  135 DEAR MAX, perhaps this time I shan’t recover, pneumonia is likely enough (…) Just in case, then, this is my last will concerning all I have written: Of all my writings the only books that count are these: The Judgment, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor, and the short story: Hunger Artist (…) should they disappear altogether that would be what I want. Only, since they do exist, I don’t mind anyone keeping them if he wants to. But everything else of mine which I have written (printed in magazines or newspapers, written in manuscripts or letters) so far as it can be got hold of, or begged from the addresses) … all this, without exception, is to be burned, and you should do it as soon as possible is what I beg of you. Franz (Kafka 1986: 253–254) Unlike Bernhard however, Kafka’s testament is not directed against the State or anyone in particular. It is reflective of his acute sensitivity as a person and as a writer. The deceased also have a right to privacy although this right is barely acknowledged by society or legal experts. To keep your private letters and diaries away from prying eyes, even after death, is not a silly whim of a dying person. Although it has never been considered seriously enough to be made into a legal right, it is undeniably a natural right. This in no way contradicts Kafka’s deep, almost demonic commitment to writing. Hundred years ago, he was exercising what is called today in the jargon of the digital age the “right to be forgotten”. Needless to say, the testaments of both the writers have not been executed; they have been disregarded, in the words of Milan Kundera “betrayed”. (Kundera: 1995) Sometimes the two writers are put together in the same basket for strange reasons. Some literary scholars compare them also because both suffered terminal illnesses related to the lungs. Now there is no harm in knowing the medical report or other personal details of the writer but then they more often than not tend to distract readers and critics from the works that the authors produced, that made them famous. It is the same as saying that Dostoevsky’s novels are nothing but expressions of his epilepsy. This chapter tries to eschew the trappings of such a priori readings. Instead of succumbing to the temptation of equating the life of the author with his works and seeking explanation and interpretation of the works in the life they lived and their death, this article is foregrounded in the semiotic approach with a focus on the textual analysis and the intertextual connections in the works of the two authors. The extensive scholarship on Franz Kafka (1883–1924) compares Kafka’s writing with that of many writers, some who wrote before him or his contemporaries or those who came after him. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol are two writers who share similarities in motifs and narrative techniques with Kafka. One only has to think of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Kafka’s The Trial or Gogol’s The Overcoat and The Nose and Kafka’s Metamorphosis (Struc 1971: 135–154). There have been comparisons with writers who came after him, particularly French

136  Literature, Film and Intertextuality existentialists such as Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Maurice Blanchot (Sartre 1955: 41–60). In fact, Kafka is very often considered the literary precursor of the literary-philosophical and cultural existentialist movement that established itself in France in the sixties and seventies. It is the French reception of Kafka that facilitated his homecoming to the German-speaking countries after the Second World War. Since then, many post-war Austrian writers have Kafka’s long shadow falling on their writing just as the German Romantics had to deal with the larger-than-life image of Goethe looming over them. Three well-known postwar Austrian writers inspired and influenced by Kafka in different ways are Elias Canetti, Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard. With this I come to the main part of my chapter. Kafka’s protagonist “man from the country” has fascinated readers and critics all over the world since he first appeared more than a century ago in the novel Der Proceß written in 1914 and published in 1925 by Max Brod. (Kafka: 1980) It is well known that the fragment novel was not published in his lifetime but Kafka published a year later in 1915 a scene out of it ascribing to it the title Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law). In this scene that plays out in a cathedral, a priest narrates a legend to the protagonist Joseph K, a kind of exigency. Much has been written on this doorkeeper legend and its two protagonists have been immortalised not only in the Kafkan studies but in films, illustrations and of course other literary narratives. One such narrative is Bernhard’s Der Diktator (The Dictator), a small text of 12–15 lines that was written around 50 years after Kafka’s Before the Law. (Bernhard 1994: 58-59) The presence of “man from the country” in both the short narratives and some other commonalities is too compelling to be taken as a coincidence. Before I attempt to bring the two narratives together in a tête-à-tête, let me first discuss the narratives separately with some details. Although Kafka’s famous parable needs no introduction, I would like to “tell” it again in my own way. A close reading of sorts is for me an intrinsic aspect of my semiotic approach. 9.1 Vor dem Gesetz Courses in creative writing invariably emphasise the importance of the first sentence of a literary work for it must have the potential to catch the reader’s attention, inviting and seducing him to enter the proverbial spider’s web. This Poesie des Anfangs is crucial, says Peter-André Alt, the author of the book Erste Sätze der Weltliteratur und was sie uns verraten (First Sentences of the World Literature and What They Tell Us, 2020). Vor dem Gesetz begins, however, with an unspectacular, almost flat and dull announcement, “Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter” (Kafka 2006: 162) (Before the law stands a doorkeeper). (Kafka 1998: 3) Hardly a proposition that grabs attention or seduces anyone! Completely undramatic! Yet this plain statement of six words that could pass off as a bureaucratic noting or a protocol sets the tone and the rhythm, the literary style and the content of this short narrative. A man from the country arrives before an imposing and daunting structure, the Law and seeks permission from an equally formidable-looking doorkeeper to enter. The doorkeeper throws a spanner with a cryptic reply “not now”, “perhaps

Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard  137 later”. He also warns him about other, more menacing doorkeepers inside. The man from the country is taken aback. He hesitates. Not having expected such obstacles, he decides to play it safe and wait. Over the course of time, he makes several attempts to access the Law. He appeals to the doorkeeper, bribes him with his modest assets and even pleads with the fleas in his overcoat that feed as parasites on him to help him. He tries to engage the doorkeeper in idle talk, all along trying to maintain his dignity. The doorkeeper neither turns him away nor does he give him a clear go-ahead. Like groβe Herren (big lords), he does not really pay much heed to him and carries on with his work. Undeterred, the man from the country never abandons his mission and waits patiently “days and years”, practically all his life, at the entrance of the Law. Despite the existential impasse, his faith in the Law appears to be unwavering. What amazes and baffles readers across the world is how credulous one can get. As he grows old and nears his end, he turns quirky and childish, mumbling to himself. The burly doorkeeper, who does not seem to have aged correspondingly, bends down to the shrivelled, dying man and roars in his ear that the door was meant only for him and he is going to shut it “now”. The man from the country, almost deaf and blind, dies without having set foot inside the door of the Law. His entire life is defined by waiting (Singh 2021: 92–93). It is a common refrain that no one is above the Law, all are equal before the Law. In this short narrative, the supplicant, the man from the country, is literally left to die before the Law. The literary scholar Heinz Politzer who also helped Max Brod in editing the first collected works of Kafka in 1935, scrolls back in time and discovers that the narrative has some connection with Jewish mythology. There are people who know the Sacred Jewish Law, the Torah and people who do not know it. The latter category of the (so-called) ignorant man or heretic is in Hebrew Am-ha’arez the man from the country (Politzer 1978: 278ff). The law, the waiting and the threshold angst are recurring motifs in Kafka’s writing which some overzealous literary scholars obsessed with Kafka’s Jewish background triumphantly identify with the Jewish religious system and the eternal Jewish wait for the Messiah. Scholars like Max Brod, Heinz Politzer and Hannah Arendt have gone down this path. So have many others. What they do not realise is that although Kafka often draws on mythological elements, be it the Greek, the Christian or the Jewish, he invariably exercises transformations on them generating new meanings and new contexts. (cf. Rosy 2003) The allusions to the heavenly courts, the doorkeepers and the cosmic light at the end of the legend are metaphysical features not to be taken literally. These motifs attributed to and juxtaposed with the bureaucracy and the judiciary highlight their abstraction, remoteness and inaccessibility. Their language is couched in abstraction. The to-the-point remarks of the gatekeeper, “not yet”, “perhaps later”, construe neither truth nor lie. He is simply making use of deception and duplicity that is inherent in the human language as such. Language is not so much about stating things as they are. It more often than not indulges in the playful art of deception, how to say things otherwise. Waiting and the related threshold angst often turn into a modern existential experience in Kafka’s works. This kind of violation of human dignity is a manifestation

138  Literature, Film and Intertextuality of power which exercises itself through the very institutions that are meant to defend these ideals. It is indeed paradoxical that these institutions claim to be neutral and independent. Hannah Arendt calls bureaucracy the most formidable form of violence, the most tyrannical of all as there is no one who can be held accountable because it is “rule by Nobody” (Arendt 1970: 38). The “upside-down”, “topsy turvy”, “eccentric and hallucinating” (Sartre 1955: 62) Kafkan world as Jean-Paul Sartre calls it, has fascinated generations of readers across the world. In the words of Sartre, this kind of fantastic literature is a revolt of the means against the end. The end may exist in this world, but the means will gradually eat it away (ibid 63). In terms of intertextual practices, what matters is how the mythical and religious motifs enter into new combinations with other signifiers within a given text to create a new discursive formation where the old signifiers get reorganised and reconstituted acquiring new significations in the process. In semiotic studies, it is always emphasised that there can be no fixed, eternal and a priori interpretation of any signifier. Rather signifiers tend to shift in their signification. This is not to say that they are not stable. The play with motifs lends new layers of meanings to the old, a kind of symbiotic understanding, one enriching the other and vice versa. The biblical parable of the Prodigal Son for example has been reinvented by so many writers including those by Rilke and Kafka. The same goes for the ancient Greek myths. The apples with which the father hits his son Gregor Samsa who finds himself transformed into a cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis do not have the same signification as the apples in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or the fruit in Original Sin. The signifier “apple” produces an altogether different order of signification in different narratives. 9.2 Der Diktator Thomas Bernhard’s Der Diktator (Bernhard 1994: 58-59) also has two dramatis personae. In this short narrative, micro fiction or miniature of about 12–14 lines, the dictator and the man from the country are introduced with the definite article. The dictator selects out of a hundred-odd applicants the einfacher Mann vom Lande (simple-minded man from the country), assigning him the singular task of polishing his shoes daily. He is accordingly assigned a vantage position “before” the door of the dictator. The dictator remains “behind” the door, shrouded in mystery and the narrative gives no indication of what happens behind closed doors. Sitting and sleeping outside the door, the man from the country starts to adapt to the new surroundings. In no time, the shoe shiner begins to gain weight developing the same fat nose and the same kind of hair loss as the dictator. He begins to resemble his boss. One reason for the uncanny resemblance, according to the storyline is that both eat the same diet. The shoe shiner transforms into a kind of the Doppelgänger of the dictator. Exaggeration is used as a narrative technique. The gain in weight is allegorical to the gain in all kinds of confidential information related to the dictator. All ministers and advisers of the dictator begin to loathe and fear this man. The supplicant transforms into the Türhüter, the guard, the bodyguard who is aware of all the little details in the dictator’s life. The man from the country turned shoe

Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard  139 shiner is tatsächlich (actually) the person closest to the dictator, physically and otherwise. One day when the man from the country feels confident and prepared, he enters the dictator’s chamber killing him with a single powerful blow. Quickly he slips into the clothes of the dead man. Satisfied with his reflection as he stands “before” the mirror in the robes of the dictator, he decides that it is time for the big announcement. Storming out confidently, he dashes into the passage, shouts that the shoe shiner attacked him and declares that in self-defence he killed the shoe shiner. Instructions are issued that the shoe shiner’s body be disposed, and his family be informed. The signifier “man from the country” a proper noun, functions in both texts as a semiotic sign that is evocative for the very reason that one is likely to criticise it, namely that it is clichéd. As a nomen est omen, it works even better than a name or half a name such as Joseph K (Der Proceß) or only an alphabet K (Das Schloss). Bernhard’s man from the country is initially selected for the job because his profile as a villager seems perfect for the job. Attributes such as simplicity, gullibility and transparency associated with villagers make him a suitable candidate for the position. He is supposed to be someone not familiar with the ways of the world which renders him harmless in the world of politics and power. The dialectic of “before” and “behind” the door dominates in both texts. The world “behind” the door is opaque and mysterious, unknown and unknowable, abstract to the extent of being metaphysical. So far the two narratives proceed more or less on similar lines. That is where Kafka and Bernhard converge before parting ways. Kafka’s protagonist remains steadfast in his character. He remains till the end what his name suggests, literally and metaphorically, the man from the country who is simple-minded and naïve, a simpleton. The resemblance to Fyoder Dostoevsky’s Idiot (1868), “a good man”, some would, however, call him a country bumpkin, is striking. (Dostoevsky 2004) He is also a literary offspring of Akaky Akakyevitch, the protagonist in Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat (1842), the quintessential clerk in the nineteenth-century Russian bureaucracy (Gogol 2014). In contrast, Bernhard’s man from the country undergoes a transformation. Literally living in the corridors of power, Bernhard’s protagonist learns fast the rules of the game. Gaining weight and losing hair over the years help him acquire the looks of the dictator. Unlike Kafka, Bernhard’s protagonist feels no threshold angst and neither is he willing to wait for years. Taking advantage of his proximity to the dictator, he one day enters his room and kills him. But this is not to demolish the hierarchical power structures and democratise them. He gets rid of the dictator only to take his place. Seizing power, he ensures the continuity of tyranny. Power changes hands as the Bittsteller-Gönner (supplicant–benefactor) constellation is inverted, but the structures of power remain firmly in place as everyone is on the same side of the power. The differences between dictator and subjects, haves and have-nots, the benefactor and the supplicant get blurred because everyone is power-hungry, seeking power. All are attracted to and seduced by power. No wonder revolutions often end up replacing one form of dictatorship with another. Both narratives are politically charged but they are not political documents. Kafka’s Man from the Country submits to authority; Bernhard’s Man

140  Literature, Film and Intertextuality from the Country becomes the authority. Although both Kafka and Bernhard pose in their writing the eternal questions of power structures and power dynamics – and both can be highly political and provocative –, the two writers have their distinct conceptual worlds, alike yet diverse. 9.3 Form, Style and Genre The three generic terms are intertwined. What binds them together is their theoretical character distinct from the content and the context of the text. Form can be likened to a Swiss pocket knife that can be used in multiple situations, not just in literary analysis but in life as such (Durdel 2020: 36). It is an umbrella term covering genre, style, narrative techniques and much more. Style could be described as a writer’s DNA, something that is unique to a person. A writer can often be identified by his/her style of writing that characterises his/her signature style (Maar 2021: 22). Let me explain with an example that Roland Barthes cites. Criticising the practice of précis writing or summary in schools, which reduces thought to message and style to an ornament, a province of luxury and leisure that is of little or no consequence, Barthes laments in his essay Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers that, “to separate the thought from the style is in some sort to relieve the discourse of its sacerdotal robes … and secularize it” (Barthes 1977: 193). Michael Maar, author of Die Schlange im Wolfspelz. Das Geheimnis großer Literatur, endorses in his own way Barthes’ position in the specific context of literature. He maintains that good literary style develops when thought and its expression in language have “found each other”, when they are in perfect harmony (Maar 2021: 25). In other words, good style involves a perfect unison of thought and its formulation in a specific language. This also implies that there may be great literary stylists in the world but if their ideas are weak, they would not be able to generate great works and vice versa. Literary style is also not about being grammatically correct and using the correct punctuation. Kafka and Flaubert are accordingly described by Maar as great stylists although they were not particular about the norms that were construed as good language style in their times. In fact, literary style is more about breaking rules than abiding by them. The literary styles of Kafka and Bernhard are also unique to them; at the same time, they do exhibit some affinity in terms of architectonics and narrative techniques. Allow me to elaborate on it with an example. In their novels, both writers prefer a sweeping architectonic structure without speed breakers like paragraphs and punctuation. Bernhard even avoids making chapters. His prose has been described as a Mahlstrom, a whirlpool (Maar 2021: 374, 375) and the long sentences in it are described as Bandwurmsätze (tapeworm sentences) (ibid: 374). The sentences are marked by repetitions of verbs, nouns, adjectives and adverbs inserted deliberately to impart to the text-discourse the impression of a labyrinthic structure. Somewhat similar is the case with Kafka. “Sprachstrom”. “Endlosigkeit” and “labyrinthische Satzgebilde” are terms used to describe Kafka’s writing (cf. Singh 2018: 208). According to Milan Kundera, who has done commendable research on Kafka:

Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard  141 [the] Kafkan imagination runs like a river, a dreamlike river that finds no respite till a chapter’s end. That long breath of imagination is reflected in the nature of the syntax. (…) The texts are divided into very few paragraphs. This tendency to minimize the articulation – few paragraphs, few strong pauses (on rereading a manuscript, Kafka often even changed periods to commas), few markers emphasizing the text’s logical organization (colons, semicolons) ̶ is consubstantial with Kafka’s style; at the same time it is a perpetual attack on “good German style” (as well as on the “good style” of all the languages into which Kafka is translated). (Kundera 2005: 116) You can see the long, intoxicating flight of Kafka’s prose in the text’s typographical appearance, which is often a single “endless” paragraph, over pages, enfolding even long passages of dialogue. (ibid: 117) This style of writing dovetails with the contents that are marked by labyrinth kind of existential situations out of which there appears to be no exit. The Kafkan character is caught in a wild goose chase that gets him nowhere. The absurdity of human existence finds expression through both form and content. Unlike Kafka, however, the reader can sense in Bernhard an anger, the Schnörkelzorn (Maar 2021: 375), directed at the society. Kafka was a master of the genres of novels as well as the short form. German umbrella terms such as kleine Prosa, Kürzestprosa (very short prose) and Miniaturen, a term that draws on the age-old tradition of miniature paintings, refer to narratives that are as a rule shorter than a short story. An appropriate term for the genre in English would be micro fiction. Short prose is marked by brevity of narrative space packing dense content in a few lines. Kafka and Bernhard were both practitioners of this genre. It is as if the two writers were trying to say that “less is more”. Characterised by the diminutive form, brevity and condensation of linguistic space and thought, it is one uninterrupted piece of writing: a single paragraph with long but few sentences and few punctuation marks, hyperbolic condensed forms like one solid rock. These miniatures (Kafka’s Betrachtung, 1912, Bernhard’s Ereignisse, 1969 and Stimmenimitator, 1978) are often marked by the absence of lengthy character sketches, reflections philosophical in nature and historiography. Rather they tend to follow the style of a factual report or protocol, devoid of sentimentality of sorts. Several texts of micro fiction are often joined together by the principle of collage (more in Engel, Robertson: 2011). In terms of narrative techniques such as the grotesque, the tragicomic and the seamless fusion of dream and reality, Kafka and Bernhard exhibit a remarkable affinity. The Kafkan and Bernhardian exploration of the enigma of human existence and existential themes through the tragicomic genre has been analysed by various literary critics. With respect to the tragicomic genre, Milan Kundera says of Kafka: In the world of the Kafkan, the comic is not a counterpoint to the tragic (the tragicomic) as in Shakespeare; it’s not there to make the tragic more bearable

142  Literature, Film and Intertextuality by lightening the tone; it doesn’t accompany the tragic, not at all, it nips it in the bud and thus deprives the victims of the only consolation they could hope for: the consolation to be found in the (real or supposed) grandeur of tragedy. (Kundera 2005: 104–105) (italics in the original) Somewhat similar is the analysis of Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, Germanist and co-editor of Bernhard’s collected works in 22 volumes with Suhrkamp publishing house: The opposites of comedy and tragedy exist alongside rather than in mutually exclusive terms. Bernhard’s virtuosity reveals itself in that he gives the reader the opportunity to re-enact this constant crossing of borders between the two genres. He appears to be a tap-dancer who, with the speed of lightning, dances on the border between the comic and the tragic. (Konzett 2002: 107) Gallows humour is a term that would be appropriate for many if not all texts in both the oeuvres. Bernhard’s malicious glee at the turn of events to the point of turning it into a horror story and Kafka’s dry humour in the hopelessness of the situation are close intellectual cousins. The grotesque imagination is at its best when horror and terror are presented with exaggerated dark humour. It can appear in the fusion of the real and the surreal but cannot be part of a typically exclusive realistic mode of presentation. Similarly, the dry protocol style mentioned above is a literary deception. Maar describes Kafka’s literary style as a “blending of precision and exaggeration”, a kind of oxymoron (Maar 2021: 343). The precision exists in terms of language and the exaggeration finds expression in the narrative techniques. Moral judgment is suspended as both narratives eschew the traditional victory of good over evil. Basically, they come across as dense metaphors that cannot be pinned down or reduced to any fixed historical time and geographical and territorial space. Bernhard deftly evokes Kafka’s famous parable and pays him in this manner a literary homage, a tribute. The shoe shiner is essentially a celebration of the Kafkan but then Bernhard moves on to unfold his own universe. Both the nameless protagonists are faced with choices: one chooses to wait at the threshold and the other chooses to cross the threshold taking matters into his own hands. It is all about the decisions and choices people make in life. Both are in their own way highly charged existential narratives. 9.4 Conclusion Intertextuality expresses itself as a process of continuity. Roland Barthes reflects on it in his celebrated The Death of the Author essay: We know now that a text is (…) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (…) His

Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard  143 only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. (Barthes 1977: 146) The phrase “never to rest on any one them” is crucial for intertextuality for it refers to the permutations and combinations of ideas that ultimately generate a new discursive formation. There could be other ways of reflecting on it. To take a mathematical allegory, the Kafkan and the Bernhardian worlds are like two circles that intersect with some common area of intersection in terms of content and form and the rest of the text-discourse is different. The overall impression it leaves is that of aesthetic affinity. In a gardener’s language, this phenomenon could be compared with grafting where the introduction of a tiny bit of another variety leads to a new hybrid fruit. The point of grafting leaves its mark and remains visible even after a long time. Languages, ideas and aesthetics travel, developing their own trajectories across time and space, across cultures and generations. Kafka draws on the ancient myths and Bernhard in turn draws on Kafka. Bernhard’s parody of Kafka’s famous parable is so refined and subtle that only readers who do a close and attentive reading of the two narratives would recognise it. He starts with Kafka and then subverts the Kafkaesque to a chilling end. Unlike Kafka, Bernhard’s man from the country turns out to be a survivor. This intertextual comparison is not historical for history and historicity take a backseat in both these narratives as the motifs strive to be more universal than specific to time and space. Lastly a few words about influence or “mutual illumination” in the world of ideas which is very different from academic writing. Poetic borrowing is intrinsic to the long literary tradition. Rousseau gave his autobiography the title Confessions. It is not as if Rousseau was not aware that many centuries prior to him Saint Augustine had given his autobiographical writing the same title. It was a conscious decision on Rousseau’s part and carried out in good faith. To cite another example but from a somewhat different perspective: At the end of a comparative study of Kafka and M. Blanchot, with the title “Aminadab or the Fantastic Considered as a Language”, Jean-Paul Sartre remarks that both writers are good but Kafka deserves a little bit more credit as he was “the first on the scene”. “Blanchot has certainly a considerable talent, but he came afterwards, and the artifices he employs are already too familiar” (Sartre 1955: 69). The same holds true for Bernhard who co-opted Kafkaesque motifs and narrative techniques in his writing. It is Kafka who first discovered, rather invented these narrative techniques and ushered in a silent “aesthetic revolution” (Kundera 2005:81) at the beginning of the twentieth century in Prague. It would not be fair to describe Bernhard as a “pick-pocket”, but Kafka definitely has deeper aesthetic pockets. Notes 1 “Austria is unique in terms of literature. For a tenth of Germany’s population, it has produced many more significant authors than would be statistically permissible. Without Austria, the prose landscape would lack the most beautiful lake plateaus and alpine slopes and mountain ranges” (author’s translation).

144  Literature, Film and Intertextuality 2 “A single district of Vienna has produced more geniuses than all of Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein or Switzerland. It’s simply crazy, so many geniuses roaming around here” (author’s translation).

WORKS CITED Arendt, Hannah: On Violence, London: Penguin Press, 1970. Barthes, Roland: Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana Press, 1977. Bernhard, Thomas: “Der Diktator” in T.B. Ereignisse, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994, pp. 58–59. Bernhard, Thomas: Der Stimmenimitator London, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhkamp, 2017. Durdel, P., Gödel, F., Lamp, et al (eds.): Literaturtheorie nach 2001, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2020. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot, Delhi: Penguin, 2004. Engel, M., Robertson, R. (eds.): Kafka und die kleine Prosa der Moderne. Kafka and Short Modernist Prose, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011. Gogol, Nikolai: The Government Inspector and Other Works, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 2014. Kafka, Franz: Der Prozeß, ed. Max Brod, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1980. Kafka, Franz: The Trial, London: Penguin, 1986. Kafka, Franz: “Before the Law” in FK: The Collected Short Stories of Franz Kafka, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, London: Penguin, 1988, pp. 3–4. Kafka, Franz: “Vor dem Gesetz” in FK: Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2006, pp. 162–163. Kafka, Franz: Betrachtung, Prag: Vitalis, 2008. Konzett, Matthias (ed.): A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard, New York: Camden House, 2002. Kundera, Milan: Testaments Betrayed. An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher, London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. Kundera, Milan: The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher, London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Maar, Michael: Die Schlange im Wolfspelz. Das Geheimnis großer Literatur, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 7. Edition, 2021. Mann, Thomas: Deutsche Hörer! Europäische Hörer! Radiosendungen nach Deutschland, Darmstadt: Darmstädter Blätter, 1986. Michaelsen, Sven & Herwig, Malte: „Interview mit Peter Handke. Zorn ist eine Form der Begeisterung, eine Art Liebe“, Berner Zeitung, 2021. https://www​.bernerzeitung​ .ch​/zorn​-ist​-eine​-form​-der​-begeisterung​-eine​-art​-liebe​-817012706423, accessed on 18.12.2021 Opitz, Michael: „Auch nach dem Tode“, Deutschlandfunk, 2004. https://www​ .deutschlandfunk​.de​/auch​-nach​-dem​-tode​-100​.html, accessed on 11.12.2021. Politzer, Heinz: Franz Kafka. Der Künstler, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1978. Sartre, Jean-Paul: “Aminadab or the Fantastic Considered as a Language”, in: Literary and Philosophical Essays from Situations I and III, translated by Annette Michelson, New York: Criterion Books, 1955, pp. 41–60. Sontag, Susan: The World as India. The St. Jerome Lecture on Literary Translation. In Memoriam W.G. Sebald, 2002. http://www​.susansontag​.com​/prize​/onTranslation​.shtml, accessed on 23.05.2023. Singh, Rosy: “Franz Kafka: Judaism and Jewishness”, Sprachkunst, Jg. XXXIV, 2. Halbband, 2003, pp. 233–247.

Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard  145 Singh, Rosy: “Die Konstellation von Lärm und Stille in Kafkas Werken: Großer Lärm, In unserer Synagoge …, Der Bau”, Wirkendes Wort, Vol. 2, 2018, pp. 201–210. Singh, Rosy: “Intertextual Connections between Franz Kafka’s Before the Law and Thomas Bernhard’s The Dictator”, Journal of Arts, Vol. 10, Issue 1, July 2021, pp. 88–101. Struc, Roman S. “Categories of the Grotesque: Gogol and Kafka”. In Franz Kafka: His Place in World Literature, edited by T. Zyla Waladymyr, Texas: Texas Technical University, 1971, p. 135–154.

