Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature 9780804783453

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At mosph e r e , Mo od, St immu ng

At mosph e r e , M o o d, St im mu ng On a Hidden Potential of Literature

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht Translated by Erik Butler

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

English translation © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung was originally published in German in 2011 under the title Stimmungen lesen © 2011, Carl Hanser Verlag. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, author. [Stimmungen lesen. English] Atmosphere, mood, Stimmung : on a hidden potential of literature / Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ; translated by Erik Butler. pages cm. “Originally published in German in 2011 under the title Stimmungen lesen © 2011, Carl Hanser Verlag.” Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-8047-8121-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8047-8122-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mood (Psychology) in literature. 2. Literature, Modern—History and criticism—Theory, etc. I. Butler, Erik, translator. II. Title. pn56.m57g8613 2012 809'93353—dc23 2011052151 Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10.5/15 Adobe Garamond

Con ten ts



Reading for Stimmung: How to Think About the Reality of Literature Today   1

M o m e n t s



Fleeting Joys in the Songs of Walther von der Vogelweide   23



The Precarious Existence of the Pícaro   29



Multiple Layers of the World in Shakespeare’s Sonnets   38



Amorous Melancholy in the Novellas of María de Zayas   50



Bad Weather and a Loud Voice: Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau   56



Harmony and Rupture in the Light of Caspar David Friedrich   62



The Weight of Thomas Mann’s Venice   72



Beautiful Sadness in Joaquim Machado de Assis’s Last Novel   82



The Freedom of Janis Joplin’s Voice   94

vi

contents



s i t u at i o n s



The Iconoclastic Energy of Surrealism   103



“Tragic Sense of Life”   115



Deconstruction, Asceticism, and Self-Pity   128

Acknowledgments   135



Bibliographical References   137

At mosph e r e , Mo od, St immu ng

R e a di ng for St im mu ng How to Think About the Reality of Literature Today

1

Over the last ten years, a mood of uncertainty has befallen academic engagements with literature—or “literary science,” as it is called in German. In quick succession and with varying levels of intellectual productivity, a series of theoretical paradigms dominated literary studies in the second half of the twentieth century. New Criticism yielded to Structuralism, and Structuralism to Marxism. Marxism and Structuralism gave way to Deconstruction and New Historicism. Deconstruction and New Historicism were then replaced by Cultural Studies and Identity Studies. An almost rhythmic change of the basic assumptions about literary interpretation became the norm. Since the beginning of the early nineties, however, no new theory of literature has posed a real intellectual or institutional challenge. This does not mean that there has been a lack of interesting publications, too few thinkers who command respect, or a dearth of debates. On the contrary: now that the constant pressure to revise one’s epistemology has relaxed, many scholars have found more time than ever—and also more inspiration—to concentrate on the literatures of different epochs and examine the



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complex historical realities that gave them their full resonance. It is no accident that we have witnessed a return to the most canonized and classical literary works. Now, without sacrificing academic honor, one can finally admit to reading them for their own sake. Space has been freed for new inquiry. This is all the more remarkable for having long belonged to figures who were so imposing that most of their contemporaries had to declare themselves either adherents or opponents of their ideas. The fact that such illustrious personages are no longer to be found is both a symptom of, and a reason for, the change that has taken place. Literary studies cannot possibly remain the same after the loss of scholars with the distinction and intellectual vitality of Erich Auerbach, Kenneth Burke, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Lucien­ Goldmann, Wolfgang Iser, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Wolfgang Preisendanz, Richard Rorty, Edward Said, and Raymond Williams. Today, after manifold departures, reorganizations, and metamorphoses (which, as a rule, have not been motivated by any explicit program or project), we find ourselves facing marked—indeed, seemingly irreconcilable, mutually exclusive—differences between two basic assumptions concerning the ontology of literature. (Needless to say, the actual intellectual landscape is more complicated, but I believe its structure begins with one basic divide.) By “ontology of literature,” I mean fundamental stances about how literary texts—as material facts and worlds of meaning—relate to realities outside of works themselves. On the one hand stands Deconstruction. Despite insistent claims of innovation, Deconstruction has always belonged to the “linguistic turn” of philosophy. This has meant—and, for its adherents, it continues to mean—that contact between language and reality outside of language cannot occur; at any rate, suggestions to the contrary are viewed as naïve and dismissed with contempt. More than any other, Derrida’s friend de Man posited—as if it were a matter of fact—that all functions of literature and modes of encountering texts, as “allegories

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of reading,” demonstrate how language does not refer to the world at all, ever. On the other hand, there is Cultural Studies. Cultural Studies shares, at least in part, the methodological (it might be better to say: ideological) assumptions of Marxism, which it considers its precursor and point of departure. As opposed to Deconstruction, Cultural Studies—as it emerged in Great Britain and was transformed into Kulturwissenschaften in Germany (without much change)—has never been skeptical about literature’s connection with extra-linguistic realities. If anything, researchers in this field have so thoroughly fused their trust in the validity of quantitative and empirical research with a certain carefree attitude toward epistemology that the modest philosophical results of this convergence make Deconstruction and its rejection of reference seem almost appealing, at least in philosophical terms. I believe that literary studies, as a site where intellectual forces combine, risks stagnation for as long as it remains stuck between these two positions, whose contrasts and tensions can cancel each other out. To overcome such dangers—which have already materialized in part—we need “third positions.” The German word Stimmung (which is very difficult to translate) gives form to the “third position” I would like to advocate. In analogy to the notion of “reading for the plot” that Peter Brooks set forth some years ago, I would like to propose that interpreters and historians of literature read with Stimmung in mind. I recommend this approach not least of all because this is the orientation of a great number of non-professional readers (who are not—and, of course, need not be—aware of the fact). 2 To gain awareness and appreciation of the different significations and shades of meaning that Stimmung conjures up, it is useful to look at the various clusters of words that translate the term into other languages. English offers “mood” and “climate.” “Mood” stands for an inner feeling



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so private it cannot be precisely circumscribed. “Climate,” on the other hand, refers to something objective that surrounds people and exercises a physical influence. Only in German does the word connect with Stimme and stimmen. The first means “voice,” and the second “to tune an instrument”; by extension, stimmen also means “to be correct.” As the tuning of an instrument suggests, specific moods and atmospheres are experienced on a continuum, like musical scales. They present themselves to us as nuances that challenge our powers of discernment and description, as well as the potential of language to capture them. I am most interested in the component of meaning that connects Stimmung with music and the hearing of sounds. As is well known, we do not hear with our inner and outer ear alone. Hearing is a complex form of behavior that involves the entire body. Skin and haptic modalities of perception play an important role. Every tone we perceive is, of course, a form of physical reality (if an invisible one) that “happens” to our body and, at the same time, “surrounds” it. Another dimension of reality that happens to our bodies in a similar way and surrounds them is the weather. For this very reason, references to music and weather often occur when literary texts make moods and atmospheres present or begin to reflect upon them. Being affected by sound or weather, while among the easiest and least obtrusive forms of experience, is, physically, a concrete encounter (in the literal sense of en-countering: meeting up) with our physical environment. Toni Morrison once described the phenomenon with the apt paradox of “being touched as if from inside.” She was interested, I imagine, in an experience familiar to everyone: that atmospheres and moods, as the slightest of encounters between our bodies and material surroundings, also affect our psyche; however, we are unable to explain the causality (or, in everyday life, control its workings). One cannot claim to understand this dynamic, much less account for it fully. However, this circumstance is no reason not to draw attention to it and describe its many variants.