10 Kafka in SoHo An Analysis of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) Syed Habeeb Tehseen

I thought it would be interesting to see if I could go back and do something in a very fast way. All style. An exercise completely in style. And to show they hadn’t killed my spirit. (quoted in Ebert 2009: 1) This was how Scorsese described his 1985 feature After Hours (After Hours: 1985), made after the major disappointment of 1983 when his long-dreamt project The Last Temptation of Christ was shelved weeks before principal photography was set to begin. The critic Roger Ebert in the review whence this quote is from, described After Hours as a “hypertext film” whose disparate elements seemed to be connected in “an occult way” (Ebert 2009: 1). Dismissing reviews calling the film Kafkaesque as merely employing a descriptive definition and not an explanatory one, he nevertheless points towards an explanation in the self-same review when he refers to the film’s “classic Hitchcock plot formula, the Innocent Man Wrongly Accused” (ibid.). Leighton Grist, who teaches Media and Film Studies at the University of Winchester, summarises the plot of the film as follows: After Hours concerns the misadventures of computer operative Paul Hackett (Dunne) who, upon meeting Marcy (Rosanna Arquette) in a coffee shop, journeys the same night to visit her at the SoHo loft in which she is staying with sculptress Kiki Bridges (Linda Fiorentino). On the way downtown, Paul loses his only $20 bill and, not hitting it off with Marcy, leaving, finds he lacks the subway fare home. (Grist 2013: 123) This chapter in principle builds upon arguments offered by the late Marion Faber, who was Professor Emeritus of German at Swarthmore University, in her article titled: “Kafka on the Screen: Martin Scorsese’s ‘After Hours’” (Faber 1986: 200). For Faber, it is the lack of a direct adaptation of Kafka’s work, which makes it in effect a perfect depiction of the author’s world: Certain films offer such a clear picture of an epoch or environment that they better capture an author's world than any direct filming of his work (…) Scorsese’s is a Kafkaesque vision of reality. (ibid: 200)

DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-15

Kafka in SoHo  147 Some direct references, however, remain. Faber for example points towards a “fundamental orientation” (ibid: 200), an “indebtedness to Kafka” (ibid: 200). In one scene halfway through the film the protagonist tries to enter Club Berlin in SoHo. For keen viewers, the stage is already set for Kafka’s famous Before the Law parable. The club bouncer denies the protagonist entrance within. Upon being bribed by Hackett, he says the following: “I’ll take your money ‘cause I want you to feel you haven’t left anything untried” (ibid: 200). Faber remarks that contrary to the parable, in which the Man from the Country remains waiting at the threshold until his demise, Hackett does succeed in gaining permission to enter, and the story moves ahead. But is this reference merely performative? A mere pastiche? Faber sees in this reference “a key to the intention of the entire movie” (ibid: 201). It reflects the inner workings of the dreamlike SoHo world that Scorsese seeks to develop: After Hours is Kafka on the screen; it transports the paranoid nightmare of Joseph K. from Prague to New York. (ibid: 201) Faber might not be incorrect in her assessment but the question must be asked: What qualifies as Kafkaesque? There are elements of Kafka’s works that each review points towards. Ebert for example focuses on the “Innocent Man Wrongly Accused”, the individual in trouble, reminiscent of Josef K from The Trial. Faber here is referring to a film aesthetic, an atmosphere akin to Kafka’s novels, especially The Trial. But what is the specific nature of this “paranoid nightmare”? Milan Kundera in his seminal book Art of the Novel, has the following to say about the “Kafkan world”: The Kafkan world does not resemble any known reality, it is an extreme and unrealized possibility of the human world. (Kundera 2003: 51) And further in terms of this uncanny world and the people in it: [a] world that is nothing but a single, huge labyrinthine institution they cannot escape and cannot understand. (ibid: 103) Indeed, when we look at the depiction of SoHo in the film, we realise that it only remotely resembles the very real South of Houston uptown Manhattan area of the time. It is rather, to use the words of Kundera here, an “extreme and unrealized possibility of that reality”. It is a nightmarish, Kafkaesque rendition of New York. And as for Paul Hackett, he typifies the Kafkaesque character, oblivious of the grander scheme of things, stuck in machinations he cannot understand and as a result of which, cannot escape. The SoHo that we see in the film, a midnight dreamlike rendition full of blind alleys, trashcans, mist and smoke, narrow pathways and seemingly endless rows of buildings stuck together seems to draw a lot of inspiration from descriptions of the city in Kafka’s The Trial. Faber highlights the “suffocating” and “deceptive” aspects of these two spaces:

148  Literature, Film and Intertextuality The SoHo that Scorsese creates, with its misty trash-can littered, threatening streets, its demonic cabbies, tenement closeness, is very reminiscent of the Prague of Kafka’s Trial where space is both suffocating and deceptive. (Faber 1986: 201) Josef K’s journey to an “out-of-the-way, lower-class district” mirror that of Paul Hackett’s to lower Manhattan SoHo, a district which at the time of the film’s release was a rather desolate area full of empty lofts usually inhabited by artists. Instead of a number of the house, in Paul Hackett’s case, he is presented with a phone number, but the journey of the protagonist into stranger surroundings is ever present here: He was given the number of the house where he was to present himself, it was in a street in an out-of-the-way, lower-class district where K. had never been before. (Kafka 2009: 27) the street was lined on both sides with almost identical houses, tall, grey tenements where poor people lived. (ibid: 29) Rolf J Goebel, Professor Emeritus for German, World Languages and Cultures at the University of Alabama in Hunstville, identifies Josef K’s irresolvable conflict in The Trial as the catalyst for him: The tribulations of Josef K., the protagonist of Kafka’s second novel The Trial (Der Proceß), revolve around the clash between the inaccessible court’s unspecified accusation and K.’s insistence on his own innocence. This irresolvable conflict forces K. to embark on an exploratory journey through the ‘phantasmagoria’ of the modern city, a space defined by surfaces, theatrical scenarios and unreadable representations. (Goebel 2002: 42) It is a similarly irresolvable conflict for Hackett, and difficulties arise aplenty, which leave him, in a certain sense of the word, arrested within the confines of SoHo. Furthermore, framings often depict Hackett’s entrapment, being enclosed in a tight space, restricted. The American film critic Dave Kehr, for example, considers ‘barriers’ to be the film’s main visual motif: Barriers provide the film’s main visual motif—the armored doors of artists’ lofts, the steel security shutters that descend over bars and shop fronts, the metal gratings that cover the apartment windows through which Paul glimpses flashing scenes of sex and violence. There is even a punk bar named Berlin, where the décor consists of chain- link fencing and the bouncer who bars the door is only slightly more accommodating than an East German border guard. (Kehr 2011: 102) It is very much a space of “surfaces, theatrical scenarios and unreadable representations”; however, critics have used other terms for the same, with pejoratives such

Kafka in SoHo  149 as “screwball”, “surrealist”, and in the case of Pauline Kael, adjectives such as “skittish paranoid fantasy” (Kael 1985). After Hours, similar to structures in The Trial uses the mise-en-scene to establish “indefinite spaces” where “the shots present deliberately vague and expansive backgrounds, the limits remaining uncertain” (Faber 1986: 201). According to Faber: Scorsese also plays with those metaphors of height and depth (keys dropping down from windows, repeated climbing of stairs, camera angles to stress oblique verticals) which are so full of meaning in Kafka’s works, establishing relationships of power and authority, exclusion and inaccessibility. (Faber 1986: 201) Examples of how the camera achieves these depictions of “hierarchy, exclusion and authority” are self-evident in the scene at Club Berlin. Hackett’s relative dependence in scenes is achieved through shot-reverse shot techniques (Beicken 2016: 86) which place the other character at a higher point-of-view than Hackett, making him appear small: This film treats space expressionistically, as does Kafka, in that these labyrinthine spaces reflect the inner situation rather than any objective, simply photographic verisimilitude. Filmically, (…) Scorsese achieves the same sense of subjective space that Kafka achieves through his unique prose. (Faber 1986: 202) The space in the film is thus inherently subjective. It is a reflection of the protagonist projecting his own reality and his anxieties onto his immediate surroundings. The public is the private or as Kundera very succinctly observes: The Kafkan is not restricted to either the private or the public domain; it encompasses both. The public is the mirror of the private, the private reflects the public. (Kundera 2003: 114) And as far as the cinematic in Kafka’s works is concerned Peter Beicken, Professor Emeritus for German literature, culture and film at the University of Maryland and a Kafka expert who has authored books on Kafka, argues: Kafka’s visual method fascinates for the richness of its innovative and structural uses of the cinematic that, at times, appears to anticipate film concepts and techniques such as the moving camera, freeze frame and parallel action. (Beicken 2016: 81) Beicken further makes some important observations with regards to certain cinematic elements to Kafka’s works:

150  Literature, Film and Intertextuality The visual impressions are not plot-related in the sense of driving the narrative, but offer visual cutaways like film shots that are inserted into the action. (ibid: 84–85) These “cut-aways” as Beicken puts it, are present aplenty in After Hours. Hence, a random shot of a violent shooting placed in-between scenes of Hackett fleeing a mob (see Faber 1986: 203), leaves a visual impression upon the viewer as it does on the protagonist as well; it does not, however, drive the narrative further. Faber identifies an “abyss of sinister possibility within a deceptive familiar reality” (ibid.) hiding behind these scenes. Wolfgang Jahn in his analysis of Kafka’s Amerika, identified such visual cutaways as Zwischenbilder, that is, “interspersed scenes” (Beicken 2016: 84). Kehr identifies this same element in After Hours: “Scorsese inserts a series of random, uncentered shots” (Kehr 2011: 101). Rolf J Goebel has also proposed that conversations between the narrator and his acquaintance in Kafka’s works mirror what in the film is known as the shot-reverse shot technique (ibid: 86). For Bettina Augustin, Kafka’s works represent a sensibility for new modes of visual representation to express Modernity in text before these techniques manifested in film (ibid: 85). On the characters of the film Faber has the following to say: The flat, dreamlike inconsistency of all the characters in this film is straight out of the Kafkaesque mold. (Faber 1986: 201) It may be prudent to ask what in the film adds to this “flat, and dreamlike inconsistency”. The opening sequence of After Hours delivers us right to the midst of Paul Hackett’s routine office work or as Kehr observes: “Scorsese plunges us straight into Paul’s consciousness” (Kehr 2011: 101). This prevents us from becoming familiar with the character and there is an implicit reduction of Hackett to his occupation. In the sequence right after the first one, we are in his apartment at night, which apart from a few lamps and a television set presents the audience with no further hints as to the personality. Grist describes Hackett’s room interestingly enough, as “characterless”: Likewise noteworthy is Paul’s uncluttered, tastefully decorated, but characterless cream and beige apartment. (Grist 2013: 133) Thus, Hackett remains a “cipher”: As a realistic character, Joseph K., too, as his abbreviated name suggests, is no more than a cipher, an Everyman whose failings and flaws can be discussed, but who never assumes the three-dimensionality of a character. (…) Kafka’s characters are like his pen and ink sketches, those stick figures, never fleshed out, which appear in the margins of his manuscripts. Likewise, this Paul Hackett is meant to be a cipher, a schlemihl, an innocent. (Faber 1986: 201)

Kafka in SoHo  151 The opening few sequences ensure that we know as little as possible about Hackett, forcing the audience to reduce him to the one-dimensionality of his occupation. There is further overarching confusion attached to the motives of Hackett and other characters of the film. Kehr, for example, succinctly describes the actions of Marcy towards Hackett as “opaque and imponderable” (Kehr 2011: 102). There are examples of situations throughout the film where it is hard to come to a logical, rational explanation or to even establish the train of thought persisting behind Hackett’s actions. Faber identifies several of these “puzzling scenes” in the film throughout: He puzzles us by his choices: Why does he go to SoHo in the first place? Why does he run after those thieves in an attempt to save the possessions of a stranger? Why does he give his housekeys to a bartender in a preposterous bargain to get subway fare? But his inconsistencies and superficialities are not intended to lead to greater psychological depths. (Faber 1986: 201). There are interesting aspects to Hackett’s suit in the film as well. One possible way to approach it is in terms of Heidegger’s conception of the uniform in Overcoming Metaphysics, where for him “a man without a uniform today already gives the impression of being something unreal which no longer belongs” (Kundera 2003: 148). It is indeed after Hackett ruins his shirt, whilst working on the sculpture and changes into another one, hence losing his “uniformity”, that things begin to go downhill for him. In scenes at the beginning of the film where he is wearing his suit and white shirt, he appears ordinary and composed, far from hysterical and seemingly at peace and in control. As soon as he loses this uniform, his sense of purpose and identity, he loses all sense of control in the reality of SoHo as well. There is a change of colours in the uniform as well. Hackett, at the beginning of the film, the daytime, is seen wearing a white shirt, whereas he switches to a black shirt in SoHo, mirroring the setting of the indefinite nightscape of the narrative from that point onwards. Returning at the end to his desk and computer, he is renewed with the same sense of purpose, having returned to his occupation, albeit covered in plaster of Paris, thus, not entirely unaffected by the night’s events: “Hackett’s ultimate return to his office building at the end of the film is like a return to paradise” (Faber 1986: 203). However, the fact that losing his shirt isn’t a change which Hackett even seems to register, references the invisibility of the uniform in the modern age. As Kundera observes: Since Kafka’s time, because of the great systems that quantify and plan life, the uniformization of the world has made enormous advances. But when a phenomenon becomes universal, quotidian, omnipresent, we no longer notice it. In the euphoria of their uniform lives, people no longer see the uniform they wear. (Kundera 2003: 149) Another important aspect of the film as well as Kafka’s works is the gendering of characters. Dagmar CG Lorenz, another Kafka expert in America and Professor Emeritus of Germanic Studies at University of Illinois Chicago, observes that:

152  Literature, Film and Intertextuality Male and female characters are configured as inseparable, even interchangeable, the same way world and mind, external and internal reality, subject and object, appear as one in his works. Clothes and names, the outermost layers, rather than physical or psychological coding, are the primary indicators of gender. (Lorenz 2002: 174) This is true in particular for the film as well. Owing to the one-dimensionality of the subjects and the abruptness of their introductions, the only solid markers of their identity are reductionist notions of clothing and names, be it Paul, Marcy or the sculptress Kiki Bridges. Paul’s suit, for example, is the only identity he possesses throughout the film; it is one which he proceeds to wear till the end and one which suffers along with him bearing the marks of the nightmare he experiences. A further important aspect that Lorenz points out is how Kafka approaches the “full range of male gender stereotypes”, stereotypes, which are distinctly observable in Scorsese’s film as well: Kafka explores the full range of male gender stereotypes, including the unheroic, irresolute, and effeminate configuration of Jewish masculinity (…) and the rough male type, who reflects Gentile gender role expectations of male assertiveness. (Lorenz 2002: 176) Although the religious convictions of Hackett are unclear (he does implore God directly in one particular scene, which God, however remains unclear), Hackett does fit the unheroic, irresolute configuration as opposed to the assertive, male type-a confrontation which occurs at least twice in the film. A perfect example is the scene in which Hackett tries to bypass the New York subway turnstile. The subway fare suddenly increased at midnight (see Faber 1986: 202), and he does not have enough money for a ticket. Trying to jump over the turnstile he is pushed back into the frame by a tall and imposing police officer, exemplifying the “rough male type” from Kafka’s works. The two-way shot betrays the hierarchy between the two characters, the uniform adds to the assertive nature of the policeman, leaving Hackett mumbling along like a child who’s just been caught stealing candy. Both the bouncer from Club Berlin and this policeman are archetypical reflections of this “rough and imposing” masculine character, reminiscent of the Türhüter from Kafka’s Vor dem Gesetz. Both characters deny Hackett entry and are impeding manifestations. Lorenz’s observations with regards to the archetypical female characters in Kafka’s works find overlaps when compared with the female characters in After Hours: His women characters, often seductive and lascivious, lack the exotic appeal of other fin-de-si`ecle femmes fatales and even his most fragile female characters are self-sufficient and surprisingly resilient … Single female characters such as Frieda (The Castle) and Fräulein Buerstner (The Trial) live away from their families. Their independence, in part expressed by the way they

Kafka in SoHo  153 follow their erotic desires, in part by their pursuit of entertainment, are virtually unparalleled in other literature of the time. (Lorenz 2002: 169–170) All female characters in the film live in spacious, empty apartments or lofts: (…) the SoHo loft of Marcy, the character played by Roseanna Arquette, and her roommate is portrayed as a vague, cavernous, indefinite space, with no clearly established sense of limit. (Faber 1986: 201) “This place is huge (…) do you share it with anybody?” remarks Hackett as he looks around Kiki’s loft. The empty subjective space in the background also represents the agency that the character possesses within the context of the conversation; this is something which becomes self-evident in how Kiki directs the conversation, ignoring Hackett at will, reprimanding and correcting him. “I have my own Mr. Softee truck”, claims on the other hand Catherine O’Hara’s character. This apparent independence and agency of the female characters are also juxtaposed by relative bondage, as Lorenz observes: The bondage of women and the social constraints on them are signalled by the fact that female characters are often cast as victims of fashion (…) they feel compelled to make themselves objects of male desire by dressing provocatively. (Lorenz 2002: 174) Although provocative might not be the best word for it, an example of this in the film is the waitress who quits her job, invites Hackett up to her apartment and asks for his opinion on her hairdo. Faber herself makes similar observations about the constraints put on female characters in the film: All these women are abject, for one reason or another, either chained as is the sculptress, in bondage without explanation, or abandoned, as Roseanna Arquette's character has been by her likewise perverse ex-husband, or, like Teri Garr's character, insecure and expecting betrayal by each and every man. They are sisters of Kafka’s women, women like Leni in The Trial. (Faber 1986: 202) Finally, if we examine the interpersonal relationships between the characters in the film, a lot of similarities emerge: Generally, the characters are caught up in their own perceptions and desires. They fail at communication and intimacy (…) Kafka deliberately constructs situations in such a way as to exclude interchange. The individual is a prisoner of the senselessly moving material world. (Lorenz 2002: 177) The screenplay achieves this effect masterfully through conversations which go around in circles. The camera, operated by Michael Ballhaus, famous for his

154  Literature, Film and Intertextuality 360-degree shots in Fassbinder films, does the same here, expertly moving the camera around the characters as they engage in conversations. We are reminded of the inevitability and cyclic nature of these conversations. Both characters may be occupying the same physical place, but they are mere bystanders, occupied with their own subjectivity. Faber puts it fairly simply: characters talk past each other: language is often more a means of miscommunication than of communication. (Faber 1986: 203) Moving beyond the characters, there is a reality which envelops them. That is, the subjectivity of the characters is encased in the fictional reality of the text, in the case of Kafka’s works, as well as in the film. Many insights can be achieved in the analysis of the midnight version of SoHo in After Hours if one considers scholarship that has attempted to approximate the themes of subjectivity and reality in the works of Franz Kafka. In his article on the city and space in Kafka’s The Trial, Goebel cites Anthony Johae regarding the “anonymous city”: Antony Johae notes, K.’s anonymous city ‘has a topography without a recognisable relief. It is received as a traveller enters a foreign city for the first time without a map: so strange does everything seem that it is as if the traveller were dreaming. (Goebel 2002: 45–46) In After Hours as well, SoHo is only verbally referenced by characters in the film. In the topography of the area itself, there is a dearth of any visual markers, i.e., signboards or advertisements, which would confirm the specificity of the area as being indeed SoHo. The geography of the space is thus suspended in a dreamlike disbelief or as Faber calls it, a “distortion”: “Scorsese’s vision of SoHo is distorted, and in general it is difficult to ‘identify’ or ‘relate’ to this film, its personnages, its plot” (Faber 1986: 203). In the fictional reality of the film itself, the midnight streets of SoHo remain anonymous, and it is this ambiguity and confusion which allows us to witness Hackett as he stumbles through the maze, much akin to a “traveller in a dream”. Pavlos E Michaelides, who teaches Philosophy and Religion at the University of Nicosia, refers in his paper Modernity and the existential metaphysics of Life and Death in Kafka's Metamorphosis to reality in the works of Kafka in the following terms: Reality is outright inconsistent breaking all bounds of self-coherence, logic, certainty, and predictability. In view of radically new evidence, one has to entirely forget all previous knowledge for reality proving to be utterly discontinuous severs the boundaries of the permissible. Hence, the pure reality of an absolute fantastic makes the relativity of all knowledge the only norm. Expressed otherwise, pure ambiguity becomes everyday norm, or the norm of everydayness. (Michaelides 2017: 103)

Kafka in SoHo  155 The film theorist Michel Chion (see Gellen 2016: 113) in the 1980s observed that the power of film to withhold visually what it presents acoustically is its most distinctive and provocative feature. Kata Gellen analyses Kafka’s unfinished work Burrow, the role of sound in it and reflects upon the borders of fiction within the world of fiction itself: It offers, in the context of a first-person literary narrative, an encounter with a noise whose source can only lie in a realm beyond that of the fictional character’s world. The sound is an “interference” from the outside – not just outside the burrow, but outside the burrower’s world – which implies the possibility of a character’s reckoning with its own fictional status in the context of a story that has no other obvious meta-fictional traits. (ibid: 111) The “acousmatic” (ibid: 112) sounds in After Hours can thus be interpreted as a “meta-fictional cinematic technique” (Whitney 2017: 314) which seek to “unsettle” (Gellen 2016: 113) the characters compelling the listeners to “seek out the sounds” (ibid: 114) and add to the “ambiguity” (see Whitney 2017: 303) of the narrative as a whole. Throughout the film we see characters unsettled by non-diegetic noises from beyond the fourth wall (Gellen 2016: 120). “There are unexplained whispers behind thin walls” (Faber 1986: 201). Off-camera dialogue between characters in the film, with Hackett as an unsuccessful eavesdropper, is further used explicitly to unnerve Hackett and make him more and more uncertain about his position in this world he has just entered. It is important to note that these similarities end somewhere. Whereas in the Burrow, the sounds drive the protagonist to the brink of destruction (see Gellen: 114), in After Hours, their role is more performative as they add to the atmosphere and ambiguity and play a rather passive role, remaining in the background and adding to the uncertainty and confusion in the foreground. For Faber the ambiguity lies as much in the unexpectedness of events: “There are constant breaks with the expected” (Faber 1986: 202). The subway fare has suddenly gone up, right at midnight, making it impossible for the protagonist to leave the now nightmarish world of SoHo (ibid: 202). There is a scene in the film, in which, as Hackett seeks to flee via a fire escape he is witness to a violent shooting. Faber sees similarities between this scene and a scene from The Trial: [when] Joseph K. opens a door in his otherwise humdrum bank and witnesses a scene of whipping. Neither of these scenes is ever integrated into the whole of its respective narrative, but both serve to reveal an abyss of sinister possibility within a deceptively familiar reality. (ibid: 203) There is a metaphysical element to the ambiguous nature of reality in the film which resonates with much of Kafka’s work as well. Faber for example points towards the “distorted mimesis of reality” in Kafka’s works which deliver the metaphysical contexts of that reality to the foreground:

156  Literature, Film and Intertextuality His [Kafka] determinedly distorted mimesis of reality reveals an inner reality which goes beyond verisimilitude to include the metaphysical context of that reality. (ibid) What is this inner reality of the film, or rather the metaphysical context of After Hours’ midnight world? Right about at the end of the film we have a scene where tired, tested, and exhausted, an agitated Paul Hackett looks up at the sky and says the following: What do you want from me? What have I done? I'm just a word processor, for Christ’s sake. (ibid: 203) In Leighton Grist’s interpretation, he has the following to say about the overarching metaphysical context of the film: After Hours presents a yuppie protagonist who, through a combination of chance and desire, is lured into a domain in which his social and sexual presumptions are exploded, his cultural understanding is deficient and his life is placed under threat (…) Paul is differently menaced by the inhabitants of the film’s night world, so the cycle – which was produced mainly during the time of Right-wing triumphalism that succeeded Reagan’s re-election in 1984 and preceded the 1987 stock-market crash – suggests the presence of tensions beneath the confident, public, ardently patriarchal façade of mid-1980s USA. (Grist 2013: 125) Grist therefore attempts to contextualise the film in the historical, socio-economic background of what he likes to call the “Yuppie Nightmare Cycle”. The continued relevance of films falling under this category not restricted to Grist’s analysis/genre however shows that this can only be half true. Rosy Singh, in her paper titled: “Franz Kafka: Mythology in Bureaucratic Modernity” makes the following observation which contextualises Kafka’s work, in a similar fashion to what Grist does with his conception of the “Yuppie Nightmare Cycle”, in the socio-economic developments of the time which created the “new space of the office”: Kafka was, one could safely say, the first writer to explore the alienation and anxiety in technocratic societies in the new space of the office. (Singh 2012: 109) In a letter to Felice Bauer, Kafka made the following observation regarding the “silent” and pernicious nature of the newly arrived “machines”: A machine with its silent, serious demands strikes me as exercising a greater, more cruel compulsion on one’s capacities than any human being. How insignificant, how easy to control, to send away, to shout down, upbraid, question, or stare at, a living typist is! (ibid)

Kafka in SoHo  157 Kafka might as well have been describing After Hours’ protagonist, Paul Hackett, the word processor. The insignificance of Hackett is displayed through how “hapless” he is throughout the film, hopelessly stuck in situations with none coming to his help: both in Kafka’s works and in After Hours, the world view revolves around a hapless hero (…) an Everyman buffetted about in a maze which is only partially of his own doing. (Faber 1986: 203) He is bossed around by authority, be it the policeman at the subway station or the club bouncer or even invisible authorities, such as the grander machinations of work in which he fulfils but the role of a mere “cog”. This metaphysics of bureaucracy is evident to Faber in the parallels between the occupations and bureaucratic worlds of Josef K and Paul Hackett: The everyday world of Joseph K. consists of immense, only seemingly rational bureaucratic categorizations; in After Hours, it is the uptown world, cool and clean, of the computer age (…) the human being as bureaucratic cog-a bank clerk-is now the human being as technological cog-a word processor-, and he is still prey to a chaotic and violent reality which his machinelike existence seems to deny. (ibid: 203–204) He is stared at by almost all characters with impunity, disregarding his subjectivity, and in fact, one may find it prudent to include a voyeuristic aspect to the trials and tribulations of Paul Hackett. It is the viewer of the film that may take joy in the puny, and insignificant, bumbling word processor stumbling through plot points and diversions beyond his comprehension. The reader of a Kafka work such as The Trial, in similar fashion, towers over the character of Josef K; staring at him with impunity and perhaps even revelling at the miseries he is confronted with, which, since by their nature are fictional, appear to be comical. Faber speaks about this apparent discomfiture associated with both the viewing of the film and the reading of Kafka’s works: Watching this film, despite its many comical touches, becomes towards its end an increasingly uncomfortable experience. And so is reading Kafka. (ibid: 204) Further, Kundera whilst referring to the omnipresence of the Kafkan in modern societies points towards “tendencies in modern history” that are inclined to recreate the Kafkan: There are tendencies in modern history that produce the Kafkan in the broad social dimension: the progressive concentration of power, tending to deify itself; the bureaucratization of social activity that turns all institutions into

158  Literature, Film and Intertextuality boundless labyrinths; and the resulting depersonalization of the individual. (Kundera 2003: 108–109) In an article published in 1986, a year after After Hours’ release, titled America’s Third Industrial Revolution, Roy B Helfgott says the following: The accuracy of the work of a human being varies over the course of a day, but a programmed machine tool will repeat the same operation with flawless and tireless accuracy. (Helfgott 1986: 41) This is a conflict we see earlier in the film as well: the very first scene shows a possible new intern trying to get to grips with the efficiency of the computer. The reliability of the computer is contrasted with the ineptness of the intern who also admits that he’s just doing it for the money and waiting to start his own book printing business for obscure artists. Grist has attached this scene to a larger “occupational frustration” (see Grist 2013: 133) present in the world “outside of SoHo”: Similar occupational frustration is implicit in the world outside SoHo. Witness the mime-like movements of the coffee-shop cashier (Rocco Sisto), whom Paul opines is “waiting to be discovered”, or the new employee (Brandon Pinchot) Paul instructs in the film’s opening scene, who speaks of setting up his “own magazine” as “a forum for writers and intellectuals”. With Julie being a skilful sketch artist, such further intimates a larger artistic and intellectual repression within Reagan’s USA. (ibid.) These opening few seconds of the film contain an inner dialectic and conflict. There is the efficiency of the computer on one side, needing nevertheless the skills of the inept intern to function accordingly. There is also an anticipatory element with regards to the potential of the computer, the electronic word, eliminating the relevance of print. This is a question that one is confronted with more realistically today with the proliferation of online media and the declining relevance of print media. In this context, there is an almost prophetic juxtaposition prevalent in the manner in which the inept intern plans to engage in a book business for obscure artists, a decision which seems diametrically opposed to the direction in which the technological developments were progressing towards; if one considers the broader technological context of the time which is depicted. It is also perhaps worth noting that both roles of Kafka’s typist as well as the more modern, yet equally obsolete word processor, are now things of the past. Even in the film itself, the first scene establishes Hackett’s occupation, in the face of the technological revolution, as an increasingly passive one. Michaelides points towards the parallels between the “humiliating metamorphosis” of Gregor Samsa and the status of “human beings” in the “era of machines brute facts and information systems”: Gregor Samsa’s self-alienation, his humiliating metamorphosis, is indeed reminiscent of the modern predicament of human beings in the technological

Kafka in SoHo  159 era of machines brute facts and information systems, points through and through to the reality of material existence and the possibilities of its deterioration, consequently moves toward the complete subversion of an ethical universe. (Michaelides 2017: 116) He sees in the character of Gregor Samsa: [the] untenable yet real reduction of human beings to a piece of matter and information moving toward the inorganic, making them at par with all animals. Henceforth, the humiliated modern human -uprooted beyond bound, stripped of all ethical purposefulness, no longer a moral entity given to thinking and questioning- is, called to de facto accept and obey the mastermind of simulated techno capital reality, and, the geophysical enterprise of its vested interests. (ibid) One can see the character of Paul Hackett as a continuation of these ideas. The reduction of Hackett to his occupation and the passive role that he plays at the office, point towards the humiliation of the modern man overwhelmed with technological progress, uprooted of any concrete purpose in life. The subversion of the ethical universe which Michaelides pointed towards is realised through the depiction of midnight SoHo: a lawless, decrepit, nightmarish “underbelly” in which Hackett finds himself, lacking any sort of direction, compelled to play by the rules of this new reality. Faber has also approximated her own definition of this subverted mirror universe: In both cases the underbelly that these worlds cloak and obscure is replete with wounds, burns, rats, dirty underwear and other kinds of filth, the breakdown of logic and predictable human relationships-and both protagonists are in danger of being engulfed by it, thereby indicating an imbalance in their lives. (Faber 1986: 203–204) The context is always bigger than the individual. Much like Josef K’s world in The Trial, Hackett is forced to accept, concede and play along as he’s subjected to the rules of a world that is rife with inconsistencies, contradictions, humiliations and above all metaphysical meaning. As Kehr observes, Hackett “finds the world withdrawing from him, turning into something remote and mysterious” (Kehr 2011: 102). It is this nightmare cycle, that Grist refers to, albeit understanding it in the context of the time and space of American socio-economic and political realities of the time. There seems to be, lastly, a prophetic element to Kafka’s works at the beginning of the twentieth century. They implicitly anticipate, complicate and represent realities that would go on to realise themselves in various ways ‘on the great stage of History’ as Kundera likes to formulate: Kafka made no prophecies. All he did was see what was “behind.” He did not know that his seeing was also a foreseeing. He did not intend to unmask

160  Literature, Film and Intertextuality a social system. He shed light on the mechanisms he knew from private and microsocial human practice, not suspecting that later developments would put those mechanisms into action on the great stage of History. (Kundera 2003: 118) This is precisely the context in which we must understand the ending of the film. Indeed, the metaphysical context in After Hours is that of the resignation of the Fachmensch, the modern man, in face of rapid technologisation, automation, who, after having the adventure of a lifetime-rather a nightmare, is content to ask no more questions, to know as little as he can. The film could thus become an even more relevant and contemporary allegory for the individual’s feelings of dispensability in the face of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the 21st Century. Much akin to Kafka’s works thus, Scorsese perhaps manages to arrive at this ‘seeing through foreseeing’ which Kundera references. Cynthia Willett, Professor of Philosophy at Emory College of Arts and Sciences, in an article published in 1996, which looked at the socio-sexual conflicts in the film, had the following to say about the ending of the film: In yuppie America, there is one way out of terror, namely to return to work. By chance, the real thieves in the film mistake the papier-mached Hackett for Kiki's sculpture and cart Hackett away. Fittingly, Hackett as sculpture falls out of the thieves’ van in front of the gates of his company the next morning. (Willett 1996: 150) Whereas at the end of The Trial, the resolution is arrived at with the death of protagonist, in After Hours, it is arrived at with the resumption of things as they were. “When, like Paul Hackett, we are delivered back into the more logical, predictable universe, we may well breathe a sigh of relief” (Faber 1986: 204). An ironically euphoric and dizzying Steadicam, accompanied by a non-diegetic Mozart symphony revolves around a Paul Hackett, sitting at his cubicle desk-covered in plaster of Paris, relieved to be able to resume his occupation; to return to the world of ciphers. “As if in celebration, Scorsese’s camera flies off for a rushing, swooping dance around the room – a flight of angels rejoicing in the salvation of a sinner.” (Kehr 2011: 104) The camera moves around the office in almost cyclic motion creating the impression that these are the limits of Hackett’s world – a world which he has resigned himself to. Works Cited After Hours. (1985). [Film] Directed by M. Scorsese. The Geffen Company, Double Play Productions. Beicken, Peter. (2016). Moving Pictures – Visual Pleasures: Kafka’s Cinematic Writing. In S. Biderman & I. Lewit (Eds.), Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 81–96.