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3 It might appear, at first glance, as if music and weather merely provided metaphors for what we call the “tone,” “atmosphere,” or, indeed, the Stimmung of a text. My point, however, is the fact that such tones, atmospheres, and Stimmungen never exist wholly independent of the material components of works—above all, their prosody. Therefore, texts affect the “inner feelings” of readers in the way that weather and music do. This is the reason I believe that the dimension of Stimmung discloses a new perspective on—and possibility for—the “ontology of literature.” For in the opposition between Deconstruction and Cultural Studies, which I have mentioned, both sides make claims about the ontology of texts in terms of the paradigm of “representation.” Texts are supposed to “represent” extra-linguistic reality (or, alternately, they are supposed to “want” to do so, even though this is impossible). The main difference between Deconstruction and Cultural Studies concerns the rejection—or affirmation—of texts’ capacity to connect with something else. In contrast, an ontology of literature that relies on concepts derived from the sphere of Stimmung does not place the paradigm of representation front-and-center. “Reading for Stimmung” always means paying attention to the textual dimension of the forms that envelop us and our bodies as a physical reality—something that can catalyze inner feelings without matters of representation necessarily being involved. Otherwise, it would be unthinkable for the recitation of a lyrical text or the delivery of a prose work with a pronounced rhythmical component to reach and affect even readers who do not understand the language in question. Indeed, a special affinity exists between performance and Stimmung. Without exception, all elements comprising texts can contribute to the production of atmospheres and moods, and this means that works rich in Stimmung need not be primarily—and certainly not exclusively—descriptive in nature. To be sure, a relationship exists between cer-



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tain forms of narration and particular atmospheres (for instance, the convergence between an elegiac mood and the structure of Machado de Assis’s Memorial de Aires, which one of the chapters discusses). The canon of world literature offers many examples of narrative prose we may associate, without hesitation, with Stimmung. Consider Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. I cannot imagine a reader familiar with this text who was at all surprised that Aschenbach and Tadzio never become a couple, or that Aschenbach’s existence—at the latest, from the time he reaches Venice—is a being-unto-death. Rather, it is the evocation of a certain fin-de-siècle decadence in all its complexity—all the nuances, smells, colors, sounds, and, above all, dramatic changes of weather—that has made this work so celebrated. In other words (and stated more philosophically—at least from the perspective of Nietzsche­ and Heidegger): the fascinating thing about Mann’s work is a particular atmosphere that can only be experienced in a historically specific awareness of the presence of death in life. 4 On a side note, some good friends have remarked that it is fitting to indicate the associative connection between my advocacy of Stimmung and the larger, more or less philosophical, aim of making effects of “presence” the object of humanistic inquiry. In the relationship we entertain with things-in-the-world (and this is a consequence of the process of modernization), we consider interpretation—the ascription of meaning—to be of paramount importance. In addition, I would like to emphasize that things always already—and simultaneously with our unreflective habitus of positing significations they are supposed to hold—stand in a necessary relationship to our bodies. I call this relationship “presence.” We may touch objects, or not. They, in turn, may touch us (or not), and they may be experienced either as imposing or inconsequential. As described here, atmospheres and moods include the physical dimension of phenomena; unmistakably, their forms of

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articulation belong to the sphere of aesthetic experience. They undoubtedly belong to the presence-related part of existence, and their articulations count as forms of aesthetic experience. (Of course, this does not mean that every articulation of presence that qualifies as “aesthetic” also counts as an atmosphere or mood.) In conceptual terms, matters are more complicated. Against the historical backdrop of the advanced “process of Modernity,” one may consider “aesthetic experience” to consist of a tension-filled simultaneity of effects of meaning and effects of presence (as opposed to everyday experience, which registers only the former). It could be that we now devote more attention to atmospheres, moods, and the dimension of presence in general than fifty, two hundred, or five hundred years ago. Needless to say, this does not mean that it is any easier to bring about effects of presence (and, among them, atmospheres and moods). Instead, it might have something to do with an everyday mode of being-in-the-world that, for most of us, fuses consciousness and software—one that suspends the experience of presence, so to speak. Perhaps this state of withdrawal has provoked an enhanced need—and an increased desire—for encounters with presence. 5 In a brilliant contribution to the lexicon Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, David Wellbery recently—and for the first time—reconstructed the history of the concept of Stimmung, exploring its many historical and semantic layers. I would like to revisit key points of his article, above all because they illustrate how openness to atmospheres and moods can enhance our experience of literature, but also because his investigative methods encourage us to reflect on the specific form of historicity that distinguishes Stimmung. The first item Wellbery examines is Goethe’s “Falconet” essay (published in 1776); this piece discusses the sensation of all-encompassing unity and harmony often experienced in altogether commonplace settings (here, a cobbler’s shop). Artists, Goethe



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observed, seek to give objective form—in a text, for instance—to the intangible things they encounter. Soon after the essay’s publication, Stimmung came to play a prominent role in the early discourse of philosophical aesthetics, which was coming into being at the time; this fact suggests that the homogeneity of situations and experiences had become an issue for contemporary society, which was rapidly undergoing internal differentiation. In Critique of Judgment—where the tuning of a musical instrument provides the metaphorical frame of reference—Kant affirmed that “balanced Stimmung” is the necessary condition for emotional and rational faculties of human understanding when they combine in judgments of taste. The intersection of feeling and reason also determined the meaning of the term for the philosophers of German Idealism (who often equated feeling and reason with subjectivity and objectivity). The notion is still influential today. In a similar spirit, the twentieth letter of Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind reads: To pass from sensation to thought, the soul traverses a medium position, in which sensibility and reason act simultaneously. Sensibility and reason combine to suspend the power that determines them both; that is, their antagonism produces a negation. This medium situation—in which the soul is neither physically nor morally constrained, yet is active in two ways—merits being called a state of freedom.

Friedrich Hölderlin advanced a conception of Stimmung that differed from the views of his friends and contemporaries. For him, the word referred to sounds that were different from those of his own time and place, which he believed he had found in the world—and the works—of ancient Greece. Three-quarters of a century later, Nietzsche posited a connection that was similar in structure but much more speculative. For him, the word Stimmung named memories and intuitions from the early stages of humanity’s existence. These ways of employing the concept of Stimmung produced a new meaning whose complexity

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went far beyond the task of mediating between opposing positions (including radically contradictory ones) and forging unity and harmony. Now, Stimmung signified complete, unalienated existence—an unattainable state in the modern age. Drawing on such reflections, Alois Riegl was convinced that Stimmung would enjoy great fortunes in the twentieth century as a “nostalgia principle.” Two intellectual currents followed from this prediction. As a nostalgia principle with “futures” (i.e., “options”), Stimmung became the object of thought that may be considered to belong to the philosophy of history. At the same time, the connection between Stimmung and prehistoric stages of human evolution suggested mankind’s future might elude the control of rationalism. Taking, above all, the latter sense of this constellation as his point of departure (minus archaizing notions), Heidegger grants Stimmung a central role in his major work, Being and Time (1927). Here, Stimmung is described as part of the existential condition of “thrownness.” Varied—and constantly changing—moods and atmospheres, Heidegger writes, condition our behavior and feelings in everyday existence; we are not free to choose them. To be sure, this aspect of Heidegger’s work—his understanding of the notion of Stimmung—was not widely received. Much more important for its reception in the twentieth century was a use of the concept that, in paradoxical fashion, confirmed Riegl’s past prediction about the future. This confirmation was paradoxical because the charged meaning that Riegl had assigned Stimmung demonstrated, on the one hand, how his definition had become a point of reference in the philosophy of history; on the other, it gave rise to influential voices that denied its applicability to the present day. Thus, Leo Spitzer—the Vienna-born master philologist of Romance languages—concluded “Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony” (published in two parts, 1944 and 1945, several years after the author had emigrated to the United States) with the assertion

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that, in view of the World War that was now coming to an end, “harmony” had forever lost its place as a potential frame for cosmology and human existence. During the final months of the conflict, the German poet and military doctor Gottfried Benn likewise noted—almost with a hint of scorn—that Stimmung, understood as mediation between opposites, was now over. He went on to write—and it is not clear whether this apparent contradiction was intentional, or if it escaped his notice—that the Stimmung of his day was characterized by the coldness and sobriety of “existentialism.” At this point, a turn occurred in the history of the concept; from now on, Stimmung—or, more precisely: one of the semantic variations of the word—was no longer charged with performing the role of “mediation” and “harmony.” 6 Ever since Stimmung has ceased to imply any form of reconciliation or harmony at all—an inflexion wholly incompatible with its original meaning—ever since, that is, the absence of Stimmung in the classical sense has counted as a form of Stimmung, the concept has become available for universal application. There is now no situation without its “own” atmosphere and mood, which means that one can seek the characteristic Stimmung of every situation, work, and text. For this reason, the book at hand is not limited to historical contexts in which the desire for mediation and harmony takes center stage. On the contrary, Stimmung is explored as a universal category. There is no culture and no epoch that will not admit the universal question about specific atmospheres and moods. Questions of a philosophical-historical nature remain, however. What particular meanings and dimensions of Stimmung do different historical and cultural conditions activate, and why? A subsidiary question belongs in this framework: What periods in the Western tradition saw Stimmung (or its functional equivalents) as a matter to be