Kafka in SoHo  161 Ebert, Roger. (2009, January 14). After Hours Movie Review & Film Summary (1985). Retrieved November 16, 2021, from https://www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/after​-hours​ -1985-1 Faber, Marion (1986). Kafka on the Screen: Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours”. Die Unterrichtspraxis / Teaching German, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 200–205. Gellen, Kata (2016). Noises Off: Cinematic Sound in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’. In S. Biderman & I. Lewit (Eds.), Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 111–129. Goebel, Rolf J. (2002). The Exploration of the Modern City in the Trial. In J. Preece (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 42–60. Grist, Leighton (2013). Yuppies in Peril: After Hours and Cape Fear. In G.L.: The Films of Martin Scorsese, 1978–99. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 122–152. Helfgott, Roy B. (1986). America’s Third Industrial Revolution. Challenge, Vol. 29, No. 5, pp. 41–46. Kael, Pauline (1985). Paulinekaelreviews. Retrieved November 16, 2021, from https://www​ .geocities​.ws​/paulinekaelreviews​/a2​.html Kafka, Franz (2009). The Trial. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kehr, Dave. (2011). When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade. London: University of Chicago Press. Kundera, Milan (2003). The Art of the Novel. New York: Harper Collins. Lorenz, Dagmar C. G. (2002). Kafka and Gender. In J. Preece (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 169–188. Michaelides, Pavlos E. (2017). Modernity and the Existential Metaphysics of Life and Death in Kafka’s Metamorphosis. International Journal of Arts & Sciences, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 101–118. Singh, Rosy. (2012). Franz Kafka: Mythology in Bureaucratic Modernity. Goethe Society of India Yearbook, pp. 108–120. Whitney, Tyler (2017). Inside the Ear: Silence, Self-Observation, and Embodied Spaces in Kafka’s Der Bau. The Germanic Review, Literature, Culture, Theory, Vol. 92, No. 3, pp. 301–319. Willett, Cynthia (1996). Baudrillard, “After Hours”, and the Postmodern Suppression of Socio-Sexual Conflict. Cultural Critique, Vol. 34, pp. 143–161.

11 The Intersection of Visual Arts and Literature Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Woodworks of Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte Mercy Vungthianmuang Guite The intersection of the visual arts and literature or the relationship between image and text has long been an interesting debate in academic dialogues, especially in humanities. Tracing it back to Boehm’s iconic turn ( Boehm,1994) and WJT Mitchell’s pictorial turn (Mitchell, 1994) in the mid-’90s, where aesthetics became the central theme of discussion and the study of the image through art history and philosophy dominated the discourse, it is important to re-visit the influence of the two mediums on each other or to re-establish the significance of visual representations in the world of linguistic dominance. With this frame of reference, this chapter analyses the “meeting” of two great artists from the world of literature and fine arts, Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880– 1938) in Kirchner’s woodcuts of Chamisso’s literary fairy-tale Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte. (Moeller & Gercken 2014) Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s execution of the “Schlemihl” narrative through woodcuts demonstrates the close relationship between the visual arts and literature. This chapter looks into Kirchner’s interpretation of the novella through his woodcuts and how he assays the narrative from his perspective. It examines how Kirchner visualises the narrative and analyses whether and in what way the visual medium apprehends the various motifs from the novella. It discusses also the role of intertextuality and intermediality in this meeting of literature and arts. The chapter is based on the study of Kirchner’s woodcut series published in a book in German by Magdalena M Müller and Günther Gercken for The Brücke Museum in Berlin 2003, and the images used in this chapter are in the public domain. 11.1 Kirchner and Chamisso Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story, published in the year 1814, is a literary fairy tale written by Adelbert von Chamisso, a German author and botanist, and it is one of the most researched texts in German literature from the nineteenth century. In the novella, the protagonist Peter Schlemihl tells his life story in fictional letters, which take a decisive turn with a mysterious encounter with the little grey man at the garden party of a very wealthy gentleman. Schlemihl ends up exchanging his shadow for wealth and thus falls into the clutches of the devil. DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-16

Intersection of Visual Arts and Literature  163 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner pioneered the early twentieth-century German Expressionist group Die Brücke (1905) making vibrant paintings, prints and sculptures that opposed the conventions of the academic world of that time. Inspired by traditional German woodcuts, the emotive, post-Impressionist canvases of Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch and the artwork of Africa and Oceania, Kirchner developed a signature style that featured mask-like faces, simplified forms and vivid, Fauvist colour palettes. The diverse subject matter ranged from portraits and nudes to scenes of urban life in pre-war Berlin. Kirchner’s art was labelled “degenerate” by the Nazis in the 1930s. During his time in the army in the city of Halle in the First World War, Kirchner read Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story, in which he saw his own fate foreshadowed by that of Schlemihl and was inspired to produce a set of colour woodcuts. Kirchner saw his troubled life as a soldier reflected in the Schlemihl narrative. He identified with the tragic fate of the protagonist Peter Schlemihl, a human being without a shadow who finds himself isolated and ridiculed in society. Peter Schlemihl mirrors the loss of Kirchner’s emotional stability that he illustrates through his woodcuts. Chamisso introduces in his novella discretely his own situation as a refugee forced out of his homeland, an outsider in an unfamiliar country. Chamisso himself was a wanderer between two countries, Germany and France, who finally found refuge in a home in Berlin. By adopting the role of Schlemihl from Chamisso’s story in his woodcuts, Kirchner imparts nuances of his times and his life to the story and the woodcuts become symbolic of what both Chamisso and Kirchner felt as outsiders in society. Both identified with the figure of Schlemihl who is shunned for lack of a shadow. This feeling of displacement, abandonment and isolation which Chamisso himself felt at the time when he wrote the story is expressed exquisitely by Kirchner through his cover page (refer to Figure 11.1) where he carefully connects the alphabets of the name of Chamisso’s original story title and the wooden carvings with a few pictures in order to show the difficulties he faced during his own personal trials and tribulations. Carving the alphabets and a complete story title on a wooden plate is not easy. This was Kirchner’s distinct expressionistic style of recreating the hardship faced by both Chamisso / Schlemihl in the textual narrative and also Kirchner / Schlemihl in the pictorial representations of the title page. The wooden etchings demonstrating Kirchner / Schlemihl as a soldier with the colour red dominating the title woodcut can be read as an expression of doubt, anger and anxiety, depicting someone who is made to feel like an outsider in his own land. 11.2 Kirchner’s Woodcuts Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s woodcut series is one of the most important of Kirchner’s works from his repertoire. The images were created towards the beginning of the First World War when Kirchner went through a psychic turmoil for which he was discharged early from military service. Kirchner’s personal crisis finds its way into the Schlemihl series and is sublimated into the timelessness of a literary and visual

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Figure 11.1  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Peter Schlemihls Wundersame Geschichte (1915). Source: Wikimedia Commons

art form, transformed into an artwork universally valid. He created the pictures for Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story at the height of his woodcut art. In this technique, he gains an exciting, rhythmic agility and a differentiated diversity. According to Moeller, “the story of Schlemihl is, if one excluded all romantic episodes, actually the life story of a persecution madness, probably it applies more to him [Kirchner] than to Schlemihl” (Moeller & Gercken 2014: 18). 11.3 The Sale of the Shadow The first woodcut from the Schlemihl series by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner is titled the Verkauf des Schattens (Sale of the Shadow) (Fig. 11.2). In the first part of Chamisso’s narrative, Peter Schlemihl turns up with a letter of recommendation

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Figure 11.2  The Sale of the Shadow. Source: Wikimedia Commons

from the very rich Mr John (Figure 11.2). The gentleman is giving a garden party, so Schlemihl is a little uncomfortable among people he did not know. He tries to enjoy the party. He sees, as a bystander, a strange, grey-old man who is at the service of this group by conjuring the most incredible things out of his cloak: a telescope, a carpet, a marquee and finally three saddled riding horses. Nobody in the group seems to notice it, but Peter Schlemihl suspects something sinister. When he leaves the company, the grey man comes after him and offers him a deal: He wants Peter Schlemihl's shadow and in return offers him a lucky bag with which he can fulfil every wish. In the original text, this particular scene is described as follows: He grasped my hand, and knelt down behind me, and with wonderful dexterity I perceived him loosening my shadow from the ground from head to foot; —he lifted it up; —he rolled it together and folded it, and at last put it into his pocket. He then stood erect, bowed to me again, and returned back to the

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Figure 11.3  Illustration by George Cruikshank 1861. Source: Wikimedia Commonsss

rose grove. I thought I heard him laughing softly to himself. I held, however, the purse tight by its strings—the earth was sun-bright all around me—and my senses were still wholly confused.1 (Chamisso 1814: 33) Kirchner illustrates this most significant and beautiful scene when the devil carefully peels (lifting, rolling and folding) Schlemihl’s shadow off the ground. The exchange of his shadow for gold is completed, and Schlemihl is herewith in possession of the inexhaustible “purse of fortune”. Kirchner’s representation of the grey man in shades of violet contrasting with the colour of red roses and sunshades (umbrellas) in this particular scene is interesting because it triggers the imagination of the onlooker how s/he would imagine the grey-old man. This is because, the colour violet is often related to the colour of the devil and in this woodcut, highlights

Intersection of Visual Arts and Literature  167 the sinister character of the grey-old man (Moeller & Gercken, 2014: 27). The figures in the background are also drawn as demonic and dark and the use of dark shades and grotesque figures encapsulates the significance of the singular crucial moment. Kirchner did not follow the example of many of the other illustrators who have made similar etchings of the exchange of shadow, for example, the black and white illustration by George Cruikshank in 1861. The large figures fill the space of the canvas (Fig 11.3) with the focus on facial expressions, affording a close up of the psychic tribulations that the characters must be experiencing. With their heightened expressivity, they tend to make a deep impression on the onlooker. Kirchner illustrates his colour woodcut with a different event: the scene in which Schlemihl and the grey man meet is shown by Kirchner to occupy the centre space of this woodcut and the two characters are also shown not isolated from the others in the company. Fanny, the beloved of Schlemihl and other women can be identified in the background, portrayed with an uncannily similar style to the artist’s famous images of Berlin prostitutes.2 11.4 The Beloved and Pangs of Love (Die Geliebte und Qualen der Liebe) In this illustration from the Schlemihl series Kirchner chooses to portray the love interest of Peter Schlemihl, and simply states that “is a delightful girl, with whom he falls in love”3 (Moeller & Gercken, 2014: 98) (My translation). Schlemihl falls in love with the forester’s daughter Mina and announces to her father that he will soon be asking for her hand. Only one important thing is clarified beforehand Peter Schlemihl must re-possess his shadow and thus become a complete human being. Schlemihl is desperately hoping to somehow get his shadow back. One year passes but he is still without his shadow. In fact, the little grey man appears at his place and is ready to return him the shadow. However, he requires a signature in blood, through which Peter Schlemihl is to exchange his soul for his shadow. Peter rejects this offer and hence the marriage does not take place as Schlemihl was unable to get his shadow back and the father of the bride-to-be rejects him. Peter loses his Mina and thus the illustration of unrequited love (Figure 11.5) on which Kirchner juxtaposes his own experiences of love and his tragic fate as an artist; Kirchner calls the third woodcut illustration Pangs of Love (Fig. 11.4). Again, the melancholy and Angst are expressed through a close up of the distorted lines of the face. These two woodcuts show how Kirchner gradually elaborates on the desired final version using prints. Woodcut printmaking is the oldest technique used in fine art printmaking. The drawing is made on a piece of wood and the untouched areas are then cut away with gouges, leaving the raised image which is then inked. The woodcut prints are produced by pressing the selected medium which in this case is paper, onto the inked image. If colours are used, separate wood blocks are required in order to accentuate the different figures and colours in the blocks. From The Beloved (Figure 11.4), Kirchner saws out the nude, which he dyes in red, puts it together with the rest of the plate, which is rolled up with black paint

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Figure 11.4  The Beloved. Source: Wikimedia Commons

and the result is a two-tone woodcut. In this woodcut, the figure is highlighted and accentuated by red contours from the drawing stick and sparse pink from the colouring stick. The illustration appears overwhelming with the prominent nude figure in the huge hat, which comes in two different shades and three-colour variants black, black-blue or black-green. Through the interplay of several colours, Kirchner gave each woodcut its own colour tone corresponding to the theme, in which the colours mutually reinforce one another. In the woodcut, too, the beloved is characterised as a model drawn by the artist, resolving the personal in her portrait. Kirchner portrays an unsentimental and unadorned beloved, clad only in a large feather hat, in her sensual nakedness. The love relationship is located in a more distant and modest place. The Beloved and Pangs of Love, the second and

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Figure 11.5  Pangs of Love. Source: Wikimedia Commons

third illustrations of woodcuts in the Schlemihl cycle, are companion woodcuts; they relate not so much to specific scenes in the text as to the artist’s own life and experiences, his musings about love and the fate of an artist who has been unable to fulfil his duty as a soldier during the World War I (Moeller & Gercken 2014: 99). All this is reflected in these two melancholic woodcut prints. In Pangs of Love, it is as if Kirchner tries to talk to the onlooker to show how desolate and isolated he

170  Literature, Film and Intertextuality feels in his inner world. His disturbed psychic state can also be seen in Pangs of Love where the dark-coloured heart is being pierced by the sharp pointed gnawing hands of a grotesque figure while Kirchner adorns a tortured look of a Being abandoned by one and all. In this woodcut, love or the heart is not represented as something beautiful or sublime, rather it portrays the ugly and fiendish side of unrequited love that destroys a person. 11.4 Schlemihl Alone in His Room In terms of form and content, Schlemihl in der Einsamkeit des Zimmers (Schlemihl Alone in his Room) (Figure 11.6) the fourth of the Schlemihl cycle, a colour woodblock, holds the central place in the whole series. Taking on the role of the persecuted Schlemihl, who eventually sought refuge in his room after rejection and public humiliation, Kirchner produces a nude in a cramped cell, gnawed at by those who taunt and despise him. In this harrowing image, Kirchner draws also on the pictorial representation of his own loneliness which he constantly suffers. The woodcut Schlemihl Alone in his Room refers to the passage in the text in which Schlemihl hides in his hotel room from the street boys who hunt and mock him after they discover his abnormality i.e., shadow-lessness.4 I continued still sadly discomposed, when the coach stopped before the old tavern. I was shocked at the thought of again entering that vile garret. I sent for my baggage, took up the miserable bundle with contempt, threw the servants some pieces of gold, and ordered to be driven to the principal hotel. The house faced the north, so I had nothing to fear from the sun. I dismissed the driver with gold, selected the best front room, and locked myself in as soon as possible.5 (Chamisso 1814: 36) Adelbert von Chamisso describes this scene with the same melancholy as Kirchner, who commented on his own anxieties at the exhibition in the Galerie Ludwig Schames, Frankfurt am Main 1919: The reason for the loneliness is that I always had to move on. I felt all sorrows, all joys. The world is so rich, how little could I create from it, how little could I help. I should never belong, I'm homeless. In the end, nothing was left for me but loneliness and the longing to go further.6 (Moeller &Gercken, 2014: 139) (My translation) This feeling of loneliness and homelessness can be understood in Chamisso’s literary depiction of Schlemihls psychic condition. He is described as a decomposed person, a “miserable bundle of contempt”. Kirchner also tries to depict Schlemihl as a person suffering from the curse of gold, who realises too late that a shadow, a kind of doppelgänger of a Being, is more important than money. In his weariness and despair, he covers the floor of the room with gold coins and

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Figure 11.6  Schlemihl Alone in His Room. Source: Wikimedia Commons

wallows in it. Kirchner, in this woodcut, portrays this desire for wealth through the transparent figure of a man in the colour of gold. Schlemihl is depicted as a Being caught in a hopeless situation. This anguish is also derived from Kirchner’s personal experiences of World War I and more so from his inability to help his homeland as a soldier when he was discharged from his military service because of his mental state.

172  Literature, Film and Intertextuality As a nude figure, Schlemihl / Kirchner is reduced to his physicality and locked in a narrow box-shaped room – instead of the best rooms of the most elegant hotel according to the text version – over whose upper edge his tormenters grin, looking down at him. The emaciated naked body, cramped into a stooped posture, corresponds to the symptoms of his anorexia condition, i.e., the refusal to eat. The left hand supports the oversized head in a gesture that is considered a symbol of melancholy in the fine arts; the face expresses paralysing perplexity. Kirchner is relentless in his illustration of Schlemihl as a figure of misery and suffering (Fig. 11.6). Kirchner is known to have left his studio only during the night, like Schlemihl – daytime he would hide in the loneliness of his room, not wanting to interact and attract attention. It can safely be said that Kirchner felt a deep connection with the figure of Peter Schlemihl, who was created and immortalised a hundred years ago by the poet Adelbert von Chamisso. Kirchner’s existential turmoil and his restless state of mind are played out in the Schlemihl-woodcuts. Kirchner seemed to have created the woodcuts based on Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story in a murky dreamy manner. Just a year later, on the 12 November 1916, in a letter to Gustav Schiefler, Kirchner writes: The impact of the war and the ever-increasing shallowness is the heaviest burden. It always seems to me to be like a bloody carnival (…) everything is turned upside down. We stagger about bloatedly trying to work. (…) We’re now like the prostitutes I used to paint. Wiped out, and the next time completely gone. (Moeller & Gercken 2014: 6) The last two portraits of the woodcut series in Kirchner’s Schlemihl cycle do not necessarily follow the plot of Chamisso story. This departure from the original text imprints Kirchner’s personal stamp on the narrative. In these two woodcuts, Kirchner treats the lost shadow as an independent entity which gives him the opportunity to dispose off the shadow as an element of validity in the context of the composition. In terms of content, these two woodcuts are devoted to Schlemihl's unsuccessful attempts to regain possession of his shadow. The devil is teasing and tempting Schlemihl, trying to persuade him to sell his soul in exchange of his shadow. The colourful, cheerful character of the two woodcuts gives rise to hope that he could regain his individuality and acceptance in society. 11.5 Schlemihl’s Meeting with the Little Grey Man on the Country Road In the woodcut Begegnung Schlemihls mit dem grauen Männlein auf der Landstraβe (Schlemihl’s Meeting with the Little Grey Man on the Country Road) (Figure 11.7), one can see Kirchner / Schlemihl in the uniform of his regiment on the horseback. The borrowed shadow, as the novella says, trotted along merrily beside him. The composition gives the impression that Schlemihl is not only riding on the horse but also on his spurred shadow, which stretches over the entire width of the wood and rises with his feet out of the pocket of the grey male. The representation is strongly influenced by thoughts of Kirchner’s military service as Kirchner depicts Schlemihl as a soldier with a military uniform riding on horseback (Fig. 11.7).

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Figure 11.7  Schlemihl’s Meeting with the Little Gray Man on the Country Road. Source: Wikimedia Commons

By temporarily possessing the shadow, the world seems to be in order again for a moment. In a good mood, the little grey man fools Schlemihl with his tricks like a circus clown. However, the happy moment is only based on deception. Chamisso describes this particular scene as follows: He [the little grey man] came on carelessly by my side, and whistled a tune— he on foot, I on horseback. A dizziness seized me, the temptation was too great; I hastily turned the reins, drove both spurs into the horse, and thus went off at full speed through a cross road. I could not elope with the shadow, it slipped away when the horse started, and waited on the road for its lawful owner. I was obliged to turn round, ashamed; the man in the grey coat, as he unconcernedly finished his tune, began to laugh at me, and fixing the shadow again in its place, informed me it would only stick to me, and remain with

174  Literature, Film and Intertextuality me, when I had properly and lawfully become possessed of it. “I hold you fast,” he cried, “fast attached to the shadow”; you cannot escape from me. A wealthy man like you may want a shadow: likely enough—and you are only to blame for not having earlier looked into the matter.7 (Chamisso 1814: 98) When Schlemihl tries to break out into a side path with the shadow, the shadow does not follow him; rather it sticks to its “legal owner”, the little grey man. The euphoria of being able to turn around the fate is shattered and it ends in renewed despair. Schlemihl is now sure that any attempt to regain his shadow would be futile. The realisation that temporary richness or luxury in itself is not sufficient to buy something which is wholesome and an integral part of oneself dawns on him. 11.6 Schlemihl Tries to Seize the Shadow in Vain In the last woodcut Schlemihl tries to Seize the Shadow in Vain (Schlemihls Begegnung mit dem Schatten) the shadow wanders next to Schlemihl over a sunny spot like a stranger, but not like that of his own: Shadow, thought I, art thou seeking thy master. I will be he; and I sprang forward to possess myself of it. I imagined that if I were lucky enough to get into its track, I could so arrange that its feet should just meet mine; it would even attach and accommodate itself to me. ‘[...] I gained on the shadow, approached it nearer and nearer, —I was within reach of it. It stopped suddenly and turned round towards me; like the lion pouncing on its prey, I sprang forward upon it with a mighty effort to take possession.8 (Chamisso 1814: 78) In Kirchner’s woodcut, the size and blackness of the shadow is the dominant figure. In the final version of the colour woodcut, Kirchner illustrates Schlemihl’s figure out of the sketchbook and prints it in transparent blue in order to increase the contrast between person and shadow: the shadow appears as the real, and Schlemihl has lost his “solid” physicality, he is like a shadow of himself. The last woodcut in the series (Figure 11.8) depicts a desperate attempt of the protagonist to catch his shadow, regain some bit of control over it and thus reconnect with the previous life. As the outcome of the novella shows, a return to normality is not possible. Schlemihl, ashamed to regain the shadow for the price of his soul, throws the “lucky soul” into the abyss and finally hurries without his shadow and without money, crossing several continents in a quarter of an hour, and travelling across nations discovering the natural flora and fauna and eventually coming to terms with his shadow-lessness. Chamisso concludes by writing to his namesake friend: And you, my beloved, Chamisso, you have I chosen for the keeper of my marvellous history, which, when I shall have vanished from the earth, may tend to the improvement of many of its inhabitants. But, my, friend, while you live among mankind, learn above all things first to reverence your shadow, and next your money. […]9(Chamisso 1814: 122)

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Figure 11.8  Schlemihl Tries to Seize the Shadow in Vain. Source: Wikimedia Commons

This realisation in the conclusion of Chamisso’s story towards “reverence your shadow and next money”, can be associated with Chamisso’s personal feelings of being homeless and feelings of an outsider during the time the story was written. His financial conditions were not too favourable until the time he found a job as a botanist in Berlin. The other metaphoric connation with the word “shadow” (Schatten) is also given to the term “Jewish-ness” (Judentum) because it is believed that Adelbert von Chamisso often expressed to many of his Jewish friends, that however rich, famous and well-known a Jew maybe, he/she can never escape his Jewishness10 (Langner 2008: 136).

176  Literature, Film and Intertextuality 11.7 Conclusion Literature and Visual Arts intersect through Chamisso’s text and the woodcut series, depicting the fate of the protagonist and the various stages of despair he undergoes when he sells his shadow for gold. This study of art and poetry together is not new. In the seminal Laokoon text, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing states that Mahlerei (Visual art) can have just as wide frontiers as poetry (Literature/Prose) (Lessing 1766: 6–7) which, in the antiquity, had its limitations. Making the statue of Laokoon a primary example in his study, Lessing inserts himself in a long tradition of the study of effects where Laokoon represents the maximum pain that a human can bear, whether that pain is corporeal or emotional. Lessing associated temporality with literature and spatiality with painting and sculpture. A visual work of art and a literary work originate in different spatial and temporal conditions, serving thereby, to liberate art from the tradition of Ut pictura poesis, “as is painting, so is poetry” (Horace, Ars Poetica, 19 B.C). Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon can be rethought from the perspective of the responses of the human mind by looking at a work of art (Sjöholm 2013:18). Similarly, WJT Mitchell, in 1992 argued for a “pictorial turn” in the humanities, registering a renewed interest in visual arts and the prevalence of pictures and images in what had been understood as an age of simulation, or an increasingly extensive and diverse visual culture. He states that “there is no essential difference between poetry and painting” and argues that “painting is no less rhetorical or ideological in its structure than literature” (Landwehr 2022: 12). Mitchell’s ideas can be related to the assertion that sister arts of painting and literature are united in a common rhetorical structure and that all forms of knowledge are socially mediated in order to suggest a tradition distinct from Lessing’s, one that is “concerned not to distinguish painting from literature but to reunify them under the common banner of representation”. He argues that no act of perception can ever be innocent or original and that “the key to the interpretive process does not lie in the nature of the object interpreted” and that “painting and literature alike must be engaged as rhetorical constructs” (Ibid.). An intermedial study of related fields certainly marks a departure from Lessing’s division of the arts into two distinct categories and looks at the representation of literary texts in other forms of art. Kirchner’s interpretation of woodcuts may not be the first, nevertheless, it is a shift towards a new paradigm away from the sharply defined boundaries of disciplines. The choice of a single moment of action and an aspect of the artistic presentation is fruitful as in the case of Kirchner’s woodcuts. It provides the viewer a new understanding of the incident in and of itself and the imagination gives the viewer the opportunity to see the other contexts of the plot. What is not real is represented; the preceding, the following, the expression of passions and the ideal as such, therefore, must involuntarily be added by the imagination of the onlooker. Kirchner projects his own fate onto the text as an incentive to produce an illustrated narrative of his own. This makes his woodcuts a “wondrous” example of existential “presentness” that transforms the text as a preface into the past. The main difference between the story (in which the central focus

Intersection of Visual Arts and Literature  177 is the exchange of a shadow for wealth and the practical and moral repercussions that arise from it) and Kirchner’s woodcuts, is that it addresses only the loss of his own identity through the allegory of the shadow and this distinguishes Kirchner’s woodcuts as his unique conceptualisation, bound to but also independent of the narrative by Chamisso, one that lends new perspective to the written text (Moeller & Gercken 2014:19). In inter-art or intermedial studies, the relationship between literature and the arts is often seen as the influence of the text over the visual, with the written text accorded the primary status. However, this does not appear to be the case in the intersection of Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story and the woodcuts of Kirchner. Kirchner’s representation of the tale through woodcuts, created nearly a century after Chamisso, is a product of its time and bears the signature and stamp of the artist. By means of its execution and interpretation, it relates to the text but at the same time, it constitutes its own aesthetic reality. Notes 1 “Er schlug ein, kniete dann ungesäumt vor mir nieder, und mit einer bewundernswürdigen Geschicklichkeit sah ich ihn meinen Schatten, vom Kopf bis zu meinen Füßen, leise von dem Grase lösen, aufheben, zusammenrollen und falten, und zuletzt einstecken. Er stand auf, verbeugte sich noch einmal vor mir, und zog sich dann nach dem Rosengebüsche zurück. Mich dünkt’, ich hörte ihn da leise für sich lachen. Ich aber hielt den Beutel bei den Schnüren fest, rund um mich her war die Erde sonnenhell, und in mir war noch keine Besinnung.” Adelbert von Chamisso: Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte.1814. Leipzig Druck und Verlag von Philipp Reclam. p.18. 2 The Berlin prostitutes are seen in the painting Street, Berlin by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1913. 3 “[…] ist das reizvolle Mädchen in das er sich verliebt.” 4 Shadow-lessness is a term used by me to depict a person without shadow. 5 “Ich war noch sehr verstört, als der Wagen vor meinem alten Wirtshause hielt; ich erschrak über die Vorstellung, nur noch jenes schlechte Dachzimmer zu betreten. Ich ließ mir meine Sachen herabholen, empfing den ärmlichen Bündel mit Verachtung, warf einige Goldstücke hin, und befahl, vor das vornehmste Hotel vorzufahren. Das Haus war gegen Norden gelegen, ich hatte die Sonne nicht zu fürchten. Ich schickte den Kutscher mit Gold weg, ließ mir die besten Zimmer vorn heraus anweisen, und verschloss mich darin, sobald ich konnte. ”Adelbert von Chamisso: Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte.1814. Leipzig. Druck und Verlag von Philipp Reclam. p.20. 6 “Das ist der Grund der Einsamkeit, dass ich immer weiter musste. Ich fuelte alle Leiden , alle Freuden. Die Welt ist so reich wie wenig konnte ich aus ihr schaffen, wie wenig helfen. Ich duerfte nie angehoeren, ich bin heimatlos. Nichts blieb mir am Ende, als allein Einsamkeit und die Sehnsucht nach weiter.” (Moeller &Gercken, 2014) p. 139 7 Dieser ging unbekümmert nebenher und pfiff eben ein Liedchen. Er zu Fuß, ich zu Pferd', ein Schwindel ergriff mich, die Versuchung war zu groß, ich wandte plötzlich die Zügel, drückte beide Sporen an, und so in voller Karriere einen Seitenweg eingeschlagen; aber ich entführte den Schatten nicht, der bei der Wendung vom Pferde glitt und seinen gesetzmäßigen Eigentümer auf der Landstraße erwartete. Ich mußte beschämt umlenken; der Mann im grauen Rocke, als er ungestört sein Liedchen zu Ende gebracht,

178  Literature, Film and Intertextuality lachte mich aus, setzte mir den Schatten wieder zurecht und belehrte mich, er würde erst an mir festhangen und bei mir bleiben wollen, wann ich ihn wiederum als rechtmäßiges Eigentum besitzen würde. »Ich halte Sie,« fuhr er fort, »am Schatten fest und Sie kommen mir nicht los. Ein reicher Mann, wie Sie, braucht einmal einen Schatten, das ist nicht anders, Sie sind nur darin zu tadeln, daß Sie es nicht früher eingesehen haben. Adelbert von Chamisso: Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte.1814. Leipzig Druck und Verlag von Philipp Reclam.p. 61. 8 “[...]Schatten, dacht' ich, suchst du deinen Herrn? der will ich sein. Und ich sprang hinzu, mich seiner zu bemächtigen; ich dachte nämlich, daß, wenn es mir glückte, in seine Spur zu treten, so, daß er mir an die Füße käme, er wohl daran hängen bleiben würde und sich mit der Zeit an mich gewöhnen.” Adelbert von Chamisso: Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte.1814. Leipzig. Druck und Verlag von Philipp Reclam. p.49. 9 “ Und Dich, mein lieber Chamisso, hab ich zum Bewahrer meiner wundersamen Geschichte erkoren, auf daß sie vielleicht, wenn ich von der Erde verschwunden bin, manchen ihrer Bewohner zur nützlichen Lehre gereichen könne. Du aber, mein Freund, willst Du unter den Menschen leben, so lerne verehren zuvörderst den Schatten, sodann das Geld.”Adelbert von Chamisso: Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte.1814. Leipzig Philipp Reclam. p.77. 10 “Mit seinen jüdischen Freunden teilte Chamisso in gewisser Weise das Schicksal: ob arm, reich, getauft oder ungetauft, berühmt, unberühmt, keiun Jude seine Judentum, das heisst, seinem Auβenseitertum, entfliehen.[...].” (Langner 2008: 136)

Works Cited Boehm, Gottfried. (1994) Die Wiederkehr der Bilder. In Was ist ein Bild?. München, pp. 11–38. Boehm, Gottfried & Mitchell, W. J. T.: Pictorial versus Iconic Turn. Two Letters, Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol. 50, No. 2–3, 2009, pp. 103–121. Chamisso, Adelbert von: Peter Schlemihls Wunderbare Geschichte. Translated by John Bowring with plates by George Cruikshank. Transcribed from the 1861 Robert Hardwicke edition by David Price. 2007. https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/cache​/epub​/21943​ /pg21943​.txt Chamisso, Adelbert von: Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte. 1814. Leipzig: Philipp Reclam, 2010. https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/31538​/31538​-h​/31538​-h​.htm Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig: Notizbuch des Künstlers, um 1919. S.1-3, nach Diktat geschrieben von Erna Kirchner. In: Günther (eds.): Ernst Ludwig Kirchner-Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story. München: Prestel Verlag, 2014. Landwehr, Margarete: Literature and the Visual Arts; Questions of Influence and Intertextuality. College Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3, Literature and the Visual arts, Summer 2002, pp. 1–16. Langner, Beatrix: Der wilde Europäer: Adelbert von Chamisso. Berlin: Mathes und Seitz Verlag, 2008. Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim: Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. Berlin: Hofenberg Verlag, 1766. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago, 1994.

Intersection of Visual Arts and Literature  179 Moeller, Magdalena M. and Gercken, Günther: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner-Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story. München: Prestel Verlag, 2014. Sjöhol, Cecelia: Lessing’s Laocoon: Aesthetics, Affects and Embodiment. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 46, 2013, pp. 18–33.

Part V

Performing and Fine Arts



12 Rhythms of the “Third” across Cultures – A Study of Performance Aesthetics Anuradha Ghosh

The proposed paper wishes to engage with the conceptualization/s of the ‘Third’ with reference to the changing contours of performance aesthetics in theatre, cinema, and the allied arts produced in the different nation-states of Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas in cross-cultural modes. Pitting the discourses of several worlds, what this paper aims to trace is the polyphonic resonance of the term ‘Third’/’third’ in select reflections panning the decades of the ‘60s and ‘70s and it’s implications thereafter in shaping the performance aesthetics of contemporary times. For methodological convenience, a binary is constructed between the discourses of the Global North vis-à-vis that of the Global South to trace the dialectical complexities inherent in the contentions about what do we mean by the ‘Third’/’third’ in cross-cultural terms taking select philosophical and aesthetic reflections of scholars engaged in critical praxis through their ‘performance’ demonstrated either through the written word or images on screen/stage. With the global decline of the ‘political Left’, conjectures on the third way/s of thinking warrants an engagement, as nothing in the world of intellectual production must be regarded as passé. Hence, the attempt here is to re-visit the diverse rhythms of the ‘Third’ across cultures through a study of performance aesthetics with reference to select literary, philosophical, cinematic and allied modes of performance texts, particularly theatrical productions among different national/sub-national, regional, ethnic and indigenous contexts. 12.1 Part I 12.1.1 Discourses from the Global South

Discourses from the Global South with a special focus on India and the nations of this subcontinent need to be selectively mapped as the rich, multilayered complexity of performance traditions gesticulates towards altogether different dynamics as what is understood by the term Third in relation to cinema, theatre and literature. It must be mentioned at the very outset that the third space in art and culture has been subject to a host of contentions in the developing world, primarily as it emerged from the womb of political movements of the mid-twentieth century that foregrounded the politics of anti-coloniality and decoloniality, before and after 1947 and later 1971. The formation of the Communist Party of India (CPI) in DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-18

184  Performing and Fine Arts Kanpur on 26 December 1925, All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in London on 24 November 1934 and the Indian People’s Theatre Movement (IPTA) as a national organisation in Mumbai on 25 May 1943 remains in terms of a spectral presence that still engulfs our relationship with the intellectual dynamics of what comprises the notion of the Third in the context of this subcontinent. The historical implications of it spill over the consciousness of people in artistic and literary productions [– oral (as in folk traditions), written as well as performed] that choose to privilege a dialogic engagement across borders rather than harbour jingoistic nationalism/s or narrow religious fundamentalism/s, that seems to survive by festering the wounds of partition, making it impossible for the nations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka to transform themselves, by breaking free from internal discord that at times take a virulent shape, with both state and non-state actants, including militant/terror groups getting into the fray. One might wonder how partition affects Myanmar or Sri Lanka, as conventional understanding takes 1947 as the watershed year that divided India and Pakistan. But if one considers what historians like Mushirul Hasan or Urvashi Butalia often emphasised regarding “the long shadow” of partition1 and extends it to the transition of East Pakistan into Bangladesh, and if one bothers to read how overnight the cartography of India’s northeastern states, sharing borders with East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and Myanmar changed, forcing people to re-align their lives/ livelihoods from scratch, one would perhaps come to terms with the issue of physical, social and existential destabilisation as the defining characteristic of the region. Sri Lanka might seem like an aberration here, but considering the nature of its colonial history, the relationship it shared with the Indian mainland from ancient times, its transition from being a British dominion to independent Ceylon in 1948 to the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka in 1972, the bloody civil war that paralysed the country and the political role of India in it, makes us re-consider what is implied by separatist movements for autonomy and what is partition and how both have their genesis in the history of European colonisation of the countries of South and East Asia and thereby falls within the scope of the long shadow of partition in metaphoric and metonymic terms. The political vision of leading intellectuals and statesmen – the founding members of the aforementioned nation-states, the hopes and aspirations that people had regarding freedom from colonial rule soon went under as poverty, unemployment, food crisis, rising price index of all commodities and deaths due to hunger, disease and malnutrition from both natural and man-made causes brought to light the dystopic dimensions of independence. Waves of resistance movements of myriad shades dot the political landscape of India in the 50s, 60s, 70s and beyond. The spirit of it all becomes the shaping influence in defining the Third in the nations of the Global South, particularly India and her neighbours. The 80s and after are marked by different secessionist movements, often militant in nature, and movements associated with the assertion of identity against socio-cultural discrimination of Dalits, Adivasis and other marginal tribes and groups. Similar resonances of resistance seem to be the affective reality of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka where, alongside militant secessionist movements and civil unrest, which in turn

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  185 led to military rule, curtailing the democratic rights of the people. Keeping this canvas in mind, we need to now see how the notion of the Thirdgradually unfolded by taking select practitioners of the form. In order to demonstrate the implications of the term Third in the realms of theatre, select discourses of Badal Sircar and Heisnam Kanhailal (from the states of West Bengal and Manipur, respectively) and Augusto Boal (from Brazil) have been taken up for a closer engagement and from the realms of cinema, select films of Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen (from India), Tareque Masud, Tanvir Mokammel (from Bangladesh), Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino (from Argentina) have been kept at the backdrop for a contextual understanding of the flows that mark it all. In Badal Sircar’s “The Third Theatre”, he traces the notion of the “Third” in terms of an alternative to the colonial legacy of proscenium theatre that worked on the principle of capital gains, unabashedly commercial, ridden with the drift of cultures in dominance. Badal Sircar/Sarkar’s (or Sudhindra Sarkar) association with the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the IPTA – his later disillusionment with political practice and the role of the CPI, which underwent two splits after 1947, over programmatic debates and chalking of political agenda and action plan leading to fragmentation of the CPI resulting in the formation of the CPIM in 1964; further debates within the CPIM led to the formation of the Charu Mazumder–led CPI (ML) in 1969, popularly called the Naxalite movement, that rejected participation in parliamentary democracy and electoral politics and followed the Chinese model calling for a total revolution through militant armed struggle and guerilla warfare, left the membership of the CPI to pursue his interests in theatre. Though he graduated as a civil engineer and had worked in India, England and Nigeria, his political commitments made him seek a form of theatre as a vocation with a concrete political mission of fomenting critical thought and radical action. His move from proscenium theatre to open-air intimate theatre or “anganmanch”2 (“angan” – courtyard within the inner domestic space of the house and “manch” – “stage”) (29) to finally the streets – whether it is a street corner, a park, an inn, a meadow – where every space within the public domain could be seized to turn it into a stage for performance involved radicalisation of the art form where the category of the performers and the spectators were no longer static ones. Although Boalian theatre playing with the notion of “Spect-Actor”3 (Boal: xx) did away with the schism between performers/actors and audience/spectators altogether as it was aligned with the political experiments of Marxism with radical components in religious philosophies creating a theological orientation to the dynamics of movements that called for not only the total change of structures in dominance and the dismantling of its operative logic but attempted to usher in alternative models that came into existence through active participation of the people in the process of development and nation building with special focus on common welfare. Human development was the key phrase for the Latin American vision of progress and not just economic development of the nation, as in the latter case, one is never sure that it would entail an inclusive model with the common good in mind or work in just the reverse order. Badal Sircar’s inspiration, however, was primarily of European origin (and not Latin American, though concepts from Liberation Theology have been used to

186  Performing and Fine Arts engage with his works by Indian scholars) as it was his exposure to “the vast world of British drama” (Kundu: 61) and the impact of Grotowski’s ideas of “poor theatre” apart from the experiments of Stanislavski4 and the Moscow Theatre Group and the ideas of Bertolt Brecht. There are also several points of convergences in Badal Sircar’s understanding of “The Changing Language of Theatre” with the discourses of Richard Schechener, whom he met in 1971, was aware of his production of Dionysus, and went to the USA in 1972 to closely associate himself with Schechener’s “The Performance Group” (Kundu: 223) in order to engage with his ideas of performance on stage. Sircar’s experiments with theatre are a critical engagement with Bengali theatre that developed through the strange fusion of colonial models with that of rural forms with their origin in folk traditions of performance. What then is “Third theatre” for Badal Sircar? The term “Third” for Sircar meant a “theatre of synthesis” (Sircar: 2) that creatively merged the schism that was operative between the rural and urban performance practices in the context of West Bengal and practices in the different regional traditions that thrived in India. While proscenium theatre in western, northern and even parts of central India in Hindustani and later Hindi-Urdu, along with Gujarati and Marathi language productions, owed its genesis to Parsi theatre, Bengali theatre developed ironically from “Western theatre” (Kundu: 24). In fact, it is quite appropriately pointed out that — contrary to common belief, neither the principles of Sanskrit plays nor the popular cultural practices had much influence on the formation and development of modern Bengali theatre. It was rather a direct result of the British educational system and the new elements of the proscenium stage, which later even penetrated the inner structure of native genres like Jatra and destroyed their identity. (Kundu, p. 25 quotes Bhattacharya, Asutosh. Bangla Natyasahityer Itihas, p. 39, to make this point). Kironmoy Raha’s Bengali Theatre too points out that “theatre came to Bengal from England about two hundred years ago via the early English traders and colonial rulers of Calcutta” (Raha: 1). Unlike Kundu, however, he points out that Bengali theatre gradually evolved after striking roots owing to two factors – (a) existence of indigenous traditional forms of popular dramatic performances that had a folk origin like Jatra, Jhumur, Alkap, Leto, Gambhira, Kathakali, Nautanki, Bhawai, Tamasha, Chhou, Manipuri dances, etc. and (b) the rise of a Bengali middle class. Badal Sircar found this rural/urban divide of Bengali theatre extremely problematic and, through his practices, tried to initiate a third avenue which could be a “theatre of synthesis” whereby the colonial forms of European/British stagecraft that were adopted by large theatre companies that operated commercially to accrue profit and hence were capital-intensive productions that in turn became a challenge to indigenous forms of productions and folk performative traditions. Even the Jatra was being taken over by companies that invested in the entertainment industry, blunting, thereby, the potentially political nature of this art form that could be used for radical purposes to subvert existing forms of oppression and exploitation. Badal Sircar felt the need to take theatre back to the domain of the people and to

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  187 initiate a people’s theatre movement through which the commercial nature of the enterprise could be destroyed. This could be done by aligning with people’s movements and politicising theatre that could then become the tool that was capable of triggering critical thought and action. Quite aptly therefore, G. Anuradha describes the theatre of Badal Sircar as a “theatre of conscientization” through a close study of his select plays. “Third theatre” thereby is no longer a theatre for consumption alone whose success would be determined by ticket prices and box office hits or the number of staged shows in theatre halls, but the yardstick for measuring success would altogether change. Has the play been able to challenge the status quo? Does it inspire the wrath of the political establishment and generate simultaneous coercive state action? Does it mobilise public opinion and create an interrogative attitude that tends to align with either an ongoing political/social movement or has the capacity to initiate concerted action towards it? “Third theatre” needs to be extremely mobile and fluid, and in order to travel light, the full potential of the human body, i.e., the body of the actor, needs to be harnessed. Rigorous physical and mental exercises of the group helped enhance the potential of the actor, but Heisnam Kanhailal of Kalakshetra Manipur observes in one of his writings how difficult it was for him to train the city-bred performers in Badal Sircar’s group who had lost their organic connection with nature. In fact, Kanhailal critiques Badal Sircar’s actor training methods for being heavily influenced by the West, as what he advocated was the “theatre of the Earth” that would work closely in response to the rhythms of the natural world and the human body needed to unlearn and de-school itself by withdrawing into pre-natal forms of existence within the womb and acquire that same consciousness whose memory is lost as we progress in our post-natal existence away from the womb of mother/ nature.5 Heisnam Sabitri Devi, the co-founder of Kalakshetra Manipur,6 and wife of the late Heisnam Kanhailal, along with the present director of the group, their son, Heisnam Tomba emphasise how their philosophy of theatre is inspired by indigenous traditions, folklore and the secular rhythms of everyday cultures of existence and their deep connection to nature. In the booklet Aesthetics of Resilience – A Manifesto written by Heisnam Kanhailal, he brings to the forefront the issues that one confronts in building an aesthetic form that evolves from a conflict zone, where human suffering arises from trauma and violence, owing to both state and non-state actants, including militant and terrorist outfits and the drug mafia that grips the state in a condition of perpetual asphyxiation. In Theatre for the Ritual of Suffering, Kanhailal mentions how the act of human suffering is existentially negotiated through social forms of mourning in a ritualistic mode which in turn inspires theatre, cinema and the allied arts. The act of resistance at the individual level as well as that of the collective is to demonstrate resilience to suffering and allow life to flow on. Living and/or dying become interchangeable in such a situation as life here may be “a living death”, while death might be the “lease to eternal life” – free from suffering. Since the ’50s, the state has been caught in a spiral of unabated violence and corruption as parallel institutions work, stifling the common citizen between the demands of the

188  Performing and Fine Arts underground outfits and the state apparatus. Not a house in Imphal and the adjoining areas have been left unmarked by losses that are not due to natural causes, much like the states of Nagaland and Assam. What avenue does theatre and the performing arts offer then to the people who need to heal? It is this central question that inspires groups like Kalakshetra Manipur to politicise theatre by intertwining “nature lore” with “native lore” (Clarifying New Trajectory: 1) by drawing upon the ancestral past of Meitei ethnicity and explore the potential of the pure, vital power of life: Bewildered7, I wandered into the ethnic jungle of impulses in order to explore the wild sources of the primeval human nature. (Ibid: 1) So, Heisnam Kanhailal and Heisnam Sabitri Devi felt the need to develop a theatre group in terms of a workshop, rather than a production company, and though he fondly recalls his association with Badal Sircar, the “psychophysical exercises, play making and … games of trust” (Ibid. p. 2) that the latter taught in an invited workshop as part of the theatre festival organised by the Manipur State Kala Akademi, when “Satabdi” visited Imphal in October 1972, inspired Kanhailal to re-think actor training programmes that were influenced by models from the West. Sircar in the chapter “Manipur Workshop” writes, “I began by establishing the ‘Circle’.8 Everybody sits in a circle whenever something is described or discussed … so there is no back-bencher and no difference in status” (The Third Theatre 1978: 59) – in order to bring about a sense of unity and team spirit. Kanhailal rather insists on the notion of an emotional hierarchy, much like that of a traditional family, that would be the cementing force of forging relationships among the members of a theatre group. Neither did he share Sircar’s vision of “theatre as social action” (Clarifying New Trajectory: 2) as what he aimed to accomplish was a “language of physical theatre rather than psychological, … solidified by social experience” as that alone could exhibit “a highly physical and visceral response to the bitter political conditions” (Ibid.: 3). Critical of the “drilling system” of the West (Ibid.: 6), he posits that kinesics is largely a process of self-discovery, an intimate realisation of the deeply personal, and Heisnam Sabitri Devi, commonly referred to as “Ima” (meaning mother in Meitei), shares the process through which she attempts to strike a “dialogue with the spirit of space” (Aesthetics of Resilience – A Manifesto, cover page). Quite interestingly, in a section titled “Inner Process” she explains to her apprentices that the “principles of rhythm, tempo and flow” are organically enmeshed, allowing us to reach a heightened emotional state of the action – “awakening the energy in the abdomen that makes the silent power uncoiled vertically through chest, fore head, top head and beyond radiating the ray of the power in all directions of the space and among the co-partners” (Ibid. inside front cover) indicating thereby the principle of cosmic unity and balance that ancient Taoism espouses through the union of the Yin and the Yang (receptive vis-à-vis active principle in terms of a dialectical binary), while the Hindu and the Buddhist Tantras and the Sakta Bhakti tradition centre on the notion of Prakriti and the Purusha, the female and the male principle whose unity leads to creation.

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  189 The “silent power” that uncoils9 itself like a serpent is a vital force that the human body is able to achieve through a heightened state of consciousness. Theatre of the Earth Project has a similar line of argument where an organic link to the planet fosters a human re-vitalisation as one re-centres oneself with the natural ecological habitus, which is fundamental for the necessary rupture of mechanical ways of living and thinking owing to the influence of urban cultures with a call for a return to the roots. No wonder then that what Kalakshetra Manipur, as a leading theatre group in India, has been able to achieve through the sheer dynamism of Heisnam Sabitri Devi’s organic acting style, and the kind of synergy she shared with the late Heisnam Kanhailal as director impacts each and every member of the group whose internal ties are built on relationships that unite a traditional family. If the play Pebet, based on a Meitei folk tale of a mother bird and her seven fledglings’ struggle with a cat, is ground-breaking because of its repudiation of verbal dialogue as an essential element of theatre, the play Draupadi, based on a short story by the same title10 by Mahasweta Devi for being almost prophetic in predicting the turn of history with the incident of gang rape and murder of Manorama Devi by the 33rd Assam Rifles, then Daakghar, based on Rabindranath Tagore’s 1912 play by the same title, meaning “The Post Office” breaks the age and gender barrier when the seventy-two-year-old actress chooses to enact the role of a six-year-old boy Amal on stage, making us re-think afresh as what is the language of theatre after-all? If it is the dynamism of gestures alone that marks the power of theatre, then how do we deal with dialogue-based theatre, and what place does it have in defining the domain of stage-based performance aesthetics? In an attempt to engage with the question raised here, let us take a close look at some of the sequences from the recorded performances of select productions by Kalakshetra Manipur to have some sense of the vital power that speaks through gestures alone, where the role of verbal dialogue is almost negligible. The play Pebet is a part of the popular phunga wari tales told by grandmothers sitting around the fireplace to little children among the Meitei tribe that resides mainly in Manipur, but a sizeable population exists in Assam, Tripura, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram in the northeastern states of India, as well as parts of Myanmar and Bangladesh. The story replicates symbolically the ethnic clashes between the seven salais or clans of Manipur and how the spirit of the land represented through the mother bird tried protecting the seven fledglings from external aggression in the form of the cat monk, symbolically alluding to the Vaishnavite pundit Shantidas Gosain, who on royal invitation, came to preach and spread Hinduism, that was later adopted as the state religion, and the ancient texts11 of the clans were destroyed to ensure centralisation of political and economic control. In the opening sequence, the still shot of Pebet Heisnam Sabitri Devi in the role of the mother Pebet is in the foreground, while the fledglings are within her protective cover. The tense posture of a frightened bird who would fight to protect her children is the epitome of the notion of motherhood. The division of stage space – the elevated circular platform like a “mandap” of a temple where icons are placed with a tree behind it, marks the world of birds, while the remaining stage space is

190  Performing and Fine Arts for the antics of the cat trying to lure the fledglings away with the intention of making them his slaves, indicating the brute physical power of the latter. In the latter half of the sequence, we see the cat monk trying to entice a frightened fledgling to win him over and then control him completely. Interestingly, it is the weakest fledgling who is ensnared first, and the rest follow suit soon, leaving the mother bird alone. The sartorial choices and colour codes in the performance are significant, as the blue sarong of the mother bird is indicative of the infinitude of the elements – the limitless expanse of the sky and the oceans, and the dark green of her blouse – portrays nature in her plenitude; the earth-clad fledglings represent the trials and tribulations of the people who ignorant as they are, think of progress and development by imitating the cat monk, who in the 1975 and later productions was clad in saffron12, but with the chanting melody of mantras, the wooden beads like rudraksha and bells around his neck and hands, he represented Hinduisation/ Indianisation, against which there was a general discontent following the implementation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 195813, in the state of Manipur to control militant extremism. The modes in which the cat monk entices the fledglings with sweet words establishes his control over them by instilling a sense of competition as well as fear of violent chastisement, the forms of torture inflicted by him as a foreign agent to the world of birds, replicating through gestures and stage settings, as well as the symmetry of lines on stage – the history of colonisation is extremely rich as signifiers that refuse closures. The critique of colonial lackeys or, rather, those of the establishment plays out quite powerfully in a scene replete with scatological imagery of licking of bird shit that falls on the paw of the cat, and then in turn, the birds are made to literally lick his back in a kind of sexual orgy of aberrant forms of power that is grotesque and abusive. To consider how a simple tale of freedom and the need to be rooted in one’s culture is opened up to reach new dimensions of political theatre is indeed no mean achievement by Kalakshetra Manipur. The entire performance maintains a uniform pitch and intensity in terms of acting, and the melody suffuses the disturbed sensibilities as the birds return home, rejecting the world of the cat, to their natural habitus. The tension is built by varying the gentleness of the mother bird teaching her fledglings the ways of bird life vis-à-vis the forced imposition of the ways of the cat world on the innocent birds, who, after the murder of one fledgling by his own siblings following the orders of the cat, realises the importance of rebelling against such virulent authority and they return to the call of their lonely, grief-stricken mother, alluding thereby to the possibility of freedom from constricted conditions of alien existence. In the final sequence of the play Draupadi, what is most interesting is the terrifying symmetry of the pyramid-like formation that is replicated to suggest the repressive and authoritarian aspects of state power that work contrary to the aspirations of the people, who either need to be cautious and wary of making false moves like the crouching posture of the actress playing the role of young Dopdi Mejhen, armed with a sickle, ready to spring to action if the need arose, watchful of the movements of the police and the military on the prowl to catch the rebels.