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thematized explicitly? In the interest of brevity, three theses may serve as a response: In the first place, it is significant that, in the early modern period, collections of literary narratives and poems were accompanied by indications concerning the space where they were to be enjoyed and the music that was to accompany them. Boccaccio’s Decameron provides the most well known example, but the works of María de Zayas (to be discussed) offer another. Niklas Luhmann called such instructions “compact communication.” By this, he meant that, as literature became increasingly autonomous and independent of specific contexts and sites of performance, authors specified frameworks of communication (and I would add: frameworks of atmosphere) for their recitation and reception. Perhaps an awareness of the importance of Stimmung developed from the experience of isolation that conditioned the emergence of modern forms of subjectivity. Romanticism is the second—perhaps the exemplary—epoch of atmosphere and mood. Stimmungen, expressing nostalgia or protest, stood opposed to the monotony of life in “bourgeois” society. I see the third moment at which Stimmung achieved condensed and intensified form at the end of the nineteenth century, when historical painting and historicizing architecture became popular. This is also when Riegl declared that atmosphere and mood would thrive in the twentieth century as the uncritical appetite for nostalgia—a prediction that was later confirmed in paradoxical fashion. The late nineteenth century was a time whose complexity seemed to escape, more and more, traditional forms of literature and art; consequently, the desire for individual points of access to harmony became more pronounced. It is no accident that at precisely this moment, Wilhelm Dilthey proposed to base humanistic methods of interpretation on personal encounters with literary texts and the situations that had given rise to them. Already in Dilthey’s day—although this occurred even more mark-

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edly in the 1920s and toward the middle of the twentieth century (with consequences that would change the semantic contours of the term forever, as we have seen)—protest was voiced against overvaluations of harmony in works of culture. Of course, from a universalized conception of Stimmung, we can say that such protests themselves belonged to a particular mood or cultural atmosphere. Critical reservations about analyzing this aspect of the phenomenon stemmed—and, inasmuch as they persist today, stem—from the belief that Stimmung is accessible only to rarefied, subjective experience. Objections along these lines may be made against this very book. In a drastic formulation, Hegel had long raised concerns about the lack of objectivity from which such an approach may be seen to suffer: The chief tendency of . . . superficial philosophy is to base science not on the development of thought and the concept, but on immediate perception and contingent imagination; and likewise, to reduce the complex inner articulation of the ethical, . . . the architectonics of its rationality—which, through determinate distinctions between the various spheres of . . . life . . . and through the strict proportions in which every pillar, arch, and buttress is held together, produces the strength of the whole from the harmony of its parts—to reduce this refined structure to a mush of “heart, friendship, and enthusiasm.”

7 The thesis of this book—and the challenge it offers—is that concentrating on atmospheres and moods offers literary studies a possibility for reclaiming vitality and aesthetic immediacy that have, for the most part, gone missing. It can only prove effective, of course, if we bear in mind strong words like Hegel’s, which provide both warning and motivation. It is not a matter of seeking possibilities of existence that have long since vanished, into which we might sometimes wish to escape (this orientation would inevitably be suspected of cultivating the bad habits of illusion and compensation.) Instead, the objective is to

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follow configurations of atmosphere and mood in order to encounter otherness in intense and intimate ways. The point of departure and catalyst for the experience of historical and cultural alterity lies, contra Hegel’s polemic, in the most objective phenomenal field of literary texts: in their prosody and poetic form. Without knowing exactly why it was so or precisely what “feelings” were involved, we can be sure that dramatists, actors, and spectators in seventeenth-century Paris were obsessed with the grave, pathos-laden verse form they called the “alexandrine.” In a literal sense, it was part of the city’s material reality at that time. Instead of disclosing meaning or objects of reference, the tone of such verses is a text-immanent component of the city’s past. Whenever we recite monologues or dialogues as Corneille or Racine fashioned them, we call them forth to new life. The sounds and rhythms of the words strike our bodies as they struck the spectators of that time. Therein lies an encounter—an immediacy, and an objectivity of the past-made-present—which cannot be undermined by any skepticism. Above all in this sense, but naturally not concentrating exclusively on prosody, the chapters of this book review cases of presence, immediacy, and objectivity—and with particular attention to contexts always already associated with atmosphere and mood. For example, I connect the surprisingly “nervous” tone (at least from today’s perspective) in songs composed around 1200 by a man who went by the name of Walther von der Vogelweide with the climate of political instability and religious uncertainty that must have surrounded him, in which he conducted his verbal battles. By way of the sixteenth-century picaresque novel, I believe, it is possible to experience an atmosphere of tension between everyday life and religious orthodoxy that must have been typical of Counter-Reformation Spain. Shakespeare’s sonnets open a world of erotic desire inseparable from specific material surroundings. Diderot’s Neveu de Rameau, through its title figure and his environment, confronts us with an almost overwhelming roughness of

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attitude that may have been prevalent in the years before the French Revolution. Memorial de Aires—a fictional diary that Joaquim Machado de Assis, the great classic figure of Brazilian letters, wrote in the early twentieth century—conducts us into the melancholy and vague abandonment that must have pervaded late-imperial Rio de Janeiro. In a European context, Thomas Mann’s celebrated Death in Venice makes the same period present; the work combines the protagonist’s ineffable feelings and the city’s weather—his material surroundings—in a fatal way. In different dimensions and by means of different textual elements, these works make readers encounter past realities. One tends to overlook the effects of immediacy they create; indeed, it is almost a professional obligation for scholars and critics today to overlook them. This immediacy in the experience of past presents occurs without it being necessary to understand what the atmospheres and moods mean; we do not have to know what motivations and circumstances occasioned them. For what affects us in the act of reading involves the present of the past in substance—not a sign of the past or its representation. 8 A recent trend in literary studies is to read works—and especially canonical ones—as if they were meant to offer allegories of philosophical arguments or agendas (this, of course, is not the same as occasionally employing philosophical concepts or arguments when reading literature). Such an approach seeks, as it were, to free ideational content from the bothersome complexities of form. Even in the best of cases, this mode of interpretation is unable to answer the question why writers evidently decided to use complicated and complex literary forms to advance philosophical claims. Here, I find confirmation for my belief that a more important function of literary texts lies in the potential that their concreteness and historical immediacy hold. By “concreteness,” I mean that every atmosphere and every mood—as similar as

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they may be to others—has the singular quality of a material phenomenon. One can gesture toward this singularity; however, qua singularity, it can never be defined absolutely by language or circumscribed by concepts. Readings that concentrate on Stimmung—as opposed to efforts to find allegories of philosophical arguments (which, of course, should not be deemed altogether inadmissible)—insist on distance. This does not mean that the “presentification” of past atmospheres and moods cannot be pursued with philosophical aims in mind. At the beginning of the Second World War, for example, the great Romance philologist Karl Vossler—who had already written a number of essays in the 1920s that may be taken as meditations on Stimmung—published a book on the poetics of loneliness in seventeenth-century Spain. At least from today’s perspective, his reading derived a mood—and perhaps a sense of hope, too—from the lyrical mysticism of Jewish Marranos. I suspect that Vossler understood this component of the texts he examined as a “consolation of philosophy,” which he meant to oppose to the threats and commandments of silence that were present in Germany at the time. The emphasis of historical immediacy in reading for Stimmung should not be equated with political naiveté. What distinguishes reading for Stimmung from other modes of literary interpretation, however—in many cases, at least—is a lack of distinction between aesthetic and historical experience. Vossler’s reading of seventeenth-century Spanish works makes present a moment of the past. This past-madepresent is encountered in its foreignness. Simultaneously with historical experience, then, the reading produces consolation and edification; and because they are qualitatively different from historical alterity, it is proper to deem these phenomena “aesthetic.” What Vossler made an object of experience—on the basis of a limited number of works in a single genre—was the atmosphere of a historical moment, not the mood of an individual situation. In addition to making present the mood of particular texts, one should attempt to

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capture the dominant moods of broader historical situations by examining works with different origins, forms, and contents. I have tried to do so in chapters on “Surrealism” in the early 1900s, on the absence of representations of happiness in the 1920s, and on the intellectual climate of “Deconstruction” at the end of the same century. In so doing, I encountered a curious continuity between different senses of the (supposed) impossibility of representing the world. In principle—one should emphasize again—there is no historical period, no phenomenological plane, no genre, and no medium that displays an exclusive affinity for Stimmung. Paintings, songs, conventions of design, and symphonies can all absorb atmospheres and moods and later offer them up for experience in a new present. For this reason, chapters of the book are devoted to the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich and to Janis Joplin’s song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” Still, the question bears repeating: how, after moving beyond the objectivity of form, is it possible, when attempting to encounter atmosphere and mood, to avoid dissolving into what Hegel accused of being “the mush of the heart”? No definitive answer exists to this question, nor is there a sure way to guarantee immunity. Concentrating on formal phenomena permits one to avoid the worst, but it is equally important not to attribute absolute qualities—or make existential claims about putative superiority—when encountering atmospheres and moods from the past and other cultures. In addition to the experience of empathy, a measure of sobriety and verbal moderation should accompany the act of reading for Stimmung. In many cases, it is better to gesture toward potential moods instead of describing them in detail (much less celebrating them). 9 But how can we uncover atmospheres and moods, retrace them and understand them? Is there such a thing as a professional—or, for that matter, “scientific”—approach? For the very fact that every Stimmung

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is historically and culturally unique, and because the same elements that constitute the phenomenon go missing when meaning is at issue—and certainly because our field of study has displayed so little interest in the matter—I am skeptical about the power of “theories” to explain atmospheres and moods, and I doubt the viability of “methods” to identify them. Indeed, my skepticism concerning methods is even stronger, for I believe that researchers on the terrain of the “human sciences” should rely more on the potential of counterintuitive thinking than on a pre-established “path” or “way” (the etymological meaning of method). Counterintuitive thinking is not afraid to deviate from the norms of rationality and logic that govern everyday life (and for good reason!). Instead, it is set into motion by “hunches.” Often, we are alerted to a potential mood in a text by the irritation and fascination provoked by a single word or small detail—the hint of a different tone or rhythm. Following a hunch means trusting an implicit promise for a while and making a step toward describing a phenomenon that remains unknown—one that has aroused our curiosity and, in the case of atmospheres and moods, often envelops and even enshrouds us. When a description of this kind occurs in reference to a literary work, it is probable that the effect—up to a certain point—coincides with that of the “primary” text. Writing in this way has affinities with the conception of the literary-critical essay that Georg Lukács laid out in his 1911 book, Soul and Form. Lukács may have seconded Dilthey’s desire for immediate experience in reading literary texts. However, he certainly opposed the latter’s advocacy of “interpretation” as the central praxis of Geisteswissenschaften. Lukács demanded that essays deviate from the “scientific” goal of finding the truth. “It is right for the essayist to seek the truth,” Lukács wrote, “but he should do so in the manner of Saul. Saul set out to find his father’s donkeys and discovered a kingdom; thus will the essayist—one who is truly capable of seeking the truth—find, at the end of his way, what he has not sought: life itself.”

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Lukács’s distinction between “truth” and “life” sets his objectives apart from matters of “interpretation”—that is, the task of laying bare the “truth” (i.e., the propositional content) that works are presumed to contain. An essay that concentrates on atmospheres and moods will never arrive at the truth located within a text; instead, it seizes the work as a part of life in the present. This approach has consequences for the book at hand; I begin to sound the depths in some chapters, but it is impossible to assess them in their proper dimensions. Reading for Stimmung cannot mean “deciphering” atmospheres and moods, for they have no fixed signification. Equally little does reading for Stimmungen mean reconstructing or analyzing their historical or cultural genesis. Instead, it means discovering sources of energy in artifacts and giving oneself over to them affectively and bodily—yielding to them and gesturing toward them. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with reconstructing the genesis or structure of particular atmospheres and moods, but such analyses are of secondary importance. Above all, my aim is to point out Stimmungen, open up their dynamic potential, and promote—as much as possible—their becoming-present. To perform such deictic gestures, it is not always necessary to write on the scale of standard scholarly discussions, with their ponderous footnotes and apparatuses. Indeed, it is not even necessary to follow the development of a mood for the length of an entire work, as it unfolds in its full complexity. I am engaged in an experiment, where certainties and conventions of how to write are still undefined. In the long term, I imagine, writing under the influence of Stimmung may well consign vaunted “methods” to oblivion. 10 As has already been said more than once, the possibility of going beyond merely deictic gestures might be realized by following the historical emergence of atmospheres and moods and their mode of textual articulation. Such exercises are offered, for example, in the chapters on

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the picaresque novel and the absence of representations of happiness in the 1920s. At the same time, it is impossible to formulate a general theory about necessary conditions for producing Stimmung in general—or even in particular. Favorable circumstances may be provided by events of all kinds: military victory or defeat, prosperity or poverty, nation-building or the frustration of such efforts. For the requisite density of feeling to be articulated in texts other than on the level of representation—for forms and tones to become “charged,” as if by electricity—habitualization must occur. In other words: wherever Stimmung penetrates texts, we may assume that a primary experience has occurred to the point of becoming a preconscious reflex. Something similar occurs—on a more abstract plane—when sensitivity to Stimmung has been refined, as is the case in our cultural present. The book at hand, for example, began as a series of short essays on literary atmospheres and moods, which appeared a few years ago in the Geisteswissenschaften section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The series met with surprisingly broad acclaim, and the reception was more engaged and more complex than what had greeted other essays on the same pages. Perhaps this reaction was an indication that something Wellbery mentioned at the end of his article on Stimmung had already become reality. At the time of writing, Wellbery had discounted a possibility for the present, but affirmed that it might yet occur: One might suppose that the disappearance of Stimmung from the vocabulary of aesthetics has something to do with the fact that musical metaphors, as means of giving figural expression to psychic realities, are no longer self-evident. If this is so, then a semantic tradition reaching back to antiquity has died out. All the same, the present discussion of the concept has shown that, in the change of aesthetic notions and paradigms that has occurred, the idea of Stimmung, time and again, has displayed the capacity to reveal new aspects of meaning. Perhaps the adaptability of the concept will make it possible to overcome its current irrelevance and, in future semantic configurations, reveal an unexpected potential for meaning.

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Since then, Wellbery has revised this assessment—or, to be more precise: he has pointed out the surprisingly rapid fulfillment of his prediction. As far as my own view of the current situation, I would like to speak less of the development of a new “potential for meaning” than the intensified aesthetic fascination that Stimmung now holds; here, matters of sense and meaning are secondary. I am interested in the atmospheres and moods that literary works absorb as a form of “life”— an environment with physical substance, which “touches us as if from inside.” The yearning for Stimmung has grown, because many of us— perhaps older people, above all—suffer from existence in an everyday world that often fails to surround and envelop us physically. Yearning for atmosphere and mood is a yearning for presence—perhaps a variant that presupposes a pleasure in dealing with the cultural past. To quell this yearning, we know, it is no longer necessary to associate Stimmung and harmony. And as long as atmospheres and moods reach us physically and affectively, it is also superfluous to seek to demonstrate that the words we use can name extra-linguistic realities. The skepticism of “constructivism” and the “linguistic turn” concerns only ontologies of literature based on the paradigm of representation. This does not matter when reading for atmospheres and moods: they belong to the substance and reality of the world.