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  191 The circular and erratic movements of the couple Dulna Majhi and Dopdi Mejhen, who are shown to keep a vigil for days, alert to any movement or sound of the army and the police who were combing the forest in large numbers for months together to nab the underground militants/rebels compare and contrast with the chilling linearity of power that assumes an organised symmetry of violence often replicating phallic forms of invasive control over the spontaneous, fluid, circular or wave-like movements of loosely organised people who rebel, whether violently or peacefully, in order to seek social, political and economic justice from systems. How even liberal democratic power structures assume a hostile oppositionality, where no attempt for dialogue is ever made, except the move to squash it all by brute force to protect the interests of the ruling elite is well demonstrated. The formation of patterns that play with order and spontaneous anarchy/disorder, linearity and circularity, darkness and light creates a visual and aural contrast is brought out in the acting style of the group. In the scene of the couple leaning on each other under a tree bereft of any foliage is indicative of the hopelessness and futility of the movement that led to heavy casualties of the tribal people and the poor, though their sheer courage to fight with their bare hands or with primitive and indigenous weapons can hardly be undermined as it is the spirit of resistance that both the short story set against the backdrop of the Naxalite movement, that works like a sequel to the novelette Bashai Tudu (2016) or Operation? – Bashai Tudu (1990) and the play set against the peoples’ resistance movement against the excesses of the army and the police in the state of Manipur in the name of controlling militant extremism since 1958, whereby encounters, arrests, unlawful detention, physical, psychological and sexual violence, interrogation, harassment, raids, body searching, extortion, etc. became a routine affair for people caught between militancy and state terror in an asphyxiating grip from where there seemed to be no exit. The tree reminds one of the final sequences of the film Jukti, Takko aar Goppo14 (Reason, Argument and Story) by Ritwik Ghatak, where amid the cross-fire between Naxalite rebels and the police, the protagonist Neelkantha Bagchi is caught with two of his youthful companions – Nachiketa and Bangabala. While the couple in the film, despite the tension all around, become sexually aware of each other’s presence and are drawn together like a pair of magnets, in the play Draupadi, the tree bereft of leaves, portrays the sterility and stagnation of the couple whose end surely would be a violent termination of life. In the latter half of the same sequence, Dulna Majhi is seen giving detailed instructions on how to deal with organised violence and the tricks of survival in the forest against all adversities. It is a turning point as it seems to confirm Dopdi Mejhen’s radical commitment to the ideals of the movement against the nefarious criminal linkages between the landlord, jotedar, police, military and bureaucratic combine who survive on making the poor, the Adivasi and the Dalit communities pushed to the margins of existence in terms of systematic exploitation and oppression at various levels. The attention with which she absorbs all that her husband Dulna Majhi has to say helps her to outwit the Senanayak’s attempt to arrest her, and from a young girl, she is seen to grow into a mature woman.

192  Performing and Fine Arts However, the radical subversion of her situation as an abject victim to the position of the human subject, capable of taking on the Commander, mocking his order of “make her” and questioning his pretensions of being an educated gentleman that shocks him into disorientation upsets the final balance of the narrative, making the victim an agent of moral and spiritual victory against the rapacious authority of the state and its institutions and the sham democracy that India had achieved in 1947 is after her gang rape in the barracks by soldiers on the orders of the Senanayak. The scene of “making her” (Devi: 189) as per the orders of the Senanayak or Commander was perhaps the most difficult one to stage. Adapting the literary text for the stage, Kanhailal interestingly shows Dopdi to have aged. It is no longer a young actress who was to present the scene of the gang rape in the military barracks, but the seventy-odd-year-old Heisnam Sabitri Devi who takes over as she has been undercover for years and is finally captured by the army. The red blouse and white saree are symbolic as it harkens to the Hindu Bengali tradition of the attire of married women and is considered auspicious like the shakha-pola – white conch shell and red coral bangles worn as a pair in both hands is indicative of purity and fertility respectively. The colour codes are an interesting way of layering the target text with the cultural connotations of the source text, reminding one of the nature of oppression, the violations and violence that are meted out to people within resistance movements. The use of the three spears replicates the phallic assertion and abuse of the tribal Dopdi, reminding one that the mythical Draupadi of the epic Mahabharata who could at least appeal to Lord Krishna to save her from the humiliation of being completely disrobed in open court in the presence of the blind King, but this hapless woman could only wonder: How many came to make her? Shaming her, a tear trickles out of the corner of her eye. In the muddy moonlight, she lowers her lightless eye, sees her breasts and understands that, indeed, she’s been made up right. She turns her eyes and sees something white. Her own cloth. Nothing else. Suddenly she hopes against hope. Perhaps they have abandoned her. For the foxes to devour. But she hears the scrape of feet … Draupadi closes her eyes … Again the process of making her begins. Goes on. The moon vomits a bit of light and goes to sleep. Only the dark remains. A compelled spread-eagled still body. Active pistons of flesh rise and fall, rise and fall over it. (Devi: 188–189) This scene is staged with such finesse that there is a spine-chilling silence as one watches in a whirl of different intensities of light how from behind a white screen, each piece of clothing is thrown on the stage, while three soldiers with their huge spears are in a rhythmic thumping movement imitative of forceful coitus is seen to create a triadic pattern of shadows with the objects in their hand, within which the silhouetted figure of Sabitri Devi as the mature Dopdi is trapped. The notion of violent phallic penetration is demonstrated with as much force as the literary text

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  193 where the line “A compelled spread-eagled still body. Active pistons of flesh rise and fall, rise and fall over it” – is symbolically replicated by the terrifying symmetry of gestures of the soldiers on stage while behind the white screen, the shadow of a woman’s head and her spread-eagled battered body twisting in agony is seen in faint outlines allowing the imagination of the audience to re-construct the painful and tragic outcome of it all. The swift shifts between light and darkness give the sense of disrobing of the actress on stage, who now wears her mangled body like a flag, refusing to be clothed and confronts the Senanayak frontally, with her head held high. The passage in the source text – “What’s the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a man? … Come on, kounter me – come on, kounter – me? … and for the first time Senanayak is afraid to stand before an unarmed target, terribly afraid” (190) – is enacted purely through the haze of light and darkness, the intense body movements of the actors and their expressions and the phallic formations that objectively demonstrate the custodial torture and gang rape that is common in conflict-torn contexts. Though Kanhailal does not align his theatrical praxis with Sircar’s definition of ‘Third’ theatre, yet, it is quite clear that his attempt of returning to the roots of Meitei tradition inspired him to look for forms of synergy with the inner consciousness of one’s being that transcends the narrow domain of the self to merge with the rhythms of the cosmos. In the book Heisnam Sabitri – The Way of the Thamoi (2022), H. S. Shivaprakash & Usham Rojio argue that Sabitri-Kanhailal’s theatre is unique as it is informed by “concepts of the thamoi (heart) and thawai (soul-spirit)” (p. 13) which is largely a matter of realisation attained through “years of experimentation and exploration undertaken independently of other institutions and models of theatre” (14). The manner in which they evolved “a body-breath and soul-spirit driven expression, through which the actor-performer transforms herself and the consciousness of the audience” makes the performance aesthetics of their theatre “at once visceral, vital, spiritual, as well as sociopolitical” (Ibid.). The minimal use of props, sparse and spartan stage settings and limited technological aids for light and sound or even costumes make their theatrical praxis quite close to the notion of Third theatre proposed by Badal Sircar, aligning them with cultural movements that seek to pave the ways for alternative forms of theatrical expressivity – forging a twilight language of an in-between world that veers between mindscapes that are dream-like and nightmarish at the same time, aiming to heal wounds of a suffering people caught in the vortex of multilayered forms of violence, making their very existence a threat that needs to be thwarted at all cost, but not by way of a cathartic release as an escape route. The theatrical praxis of Augusto Boal is yet another foray within the context of Brazil and Latin America where the participation of the spectator (which he interestingly splits to foreground the notion of the “spect-actor”) can influence changes in the narrative structure as what he works with are themes presented for dramatisation with no pre-given script. In his much-acclaimed book Theater of the Oppressed (1979), he not only challenges classical Greek poetics and critiques Aristotelian notions of drama as being a “coercive system of tragedy” (1) by pointing out in the “Preface” titled “The Unruly Protagonist” as to how “creative anarchy” (xi) of

194  Performing and Fine Arts farm labourers, craftsmen, artisans and workers was actively fostered to ensure the much-needed break from the tyranny of rules and order necessary in team-work to complete their work during harvest time or while making buildings and monuments and other kinds of constructive/productive, output-oriented jobs. In fact, the cult of Dionysus, the “god of happiness, god of binges” (Ibid.) facilitated this move for “creative anarchy” that fostered unbridled freedom of words, actions, gestures or thought in order to revitalise the spirit by drinking, dancing, singing, performing to relax and open up by tearing down the social hierarchies that otherwise existed to ensure the rule of law and order. According to Boal, it was a time when “Censorship sleeps and the mouth speaks. Mission accomplished, so the rules can be broken” (Ibid.). But how can “creative anarchy” be allowed “to play havoc”? “Freedom needed to be kept within bounds. There had to be limits. But can freedom in handcuffs be truly free?” (Ibid.) Boal presents the story of Thespis, the poet and stage actor, and Solon, the lawmaker, in order to trace the journey of how freedom could be supervised and controlled in the form of censorship and goes on to show how both Plato and Aristotle subsequently reinforce it through their discourses on art. While Plato denounced all forms of art asserting that it had no place in an ideal republic, Aristotle emphasized on its relevance, and in relation to tragedy, he argued that through the process of identification of the audience with the spectacle, the negative emotions accumulated in society gets purged by the process of catharsis, making art relevant in instilling pity, fear and admiration for the protagonist. It was through Aristotle’s notions of mimesis, identification and catharsis that finally the wedge between the actor and the character was driven in separating, flouting all that Thespis had earlier proposed, as only through the unification of the actor and the character depicted on stage to narrate one’s lived experiences or what one has seen can lead to the realization of the democratic potential of drama that presented no absolute thought, but by inserting different points of view, facilitated dialogue, which in turn was considered dangerous for the establishment of order, as it alone could counter and challenge ideas in circulation. In Boalian terms, the singular contribution of Aristotle lies in inserting “the Prosthesis of Desire” (xvii) as the actor was finally separated from the character, and the latter was now wedded strangely to the “overpowered spectator” (Ibid.) through the axis of identification of the spectator with the protagonist, and all art was then understood as an imitation of nature. It is through empathy with the protagonist that this strange marriage between the spectator and the protagonist takes place and makes it possible for a prosthetic implant of the desires of the latter on the former, which in turn enables catharsis or the purging of emotions to restore balance by blunting and dissipating the accumulation of negative energy that culminates in rebellions of various degrees. Taking on “Machiavelli and the Poetics of Virtù”, Boal posits his ideas of how the ideals of bourgeois individualism gains ground and draws attention to how the discourses of Hegel and Brecht evolve from this conceptual lineage which tries to foreground notions like “the character as subject” and “the character as object” respectively in terms of a dialectical reversal, that is still caught in the traditional terms of reference in circulation. It is this philosophical backdrop that Boal politically engages with and taking cues from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  195 (first published in Portuguese in 1968 and translated in English in 1970) that critiques the banking concept of education and introduces the notion of participatory pedagogy, he develops his ideas of theatre as “Poetics of the Oppressed” (116) that takes one back to the models of theatrical performance that the old Thespis stood for. It is his “Experiments with the People’s Theater in Peru” (120) that the idea of using theatre in education emerges under the aegis of the national literacy mission (Operación Alfabetización Integral or Integral Literacy Operation – ALFIN project) conducted in August 1973 in the cities of Lima and Chiclayo, in the “barrios or new villages, corresponding to our slums”, “rural areas” and “mining areas” where the population was mostly bilingual, Spanish not being their first language (121). He writes that the express purpose of the poetics of the oppressed was “to change the people – spectators”, passive beings in the theatrical phenomena into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action. Aristotle proposes a poetics in which the spectator delegates power to the dramatic character so that the latter may think and act for him. Brecht proposes a poetics in which the spectator delegates power to the character who thus acts in his place, but the spectator reserves the right to think for himself, often in opposition to the character. In the first case, a “catharsis” occurs; in the second, an awakening of critical consciousness. But the poetics of the oppressed focuses on the action itself: the spectator delegates no power to the character (or actor) to either think or act in his place; on the contrary, he himself assumes the protagonic role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change – in short, trains himself for real action” (122). Pitting the forms of theatre that Boal introduces when he discusses the notion of “theatre as discourse” (126) where unlike Sircar or even Kanhailal, he does not concern himself with the “language of theatre” but considers “theatre as language” that one can gain proficiency through “knowing the body” (both literally and metaphorically) and “making the body expressive” through various physical and psychological exercises and games. Spectators engage in “simultaneous dramaturgy” while the actors perform and intervene directly in the dramatic action by speaking through images expressed in body language, changing the course of the narrative altogether, leading to what he terms as “theatre as discourse” making it part of “Forum theatre”. “Theater as discourse” uses methods that have the potential to construct what Boal terms as “forms of a rehearsal-theater, and not a spectacletheater” (143), and his experiments with it, in Brazil and Argentina, apart from Peru, give rise to “Newspaper theatre”, “Invisible theatre”, “Photo-romance theatre”, “Breaking of repression”, “Myth theatre”, “Trial theatre” or “Analytical theatre” and “Masks and Rituals” (143–155). In his experiments with the Arena Theater of Sao Paulo, he further develops the notions behind Forum theatre by introducing the Joker System, where the structure and function of the Joker are “magical, omniscient, polymorphous and ubiquitous” (182), bringing back the centrality of the chorus that could be furthering the dialogic encounter by pitting the deuteragonist and antagonist, alongside the protagonist, who is the chorus leader – “the coryphaeus” (Ibid.) who presents a certain school of thought that warrants an examination.

196  Performing and Fine Arts If “Third Cinema” as Solanos and Getino argue is opposed to the cinema of the first and the second world and is anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and against the national bourgeois that exists to protect the interests of imperialism in the national context, it is not just experimental cinema or avantgarde, merely for the sake of ushering in some kind of novelty in its presentation. In the film The Hour of the Furnaces (Spanish: La hora de los hornos) made in 1968, one gets an idea of what guerrilla cinema is, and how such a film-making practice can work to prepare people to join movements for radical transformation. In India however, or for that matter in Bangladesh, the parallel or art cinema movement might have taken political themes, and are experimental in nature but none fall within the purview of what is defined as “Third” in terms of a radical alterity. Tareque Masud15 and Tanvir Mokemmel’s16 works like that of Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Shyam Benegal, Goutam Ghosh, Aparna Sen and a host of others fall within the ambit of experimental cinema but not Third cinema, barring select films of Mrinal Sen – whether it is his Calcutta Trilogy (Interview, Calcutta ’71 and Padatik released between 1971–’73), or Chorus (1974) or Oka Oori Katha (The Outsiders, 1977) or Ek Din Pratidin (And Quiet Rolls the Dawn, 1979) or Kharij (The Case is Closed, 1982). In fact, John H. Hood in Chasing the Truth: The Films of Mrinal Sen writes that Mrinal Sen was not afraid to be called a poster film-maker17 owing to the manner in which he aligned himself with radical political movements, making the cinematic signifier, largely a gesture that provoked critical thought (not necessarily action), without a closure. As Solanos and Getino mention in the essay “Towards a Third Cinema” (1971), whatever cinematic practices had unfolded in the nations of the Global South (India and Bangladesh included) can be best described as the “‘progressive’ wing of Establishment cinema”; which in the words of Jean-Luc Godard captures the feeling of film-makers who find themselves “trapped inside the fortress” (Nichols: 45)18, but in the world of theatre, the story is somewhat different. 12.2 Part II 12.2.1 Discourses from the Global North

If one traces the turn of discourses since the 1960s, one encounters that for Europe and the nations of the developed world, the term “third” often implied gestures in thought that are mired in ambivalent tendencies19, whose free play makes the signifier only a potential one. The ambivalent, paradoxical, indeterminate layering of what the “third”20 implied in the decade of the ’70s and after in France and other nations of Europe was largely owing to the structural set-backs of macroeconomic flows on capital that needed to re-organise itself after the two world wars and the compulsion to free the colonies in Asia and Africa and re-work the trade network that would no longer need to be involved in direct rule, as the independent nation-states had their nascent bourgeoisie with feudal linkages that would serve the interest of the former colonial masters. Reading Ngugi Wa’ Thiongo’s fictionalised rendering of such politics in a book like Matigari (1986) or the works of an author like Mahasweta Devi (Bashai Tudu or Operation? – Bashai Tudu and “Draupadi”21 translated by Samik Bandopadhyay and Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak)

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  197 about Adivasi India, on comparative terms compels one to recognize how colonial networks re-organise themselves to maintain their hold over their erstwhile colonies by facilitating trade without frontiers. One must also mention how the set-back in political movements for greater democratisation and labour rights was systematically throttled in the countries of the Global North, and most public intellectuals and scholars of the non-conservative fold agree that it was the failure of the May uprising in 1968–1969 France that led to a specific kind of shift facilitating the language of ambivalence and paradoxes to be the most “radical” move for discourse formulation. Unlike the discourses of the Third in countries of the Global South, in Europe, the works of Eugenio Barba centrally address the issue in the light of the discussion made above. In Ian Watson’s Towards a Third Theatre – Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, he discusses why Barba’s experiments with theatre are ground-breaking. The manner in which he combines the creativity of an artist with the more reflective skills of a researcher, theorist and teacher surely warrants an engagement as he not only turns to the different nations of Asia for inspiration but also draws heavily from the traditions in North and Latin America. Since 1964, when he founded the Odin, he has created over twenty original works, ranging from intimate theatre pieces to large-scale outdoor spectacles. He has established one of Western Europe’s only government-funded theatre laboratories, the Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium (NTL), which apart from researching performance, incorporates a publishing house, film and video archive and production facility. He also heads the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA), which he founded in 1979 to investigate the connections between traditional Eastern and contemporary Western performance. In addition to his practical successes, Barba has produced many articles as well as books, which together encompass important writings on actor training, dramaturgy, performance and theatre sociology22 (Hodge: 209). In “Theatre Theory: Sociology and the actor’s training technique”, Watson points out the central metaphors in Barba’s training practice as presented in “his two major books in English – The Floating Islands and Beyond the Floating Islands” that conceives of “the theatre group as an island”, alongside notions like “theatre as a body losing blood…, presence as body-in-life…and group theatre as pueblos” (Watson: 18) He goes on to say that “Barba’s theories are primarily concerned with two aspects of theatre: sociology and practice. His ideas on sociology draw mostly on his observations of the independent group theatre movement in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. The major concerns in these writings are the social dynamics of group theatre and the function of group theatre within the greater theatre community” (Watson: 18). Watson’s account of the personal history of Barba – an Italian national who settled in Norway and became a member of the Norwegian Merchant Marine that took him to different parts of Asia opening him up to layers of cultural experience is significant as it finds its way in the imagery he uses to visualise his theories and concepts of theatrical performance.Terms and phrases like the “archipelago”, “floating islands” and “bartered” – exchange of theatrical technique, “planet theatre”, “third theatre”, etc. are drawn directly from an imagination that is oceanic

198  Performing and Fine Arts in nature rather than territorial, more fluid and spontaneous rather than solid and fixed with a sense of finite limits, boundedness that is alien to the cyclical nature of the rolling waves, their eternal ebb and flow. The manner in which he assimilates aesthetic practices drawn from several indigenous cultural traditions celebrating cultural pluralism and cultural diversity makes his art a veritable fusion of forms that effectively bridges the divide between European and Asian dramatic forms making the experience truly Eurasian in nature. The practical experimentation23 of the group with notions like “pre-expressivity”, “energy”, “dilation”, “opposition” making them draw upon “a transcultural “physiology”” is the result of intensive research on codified performing traditions like Kabuki, Ballet, Odissi, Kathakali, Noh, Onnagata, Barong, and several other traditions and its assimilation into their training programme along with close associations with celebrated performers like Sanjukta Panigrahi – Odissi, Rukmani Devi Arundale—Bharatnatyam, Peking opera—artist Mei Lanfang, Zeami or Seami, also called Kanzi Motokiyo – the founder of the modern form of Japanese Noh drama, Danish actress Iben Nagel Rasmussen, British actress, scholar and performer associated with the Odin Teatret, ISTA and the University of Eurasian Theatre – Julia Varley, Italian actress, scholar and teacher well versed in South-east Asian and Far East Asian performance traditions and member of the Odin Teatret – Roberta Carreri, along with the knowledge of The Natyashastra and other ancient and indigenous treatises makes Barba’s professional identity truly “that of the theatrical polyglot” (Hodge: 209). His ideas of the “third theatre” escapes definition as it remains a potential signifier that refuses closure on a signified that can be articulated in language. He uses the term for the first time in “1976 at a conference in Belgrade” (Turner: 28). Rather, critical of both experimental theatre and the avantgarde as both are part of cultural institutions, what the Odin aimed at was finding—a new theatrical language, new forms of contact with the spectator (Barba, 1979: 29) and to develop a theatre not rooted in one cultural tradition, but a ‘theatre that dances’, that is, a theatre not wholly dependent on the spoken text but employing dance and song. (Turner: 27) The intention of “Third theatre” was to create a global network of relationships that would exchange ideas on performance traditions and practices on the lines of a bartered economy of free cultural exchanges. Barba envisions a practice of theatre that celebrates diversities and differences and hence the “third space” becomes the space of ambivalent ambiguity that is always in the process of becoming infinitely possible in terms of the potential to be realised and thereby he qualifies it further by re-phrasing it as “planet theatre”. How does one conceive of the theatrical text then? Is it a finished product or a text that is continuously expanding denying both a centre and a periphery in its quest to become a text? Who authors such a text – an individual director or the group itself where the ownership is collective and shared? Finally, what does Barba mean when he suggests the creation of little traditions and societies that support the building of such global networks of exchanges? Why does Barba not refer to ancient Greek traditions for inspiration as Greek theatre hardly relied on the spoken word alone? Why does he need to turn to Asia? What

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  199 kind of political role does such a theatrical practice have and how radical it really is? Or, through its concepts does the ISTA question the very notion of radical theatre by dissociating theatre from political and social movements and making it purely a kind of transcultural experience of visual and aural delights that appeal to the senses, and if so, to what end? 12.3 Part III 12.3.1 Towards a Conclusion …

Interestingly, despite the hegemonising tendency of cultures in dominance, authors, auteurs, artists and performers of the postcolonial nation-states of the Global South often critiqued the political establishment for diluting the khwabnama24 of independence from colonial rule by aiming to address issues pertaining to the marginalised subaltern, indigenous and ethnic cultures that often combine to construct the aspirations of the sub-national/regional, which blends into the spirit of the national. One critique made by academics when they engage with reflections on the aesthetic praxis of creative writers and performers primarily of India is that they are heavily influenced by the concepts and terms of reference that is in currency in the West/First World. What a practising artist can demonstrate through his/her practice needs to be engaged with productively and often it is the tendency of armchair academics or media pundits to sit in judgement on the trials and tribulations that performers often have to go through with severe crunch in financial resources, lack of public funding and allied challenges of not having a network of patronage that supports artistic endeavours. Whether it is a Manujendra Kundu trying to prove how Badal Sircar has been imitating the theories of Richard Schechener and how inadequate his articulation of the same is, or scholars of Kanhailal trying to point out how weak their theoretical reflections of the nature of their aesthetic practice is, miss the fundamental point here, and that is the language in which an artist “speaks” is kinesics, based on gestures that are primarily non-verbal in nature, and largely within the domain of experiential reality. The kind of intellectual exposure or academic training and the kind of support system the First World has, to “groom” performing artists is singularly lacking in the developing world. Without the patronage of the state or political and social movements that have the potential to radicalise art, as it is one of the many critical tools used as an arsenal for interrogating the established system, the practitioner is in a double bind, struggling between the paradox of verbalizing an experience which s/he is trained primarily to demonstrate and show, in order to tell. In conclusion therefore, one can posit how and why are the discourses of the Global South so different from those of the Global North by pitting the perspectives of what comprises the “Third” for Badal Sircar, Heisnam Kanhailal, Solanos and Getino and Augusto Boal with those of Roland Barthes and Eugenio Barba. The determinate nature of understanding what is the “Third” in terms of an anticolonial move of resistance to usher in a decolonial practice of theatre or cinema, that is by and large aligned with larger social and political movements, as an act of concientisación comprises the core elements of the “Third” in India and Latin

200  Performing and Fine Arts America. The act of experimentation with the form and style of performance is tied to indigenous traditions and cultures of faith which are radically re-aligned to inspire critical action. Quite in contrast to this is Barthes’ notion of the construction of the signifier itself as an approximation at best, as it can only indeterminately indicate a signified, and that too, in a very transient, evanescent sense. The “archipelagic” imagination that infuses the aesthetics of intellectuals like Eugenio Barba offers yet another rendering of the beat of the ‘third’ which is in sharp contrast to the praxis of a Badal Sircar or a Heisnam Kanhailal or for that matter, an Augusto Boal or Solanos and Getino who aimed at politicizing art as an alternative to its aestheticisation, making the dialectics of mythologizing itself a historical act, that emanates from a specific material culture. This movement “against interpretation” (to borrow a phrase from one of the seminal essays of Susan Sontag) by the discourse on the “third” emanating from the nations within the Global North, is after all yet another gesture of aestheticizing not art, but methodologies that celebrate the erotics of art, rendering politics to the dust-bins of history, as if it is it’s only rightful place. Notes 1 See Butalia, Urvashi Ed. Partition: The Long Shadow, Penguin India, New Delhi: 2015. 2 See Sircar, Badal. On Theatre: Selected Essays. Seagull Books, Calcutta:2009. 3 See Boal Augusto’s “Introduction” to his seminal work primarily based on his experiments with the “People’s Theater” in Peru and Brazil, that was later compiled together with his reflections on the poetics of performance within the European tradition in Theater of the Oppressed. Pluto Press, London: 2000 (New Edition), originally published in 1974 as Teatro del Oprimido, the English translation of which appeared in 1979. 4 See Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. Translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, A Theatre Arts Book, Routledge, New York, London: 2003 (Text reset). 5 All these exercises were demonstrated by Heisnam Sabitri Devi and Heisnam Tomba during the three-day workshop under the aegis of DRS 3 during 13–15 March 2019 in Jamia Millia Islamia. 6 Kalakshetra Manipur was established on 19 July 1969 by Heisnam Kanhailal and Heisnam Sabitri in Imphal. 7 Kanhailal’s disillusionment in the wake of his termination after three months of training in the National School of Drama, New Delhi in 1968 makes him critical of urban-centric discourses on theatre and the performing arts. Though formal education could barely get him a clerical position, it doesn’t deter him from pursuing theatre as a vocation like Badal Sircar, but for him the purpose of it all was to nurture and heal a ravaged generation caught amid the fury of contrary forces where normal life remained suspended. 8 Sircar’s pre-occupation with demarcating the “Circle” warrants a comparative reading of Constantin Stanislavski’s notion of “Concentration of Attention” (Chapter 5, 79-102) of An Actor Prepares, where through the use of “points of light” and “circles of light”, he trains actors to fix their attention on the action on stage, as performance by the group and the coordination of gaze on the stage together constructed the impact on the audience as a whole. Individual forays for making one’s personality felt on the stage was discouraged and so was the actor’s attempt at direct communication with the audience as it hindered the aesthetics of performance. Performance on stage is a collective act, where individuals (whether in major or minor roles) are subordinate to the coordinated action

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  201 of the group. In fact, Stanislavski using the persona of Kostya narrates his experience as a student in the Director Tortsov’s actor training programme quoting his instructions to record how one can reach the levels of one’s subconscious, taking re-course through “imagination” and “emotion memory” using objects on stage to focus one’s attention on: “Up to now,” he said, “we have been dealing with objects in the form of points of light. Now I am going to show you a circle of attention. It will consist of a whole section, large or small in dimension, and will include a series of independent points of objects. The eye may pass from one to another of these points, but it must not go beyond the indicated limit of the circle of attention.” (89) This seminal book was translated by Elizabeth Reynold’s Hapgood in 1948, and was first published by Routledge, London and New York in 1936 by Theatre Arts, Inc. The edition referred to here is the “text reset” version of 2003. Sircar’s privileging of the theatre group and negation of stardoms that commercial theatre and cinema popularised is worth making a note of. 9 One is reminded of the fascinating book on the Hindu Tantras by Sir John Woodroffe titled The Serpent Power, Ganesh & Co., Madras:1964 where yogic postures and meditation resulted in the uncoiling of a vital energy that travelled from the naval region, right up to the head leading to siddhi or realization through sadhana or devotion, a state of pure bliss associated with the cosmic balance and harmony. 10 Draupadi was first published in the literary periodical Parichay (Autumn Number, 1977), but was printed together with the novelette Operation? – Bashai Tudu in Agnigarbha, Kolkata:Karuna Prakashani 1978. 11 The Puyas. 12 See Bharucha Rustom. The Theatre of Kanhailal – Pebet & Memoirs of Africa, Seagull Books, Calcutta: 1998. In his performance text of Pebet, while describing the costumes, he writes, “The Cat wears a short yellow dhoti … Overall, he is supposed to look like a pseudo-monk” (42). The colour of the Cat’s costume has changed over time, to avoid controversy approximately after 2010. In recent productions, The Cat is attired in earthtones as well like the fledglings, keeping them within the anthropological domain. 13 “Violence became the way of life in north-eastern States of India. State administration became incapable to maintain its internal disturbance. Armed Forces (Assam and Manipur) Special Powers Ordinance was promulgated by the President on 22nd May of 1958, in which some special powers have been given to the members of the armed forces in disturbed areas in the State of Assam and Union Territory of Manipur.” See, https://www​.mha​.gov​.in​/sites​/default​/files​/armed​_forces​_special​_powers​_act1958​ .pdf 14 Made in 1974, but released in 1977. 15 See Muktir Gaan on the 1971 War for Liberation from East Pakistan to Bangladesh released in 1995 or Matir Moina in 2002. 16 See Lalsalu 2001. 17 Hood writes, “his desire is to promote critical and creative thinking amongst his audience” (22). In an interview with Sen in September 1989, the author quotes him saying, “My job is to provide information from a point of view which is clearly not neutral … My intention is to communicate as effectively as I can, to provoke the audience. The film-maker has to be an agent-provocateur – one who disturbs the spectator and moves him to action” (Ibid.). 18 See Nichols, Bill Ed. Movies and Methods: An Athology (volume 1). Seagull Books, Calcutta: 1993. 19 See, Barthes, Roland. ‘Third Meaning’ in Image Music Text, Ed. & Trans. By Stephen Heath, Fontana Press, London: 1977, where while discussing the still shot of the coronation ceremony of the Czar in Sergei Eisenstein’s two-part film Ivan The Terrible (1944), he zooms in on the two courtiers showering the crowned king with gold and what the passive, immobility of their mask-like faces tend to convey in terms of a cinematic signifier, though they are peripheral characters, almost with no agency to posit the layers of

202  Performing and Fine Arts ambivalences that are caught in frames outside the main narrative movement in gestures by those who have little or nothing to do with the film’s diegesis. 20 See Ghosh, Anuradha. “‘Celebrating’ Cultures of Popular Resistance and the ‘Third’ Space in Art in the Era of Globalization’” in Hasan, Mushirul & Jalil, Rakhshanda (Eds.) Third Frame – A Quarterly Journal, vol. 1, No. 4, October-December, 2008, Cambridge University Press India & Academy of Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi: 2008. 21 Published first in Parichoy in 1977. 22 See Ian Watson’s Chapter on “Training with Eugenio Barba – Acting principles, the preexpressive and ‘personal temperature’” in Alison Hodge Ed Twentieth Century Actor Training, Routledge, London and New York: First published 1999, Rpt. 2004. 23 See Ian Watson’s Chapter on “Training with Eugenio Barba – Acting principles, the preexpressive and ‘personal temperature’” in Hodge, Alison Ed. Twentieth Century Actor Training, Routledge, London, New York: first published 1999, Rpt. 2004. 24 Elius, Akhteruzzaman. Khwabnama.Noya Uddog Prokasoni, Dhaka: 1996.