Fl e e t i n g J oy s i n t h e S o n g s o f Walt h e r v o n d e r V o g e lw e i d e

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he middle ages, as they have been imagined ever since they were rediscovered by Romanticism—valorous knights jousting, fair ladies in high towers surrounded by deep forests—these Middle Ages never existed. The picture is the product of a few hundred songs that bards performed at courts—first in the south of France, then in the north and in German-speaking lands. Since then, this fantasy has set the tone—in a specific, but also in a historically varied way—for our understanding of luck, good and bad, in love; in some cases, it may even have determined the success or failure of individual lives. With endless variation on a finite repertoire of situations and motifs, these texts encouraged self-confident joy among nobles who must have been obsessed by the defiant eccentricity of their gestures. “Friends, I will sing a song after our taste”—begins a poem ascribed to William IX of Aquitaine (one of the most powerful princes of his day)—“Its love, joy, and youthfulness are more mad than sensible. May he who fails to understand its words be deemed a peasant.” Scholars will never agree about the precise circumstances favoring the development of this tone—the medium of a haughty, elite sense of self. However, there can

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be no doubt that it emerged in opposition to harsh conditions of medieval life (in these songs, nothing is celebrated more than the end of the gray and lonesome winter) and to counter religious commandments of austerity (in the Middles Ages, marriage and the passions of love were thought incompatible, and William IX, as the “first troubadour,” spent his life feuding with the church). Decades ago, Hugo Kuhn—a medievalist unsurpassed for his power of imagination—speculated that pride in the male and female roles one finds in Minnesang may have brought forth early conceptions of happiness and sorrow that were experienced as social reality only half a millennium later by the bourgeoisie under the distinct influence of Romantic ideas. What concerned Kuhn in his philological interpretations was the question whether, in the comparatively reserved tones of German love lyric, it was possible to receive an unmediated impression of the high spirits at medieval courts. Kuhn’s own responses often expressed doubt, and sometimes they even seemed trapped in Romantic melancholy. His ablest successors have long since agreed that literary forms and formulas will forever obscure the true nature of the atmosphere at court. We will never be able to reconstruct, even partially, the music and melodies of songs on the basis of the notation and verse forms that remain. The few sources we do have for courtly festivals—for example, the Whitsuntide knighting of Barbarossa’s sons at Mainz in 1184—contain little information about social rituals and attendant circumstances. The hints of individuality one encounters in lyrical works, which offer roles that are matters of convention, have been revealed, once and for all, as illusory. Even though we should know better, it remains as difficult for us as for “naïve” readers ever since the thirteenth century to avoid the temptation of yielding to emotion when, for example, we read the words of Walther von der Vogelweide: Can you see the power of wonder given to May? Now, soon, all will be well for us.

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We will be joyful, And dance and laugh and sing, Free of dull and boorish pleasure.

Although Walther’s verses recall those of William IX, composed one hundred years earlier, their distinguishing mood comes from the fact that—almost obsessively—the scenes of springtime joy are paired with the colors and sounds of winter: The world shone yellow, red and blue, Green in the woods and elsewhere. Little birds sang there. But now, the hooded crow croaks. Does the world now have another color, too? Yes, it has become all pale and gray, And thus, furrows have appeared on many brows.

It would be entirely in keeping with what we know about the formulaic fashion in which medieval poetry was composed if we could simply distinguish between springtime and winter poems. In Walther’s works, however, the harsh cold of winter always threatens the bliss of May. Hardly a pleasure in his text is not laden with the destructive intuition of its own end. To convey this state of emotion, the songs take up, again and again, an image that stands apart from the changing seasons—an image incompatible with the tastes and colors that belong to them. This image also occurs in the so-called “Elegy”—a text that commentators have, with some plausibility, interpreted as the poet’s embittered look back on life: Woe, how the sweet things of this world have led us astray! I see bile floating in honey: On the outside, the world beautiful—white, green, and red— But inside black, as dark as death.

Here, the combination of beautiful sweetness and black bitterness—the German employs the verb sweben to represent how honey

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and bile flow into one another—reaches a point of religious asceticism according to which all the pleasures of this world are revealed as deception. A decade earlier, in an invective he composed against Pope Innocent III (who had made an alliance with the Guelphs and the king of France against the Staufen dynasty), Walther had employed the image of bile as a metaphor for what interrupts the order and joys of the world in passing: Suddenly the angel exclaims: Woe, woe, a third time woe! Once Christendom was beautifully arrayed; Now poison has entered it. Its honey is become bile. The world will regret it yet.

In the tone and mood one experiences reading these songs and political statements, pleasure and joy occupy a precarious position vis-à-vis the bitterness of the world. In contrast to the haughty and defiant gestures of early troubadours, the intensity of joy, in Walther’s works, is fundamentally menaced. The contrapuntal relationship between joyous warmth and “existential” cold has nothing to do with the tensions of erotic passion and suffering that one finds in the songs of contemporaries. In the Morgenlied, for instance, the celebration of pain in love still expresses the self-assurance of people at court. Such pride in worldly joys and worldly pains transforms, in Walther’s songs, into a mood of fleetingness and floating. This is true even of the seemingly self-confident poem that supposedly inspired Hoffmann von Fallersleben, in exile on Heligoland, to compose the infamous first verse of the German national anthem: German ways are a better kind of life. From the Elbe to the Rhine, And back again, to Hungary, There, I’m sure, live the best I have known in the world.

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Experts agree that these verses, which seem to be intended as self-glorification, were written above all to counter French songs that mocked the ways at German courts. Walther’s poems contain a kind of “irritability” that may be a reaction to the chaos of ongoing conflicts between the political powers of his day, which intruded upon the singer’s life; somehow, he had to get along at different courts, where different loyalties prevailed. Walther’s continuous changes of alliance are less important than his abiding grief at the fact that, everywhere he went, the world failed to realize the order foreseen by God. In June 1198, after the unexpected death of Emperor Henry IV, the Guelph prince Otto, Barbarossa’s son and heir, ascended to the throne in Aachen; the archbishop of Cologne presided. However, the crown itself, as well as the insignia of empire, remained in possession of the House of Hohenstaufen. At the time, Walther (along with most princes) supported Philipp of Swabia, the brother of the deceased emperor and himself a pretender to the throne. On the occasion of Philipp’s coronation in Mainz by a Burgundian archbishop, three months after Otto’s, Walther composed a verse affirming that the old crown had really been made for the new king: The crown is older than king Philipp All must consider it a miracle That the smith made it just so It fits his imperial head. May no one separate crown and crown.

More than an allegory of political legitimacy, the image of the crown on Philipp’s head was Walther’s way of expressing certainty on a cosmic scale; by this means, he told himself—as well as the Hohenstaufen court—that such an ordering of the temporal world matched the designs of God. A year later, he described the Christmas celebrations at the Hohenstaufen seat in Magdeburg from the same perspective: King Philipp stepped forth, visible to all, In the threefold dignity of King,

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Son of the Emperor, and Brother of the Emperor. He bore the scepter and the crown of the realm With gravity and assurance.

The high-born queen, he further states, is “a rose without thorn, a dove without bitterness.” These descriptions focus on cosmic rightness: the royal couple occupies its position in keeping with the divine plan. Yet neither the Hohenstaufen court nor any other center of power remained without “bile” for Walther (or, more precisely: the poems that have been passed down to us under this name). His yearning for cosmic rightness and temporal calm was never satisfied. Transformed into alert irritability, it appears at the fore of all his songs and determines the mood. However, precisely because lamentation and warning fill his works, the moments of calm and joy that they call forth as well have an intensity—indeed, a dignity—of their own. The magic of Walther’s late songs expressing earthly love is not just the poet conferring the qualifications of a noblewoman on a girl who is a commoner; it also arises from the hope that a more basic erotic situation will provide greater fulfillment than a “classic,” courtly setting with its premiums on eccentricity and passion. As thanks for the fief granted him in 1220 in the name of Frederick II, Walther modulates his formerly exalted tone in a way that borders on the grotesque. He informs his imperial addressee that he no longer fears “February’s frost at his toes.” Does such a reading not violate all the taboos that modern literary criticism has established—and for good reason—against biographical modes of interpretation? To be sure, the “late” Walther von der Vogelweide giving thanks for his fief may well not be the same as the “early” Walther who sings of the coronation at Mainz. However, to doubt whether the mood of irritability—which arose from the yearning for lasting joy—was an objective feature of the decades around 1200 strikes me as unnecessarily academic.

t h e p r e ca r i o u s e x ist ence of t h e p í ca r o

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ixteenth-century readers may have experienced it otherwise, but from the perspective of literary history, the genre of the picaresque arose unexpectedly and, so to speak, without warning in Castilian culture. From there, it soon cast its spell on authors and readers elsewhere in Europe. In 1554, the first three editions of the anonymous work, La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes y de sus fortunas y adversidades, appeared simultaneously in Burgos, Alcalá, and Antwerpen. The fact that the genre is apparently without forerunners—that a textual tradition culminating in its distinctive narrative structure and type of main character has not been uncovered—has, for decades now, prompted scholarly speculation about possible “models” and “influences,” even going back to St. Augustine’s Confessions. To be sure, in the Middle Ages, there were works and genres that featured—as do picaresque novels—a series of episodes of the more or less “adventurous” kind; here, various encounters permitted the identity of the protagonist to be displayed in different aspects. The highly influential “courtly romances” of Chrétien de Troyes, which were composed in the third quarter of the twelfth century, show young knights who—for various reasons—have lost honor and status at King Arthur’s

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court. The knights win their positions back by means of cycles of two aventiures; in the process, they offer paradigms of aristocratic comportment. In the middle of the twentieth century, the great medievalist Hugo Kuhn first showed how the individual components of this complex “double circle” fulfilled key narrative functions. Because they incarnate abstract and unchanging values, the heroes of this genre and their paths of adventure may be called “allegorical.” In the so-called “prose romances under Spanish conditions”—the very specifically Iberian development of the European tradition of chivalric romance that Miguel de Cervantes would soon parody—the highly differentiated narrative structure and component parts flattened into a series of episodes that could be shortened or, more often, lengthened, at will. In the fourteenth century, a unique work—in the literal sense—with the same structure was composed in the Castilian tongue: the Libro de buen amor. This book brings manifold narratives and linguistic forms together at the vanishing point of a sinful individual called “Juan Ruiz, el Arcipreste de Hita.” The resulting complexity does not achieve full coherence (which makes the Libro de buen amor all the more fascinating—even though it excludes its possibility of being a direct precursor to the picaresque novel). Afterward, fifteenth-century vernacular historiography on the Iberian Peninsula brought forth collections of short biographical works; here, all the distinctions and caste virtues one expects of monarchs and members of the high nobility are mixed—often, in astonishing ways and without clear order—together with observations about their physical weaknesses and vices. The innovation and remarkable historic discontinuity represented by Lazarillo de Tormes lies in the way the work’s episodes form a narrative arc, which in turn allows the protagonist’s distinctive charactertype—the personality of the pícaro—to emerge. Two qualifications are in order, however. In contrast to the narrative structure of Chrétien de Troyes’s courtly romances—where heroes resolutely seek rehabilitation from the very moment they lose status—the path of the picaro—from

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chapter to chapter, but also within individual episodes—is depicted as a process of learning. For example, Lázaro’s first master—a blind beggar who exploits his condition to great effect—punishes him, time and again, with extreme cruelty. Lázaro reacts by hardening himself and waiting until he can obtain revenge in a highly skillful manner. As they stand in front of a stone column, Lázaro tells his patron that an overflowing gutter lies before them. “Jump as far as you can,” he says, “and you’ll get over the water.” I scarcely had time to say this before he reared up like a billy-goat and hurled himself as hard as he could, having taken one step back to give himself more impetus. He crashed head first into the post, which rang as if a pumpkin had hit it, and then fell back half dead with his head split open.

Having obtained his freedom, Lázaro takes off forever. (The reader learns that the blind man, astonishingly, survives the prank.) Such an education—Bildung, if you will—makes Lázaro hardboiled and bent on survival. However, the hero is not just a clever ruffian. After serving a priest who is avaricious to the point of sadism, Lázaro hires himself out to a third master—a petty nobleman. He soon discovers that his patron is even poorer than he is; because of his social station, however, the noble is not free to employ strategies of survival such as begging and stealing. Lázaro resolves to help “Escudero” and his kind with all the generosity he can muster: “This man,” I said, “is poor and nobody can give what he hasn’t got. But the stingy blind man and the evil priest, God gave them both plenty, one for his job and the other for his quick tongue; they nearly starved me to death and I was right to leave them, just as I’m right to take pity on this one here.” As God is my witness, whenever I meet one of those gentlemen today, walking along as if he owns the place, I’m sorry for him and wonder if he’s going through what my master suffered. Even though

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he was poor, I enjoyed serving him more than any of the others for the reason I’ve given.

If, then, the key difference between courtly romances and Lazarillo de Tormes lies in the fact that the protagonist learns from everyday life—instead of just being a complex allegory for aristocratic values—it is important to observe that the further adventures of Lazarillo—after the third episode and the good master—do not yield a unified narrative arc. In the seventh (and last) chapter of the book, Lazarillo reports, full of pride, that he now serves the executioner of Toledo. Only at this point does the reader learn to whom, within the fiction, he has been addressing his autobiographical account. The story has been offered to the friend of an archpriest—also in Toledo—at whose house Lazarillo’s wife “comes and goes”—that is, where she is a concubine, as the reader readily surmises: We got married and I’ve never been sorry because, besides her being a good and attentive girl, the priest is always very kind to me. Every year I get, more than once, a whole load of corn; I get my meat at Christmas and Easter, and now and again a couple of votive loaves or a pair of old stockings. He arranged for us to rent a house next to his. On Sundays and holy days we nearly always eat in his house.

The nature and extent of the agreement are obvious. With the exception of one of the very first editions of the novel—where certain inserted comments make it all but impossible for the reader not to draw this conclusion—the text offers no “objective” proof that Lázaro is a cuckold. What “betrays” the fictional hero is the almost burdensome intensity of his insistence—which does not fit with his origins or biography—that he occupies a respectable station. Such affirmations make what he says precarious, and they create a growing mood of nervousness and irritation. They begin on the first pages of the work, where Lázaro, the son of a man who was executed for

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stealing grain, cites Pliny. I will return to this nervous, irritated mood and tone. Beginning with the multiple editions that appeared in 1554, Lazarillo de Tormes—the first picaresque novel—inaugurated a genre whose course is curious—bizarre, even. As early as 1555, the story was printed in an edition that added a second part containing a great number of interesting episodes; the expanded text did not, however, resume the hero’s character development. The continuation, that is, lacked the quality that had distinguished the picaresque genre at its inception. For almost half a century, the picaresque produced nothing new—until, in 1599, Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache appeared in Madrid, in two installments; in 1640, Mateo Luján wrote the sequel. Guzmán de Alfarache is a character who—like Lazarillo de Tormes—learns from his adventures, yet his long story does not culminate in a (precarious) balance, as occurs, for example, with Lázaro’s “agreement.” The final sentences of the 1640 continuation show how the text and genre remained open for further elaboration: This is where all my carefree steps led me, even though—praise be to God—I soon escaped to freedom. In the third part of my story I will recount how I fled the galleys and all else that befell me in life. I extend the invitation, if this portion has not already proven too dull or bothersome.

The continuation of Guzmán de Alfarache was never written—perhaps because the genre had already exceeded its limits of productivity by 1640. Remarkably, Francisco de Quevedo’s Buscón was already written in 1604, even though the book did not appear in print until 1621. In every way, Buscón is to be taken as a parody of the picaresque genre. In 1605, Pícara Justina appeared; here, the main character is a woman. One has the impression that, already by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the genre had entered a phase of involution—the stage of development characterized by new versions of the same basic structure, which has ceased to be truly productive.

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Formulated in sharper terms, this might mean that the history of the picaresque genre between Lazarillo—which did not maintain the potential of its narrative design up to the end—and Guzmán—which abandoned its productive potential altogether—left open what one could call its “logical culmination” as a kind of hiatus. At the same time, among literary readers—far beyond the history of the genre in the concrete sense and, indeed, without interruption and until today—an intense fascination for picaresque characters has remained alive. In terms of reception and influence, an unusual amount of energy seems to have emanated from this literary form. A series of questions follows: What particular historical constellation gave rise to the picaresque novel? Why did the genre enter a stage of involution before it really became productive? What underlies the fascination that the picaresque hero holds over and above the historical situation in which “he” originated? A constitutive feature of the pícaro—and of Lazarillo de Tormes, more than any other—is the way that the hero’s “true identity” and the “false identity” resulting from adaptation are resolutely maintained and guarded. The protagonist blackmails himself into an honorable public position, which he pays for with domestic humiliation. The mood of the work—which is never made explicit—results from the fact that Lázaro’s “rise” to respectability (that is, the identity he obtains through adaptation) is purchased at the price of permanent disgrace as a cuckold (the identity he cannot conceal). Conditions of existence like this must have been commonplace in fifteenth-century Spain— and not just for the Jews and Muslims who, after the expulsion of 1492, remained in the country and clung to their faiths under the mask of conversion. The discrepancy between everyday habits and official status—alternation between deception (engaño) and disappointment (disengaño)—concerned much broader swaths of a society in which, already by the early sixteenth century, distinct structures of modern subjectivity had emerged. It was this discrepancy, above all, that made it possible for the Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to create