Works Cited Anuradha, G. “Badal Sircar’s Third Theatre: A Theatre of Conscientization.” Language in India, March 3, 2019. www​.languageinindia​.com. Babbage, Frances. Augusto Boal. Routledge, London and New York, 2004. Bagchi, B. “Satinath Bhaduri’s Bengali Novels Jagari (The Vigil) and Dhorai Charit Manas as Utopian Literature.” Open Library of Humanities 5(1), 2019, p. 2. doi: https://doi​.org​ /10​.16995​/olh​.407. Barthes, Roland. “Third Meaning.” In Image Music Text, Ed. and Trans. By Stephen Heath. Fontana Press, London, 1977. Bharucha, Rustom. The Theatre of Kanhailal – Pebet & Memoirs of Africa. Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1998. Butalia, Urvashi Ed. Partition: The Long Shadow. Penguin India, New Delhi, 2015. Boal, Augusto. Theater of the Oppressed. Translated by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer. Pluto Press, London, 2000 (New Edition). Devi, Mahasweta. Bashai Tudu. Translated by Samik Bandopadhyaya and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Thema, Kolkata, 2016 (First Edition 1990). Elius, Akhteruzzaman. Khwabnama. Noya Uddog Prokasoni, Dhaka, 1996. “Essential Drama - Thinking Together about Theatre.” Interview with Paul Allain. http:// essentialdrama​.com​/tag​/eugenio​-b​arba/ “Eugenio Barba - Odin Teatret.” http://old​.odinteatret​.dk​/about​-us​/eugenio​-barba​.aspx Ghosh, Anuradha. “‘Celebrating’ Cultures of Popular Resistance and the ‘Third’ Space in Art in the Era of Globalization.” In Mushirul Hasan and Rakhshanda Jalil (Eds.), Third Frame – A Quarterly Journal, 1(4), October–December, 2008, Cambridge University Press India & Academy of Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, 2008. Hodge, Alison Ed. Twentieth Century Actor Training, Routledge, London and New York: Rpt. 2004. Hood, John H. Chasing the Truth: The Films of Mrinal Sen. Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1993. Kanhailal, Heisnam. Aesthetics of Resilience – A Manifesto. Kanhailal-Sabitri Work Centre, Imphal, 2010. ——— Clarifying New Trajectory. Kalakshetra Manipur, Imphal. 2011. ——— Theatre of the Earth Project. Kalakshetra Manipur, Imphal, April 2010. ——— Theatre for the Ritual of Suffering. Kalakshetra Manipur, Imphal, 1997.

Rhythms of the Third across Cultures  203 Kundu, Manujendra. So Near, Yet So Far: Badal Sircar’s Third Theatre. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016. Nichols, Bill Ed. Movies and Methods: An Anthology (Volume 1). Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1993. Raha, Kironmoy. Bengali Theatre. National Book Trust, New Delhi, 1978. Sircar, Badal. On Theatre: Selected Essays. Seagull Books, Calcutta, 2009. ——— The Third Theatre (based on a project ‘Workshop for a Theatre of Synthesis as a Rural-Urban Link funded by Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship, June 1971–May 1973), Ghosh Printers, Calcutta, 1978. Solanas, Fernando and Getino, Octavio. “Towards a Third Cinema”. In Movies and Methods (Vol. 1), edited by Bill Nichols, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1993, pp. 44–64. Stanislavski, Constantin. An Actor Prepares. Translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapsgood, A Theatre Arts Book, Routledge, New York and London, 2003 (Text reset). Shivaprakash, H. S. and Rojio, Usham. Heisnam Sabitri: The Way of the Thamoi. Niyogi Books, New Delhi, 2022. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958. https://www​.mha​.gov​.in​/sites​/default​/files​/ armed​_forces​_special​_powers​_act1958​.pdf Turner, Jane. Eugenio Barba. Routledge, London and New York, 2018. wa Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ. Matigari ma Njiruungi. Heinemann – African Writers Series, Kenya, 1986 (translated into English by Wangui wa Goro, 1989). Watson, Ian. Towards A Third Theatre - Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret. Routledge, London, New York, 1995 edition. Woodroffe, Sir John. The Serpent Power. Ganesh & Co., Madras, 1964. Filmography: Mokammel, Tanvir. Lalsalu (A Tree Without Roots) Kino-Eye Films and Maasranga Production Limited (Co-produced), Bangladesh (2001) Sen, Mrinal. Interview. Mrinal Sen Productions, West Bengal (13 November 1971) ———. Calcutta ’71. D. S. Pictures, Kolkata (12 October 1972) ———. Padatik (The Guerilla Fighter) Mrinal Sen Productions, West Bengal (27 September 1973) ———. Chorus. Mrinal Sen Productions, West Bengal (1974) ———. Oka Oori Katha (The Outsiders) A. Paradhandhama Reddy (1977) ———. Ek Din Pratidin (And Quiet Rolls the Dawn) Mrinal Sen Productions, West Bengal (1979) ———. Kharij (The Case Is Closed) Neelkanth Films, India (1982) Solanas, Fernando and Getino, Octavio. The Hour of the Furnaces (Spanish: La hora de los hornos) Edgardo Pallero & Fernando Solanas, Argentina (1968)

13 To Play the Puppet Intermediality in Robert Wilson’s Stage Adaptation of ETA Hoffmann’s The Sandman1 Thomas Wortmann

13.1 Dolls 1816 ... In an entertaining interlude, The Sandman’s narrator tells his “günstige[n] Leser” (Hoffmann 1985: 46)2 about the aftermath of the “Olimpia Affair”: for example, Spalanzani, an “Automaten-Fabrikant”, is able to recover from the serious injuries he sustained in his fight with Coppola, but must leave the university. In his place, a professorial colleague with the denomination for “Poesie und Beredsamkeit” (ibid.) claims sovereignty of interpretation over the scandal by interpreting what happened as “eine Allegorie – eine fortgeführte Metapher”: “Sapienti sat!” (ibid.). The ramifications of the affair, however, were not limited to the academic sphere, as Olimpia was not only Spalanzani’s private research project but also part of bourgeois society as a member of numerous “vernünftigen Teezirkeln” (ibid.). The narrator reports with obvious amusement about the irritations this causes among couples in the city: [V]iele hochzuverehrende Herren beruhigten sich nicht dabei; die Geschichte mit dem Automat hatte tief in ihrer Seele Wurzel gefaßt und es schlich sich in der Tat abscheuliches Mißtrauen gegen menschliche Figuren ein. Um nun ganz überzeugt zu werden, daß man keine Holzpuppe liebe, wurde von mehrern Liebhabern verlangt, daß die Geliebte etwas taktlos singe und tanze, daß sie beim Vorlesen sticke, stricke, mit dem Möpschen spiele u. s. w. vor allen Dingen aber, daß sie nicht bloß höre, sondern auch manchmal in der Art spreche, daß dieses Sprechen wirklich ein Denken und Empfinden voraussetze. Das Liebesbündnis vieler wurde fester und dabei anmutiger, andere dagegen gingen leise auseinander. (ibd. 46f.) Olimpia’s unmasking brings lovers closer together – or separates them. Those who talk to each other, who listen to each other (for the first time), in the worst case put their “Liebesbündnis” (47) at risk: actually getting to know one’s counterpart is not always a good idea, this is how the couple-therapeutic findings of The Sandman could be summarised. What the narrator inserts at this point in the plot – between Nathanael’s “gräßlicher Raserei” (45), his incarceration in the “Tollhaus[]” (45) and his awakening from a “schwerem, fürchterlichem Traum” (47) – on just under one and a half DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-19

To Play the Puppet  205 pages could be understood as a form of comic relief. In fact, the drastic description of the protagonist’s psychological breakdown is followed by one of the most humorous episodes of The Sandman, with which a central theme of the story is taken up in an ironic twist. After all, The Sandman is hardly a text that revolves around love, or rather around the problems and potentials of different, sometimes deviant pairings. And so the rehearsals to which the women of the town are subjected by their partners after the unmasking of the automaton are a repetition on the macro level of what has already been played out in many variations on the micro level with the example of the love triangle Clara/Nathanael/Olimpia – albeit under the opposite sign. If the “gentlemen” of society test whether the speech of their partners also presupposes “thinking and feeling” in order to make sure that their counterpart is not a wooden doll, Nathanael relies on exactly the opposite: precisely because Clara thinks, she seems cool to Nathanael, the beloved appears to her partner as a “leblose[r] […] Automat” (32). And conversely, he perceives the complete absence of any reflection in Olimpia’s speech as proof of her “tiefe[n] Gemüt[s]” (43) and her understanding of his person. On the one hand, this is an ironic recourse to romantic models of love and the associated (male) models of projection in general; on the other hand, Nathanael’s crazy view of the world, in particular, is impressively staged. Now, with the Automate, a motif is called up, to which the author ETA Hoffmann showed great interest. Texts such as Das Gelübde, Nußknacker und Mausekönig, Die Automate or Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr can be cited as evidence of this. The prominence of the motif in the œuvre is the subject of a separate article in the Hoffmann Handbook. In “Unheimlich an der Automate” Claudia Liebrand notes there with reference to The Sandman, ist gerade, dass […] [sie] die Anforderungen der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft im Allgemeinen und ihres Bräutigams, Nathanaels, im Besonderen passgenauer erfüllt, als ihre menschlichen Präfigurationen es vermögen. In Olimpia kommt zur Anschauung, wie seelenleer, wie mechanizistisch, abgemessen und steif die bürgerliche Gesellschaft und die jungen Mädchen sind, die sich nach den Vorgaben dieser Gesellschaft zu verhalten haben. (Liebrand 2015: 242) If one sets this socio-critical moment of the motif central to the reading of The Sandman, then the reaction of the bourgeois circles described by the narrator must be related, first, to the fact that the ladies and gentlemen feel betrayed by Spalanzani. Second, this feeling of betrayal is accompanied by the more fundamental, anthropological irritation and narcissistic mortification that the distinction between man and machine, between soul and apparatus, is probably more difficult than is commonly imagined. Third, the hectic measures taken in bourgeois circles to test the beloved and love or love communication per se are to be understood as a response to the fact that Olimpia’s problem-free acceptance into society has distorted its codes, which relies on superficiality, to the point of recognisability.

206  Performing and Fine Arts In The Sandman, as can be summarised here, the doll causes problems, it causes irritations – precisely this constellation is utilised by Hoffmann in a poetically productive fashion. And Robert Wilson follows up on3 this with his adaptation of The Sandman, as will be shown in the following. The argumentation of this chapter is structured in four steps: After some introductory reflections on aesthetic and thematic parallels between Hoffmann’s and Wilson’s work, the second step deals with the contrast between dream narrative and case history – and thus with the two competing readings that Wilson’s adaptation offers for The Sandman. Subsequently, the figure of the Sandman himself comes into view: He appears in the Düsseldorf production as an independent figure whose status within the fiction remains undetermined. In this way, the Sandman becomes the founder of ambivalence. Finally, it is a question of how Wilson’s directorial work inscribes itself in the series of Hoffmann adaptations and to what extent – in recourse to Mieke Bal’s concept of preposterous history – the production can be understood as a reflection on the medial conditions of the reception of historical texts. 13.2 ... and Puppets 2017 Wilson, one of the most prominent directors of international theatre (Lehmann 2011: 131–138),4 would have read with great pleasure the Olimpia passage of The Sandman quoted above. And also the nocturnal episode in which Nathanael, before his father’s eyes, has his limbs unscrewed and screwed on again like a doll by the advocate Coppelius, must have pleased Wilson, because as a director he is interested in the connection between man and mechanics: The hallmarks of his theatrical works – in addition to a sophisticated, effective lighting dramaturgy and the combination of text and (modern) music – are a special treatment of the actors’ and actresses’ bodies that is oriented towards Asian theatrical traditions. Wilson refrains from a psychological–naturalistic style of acting, his actors and actresses move on stage in an emphatically artificial way, reminiscent of automata. Their faces are so heavily made up that they appear mask-like, almost satirically distorted. In short, their acting is always presented as just that, as a game, as an artificial act and as a performance. Wilson himself emphasises the closeness of his work to puppetry in the programme of the Düsseldorf Sandman production.5 The performers in Wilson’s Sandman adaptation are also committed to such an aesthetic. Every movement of the body, every turn of the torso or the head is meticulously choreographed. Every gait, every hand movement, sometimes extremely slowed down or performed in staccato, seem puppet-like and controlled by an invisible hand. Doris Kolesch has described Wilson’s work as “diametrales Gegenteil” to the tableau vivant: “Wilsons Bilder” the theatre scholar explains, “versuchen jenen Moment einzuholen, an dem der Körper stillgestellt, gebändigt und gerahmt wird, um zu einem bedeutenden zu werden” (Kolesch 2002: 249). In relation to Hoffmann’s The Sandman as a pre-text, this form of representation (typical of Wilson’s directorial works) contains a punchline: the theatre maker appears as Spalanzani redivivus but in an interesting inversion. If the Italian professor’s

To Play the Puppet  207 project consists in making an automaton appear human, the American director aims at presenting humans as automatons. Hans Thies Lehmann has located the implications of this presentation in terms of drama and theatre history in his seminal contribution to Wilson’s stage aesthetic: [D]ie zeitlupenartig verlangsamte Bewegung (Slow Motion) der Akteure erzeugt in Wilsons Ästhetik immer wieder eine ganz eigentümliche Erfahrung […]. Die Rede ist von dem Eindruck, daß die menschlichen Akteure auf der Bühne gar nicht aus eigenem Willen und Entschluß handeln. Wenn Büchner schreiben konnte, daß wir Menschen Puppen seien, die an unsichtbaren Drähten von unbekannten Gewalten gelenkt werden und Artaud vom “automate personnel” sprach, so korrespondieren diese Motive mit jenem Eindruck, daß in Wilsons Theater geheimnisvolle Kräfte am Werk sind, die die Figuren magisch, ohne einsehbare Motivationen, Ziele und Zusammenhänge zu bewegen scheinen. Die Gestalten bleiben solitär in einen Kosmos eingesponnen, in ein Netz aus Kraftlinien und – ganz konkret durch die Lichtregie – "vorgezeichneten" Bahnen. (Lehmann 2011: 131) Beyond the pure “show value” – Wilson’s productions are always optical spectacles and have often been criticised as such – the movement of the actors on stage can thus be understood as an examination of the question of the extent to which the subject of modernity has any decision-making power at all and can determine his own actions, in short: how much agency is due to man. If one follows Lehmann’s reading, the theatre maker Wilson, like the author Hoffmann, relies on the sociocritical potential of the puppet. Thus, when the “light artist” and “puppeteer” Wilson dedicates himself to Hoffmann’s “Nachtstück” and “Automatentext”, he adapts a narrative that is thematically and aesthetically equally close to him or his dramaturgical ideas.6 In the case of The Sandman, the director’s adaptation remains quite close to Hoffmann’s pre-text. The production is divided into two parts with a total of 22 scenes and several interludes, most of which follow the structure of the plot in Hoffmann’s text. Wilson takes over the core personnel of the tale, dispensing with the wet nurse, for example, and adds a character in the form of the Sandman, who appears in his own right and about whom we shall have to speak. Like Hoffmann’s tale, Wilson’s production is framed. The plot is enclosed by a prologue and an epilogue. While the prologue, following the narrator’s opening through the correspondence in Hoffmann’s Nachtstück, deals with the visit of the weather glass merchant Coppola to Nathaniel and the associated activation of trauma, the epilogue, emancipating itself from the pre-text, shows not the family happiness of the hand-holding Clara, which is in any case only colocated, but another form of “family constellation”. Wilson’s production ends with a final joint vocal performance by all the characters, including the resurrected Nathaniel.7 Many of the scenes are flanked by songs written by British singer–songwriter Anna Calvi and sung by the actors and actresses, sometimes as solo numbers, sometimes as duets or in chorus. Calvi’s songs are not direct settings of the literary

208  Performing and Fine Arts text; rather, there are thematic and motivic parallels with Hoffmann’s narrative: Calvi’s lyrics revolve around fear and horror, (night)dreams and madness. The songs interrupt the course of the action, they comment on what is being portrayed and also create connections between individual scenes through repetition. We will have to come back to this. Like every transfer of a literary text into another medium, Robert Wilson’s adaptation also develops an independent perspective on Hoffmann’s tale by emphasising individual aspects while relegating others to the background. Among these more marginalised aspects, for example, is the art subject. The Sandman has been read as a “(fiktive) Künstlerbiographie, in der die Momente des Wahnsinns mit großer Präzision auf das Kunstthema bezogen bleiben” (Liebrand 1996: 87). Wilson is obviously less interested in this aspect. Thus, Nathanael’s involvement as an artist only becomes an issue in the scene in which he, writing a letter to Lothar, is seen as an “author” on stage. (Figure 13.1: Nathanael as an Artist) However, this is a caricaturing-distorting representation of a writing scene. In a mannered gesture, Nathanael notes the lines with an oversized quill so large that it tickles the writer’s nose until he begins to laugh. Invoked is the pose of a great poet, though this format is marked as too large for the writer: The author Nathanael is a ridiculous figure. What Wilson is interested in instead, he has mentioned in numerous interviews. It is fear, he says, that drives him as a theme and which Hoffmann’s narrative also sets centrally through the fear experiences of its protagonist, in order to simultaneously aim at the audience’s desire for fear (Keim 2017). It is therefore to be understood programmatically when the first song of the evening bears the title “There Will Be a Horror” and to this “soundtrack” almost the entire cast of characters

Figure 13.1  Nathanael as an Artist

To Play the Puppet  209

Figure 13.2  Scream of Fear

parades across the stage – freezing several times in a collective scream of fear. (Figure 13.2: Scream of Fear)

13.3 Dream vs. Trauma? Competing Readings Strictly speaking, the song “There Will Be a Horror” is already the second opening of the evening, because even before the curtain rises, a “Miniaturdrama” (Spiegel 2017) with three figures can be seen on the proscenium as the audience enters the hall. At the right edge of the stage, Olimpia turns to the music of a music box. In the centre of the stage, a small puppet in a black Pierrot costume can be seen mechanically bringing a trumpet to its mouth without ever producing a sound. At the left edge of the stage, the Sandman lies in a bed and – also mechanically, reminiscent of a Jack-in-the-Box – repeatedly wakes up from sleep with a scream. As a spectator of this prelude, one briefly moves into the position of the protagonist Nathanael, because one is unsure whether one sees puppets or people on stage. In addition, the Sandman figure invokes the field of reference of sleep and dreams, which is also referred to in other, prominent places in the production. Thus, the first line, repeated several times, of “There Will Be a Horror”, the song that is heard after the opening of the curtain, is “Dream On”. The production also closes a good hour and a half later with exactly these (sung) words, thus providing the performance with a framework. If one follows this reading instruction, many of the following “surreal” scenes, for example, the one in which hundreds of opening and closing eyes appear on the back wall of the stage, present themselves as committed to a (nightmare) dream logic. The fact that this image is reminiscent of

210  Performing and Fine Arts the dream episode from Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound, of all things, reinforces this association. Negotiated with this access to Hoffmann’s narrative is the question, much discussed in research, of how The Sandman is to be read: as a text in which the irritating events can be attributed to the workings of supernatural forces, or, following Sigmund Freud’s effective reading of the narrative, as a case history that provides a traumatised individual’s displaced view of the world. Robert Wilson takes up the first reading but varies it. By placing the dream analogy so prominently at the beginning of the production, the work of supernatural forces cannot be ruled out in principle, since the rules of reality are suspended in the (night)dream. At the same time, however, the Sandman production also keeps the reading of the case history in play. It even explicitly refers to this possibility of interpretation when it has the Sandman, of all people, refer to Freud’s essay on the uncanny in the Viennese dialect – namely the famous passage in which Freud equates “secret” and “uncanny”. This citation of Freud’s essay provides an indication of a psychological or psychoanalytic reading of the narrative, which is joined by numerous others in the adaptation. Thus, in Wilson’s work, the bourgeois nuclear family appears as a machinery in which the subject – in this case, Nathanael – experiences psychological indignities. In this context, Wilson’s adaptation takes a shift from the pre-text. Whereas in Hoffmann’s Sandman the father is the one whose adherence to the experiments with Coppelius results in the son’s traumatisation, and the mother occupies a rather marginal position, in Wilson’s production Nathanael’s mother is the more prominent parental authority, even advancing to the centre of the family. Unlike in Hoffmann’s Nachtstück, in which Nathanael’s nurse tells the story of the evil Sandman, in Düsseldorf’s Sandman it is the mother who thus brings the Sandman into the world qua narrative and provides the child with the “material” that starts its projection machinery – and keeps it running until the end. In a certain sense, however, and to this extent the contrast just described can be mitigated, the production makes explicit something that is already laid out in the pre-text, since it is the mother’s explanation of the Sandman – “[W]enn ich sage, der Sandmann kommt, so will das nur heißen, ihr seid schläfrig und könnt die Augen nicht offen behalten, als hätte man euch Sand hineingestreut” (13) – that leaves Nathaniel “[un]befriedigt” (ibid. ), arouses his curiosity and stimulates his imagination: “[I]n meinem kindischen Gemüt entfaltete sich deutlich der Gedanke, daß die Mutter den Sandmann nur verleugne, damit wir uns vor ihm nicht fürchten sollten, ich hörte ihn ja immer die Treppe heraufkommen” (ibid.). Subsequently, Nathanael will not only ask further questions but will also embark on the expedition to his father’s study in order to recognise in Coppelius the Sandman, about whom his mother had told him at Wilson. Thus, at the beginning of Nathanael’s delusion in the adaptation is the mother. And she keeps this prominent position for the entire course of the evening. Again and again she appears, interrupting conversations between Clara and Nathanael, singing lullabies to her child, and even attending the ball at which Nathanael decisively approaches Olimpia. If Freud sees in Nathanael an Oedipus redivivus, Wilson follows this reading in his production. That the mother, in contrast to Hoffmann’s text, is not a marginalised figure in the

To Play the Puppet  211 adaptation and appears again and again is therefore dearly bought: She “pays” her way into the centre of the family by being marked as the origin of her child’s traumatisation. (Figure 13.3: Mother/Son) This trauma can be seen in Nathanael: His eyes always seem torn open, almost cartoonishly distorted, due to the dark make-up pulled down to under his eyebrows; his bright red hair (obviously inherited from his mother), which in combination with the red suit Nathanael repeatedly wears, reminds him of his father’s and Coppelius’ experiments involving fire and heat. The fright is literally written on Nathanael’s face – and forever so. Connected to this is an ambivalent model of temporality that organises the production as a whole. On the one hand, Wilson’s Sandman, through the chronology of events, stages precisely that (Freudian) concept of Nachträglichkeit that is also constitutive of Hoffmann’s narrative dramaturgy: it is only the encounter with the weather glass dealer Coppola that activates the childhood trauma and leads to Nathanael becoming hopelessly entangled in his projections. The fact that in Wilson’s production, it is the adult Nathanael

Figure 13.3  Mother/Son

212  Performing and Fine Arts who observes the experiments of his father and Coppelius and finally becomes the object of an experiment himself is only consistent in view of this post-transformation configuration. On the other hand, however, the encounter with Coppola, with which Wilson’s production begins, not only wrenches the adult Nathanael back to his childhood, it simultaneously makes him a “hypermotorische Kind” forever (Spiegel 2017: 19). His erratic behaviour, his spontaneous and violent changes of mood, his sudden outburst into laughter as well as his refusal to respond to rational explanations: All of this can be understood as an expression of a gradual slide into madness, but it also makes Nathanael appear as an infantile figure. When the student calls for his “Papa”, when his “Mama” repeatedly puts him to bed, the protagonist seems like a small child. And so it is no coincidence that in Wilson’s adaptation, young Nathanael is not played by a child at all. The lullaby is sung by the mother to her adult son. This precisely stages the presence of the trauma, from which there is no way out for the traumatised person – except death. 13.4 The Sandman in The Sandman Wilson’s production confronts the central questions that every interpreter of Hoffmann’s text has to answer: How is the relationship between Coppola and Coppelius to be understood? Are the advocate and the weather glass merchant one person? Is Nathaniel the victim of evil forces or is he suffering from delusions of persecution? (Bergengruen 2018). The stage adaptation of The Sandman provides a clear answer to these questions: in Wilson’s production, Coppola and Coppelius appear as one character; they are portrayed by an actor who switches between “characters” only by disguising his voice and adopting an accent. The feuilleton criticised this dramaturgical decision. ETA Hoffmann, Martin Krummholz notes in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, for example, was interested in the question of “ob das Unheimliche im Seelenleben eines Menschen produziert wird oder ob es in der materiellen Welt existiert”; the problem with Wilson’s staging is that it erases this ambivalence (Krummholz 2017). With regard to the double figure of Coppelius/ Coppola, this criticism is true, but Wilson’s staging instigates the ambivalence erased here elsewhere, namely through the introduction of the ominous figure of the Sandman, whom the director adds to the personnel of the narrative. This Sandman appears in a prominent place: Before the curtain rises, he is part of that “installation” in which Olimpia turns to the sound of a music box. The cries of anguish of the Sandman set the programme of the evening, he opens the performance, in the further course of which he sings, dances and appears at crucial points in the plot. At the beginning of the second half of the evening, for example, he can be seen as a burning man. Dressed in a white costume, flames are projected onto him, while a small house, also on fire, can be seen in the background of the stage. (Figure 13.4: Sandman as a burning man) The implication is that the Sandman has something to do with the fire in Nathaniel’s apartment, which causes the student to move into the room across the hall from Spalanzani’s apartment. This, however, is the beginning of the end: it is in this very apartment that Coppola, the weather glass merchant, seeks him