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the first world empire in modern times; to counter the challenge posed by the Reformation, this imperial role included the mission of placing the yoke of Christian orthodoxy on subjectivity and autonomy. Social mobility was not impossible in this society, but it could not occur without paying tribute to the authority of orthodoxy. From the end of the sixteenth century on, the picaresque novel participated in—and articulated—this climate of duplicity. One hundred years later, it had become divided into two largely independent spheres of life. As can be gathered from Calderón’s El médico de su honra, sacrifices must be made to honor that had been threatened in the public sphere—even when there was no real reason for doing so; political offices and duties were distributed independent of the actual qualifications held by those who received them; the gap between the nominal and actual value of money grew wider and wider. Under such conditions, the life-story of someone like Lazarillo de Tormes lacked affective immediacy, whereas instability and a truly ecstatic ability to practice social masquerade came to the fore. This is exactly what Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache and Quevedo’s Buscón depict. The historical moment when everyday experience had validated the duplicitous mood of the picaresque novel was long past. Why do we remain fascinated by the pícaro to this day? Why do we take pleasure in discovering “picaresque heroes” in works that have little or even nothing to do with the historical genre? I suspect the answer has less to do with the joyous attitude of such adventurers than with their small—and often dubious—triumphs and their capacity for disguise, which seems limitless. The complex historical phenomenon that confronted the world around 1550—and the problem that has preoccupied philosophy ever since (and today more than ever)—concerns the astonishing human capacity for self-deception, as well as the impossibility of ever practicing self-deception to the point of absolute (self-)certainty. Existential philosophy of the mid-twentieth century (above all, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness) and contemporary analytic

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philosophy seem to have cycled through nearly all the variants of this predicament. The conclusion seems to be that we are stuck—between the poles of unattainable transparency and complete delusion—in a state of varying degrees of self-inflicted error. Even when we discern the difference between truth and illusion— as the fictional Lázaro does in writing his story—a note of uncertainty vibrates in every affirmation. Not rarely, it leads to overreactions— for example, to the rejection of objections that no one else has even thought of. Lázaro inflicts this dilemma on himself and gets caught: Evil tongues—that we’re never short of and never will be—make life impossible for us, saying this and that and the other; that my wife goes and makes his bed and cooks his dinner. I hope God forgives their lies.

In the original, the last sentence sounds just as confusing—and despondent—as it does in translation. Like many others living under the conditions that prevailed in mid-sixteenth-century Spain, the hero seems to have reached a point where the impossibility of believing the lie that sustains him also prevents him from voicing it even somewhat convincingly. When Lázaro explicitly forbids those around him to speak of his “situation,” he admits that what is not to be said is, in fact, the truth: Nobody’s ever heard us mention the subject again. In fact, when I sense that someone wants to say something to me about her, I cut him short and say: “Look here, if you’re my friend, don’t say anything to upset me, because anybody who annoys me is no friend of mine, especially if he wants to make trouble between me and my wife. I love her more than anything else in the world, even more than myself. Thank God, life is marvelous for me with her, much better than I deserve. I swear on the Sacred Host itself that she is as good a woman as any in Toledo. If anyone says the opposite I’ll kill him.” As a result nobody says anything and there is peace at home.

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With each of these words, the reader gains certainty about the protagonist’s real situation. The feeling of what, still today, the Spanish call vergüenza ajena—that is, the embarrassment one feels for another person (even a character in a novel)—becomes more and more intense. What grabs hold of us to a point verging on physical unwellness is the climate of tension that arose from historically specific circumstances, which the text of Lazarillo de Tormes makes present. In the end—and above all in rereading the novel—this mood of embarrassment lies thick on the whole work—even in passages where the narrator strikes a self-confident tone. For this reason, the final sentence sounds like the beginning of an end that will not be long in coming: That was the same year as our victorious Emperor entered this famous city of Toledo and held his parliament here. There were great festivities, as Your Honour doubtless has heard. At that time I was at the height of my good fortune.

Readers will, of course, never know what “truth” lies behind these words—or, because this is a work of fiction, what it “might have been”—but they can be sure that they should not trust the narrator any more than he trusts himself.

m u lt i p l e lay e r s of t h e wor l d i n s h ak e s p e a r e ’ s son nets

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n the seventh of nine years I spent at the Siebold Gymnasium in Würzburg, the English teacher was named Emil Reuter. He was known more for being what people call a “character” than his intellectual style or scholarly ambitions outside the classroom (which some teachers still harbored at the time). The unmistakably Lower-Franconian accentuation of his spoken English was legendary. He often—and eagerly—brought forth its cadences by reciting the classics. With Emil Reuter, we read and discussed Oscar Wilde’s Canterville Ghost word by word—so slowly that today, almost fifty years later, I can still recite lengthy passages from memory. Just once—in a single lesson, I believe—he delivered Shakespeare’s wonderful Sonnet 18, whose fourteen verses—beginning with “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”—I am ready, even now, to reproduce for anyone. What “Old Emil,” as we called him, said about works generally did not merit further discussion: Shakespearean sonnets have a different structure than Petrarchan sonnets (of course, none of us had read Petrarch); “summer days” in England are mild, that is, less warm than in Germany (to say nothing of Italy or the Adriatic coast); to be sure,

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Old Emil would have rejected—had he acknowledged it in the first place—the observation that, in Shakespeare’s lyric, it is most often a male lover addressing another man. Yet far more has stayed with me from this single class than mere anecdotal amusement. Ever since—and without reliving the Franconian accent—I have simply been happy whenever Sonnet 18 has been set before my eyes. At such times, I have experienced the wish that, at some distant point in the future, I might have more time to devote to Shakespeare’s hundred and fifty-four poems. Only: What is it exactly that stayed with me for decades—in spite of Emil Reuter’s accent—like the promise of something I couldn’t name? Put somewhat differently: What is it of the sonnet’s beauty and power that touched me so deeply—when I was sixteen or seventeen—that it stayed with me, like the small scar on my left hand that I got in a bicycle accident? The scar recalls the pleasurable exertion that comes from riding fast in the wind (as well as the occasionally unpleasant results of such activities). “William Shakespeare” is not my own invention any more than the figure—the ideas and feelings associated with this name—that we use today to experience and understand what the great Harold Bloom (with particular attention to the Bard’s plays) has called “the human,” tout court. Bloom has declared Shakespeare the permanent, unavoidable contemporary of our modernity. Perhaps his grandiose claim does not go far enough. All the same, I am certain that what fascinates me in Shakespeare’s plays and—even more—in his sonnets is the historical difference they present. It seems they have concentrated—and absorbed—an entire world: the loud, dirty, tender, dangerous world of Shakespeare’s London around 1600. Now, it seems, they offer us the certainty that—for brief moments—we can dive into this time both in spirit and bodily, too. Whoever recites Shakespeare’s sonnets—or stages his plays—lends physical presence to the words, phrases, and rhythms of his day, calling forth a vanished world. This is not a matter of “remembering”—as one

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says all too readily—but of “making-present.” When they are called forth to new life, the words strike the bodies of listeners from without; at the same time, they—and the images and meanings they convey— affect us “like a touch from inside.” Both aspects together—the “outer” sound of the words and the power within them—can make Shakespeare’s world present again. The atmosphere is different from what is familiar to us. For this reason, it is so alluring that it touched us even as pupils in a Würzburg classroom. As a matter of principle, texts and artifacts soak up the atmosphere of their times. In both aesthetic and historical terms, however, everything depends on the degree to which texts absorb them and the intensity with which acts of reading and reciting make these moods present again. As love sonnets, Shakespeare’s poems—with their images, tropes, and forms—are inscribed in the European tradition of Petrarchism, which polished the style of the Occitan troubadours (which often creates an impression of immediacy) into a rhetorically perfect repertoire of elegant—and for the most part impersonal and distancing—formulas. In Shakespeare’s hand, these formulas became loaded again with a new—and different—energy. We cannot ever know who, exactly, inspired them, nor can we find out precisely whom they were intended to delight. Yet all the same, we cannot avoid picturing the author as a “genius of imaginary identification,” as Stephen Greenblatt has observed. While writing his works, it seems that Shakespeare played a number of roles in real life; he conquered this terrain for his texts. Although we may not always notice it, we cannot—nor should we—doubt that the atmosphere of a particular presence of the past can touch us directly; at the same time, we sense that this world and its atmosphere will never materialize fully or assume definite form for us. In fact, it is impossible not to see how moments of the past must necessarily find greater or lesser resonance in specific “presents” and life-situations of posterity. The “Renaissance” itself experienced such renaissances throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To