To Play the Puppet  213

Figure 13.4  Sandman as a burning man

out; it is from here, through the weather glass merchant's perspective, that he sees his neighbour Olimpia, with whom he falls hopelessly in love. It will eventually be this perspective that shows him Coppola from the tower and drives him to suicide. But what status does the Sandman have within the diegesis? It is striking that although he participates in group scenes such as the ball at Spalanzani’s, he mainly appears alone in interludes or wanders across the stage in other scenes – apparently unnoticed by the rest of the character’s personnel – in the background. There are no verbal interactions with the Sandman. If one follows the reading suggestion given at the beginning of the production and understands what is shown on stage as a dream, his appearance as an independent figure fits in without any problems since all kinds of supernatural figures can appear in (night)dreams. If one does not follow this reading, his presence causes irritation. If one understands the adaptation as a staged case history and the Sandman as a delusional projection of Nathaniel, the question arises why he represents the only figure with whom Nathaniel does not communicate. More than that, he does not seem to perceive the Sandman at all. This, however, raises the question of whether Nathanael actually suffers from paranoia, or whether he is perhaps not being pursued by a supernatural force, which would, in turn, complicate the reading of the case history. Designed is a scenario that resembles the conceptualisation of fantasy as it organises Hoffmann’s quite general texts. In this context, Hans Richard Brittnacher has spoken of a “eigentümliche[n] Logik des Widerspruchs” in Hoffmann:

214  Performing and Fine Arts [I]hr zufolge kann etwa eine Figur zugleich sie selbst und ein anderer sein, kann eine Szene Traum und doch auch Erlebnisrealität bezeichnen, können zwei Figuren zugleich identisch und different sein. Verdopplungen und Korrespondenzen entsprechen dem poetischen Vorhaben, eine Welt darzustellen, die normal und gleichzeitig undurchsichtig ist, in der die Person selbstbestimmt zu handeln glauben, aber vielleicht auch dem Diktat einer geheimen Verabredung der Geister und Dinge folgen. (Brittnacher 2015: 385) This ambivalent scenario cannot be resolved in Wilson’s production. The director also relies on the ambiguity that distinguishes The Sandman as a fantastic text. The closing figure of the production also has no less potential for irritation: Wilson’s adaptation, as has already been mentioned, does not end with Nathanael’s suicide, nor with the Fama scene that shows Clara as wife and mother. Rather, in the final scene, the complete cast of characters presents itself again, including Nathanael and his father, who have apparently risen from the dead. (Figure 13.5: Family Constellation) So it’s all just a game? Or even a happy ending? That would be one way to interpret this final configuration. Such a reading is thwarted by the song that the ensemble sings. It is the title with which the production began: “There will be Horror!” If in the first performance of the song the future tense was still to be understood as a reference to what now follows, in the final configuration it takes on a disturbing tone. There is no change to an (epic) past tense, no distancing from the events and no form of processing. Instead, a circular structure is established from which there

Figure 13.5  Family Constellation

To Play the Puppet  215 seems to be no escape because even death offers no way out. After the nightmare is before the nightmare. If Hoffmann’s text delivers an end with horror, Wilson’s adaptation presents horror without end. 13.5  Reception, Reflection: Preposterous History If Wilson understands The Sandman as a story that tells of fear and plays on the fearfulness of its recipients, his adaptation emphasises the gruesome literary tradition line into which Hoffmann’s tale inscribes itself (Junges 2019). The theatre maker focuses on The Sandman as a tale of horror, i.e., as a text that, according to a common literary definition, tells of the “Grauen vor einer entsetzlichen Erscheinung” and follows an “Ästhetik des Schrecklichen” (Brittnacher 2007: 327).8 This is a classification of the Sandman that is quite common in the Anglo–Saxon world, where Hoffmann’s stories and novels, along with those of Edgar Allan Poe, are among the founding texts of the horror genre. And by emphasizing this aspect, Wilson continues along a line that has decisively shaped Hoffmann’s international reception and continues to do so to this day. “Man kann nicht umhin, festzustellen” Arno Meteling explains in a seminal contribution to Hoffmann's reception in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, dass es wahrscheinlich die schon im 19. Jahrhundert zum Klischee geronnene Figur des “Gespenster-Hoffmans” ist, die nicht nur im kulturellen Imaginären, sondern in der deutschen, aber auch in der internationalen Literatur am sichtbarsten fortlebt. […] Mit der Hoffmann’schen Phantastik reüssieren deshalb vor allem die Monster der Gothic Novel des 18. Jahrhunderts beziehungsweise auch der deutschen Schauerromantik sowie die grotesken, unheimlichen und schrecklichen Aspekte des Phantastischen im 19. Jahrhundert genauso wie in der modernen Literatur. (Meteling 2009: 582) And this specific form of recourse to Hoffmann’s work, which is less about the aesthetic facture of the texts, but rather about motivic adoptions (of doppelgänger figures, monstrous figures, etc.), is also decisive for the cinematic reception of the work.9 Meteling sees continuations of Hoffmann’s motifs not only in film adaptations of Hoffmann’s novels and stories10 but also in films in general that have thematic and motivic parallels to Hoffmann’s work. Meteling counts among these genres such as film noir, science fiction, fantasy and horror films, as well as works by directors such as Fritz Lang, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell, John Carpenter and Ridley Scott (Meteling 2009: 587). Interestingly, Wilson’s stage adaptation of The Sandman also focuses primarily on cinematic intertexts. To cite the most striking examples: The way the director puts the eye motif, so prominent in Hoffmann’s tale, into the picture through projections of hundreds of opening and closing eyes on the back wall of the stage resembles the dream episode Hitchcock’s film Spellbound, designed by Salvador Dalí, mentioned above. Wilson’s play with light and shadow, especially with Coppola/Coppelius’ silhouettes allude to the expressionist German film11; the

216  Performing and Fine Arts mask makes the advocate/weatherglass dealer appear as the successor of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu.12 And this film-historical line can be continued far into the twentieth century, and the costume and mask of Coppelius/Coppola show parallel with the villain Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin given by Danny DeVito in Tim Burton’s 1992 film Batman Returns. Burton’s Penguin is also created as a “double figure” and his name “Cobblepot” is distantly reminiscent of Coppelius/Coppola.13 Finally, the figure of the Sandman, who seems to guide the action and whose status within the fiction remains eerily indeterminate, seems like a postfiguration of the Mystery Man from David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Such proximity between theatre and film is not least constituted by the overall layout of the production, which is divided into twenty-four parts14 in the programme booklet – and thus has exactly as many scenes as the film generally uses per second to simulate a moving image to the human eye. But how are these intermedial recourses to be understood? There are (at least) two possible readings: first, by relating the literary text to twentieth-century film history, lines are drawn that lead from Hoffmann’s tale of horror into the media culture of the present. Such a strategy of citing and restaging image conventions and visual patterns from different media generally organises Wilson adaptations of “classic” texts for the stage. It can be understood as a strategy of actualisation that, on the one hand, highlights the connectivity of the historical text and, on the other hand, shows the embeddedness of pop cultural artefacts of the present in lines of motif-historical tradition. Second, however, and this aspect is the more interesting one, this intermedial play can be understood as an examination of how the perception of historical texts (and contexts) is itself conditioned by images of the present. Wilson’s directorial works, as Kolesch summarises it, demonstrate, daß Sehen auf Wiederholungen beruht und daß diese Wiederholungen immer eine Transformation und Modifikation bestehender Muster bewirken. Sehen und Erinnern gehen Hand in Hand, erweisen sich als nomadische Tätigkeiten ohne scharfe Ränder. Performativ ist dieser Prozeß, insofern im Sehen eine Re-Inszenierung vorgängiger visueller Patterns vorgenommen und eine Re-Codierung vorgängiger Bedeutungszuschreibungen versucht wird. (Kolesch 2002: 247) What applies in the case of Wilson’s staging of Büchner’s historical drama Danton’s Death, to which Kolesch’s reflections refer, to the images of historical figures that the director takes up by juxtaposing and modifying iconic representations of revolutionary events (for example, by restaging Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat), also applies to The Sandman. Of course, this is not about the revision of historical images, but, no less fundamentally, about the question of the conditions of the reception of a text from the nineteenth century by recipients of the twenty-first century. It should be noted that Wilson’s approach is no different from Meteling’s in his handbook-article on the continuation of Hoffmann’s texts in international film.

To Play the Puppet  217 Both “present” a broad, almost ubiquitous medial afterlife of Hoffmann’s work in their own medium. For example, Meteling notes: Neben deutschen Stummfilmen und modernen phantastischen Genrefilmen sind auch filmische Projekte einzelner “auteur”-Regisseure zu den Transkriptionen der Literatur Hoffmanns zu zählen, die diese vor allem über die Diskussion psychosexueller Themen, meist vor familiärem Hintergrund, in Szene setzen. Zu nennen sind exemplarisch Alfred Hitchcocks komplizierte und mitunter inzestuös und gewaltbesetzte Familien- und Wahlverwandtschaftskonstruktionen wie in Rebecca (US 1940), Psycho (US 1960), The Birds ([US] 1963) oder Marnie (US 1964), die pathologisch aufgeladenen Doppelgängerkonstruktionen wie in Shadow of a Doubt (US 1943) und Vertigo (US 1958) sowie die stilbildende Inszenierung eines männlich phantasmatischen Beobachtungsszenarios in Rear Window (US 1954), das sein Vorbild in zahlreichen romantischen Blick- und Fensterszenarien und vor allem in Hoffmanns Erzählungen Der Sandmann, Das öde Haus und auch Des Vetters Eckfenster hat. (Meteling 2009: 582) The German silent film, the fantastic film and the work of Alfred Hitchcock: Meteling draws similar parallels to Wilson. And without question, the aforementioned thematic complexes – incestuously charged relationships within the bourgeois nuclear family, gender- and power-theoretically charged scenarios of the gaze – are central to Hoffmann’s oeuvre, but, it should be emphasised, they are not reserved exclusively for him.15 Hitchcock’s observation scenarios, for example, could just as conclusively be interpreted as meta-reflexive references to their own medium, since they repeat on a small scale what characterises the dispositif of cinema on a large scale: a voyeuristic arrangement of the gaze. This, in turn, as Laura Mulvey has impressively elaborated in one of the most powerful essays in film history (Mulvey 1975: 6–18), is inherent to film itself, because it works with conventions of representation in which the gaze is phantasmatically charged and gendered. Somewhat provocatively, one might ask: Is Hitchcock quoting Hoffmann, or is he not rather working off the conventions of his own medium? And do directors like David Lynch, Tim Burton, Michael Powell and Ridley Scott then follow the master of suspense rather than the author of German romance? Are the parallels Meteling and Wilson draw between the nineteenth-century narrative and twentiethcentury films, then, the result of an anachronistic approach? Granted: Considerations like these can be easily invalidated if one applies a broad concept of intertextuality or intermediality. But they can also be invalidated because, in Wilson’s case, they fail to recognise the point of the adaptation, which makes use of the mediality of the theatre. In contrast to Meteling, Wilson’s (self-) reflexive theatre does not establish a chronology but shows the intertexts simultaneously. His Sandman production cross-fades Hoffmann’s text with the images of the film; the adaptation aims less at the influence of the earlier (literary) text on the (cinematic) later one, but rather at the fact that the view of Hoffmann’s The Sandman for today’s readers is always mediated by current “texts” and their

218  Performing and Fine Arts handling of the themes, motifs and topoi that are also central to Hoffmann. To summarise the constellation pointedly: When Coppola/Coppelius are perceived as Batman’s counterparts, when the audience sees Hoffmann’s eye motif in Dali’s and Hitchcock’s surreal imagery, this describes not the exceptional but the normal case of the reception of historical texts. More than twenty years ago, Mieke Bal used the term “preposterous history” (Bal 1999: 7) to describe such an “anachronistic” approach to texts, images and films. With this, she describes the fact that the perception of the earlier text (consciously or unconsciously) always takes place in front of the foil of later texts – and this perception also changes accordingly: Like any form of representation, art is inevitably engaged with what came before it, and that engagement is an active reworking. It specifies what and how our gaze sees. Hence, the work performed by later images obliterates the older images as they were before that intervention and creates new versions of old images instead. This process is exemplified by an engagement of contemporary culture with the past that has important implications for the ways we conceive of both history and culture in the present. (ibid.: 1) What does this mean in concrete terms? If one looks at narratives such as The Sandman, equipped with knowledge of film history of the last hundred years, one perceives these texts differently than a contemporary audience. One recognises in these earlier texts what the later films process. The relationship between the original and quotation is reversed. If one then looks in turn from Hoffmann to the film history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the later films appear as a continuation of the earlier texts. Meteling’s outlining of a long line of directors whose films he explicitly understands as “Transkriptionen” (Meteling 2009: 589) of Hoffmann’s work nolens volens sets the scene for the constellation described here. This is not to question the fact that in each case references can be made between texts and film. But the genesis of these references is a reciprocal process. If one is aware of this interplay, such an “anachronistic” approach does not mean a dehistoricisation of Hoffmann’s text with regard to the history of literature and ideas. Rather, this access ensures that the conditions and media framings that (unconsciously) influence the reception of a text are reflected. And it further ensures that texts become accessible and connectable for readers in a completely different way. The almost euphoric reception of Wilson’s Sandmann by the Düsseldorf audience is an impressive example of this. Notes 1 This chapter draws on the following text: Thomas Wortmann: Bildertausch – preposterous history. Robert Wilsons Adaption von ETA Hoffmanns Sandmann, in: E.T.A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch 28 (2020), S. 121–140. I would like to thank Claudia Liebrand, Sandra Beck, Vanessa Höving and Leon Igel for discussing this text and formulating helpful comments. I thank Adama Diéne for the help with the translation of the manuscript.

To Play the Puppet  219 2 All quotations from Hoffmann’s Sandman are referenced below with page numbers in parentheses in the running text. 3 Robert Wilson’s adaptation entitled Der Sandmann von E.T.A. Hoffmann premiered at the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen on 3 May 2017. The premiere at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus, which co-produced The Sandman with Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen and Unlimited Performing Arts, took place on 20 May 2017. The production was extremely successful and has been revived by the Schauspielhaus in every season so far. In the meantime (as of 2022), the ensemble has completed numerous international guest performances, including in Belgium, Norway and China. I would like to thank the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf for providing a recording of the Düsseldorf premiere on 20 May 2017, on which the following is based, in addition to three visits to later performances. 4 An overview of Wilson’s work can be found on the homepage www​.robertwilson​.com. In his standard work on postdramatic theatre, Hans Thies Lehmann dedicates a long passage to Robert Wilson’s works. 5 His theatre strives “nach einer Art von Freiheit in der Mechanik”. The director explains this paradoxical formula as follows: “Je mechanischer wir als Performer agieren, desto freier können wir sein. Wenn man etwas zum ersten Mal tut, ist man frei, aber diese Freiheit reproduzieren zu lernen, braucht Zeit” (Ortiz 2017: 10). 6 Theatre critics have also pointed to this proximity: “Der Regisseur des schwarzromantischen Black Rider”, as Andreas Wilink notes on Nachtkritik, “musste auf E.T.A. Hoffmanns” […] Sandmann stoßen (Wilink 2017). 7 Thus, the final configuration shown on stage differs decisively from the one delivered in the programme booklet. There it says about the epilogue: “Jahre später soll Clara, verheiratet und Mutter geworden, ein ruhiges häusliches Glück gefunden haben, doch das sind nur Gerüchte”. The implications of the “new” closure figure will require to be thought about. 8 On ETA Hoffmann’s recourse to horror as well (Grizelj 2012: 105–122). 9 Here Meteling follows Klaus Kanzog’s assessment: “Die Auswahl aus dem Figurenbestand der Erzählungen ETA Hoffmanns und die Aktualisierung attraktiver Handlungsmodelle lassen eine weitere Besonderheit der filmischen Hoffmann-Rezeption erkennen: Hier werden nicht primär Werke transformiert, sondern ausdrucksstarke Figuren und potenziell szenische Momente” (Kanzog 2009: 152). 10 Cf. for a fundamental reappraisal of this line of reception: (Kanzog 2009: Anm. 28). 11 Hoffmann research has also already dealt intensively with this proximity. The following secondary literature should be mentioned: (Gruber 2005: 117–132); (Schäfer 3029: 71–84). 12 Wilson’s adaptation thus draws a line between two “texts” that 1920s cinema audiences had already drawn. Thus, Siegfried Kracauer notes: “Wenn von Nosferatu die Rede war, brachten die Kritiker, mehr noch als im Fall von Caligari, gern E.T.A. Hoffmann ins Spiel” (Kracauer 2017: 86). Kracauer himself problematizes this “Hinweis auf die romantischen Vorläufer des Films” in the further course of the argumentation. Cf. ibid. 13 From a “Pinguin im Zombie-Modus” Hubert Spiegel speaks in his review for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Cf. (Spiegel 2017). More generally, there are numerous parallels between the surrealistic-looking scenes and the whimsical-looking and acting characters in Wilson’s stage works and Burton’s films. 14 In the programme, there are twenty-three scenes framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The epilogue, whose plot is summarized in the programme booklet, was not shown on the Düsseldorf stage. Instead, the 24th and last scene moved into the position of an epilogue, also because it could only be seen on stage after a long period of darkness. 15 Stefan Ringel notes in his contribution to the cinematic reception of Hoffmann's texts: “Filmische Adaptionen von Werken E.T.A. Hoffmanns beschränken sich nahezu ausschließlich auf den deutschsprachigen Raum. […] Dieser Befund ist erstaunlich angesi-

220  Performing and Fine Arts chts der Tatsache, daß E.T.A. Hoffmann wie kaum ein zweiter deutscher Schriftsteller im Ausland rezipiert wurde. Aber gerade diese starke Rezeption könnte die Ursache für die wenigen Adaptionen im Ausland sein: Die von E.T.A. Hoffmann beeinflußten Schriftsteller, z.B. Edgar Allan Poe, lieferten mit ihren Erzählungen zahlreiche Vorlagen, so daß ein Rückgriff auf Erzählungen Hoffmanns selbst unnötig ist. Insofern wäre E.T.A. Hoffmann mit seinen Stoffen und Motiven zwar der Stammvater zahlreicher Klassiker des phantastischen Films – von den Frankenstein-Verfilmungen bis hin zu ungezählten Adaptionen E.A. Poes –, bliebe aber selbst mit seinen Werken im Hintergrund. ” (Ringel 1995: 94).

Works Cited Bal, Mieke (1999): Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, Chicago, p. 7. Bergengruen, Maximilian (2018): Verfolgungswahn und Vererbung. Metaphysische Medizin bei Goethe, Tieck und E.T.A. Hoffmann, Göttingen. Brittnacher, Hans-Richard (2007): Art. “Horrorliteratur”, in: Metzler Lexikon Literatur. Begriffe und Definitionen, edited by Dieter Burdorf, Christoph Fasbender and Burkhard Moennighoff, Stuttgart, p. 327f, here p. 327. Brittnacher, Hans-Richard (2015): Art. “Das Phantastische/Das Wunderbare”, in: E.T.A. Hoffmann Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Christine Lubkoll and Harald Neumeyer, Stuttgart, pp. 384–390, here p. 385. Grizelj, Mario (2012): In the Maelstrom of Interpretation: Reshaping Terror and Horror between 1798 and 1838 – Gleich, Hoffmann, Poe, in: Popular Revenants. The German Gothic and its International Reception 1800–2000, edited by Andrew Cusack and Barry Murnane, Rochester, pp. 105–122. Gruber, Bettina (2005): Hoffmann, Chamisso, Caligari. Der Student von Prag und Das Cabinett des Doktor Caligari. Zu den romantischen Prämissen zweier deutscher Stummfilme, in: E.T.A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch 13, pp. 117–132. Hoffmann, E.T.A. (1985): Der Sandmann, in: ders.: Sämtliche Werke in sieben Bänden, Bd. 3: Nachtstücke, Klein Zaches, Prinzessin Brambilla, Werke 1816–1820, edited by Hartmut Steinecke in cooperation with Gerhard Alroggen, Frankfurt a.M., pp. 11–49. Junges, Stefanie (2019): Eine Vision der ästhetischen Groteske, in: E.T.A. Hoffmann Portal from August 14th 2019, available online: https://etahoffmann​.staatsbibliothek​ -berlin​.de​/eine​-vision​-der​-aesthetischen​-groteske​-der​-sandmann​-am​-schauspielhaus​ -duesseldorf/. Kanzog, Klaus (2009): Reflexe der Werke E.T.A. Hoffmanns im Film, in: E.T.A. HoffmannJahrbuch 17, pp. 149–165, here p. 152. Keim, Stefan (2017): Robert Wilson's interview with Stefan Keim: Auf dem schmalen Grat zwischen Grusel und Groteske, in: Die Welt from April 30th 2017. Kolesch, Doris (2002): Robert Wilsons Dantons Tod: Das nomadische Auge und das Archiv der Geschichte, in: Mediale Performanzen. Historische Konzepte und Perspektiven, edited by Jutta Eming, Annette Jael Lehmann and Irmgard Maassen, Freiburg i.Br., pp. 238–250, here p. 249. Kracauer, Siegfried (2017): Von Caligari zu Hitler. Eine psychologische Geschichte des deutschen Films, Frankfurt a.M., p. 86. Krummholz, Martin (2017): Unheimlich geheimnislos. Robert Wilson eröffnet die Ruhrfestspiele mit seiner Inszenierung "Der Sandmann" nach E.T.A. Hoffmann – einer opulenten Rockoper. Leider völlig ohne Magie, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung from May

To Play the Puppet  221 5th 2017, available online: https://www​.sueddeutsche​.de​/kultur​/theater​-unheimlich​ -geheimnislos​-1​.3490628. Lehmann, Hans Thies (2011): Postdramatisches Theater, Frankfurt a.M., pp. 131–138. Liebrand, Claudia (1996): Aporie des Kunstmythos. Die Texte E.T.A. Hoffmanns, Freiburg, p. 87. Liebrand, Claudia (2015): Art. “Automate/Künstliche Menschen”, in: E.T.A. Hoffmann Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Christine Lubkoll and Harald Neumeyer, Stuttgart, pp. 242–246, here p. 242. Meteling, Arno (2009): E.T.A. Hoffmanns Wirkung im Film und in der Literatur nach 1945, in: E.T.A. Hoffmann. Leben  – Werk  – Wirkung, edited by Detlef Kremer, Berlin and others, pp. 581–591, here p. 582f. Mulvey, Laura (1975): Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in: Screen 16/3, pp. 6–18. Ortiz, Janine (2017): “I Want to be a Machine” - Über Robert Wilsons “Sandmann”Adaption, in: Der Sandmann von E.T.A. Hoffmann. Programmheft 2017 zur Inszenierung im Rahmen der Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen und am Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, pp. 9–11, here p. 10. Ringel, Stefan (1995): E.T.A. Hoffmanns Werke im Film, in: E.T.A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch 3, pp. 84–94, here p. 94. Spiegel, Hubert (2017): Lustschreie, Lichtblitze, Hirngespinste. Robert Wilsons “Sandmann”, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from May 5th 2017, available online: https://www​ .faz​.net​/aktuell​/feuilleton​/buehne​-und​-konzert​/robert​-wilson​-bei​-den​-ruhrfestspielen​ -15000477​.html​?printPagedArticle​=true​#pageIndex​_2. Wilink, Andreas (2017): Der Augentrug. Der Sandmann – Robert Wilson eröffnet mit E.T.A. Hoffmanns unheimlicher Erzählung die Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, in: Nachtkritik from May 3rd 2017, available online: https://nachtkritik​.de​/index​.php​?option​=com​ _content​&view​=article​&id​=13​​940​:d​​er​-sa​​ndman​​n​-rob​​ert​-w​​ilson​​-eroe​​ffnet​​-mit-​​e​-t​-a​​-hoff​​ manns​​-unhe​​imlic​​her​-e​​rzaeh​​lung-​​die​-r​​uhrfe​​stspi​​ele​-r​​eckli​​nghau​​sen​&catid​=38​&Itemid​ =40. Wortmann, Thomas (2020): Bildertausch – preposterous history. Robert Wilsons Adaption von E.T.A. Hoffmanns Sandmann, in: E.T.A. Hoffmann-Jahrbuch 28, pp. 121–140. (List of Photos): Wortmann All images taken from: Robert Wilson: Der Sandmann von ETA Hoffmann. Production of the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf in coproduction with the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen and Unlimited Performing Arts. Photographs by Lucie Jansch.

14 Intermedial Study of Stuart Patience’s Paintings and ETA Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816) Sahib Kapoor

To a layman, an illustration of a scene from a literary text depicts a particular “pregnant” moment in the narrative time and space (Lessing 1876: 166). Keen art critics would, however, be aware that the visual image reveals much of the story that leads and culminates into that crucial moment and the image may even foretell what will happen next. This chapter attempts to investigate this word–image relationship with reference to the German writer from the late Romantic period ETA Hoffmann. It presents the visual interpretations of ETA Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann by the contemporary artist Stuart Patience. Surprisingly, very little academic research has been done on his set of four Sandmann illustrations. In the last century, comics and graphic novels have evolved a mechanism of a series of graphics and written texts strung into a long narrative representing a chronology of times and spaces. On the one hand, some texts contain images directly within themselves, also known as illustrations; on the other hand, we have illustrations that are independent entities from their textual counterparts. In the second case, however, the text and its illustrations form a two-part unit, which is semiotically heterogeneous. In his book Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes defines two types of connections between the text and the image. In the first case, the image is dependent on the written narrative. This means that the text contributes to interpreting the image in the reader’s mind. The written text plays a more prominent role than the image in this context. In the second case, the relationship between the text and image can be complementary, which implies that both mediums are on equal footing and complement each other. In this case, there is “a mutual relationship” between the text and the image. (Barthes 1995: 175) 14.1 Der Sandmann Der Sandmann is a well-known story written by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (originally Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann) in 1816. Hoffmann’s narratives are conflated with realistic and fantastic elements, often depicting the tension between the rational and the irrational, a common motif of the late Romantic epoch. The visual aspect of this narrative is an essential aspect of the novella since it revolves around the visual organ, i.e., eyes, and how this visuality deceives at various levels. “Seeing” plays a vital role in the narrative, and so does its depiction in the illustrations. The illustrations and paintings of Der Sandmann appear later, some DOI:  10.4324/9781003377733-20

Patience’s Paintings and Hoffmann’s Sandmann  223 a century later, the only exception being Hoffmann himself, for whom the image came first and then the written narrative (Riemer 1976: 2). In that sense, visual representations are primarily interpretations of the written text. Both the mediums, i.e., the verbal and the visual, interact and “talk” with each other. The visual representations can shed light on the reception of the novella in different historical times and spaces. The novella has been illustrated many times. Nevertheless, very few paintings of the novella have been studied systematically and in detail. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the illustrations although these images are also representations of the written text and contribute in their own way to the reception of the works. With the “pictoral turn” in humanities, this attitude is changing fast. The visual artist may focus on different motifs such as the doppelgänger, eye motif, binary relations like sanity and madness and the confusion and the tension between inner and outer worlds of the protagonist. In her book E.TA Hoffmann und seine Illustratoren, Elke Riemer states that around 30 artists have illustrated Der Sandmann (Riemer 1976: 135). Each artist is said to have presented the novella from various perspectives. With each new representation of the novella, a new interpretation comes to life. Claude Lévi-Strauss emphasised in his structural study of myths that every new version of the myth adds a new slate to the already existing set of slates, and in this manner, the density of the composition increases over time. Each slate is, however, somewhat different from the other, which means that the various versions do not merge and become one, but each maintains its independent entity with the core structure remaining the same. The same is true in the case of visual representations of the word. The image is, however, constituted in a different manner keeping in mind the specificities of the medium; it is developing its content and meaning step by step, organizing the space, and guiding the viewer’s eye from one point to another (Burger und Cattoni 2019: 6). There are certain structural analogies to Der Sandmann that ought to be discussed before moving to the pictorial representations of the narrative. A powerful and widely discussed signifier is the eye motif. The eyes play a central role in the narrative from the beginning to the end. Fear of losing eyes propels Nathanael into the depths of madness and ultimately to his death. Advocate Coppelius is seen as the Sandman who pulls the eyes out of the eye sockets. Coppola, the doppelgänger of Coppelius, sells binoculars, spectacles and other optics, which Nathanael invariably ends up buying. This encounter revives the traumatic memories of childhood to his conscious mind. Nathanael’s fear of losing his eyes starts with his first encounter with Coppelius. The fear can be traced to the scene where Coppolius discovers Nathanael sneaking into the workshop. “Mir war es als würden Menschengesichter ringsumher sichtbar, aber ohne Augen – scheußliche, tiefe schwarze Höhlen statt ihrer. ‘Augen her, Augen her!’ rief Coppelius mit dumpfer dröhnender Stimme” (Hoffmann 1975:14). Another powerful signifier is the feeling of uncanny, highly debated in the context of  Der Sandmann. Uncanny here are the feelings that are triggered by the twist given to the tale of Sandman, which appear to be in opposition to its benign traditional fairytale character. A mythical character of European folklore, the Sandman sends children to sleep and adds beautiful dreams to their sleep by

224  Performing and Fine Arts sprinkling magical sand into their eyes, hence the name Sandman. There is a crucial moment when the young Nathanael is discovered by Coppelius hiding in the workshop, and Coppelius threatens to pull out Nathanael’s eyes. Overwhelmed with fear he instantly loses his consciousness and faints. In his well-known essay Das Unheimliche  (1919), Sigmund Freud, offers a psychoanalytical interpretation of Der Sandmann with the castration anxiety as the basis of the interpretation. Freud states that the feeling of uncanny is activated when certain correlating events take place. In the case of Der Sandmann, these are Nathanael’s fear of losing his eyes and the puppet Olympia. Freud interprets the fear of losing one’s eyes as castration anxiety. The trauma that Nathanael encounters as a child is repeatedly reproduced, culminating in a catastrophic end. The uncanny motif and eye motif are deeply intertwined with each other (Freud 1982: 377). Another important binary opposition is the machine motif or the tension between humans and machines. People were quite fascinated with machines arriving in the second half of the nineteenth century and industrialisation was to transform the lives of people radically. The interaction with machines became a theme in the literature of the late Romantic period. Keen to make machines a part of their life, people thought of them as a perfect substitute for humans, for machines can work like or even better than humans. They could even sing and dance, and do all the possible and impossible things that one could imagine. Above all machines do not complain. The story can also be seen as a reflection of this fascination with machines. It highlights the passion for machines and their fatal impact on the psyche of humans and human society. In the case of Nathanael, Olympia’s presence and absence are both reasons why Nathanael loses his sanity. The ball dance is one of the scenes depicting Nathanael’s obsession with Olympia, where Nathanael could have killed anyone who would think of dancing with Olympia. In the inner world of Nathanael, Olympia, the puppet, comes to life and he falls in love with her. Olympia replaces in his thoughts the real women. Despite her measured steps and deadpan gaze, he fails to “see” through her. The suicide at the end can be traced back to Nathanael’s absolute devotion to the automat Olympia (Bloom 2000: 295). 14.2 Paintings by Stuart Patience The black-and-white illustrations of Hoffmann’s narrative by Stuart Patience were first exhibited in Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Detroit, a rather unusual museum that is home to mechanical oddities, celebrating the role of automata through history and literature. The exhibition in 2018 featured paintings created by artists across four centuries, including Rebecca Horn, Paul Spooner, Tim Lewis and Stuart Patience from the 21st century. Stuart Patience was born in Tunbridge Wells, England, in 1986. He graduated from Kingston University. He currently lives and works in London. In 2015, he illustrated the cover of the review supplement of The Guardian with the illustrations of Alice in Wonderland. In 2021, he was commissioned to illustrate the characters of the famous American movie Dune directed by Denis Villeneuve. The select paintings for this chapter are original ink

Patience’s Paintings and Hoffmann’s Sandmann  225 drawings based on ETA Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816) taking the fine line between desire and delusion as the point of departure. This painting titled Now to Our Work (Figure 14.1) has a circular border and presents a workshop where two people are engaged in their work. The glow of fire adds to the aspect of danger. The painting has two hands on its borders holding the curtains obviously representing the young Nathanael: Er saß, wie gewöhnlich, stumm und starr den Rücken der Türe zugekehrt, er bemerkte mich nicht, schnell war ich hinein und hinter der Gardine, die einem gleich neben der Türe stehenden offnen Schrank, worin meines Vaters Kleider hingen, vorgezogen war. (Hoffmann 1975:11) In the painting, there are two people and shelves with eyeless dummies and an oven. This scene is the “pregnant moment” (cf. Lessing) when Nathanael sees Coppelius from behind the curtains. Nathanael describes the scene as: Der Sandmann steht mitten in der Stube vor meinem Vater, der helle Schein der Lichter brennt ihm ins Gesicht! – Der Sandmann, der fürchterliche

Figure 14.1  Now to Our Work. Source: Stuart Patience

226  Performing and Fine Arts Sandmann ist der alte Advokat Coppelius, der manchmal bei uns zu Mittage ißt. (Hoffmann 1975:11) Coppelius is in the front and Nathanael’s father is standing in the back sorting out artificial eyes from the bucket. Coppelius is portrayed as a huge man holding an eye with a pincer and carefully observing it with a magnifying glass in his right hand. One eye is also lying in the middle of the room in front of him. He is checking the eyes for his experiments. Both the figures are wearing black robes. Coppelius is trying to examine the eye using a magnifying glass that here functions to show what is hidden. The objects which are otherwise not visible to the naked eye appear to be clear and precise when seen with a magnifying glass. The shelves of the workshop are occupied by dummy heads and masks lacking eyes, artificial body parts and clockwork. On the ceiling, independent artificial body parts are hanging. The clockwork alongside the dummy heads on the shelf and body parts on the ceiling leads to a pre-disclosure of the course of the story. Viewers can sneak into the experiment as Coppelius attempts to bring the puppet doll, the android to life. The painting can be seen as describing the crux of the story in advance portraying an android being crafted. This pre-disclosure is nowhere to be found in the narrative and can be considered a telescopic revelation of the future event to the viewers. Hoffmann’s narrative and the Patience’s paintings intersect with each other as both are seen through Nathanael’s prism. This scene plays a crucial role as this is the exact moment when Coppelius leaves a permanent scar on Nathanael’s psyche. Spellbound (Figure 14.2) is the second painting in the cohort where the telescopic lens zooms on a maiden in a room. There is a circular nimbus-like ring surrounding her upper body that projects her in focus. The circle within the multiple border circle highlights the geometry of the painting. Arms clearly bear screws. Her eyes seem to be motionless and her face emotionless. Her fingers have gaps and appear as if they are artificially fixed to her arms. There is a flower vase on a circular table on her left. This maiden can be identified as Olympia. The name Olympia derived from Mount Olympus, the mountain where the Greek gods and goddesses reside, refers clearly to someone beyond the human. It has the aura of the supernatural. The painting presents Olympia through a lens, which Nathanael bought from Coppola. A similar scene is present in the story as well when Nathanael encounters the doppelgänger Coppola and buys a telescope to see Olympia through his window. Olympia is sitting still. Her hair is perfectly braided, and she is wearing a bell-shaped dress with short puffed sleeves and a black bow along with a necklace. The skirt has some circular designs. The mechanical arms with screw marks are also in the spotlight. These marks play an essential role here, especially the line on her neck. Olympia can be beheaded through this neckline. The true identity of the sitting female is revealed here. In secondary literature, she is referred to as a doll, a puppet and an automat. In the novella, no one surprisingly notices the artificiality of Olympia, and even Nathanael completely fails to understand her strange behaviour and mechanical sounds such as “Ach, Ach”. The text mentions nothing about the arms or the neckline of Olympia. The narrative describes her sitting idle in the

Patience’s Paintings and Hoffmann’s Sandmann  227

Figure 14.2  Spellbound. Source: Stuart Patience

same posture for hours. Significant here is also the presence of a vase containing flowers that appear to be artificial. The form is her clockwork, the machinery that controls her movements. The composition with its special dynamic, the presence of the vase and the screw marks on her body lead to a pre-disclosure of the reality that will be experienced by the protagonist and viewers at a later stage and makes the painting narrate and reveal the written text. The third painting in the exhibition titled  Spin Round Wooden Doll (Figure 14.3) is of the ball dance, where Olympia is introduced in the social circle for the first time, the event where the gathering of human beings collectively gets fooled by an automat. The painting has seven young female figures and three male figures, including Nathanael and Olympia as a dancing couple. Some females are wearing ocular masks, and all of them are wearing puffed-sleeve black dresses. Males in the figure are also wearing black suits with long coats. Two males behind Nathanael observe the dance somewhat critically from a distance. Olympia is wearing a white puffed-sleeve dress with a bustle. There are clockworks visible under the transparent bustle of her gown but this glimpse is meant only for the viewer of the painting and not the other figures in the canvas. The clockwork is attached to the

228  Performing and Fine Arts

Figure 14.3  Spin Round Wooden Doll! Source: Stuart Patience

legs of Olympia to measure and control her movements. On the neck, two screw marks connect the head with the rest of the body. Nathanael is wearing a suit with a black waistcoat. Nathanael and Olympia are in the centre of the picture with the rest of the audience encircling them. It is raining outside, seen from the window behind Nathanael. This painting brings the terrifying encounter between humans and machines in focus. Olympia represents a flawless woman who is beautiful, who can sing and dance perfectly and listen for hours to boring poetry without yawing. All the women present in this picture seem jealous and annoyed with the perfect Olympia. The clockwork is presented to the viewers of the picture but not to the readers of Hoffman who mentions only the strange movements of Olympia’s feet »In Schritt und Stellung hatte sie etwas Abgemessenes und Steifes, das manchem unangenehm auffiel« (Hoffmann 1975:31). The rain outside is an addition to the plot as there is no mention of this in the narrative. This painting is again a pre-disclosure of the non-human identity of Olympia. The painting There You See the Eyes (Figure 14.4), the last painting in the series, depicts in a black background a disembodied mechanical robot with the head decapitated from the body and springs popping out of the neck and rest of

Patience’s Paintings and Hoffmann’s Sandmann  229

Figure 14.4  There You See the Eyes. Source: Stuart Patience

the body, and there are no eyes in the face. The legs and arms fall apart from their respective body organs, screws and eyes on the floor. Some liquid flasks are on the floor. This scene depicts the dismantling of Olympia. Nathanael realises Olympia is simply a puppet, “eine Holzpuppe”. This painting draws its inspiration from one of the earlier works of Patience that he produced in 2015, Alice in Wonderland. The fall of Olympia is like that of Alice. The painting lies in a space where the fight ends – the fight between the maker of Olympia, Spalanzani and the maker of her eyes, Coppelius. Spalanzani catches the eyes, and Coppelius runs away with the rest of the android. This scene is also narrated in the story: Voll tiefen Entsetzens prallte Nathanael zurück, als er die Figur für Olimpia erkannte; aufflammend in wildem Zorn wollte er den Wütenden die Geliebte entreißen, aber in dem Augenblick wand Coppola sich mit Riesenkraft drehend die Figur dem Professor aus den Händen und versetzte ihm mit der Figur selbst einen fürchterlichen Schlag, daß er rücklings über den Tisch, auf dem Phiolen, Retorten, Flaschen, gläserne Zylinder standen, taumelte

230  Performing and Fine Arts und hinstürzte; alles Gerät klirrte in tausend Scherben zusammen. (Hoffmann 1975:41) An object in the painting that seems entirely irrelevant at first glance is the tabletop, on which Olympia lies dismantled. The tabletop is also present in the story but plays a crucial role here in this painting. The constellation of the tabletop and Olympia is worth discussing. In the text, Nathanael stumbles over the table, whereas Olympia lies on the table in the painting. The position of Olympia on the top of the tabletop indicates that Olympia might be a self-reflection of Nathanael. Coppelius and Spalanzani used Olympia as an object to play with Nathanael’s emotions and sanity. Both were successful as Nathanael loses his mind when Olympia breaks into pieces. Nun sah Nathanael, wie ein Paar blutige Augen auf dem Boden liegend ihn anstarrten, die ergriff Spalanzani mit der unverletzten Hand und warf sie nach ihm, daß sie seine Brust trafen. – Da packte ihn der Wahnsinn mit glühenden Krallen und fuhr in sein Inneres hinein Sinn und Gedanken zerreißend. (Hoffmann 1975:42) Though the grotesque painting corresponds to a large extent to its written counterpart, the painting tends to reveal more details about the real identity of Olympia to viewers than the written text to readers. There are no people, no fight and no signs of madness. A magnifying glass and the eyes at the bottom of the painting are similar to the first painting, which causes optic illusions, prominent in Hoffmann but not in Patience. The artist may be trying to give his perspective to the viewers of the unspoken conclusion of the story. This painting aims to clarify the text's confusion and thus make the series of three paintings stand alone. 14.3 Conclusion The series by Patience focuses on Olympia, in production, completed or broken. The visuals span from her very inception to her destruction. All paintings have circular borders that create an impression as if the viewers see the paintings from the glass telescope of Nathanael, except for the third painting (Figure 14.3 Spin Round Wooden Doll!), which is depicted from the point of view of a visitor to the ball of which Nathanael himself is part. The focus of the painting lies on Olympia, but it is important to note that we see the visuals through Nathanael’s eyes. The paintings are not a replica of the text but an interpretation of it, which the artist chose as his way of storytelling. With the particularities of its medium, this series could also stand alone, independent of the written text. The “translation” of the narrative into paintings makes it a new conceptual construct. The pictures are not only some ink artworks drawn to present the novella through artwork, but it is an approach to provide a new interpretation of the narrative which highlights the uncanny and grotesque nature of the story from the very beginning till its end. Highlighted is the human-machine dichotomy. According to Barthes’s categorisation, the connection

Patience’s Paintings and Hoffmann’s Sandmann  231 between the text and the image is complementary. The paintings do not modify the meaning of the text. As the focus of the exhibition was on human-machine interaction in literature, the artist focuses his series on the depiction of the same. The ink illustrations draw on the forms and layout of comics in Europe and America where the frame can take different forms. Works Cited I am deeply indebted to Stuart Patience for permission to publish the paintings. Barthes, Roland: Elements of Semiology. London: Hill and Wang, 1995. Bloom, Michelle E. ‘Pygmalionesque Delusions and Illusions of Movement: Animation from Hoffmann to Truffaut’. Comparative Literature 52(4), 2000, 291–320. Burger, Maya and Cattoni, Nadia (Eds.): Early Modern India: Literatures and Images, Texts and Languages. Heidelberg; Berlin: CrossAsia-eBooks, 2019. Freud, Sigmund: ‚Das Unheimliche‘. In: Ders.: Studienausgabe, Bd. IV. Psychologische Schriften. Hg. v. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, James Strachey. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1982 Hoffmann, E. T. A.: Nachtstücke. Mit 48 Zeichnungen von Alfred Kubin. Fourier und Fertig Wiesbaden, 1975. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Hugo Blümner (ed.). Lessings Laokoon. Berlin: Weidmann, 1876. Riemer, Elke: E. T. A. Hoffmann und seine Illustratoren. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1976 (2. Aufl. 1978). Weblinks Patience, Stuart, The Sandman by ETA Hoffmann, The Marvellous Mechanical Museum, Compton Verney https://www​.heartagency​.com​/projects​/the​-marvellous​-mechanical​ -museum​-compton​-verney/​?linked​_artist​=1165 https://stuartpatience​.co​.uk/ http://s​-patience​.blogspot​.com/

Index

Adorno, T. W 19, 21 Advaita Vedanta 33, 37 aesthetics 19, 24–25, 48, 51–52, 54–55, 61, 67, 83–84, 91, 100, 111, 162 aesthetic sacrality 24 Aesthetics of Resilience – A Manifesto (Kanhailal) 187, 188 After Babel (Steiner) 73 After Hours (Scorsese) 146–147, 150, 160 Akaky Akakyevitch 139 Alice in Wonderland 224, 229 All-India Progressive Writers’ Association 184 Also Sprach Zarathustra (Nietzsche) 40 An Baches Ranft 20–21 Apollonian 31–36, 40 apparent and secret (Goethe) 81–83, 94 Aquinas, Thomas 61 arabesque 16 Arendt, Hannah 137–138 Aristotle 55, 61 Ars Poetica (Horace) 176 Art of the Novel (Kundera) 1, 147 Austrian literature 133 Austro-Hungarian Empire 133 Autobiographical Fragments (Buber) 101, 107 autonomisation 39 autonomy of art 19 Bal, Mieke 206, 218 Barba, Eugenio 197–200 baroque 8–11, 13, 23 Baroque Hall (in Bückeburg Castle) 10 Barthes, Roland 140, 142, 199, 222 Batman Returns (Burton) 216 Bauhaus 8, 12 Beckett, Samuel 136 Before the Law (Kafka) 136, 147 Bengali theatre 186

Bernhard, Thomas 133–144 Betrachtung (Kafka) 31, 141 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche) 34 Bible 83 Bielefeld 10, 15–17 Bielefeld New City Hall 16 Bielefeld Old Town Hall 15 biological genes 70 Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche) 31–36, 40 Birus, Hendrik 87–88, 90–91 Blanchot, Maurice 136, 143 Blätter für die Kunst (George) 18–20 Boal, Augusto 193–195, 199 Book of Hafiz (Goethe) 81, 84–88, 91, 94–95 Brahman 106, 117 Brazil, Argentina, Peru 195 Brod, Max 134, 136, 137 Buber, Martin 100–102, 105, 109–110 Buddha (legends) 103 Cabaret Voltaire 72, 74 Camus, Albert 136 Cartesian philosophy 37 castration anxiety 224 Chamisso, Adelbert von 162–178 Chandogya Upanishad 104, 106, 110 Communist Manifesto 113, 120 Communist Party of India 183–184 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky) 135 cross-fertilisation 2 Cruikshank, George 167 Dadaism 72–77 Dada Manifesto 74 Dada movement 70, 72, 76 Dalí, Salvador 215 Daniel (Buber) 64–65, 105 Danton’s Death (Büchner) 216 Das Gelübde (ETA Hoffmann) 205 

234 Index Das Pañcatantra und seine Morallehre (Walter) 113 Das Schloß 139 Death of the Author (Barthes) 142 Der Diktator (Bernhard) 133, 136, 138 Der Proceß 134, 136, 139, 148 Der Sandmann 210, 217, 222–225 Der Siebente Ring (George) 20 Der Stimmenimitator 141 Descartes, René 7, 37–38 Devi, Heisnam Sabitri 187–189, 192 Dialogicity (Bachtin’s concept) 86 dialogic philosophy 105 Dichtung und Wahrheit (Goethe) 81 Die Automate (ETA Hoffmann) 205 Die Brücke (Kafka) 163 Die Dionysische Weltanschauung (Nietzsche) 35 Die Flucht aus der Zeit (Ball) 73 Die Schlange im Wolfspelz (Maar) 140 Dilthey, Wilhelm 23 Dionysian art 35–36, 40 Disputationes Metaphysicae (Suárez) 37 Divan-Poet 85–87, 89, 91 Doctrine of Elements (Kant) 38 doorkeeper 136, 137 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 135, 139 Douglas, Mary 14 Draupadi 189–192, 196 Dreigroschenoper (Brecht) 6 Duchamp, Marcel 71–72 Durendal 63, 67 The Dwarf (Hesse) 53–55

fairytale 52, 56 Fairy Tales Transformed (Bacchilega) 53 Faust (Goethe) 46, 83 Fetwa 87–89, 91 Feuerbach, Ludwig 110 Flaubert, Gustave 140 folktale 55, 57 Foucault, Michel 1 Fountain (Duchamp) 72, 75 French Revolution 50 Freud, Sigmund 74, 210, 224 Friedman, Maurice 101 Fuchs, Thomas 9 functionalist architecture 8 functionality and efficiency (architecture) 14 gallows humour 142 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 100 Gandhi, Politics and We (Buber) 100 George, Stefan 18–20, 22 German Romantics 2, 50, 136 Gesamtkunstwerk 2, 8 Global North 196, 199 Global South 183–184, 196, 197, 199 Gogol, Nikolai 135, 139 Greek mythology 34, 103 Greek theatre 198 Grist Leighton 156 Gropius, Walter 17 grotesque 68, 230

eclecticism 16 Ecstatic Confessions (Buber) 103 Elements of Semiology (Barthes) 222 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Hegel) 17 Enlightenment 7, 61 environmental destruction 58 epigonism 22 Epirrhema (Goethe) 82 epistemological negation 33, 37–38 European rationalism 7 Events and Meetings (Buber) 103 Even-Zohar, Itamar 114, 119 exagerration technique 138 existentia and essentia 34 existential dualism 34

Hackett, Paul (After Hours character) 146–148, 150, 156–157, 159 Hafez 81, 83, 94 Hälfte des Lebens (Hölderlin) 21 Hammer, Joseph von 84, 86–87, 89–90, 92, 94 Heisnam Sabitri – The Way of the Thamoi (Shivaprakash & Rojio) 192 hermeneutics 22 Hertel, Johannes 113 Hesse, Hermann 48, 50, 52, 58, 100 Hinduism and Buddhism 52 historicism 13 Hitchcock Alfred 215, 217 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus (or ETA) 222 Hölderlin, Friedrich 23 Hübsch, Heinrich (architect) 14, 15 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 8, 110

Faber, M 146–155, 157, 159, 160 facemasks 42 Fagus factory (design: Walter Gropius) 17

I and Thou (Buber) 100–110 iconic turn 162 imitatio Christi 65, 67

Index  Impressionist avant-garde 11 Indian People’s Theatre Movement 184 intermediality intermediality 162, 217 International School of Theatre Anthropology 197 intertextuality 1, 2, 74, 143 Iqbal, Muhammad 95 Jahn, Wolfgang 150 Jahraus, Oliver 6 Judaism (Buber) 104 Jung, Matthias 8 justice 48–50, 55, 58 Kafka (parody) 143 Kafka, Franz 133–135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 154 Kafka’s literary style 140–141 Kafkaesque 143 Kafkan comic 141 Kalakshetra 187–190 Kalilah wa Dimnah 116 Kanhailal, Heisnam 185, 187–189, 192, 193, 195, 199, 200 Karawane (Ball) 72–73 Kassner, Rudolf 103 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 162–177 Kristeva, Julia 1, 86 Kundera, Milan 1, 135, 140, 141, 147, 149, 151, 158–160 Kundu, Manujendra 199 La Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland) 60–68 Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Lessing) 23, 176 l’art pour l’art 19 Last Temptation of Christ (Scorsese) 146 Lavater, Johann Caspar 19 Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr (ETA Hoffmann) 205 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) 8 The Legend of the Baal Shem (Buber) 102 Le sacre du printemps (Stravinsky) 24 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 176, 222 Lettres Persanes (Montesquieu) 84 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 223 Lewis, Franklin 92, 93, 224 The Life of Dialogue (Buber) 101 literary history 17, 21 Loos, Adolf 11, 13–14, 22

235

Loos House 11, 12, 17 Lorenz, D. C. G 151–153, 161 Lost Highway (Lynch) 216 Luhmann, Niklas 23 Maar, Michael 133, 140–142 magical realism 53 A Man by the name Ziegler (Hesse) 56, 57 Man from the Country (Kafka) 136–139, 143, 147 Manipur 185–191 martyrdom 60, 66 mask 34, 36 Mazumder, Charu 185 Mazumder: anganmanch 185 mediaeval literature 60 mediality 217 Meditations (Descartes) 37 medium (of art) 40–41, 77, 90, 113, 230 meme culture 76 Metamorphosis (Kafka) 135 Michaelides, Pavlos E 154, 159 micro fiction: defined 141 mimesis 61 mimetic 67 Mitrabhed (first book of Pañcatantra) 116, 118, 122 modernism 11, 13–14, 16–17 Mona Lisa (Da Vinci) 71–72, 75 monism and dualism 105 Mörike, Eduard 10 The Mountain Full of Secrets (Hesse) 57–58 Mozart on His Journey to Prague (Mörike) 10 mutual illumination 6, 25, 143 mysticism 90, 103 Nachtstück 207, 210 National Socialism 14 nature lore and native lore 188 negation: principium individuationis 37 neo-baroque 10–11, 13, 18 New Testament 83, 87 Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böhme (Buber’s dissertation) 101 Nietzsche, Friedrich 31–47 Nußknacker und Mausekönig (ETA Hoffmann) 205 Oesterle, Günter 16 Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias (Foucault) 1

236 Index On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Schiller) 50 On Truth and Lies in the Extra-Moral Sense (Nietzsche) 38 Open Secret (Goethe) 81, 83, 85–86, 89–92, 94 oral cultures 1 Oriental Themes in Buber’s Work (Wood) 105 Original Sin 138 Ornament and Crime (Loos) 13 The Overcoat (Gogol) 135, 139 Overcoming Metaphysics (Heidegger) 151 oxymoron 81, 83, 94, 142

realignment 75 Religion and Philosophy (Buber) 103–104 religious architecture 2 remixes 71, 74, 77 Renaissance 23 Rend 83, 91, 94 retro narratives 1 Rilke, Rainer Maria 18, 24, 102, 138 Rococo 11 Romanticism 16, 22, 50 Rosa, H 9, 24 Roy, B Helfgott 158 Ruben, Walter 113, 120 Rymer, Thomas 48

Pancatantra 113–128 parody 1, 71 pastiche 1, 147 Patience, Stuart 222, 224, 229, 230 Pebet (phunga wari tales)189 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire) 194–195 performance traditions 183, 198 personification 40 Peter Schlemihl’s Wondrous Story (Chamisso) 162–163, 172, 177 Pforr, Anton von 114–115, 117–118, 123–124, 126 philosophy of dialogue 102, 104–105, 109–110 pictorial turn 162, 176, 223 plastic arts 35, 36 Plato and Aristotle 194 Poet-Figure 84–89, 91, 94–95 poetry and religion 86 politicization of art 200 Politics of Aesthetics (Rancière) 50 Politzer, Heinz 137; Torah 137 popular culture 21, 53 postcolonial theory 7 post-enlightenment 61 post-war Austrian writers 136 Prague 1, 10, 12, 13, 133, 143, 147, 148 principle of individuation 31–34, 36–38, 40–42, 46 Prodigal Son 138 psychoanalysis 39, 42 psychologism 39 Purusha 106

Sabitri-Kanhailal’s theatre 193 The Sandman (Hoffmann) 204–220 Sartre, Jean-Paul 136, 138 Schiller, Friedrich 50–51 Schopenhauer, Arthur 31, 33, 36–38, 41, 110 Schöttker, D 17 Scorsese, Martin 146–150, 160 The Selfish Gene (Dawkin) 70 semiotic mixing 1 semiotics 1, 23 Sen, Mrinal 185, 196 Singh, Rosy 25n3, 156 Sircar, Badal 185–183, 193, 199 slam poetry 74 SoHo 146–160 Song of Roland 60–62 Spellbound (Hitchcock) 210, 215, 227 Sri Lanka 184 subjectivity 6 surrealism 74 syncretism 16 synergy 9

Rancière, Jacques 48, 50, 51 Rawls, John 48–49 Readymades 70, 72, 75

tableau vivant 206 Tagore, Rabindranath 100, 189 terminus technicus 92 thamoi and thawai 193 Theater of the Oppressed (Boal) 193 theatre 33, 35, 198 theatre as discourse 195 Theatre for the Ritual of Suffering (Kanhailal) 187 theatre of conscientization 187 theatre of the Earth 187, 189 theories of aesthetics 1, 61 third cinema 196 third theatre 185–188, 193, 197–198

Index  tragedy 34, 35 tragicomic 141 transcendental philosophy 109 The Trial (Kafka) 147–148, 154 Tzara, Tristan 76 uncanny 210, 223 Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche) 31 Upanishads 100, 103–106, 110 Vedanta and Buddha 103 Vedanta School of Indian philosophy 105 Villa Müller 12, 13 Vishnusharman 120 Vratakathaa 123

237

Wagner, Otto 24 Walzel, Oskar 6, 22–23 Wegener, Hans 115, 119, 124 Wertheim, Ursula 90 West Eastern Divan (Goethe) 81–96 Wilson (adaptation and cinematic intertexts) 215 Wilson, Robert 204, 206, 208, 210 Wölfflin, Heinrich 23 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin) 62 World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer) 33 Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers (Barthes) 140