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move beyond the general logic of history and hermeneutics, Shakespeare’s works have the potential—one that is perhaps unrivaled in our culture—to achieve density and immediacy in the ways they make the atmosphere of their own world present. I would now like to show how Shakespeare’s sonnets preserve such climates and moods in different layers. These levels of significance are connected along manifold and varying lines; however, they are distinct from one another and can be classified as separate phenomenal spheres. They affect the reader or listener simultaneously; yet at the same time—at every moment—some elements are suspended and others start up, like different instruments in an orchestra.  For Shakespeare, the universe and the stars—which are significant both astronomically and astrologically—provide the cosmic horizon where events of love occur: Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck; And yet, methinks, I have astronomy, But not to tell of good or evil luck. . . . [. . .] . . . From thine eyes my knowledge I derive, And, constant stars, in them I read. . . . (Sonnet 14)

Almost all the passages belonging to this peripheral layer seem, at first glance—at least from the perspective of our own times—to translate cosmological references into metaphorical descriptions of the beloved. But historically—that is, in the context of Shakespeare’s sonnets—one realizes, at second glance, that the lovers and their love are not made present by metaphors alone. Instead, because they are part of the universe; they embody and materialize its concrete and spiritual realities. Thus, the dynamic presence of the entire universe in the company of the beloved is not just a hyperbolic formula of erotic rhetoric (as would

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be the case in Petrarchan verse); when we take the language seriously— in an altogether physical sense, that is—it shows its true power: . . . For nothing this wide universe I call, Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all (Sonnet 109)

If this were just a matter of conventional rhetorical amplification, then it would be entirely superfluous to emphasize, as Shakespeare does in the second line (“in it thou art my all”), that the lover perceives no one—and nothing—in the whole “wide universe” except for the beloved. Shakespeare never fully transforms the natural world or the things within it into metaphors for people and human affairs. By allowing them to retain the vitality of possible literalness and concreteness, he charges them with energy. The same is true of the next layer of Shakespeare’s world and the atmosphere within it: the seasons, weather, and their influence on all that belongs to nature. Shakespeare emphasizes that human existence belongs to the same order of reality as the growth of plants: . . . I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky. . . . (Sonnet 15)

Thinking about his beloved refreshes the lover as rain does the earth: So are you to my thoughts as food to life, Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground (Sonnet 75)

However, nature also shows itself in the violence it visits on aging bodies. The introductory sonnets in particular—but others, as well— dwell on the possibility that the lover, like autumn leaves, is doomed to wither and fall: That time of year thou mayst in me behold, When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang (Sonnet 72)

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The beloved is not safe, either. The lover knows nature will not spare him, even though he stands at the peak of earthly perfection: When lofty trees I see barren of leaves, Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard: Then of thy beauty do I question make. . . . (Sonnet 12)

A plausible biographical interpretation has taken these lines in reference to the Earl of Southampton, who was as famous for his looks as for declarations that he would never be wed. In recalling the fleeting nature of physical beauty, Shakespeare may have meant to urge the young man to contract a legitimate marriage and transmit his radiant qualities to descendants. Speculation of this sort will never provide more than hypotheses. However, the fact that Shakespeare’s sonnets time and again—and in the face of all skepticism—elicit such guesswork is evidence of the life that dwells within them. From comparatively general associations with the cycle of the seasons, the signs of age pass to the body of the beloved, and the mood intensifies: The glass will show thee how thy beauties wear, Thy dial how they precious minutes waste, The vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear, And of this book, this learning mayest thou taste: The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show Of mouthed graves will give thee memory. . . . (Sonnet 77)

From the folds on the beloved’s face, the first traces of a more serious decline appear. On the next level of significance, scars mark his countenance: Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn, When beauty lived and dies as flowers do now (Sonnet 68)

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In the complex atmosphere and mood of the world in Shakespeare’s sonnets, nothing is stronger than the intricately gradated feeling of time running on and running out; we can look back on it, but no will, desire, or sacrifice can alter its rhythms. After stars, seasons, and the aging body, space is a further layer of the world that surrounds the lovers. Often, however, it remains a mere stage for movement and temporality: Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do minutes hasten to their end. (Sonnet 60)

Above all, the space the poems call forth separates, time and again, the radiant young beloved from his aging lover, whom only a leap—a mental leap, at any rate—can bring into desired closeness. No matter then although my foot did stand Upon the farthest earth removed from thee, For nimble thought can jump both sea and land As soon as think the place where he would be (Sonnet 44)

Once spatial proximity has been established, the physical presence of bodies offers the next palpable register of world, atmosphere, and mood. “Sociability,” as this level may be called, is not only—or even primarily—a dimension of intentions, strategies, or opinions in Shakespeare’s sonnets; it does not yield anything like “communication.” Above all, it is perceived in the voices of people in the surrounding environment: . . . when her mournful hymns did hush the night; But that wild music burdens every bough, And sweets grown common lose their dear delight: Therefore, like her, I sometime hold my tongue, Because I would not dull you with my song (Sonnet 102)

At any rate, the presence of others—and, as we can see: one’s own presence for others—is felt as uneasiness and sometimes even as a state

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of threat; hardly ever is it a positive turn of events or the experience of fulfillment: That use is not forbidden usury Which happies those that pay the willing loan (Sonnet 6)

The mere presence of the beloved entails the possibility of being wounded: I do forgive thy robb’ry, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty; And yet love knows it is a greater grief To bear love’s wrong, than hate’s known injury. . . . (Sonnet 40)

That said, the state of fulfillment in the company of the Other is by no means impossible in Shakespeare’s sonnets. It occurs as the moment when the inspiring physical closeness of the beloved becomes one with the presence of the lover and, thus, the breath and voice of the poems themselves: How can my Muse want subject to invent While thou dost breathe, that pour’st into my verse (Sonnet 38)

In these verses, too, I believe, “breath” does not simply provide a metaphor for spiritual animation that occurs through the mediation of the beloved. For breath, voice, and living energy give the sonnets an altogether physical presence. Therefore, the bodily unity of the lovers is ultimately the matter at the core of the sonnets’ mood, which enfolds them in many-layered tones and dimensions, up to the stars. Like a magnet—the innermost force governing the world—the beloved draws the elements of the world to himself (or herself ): What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend (Sonnet 53)

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The soul of the lover experiences an inexorable pull: Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth, Feeding those rebel powers that thee array (Sonnet 146)

 The vividness of Shakespeare’s world, which touches us so profoundly, is also due to the explicit elaboration of manifold contrasts between heterosexual and homosexual forms of eroticism. The conventions—or, at any rate, the preferences—of that particular moment in history permitted celebrations of sexual fascination between men as a happier and more beautiful form of intimacy. Of course, this circumstance did not devalue the force of pure physical attraction between men and women: Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, Which, like two spirits, do suggest me still: The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman coloured ill. . . . (Sonnet 144)

For all that, Sonnet 20 presents the physical (genital) differences between men and women as a matter so far inferior to the tender admiration of same-sex beauty that they—physical differences—do not even provoke the lover’s jealousy of the women with whom his beloved entertains erotic relations: A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion; A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false woman’s fashion. [. . .] By adding one thing to me nothing: But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.

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And yet, there are also—in poems where heterosexual love is evoked— wonderfully vivid and, for us, astonishingly direct descriptions of sexual arousal. They include the following allusion to the extreme sensitivity of the delicate skin of the palms: How often when thou, my music, play’st Upon that blessed wood whose motion sounds With thy sweet fingers, when thou gently sway’st The wiry concord that mine ear confounds, Do I envy those jacks that nimble leap, To kiss the tender inward of thy hand (Sonnet 128)

 Like most collections of songs and poems—especially those of the medieval and early modern periods—there are too many moments of coherence between Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, as they stand arranged, for us to disregard signs of narrative entirely. Yet at the same time, an altogether coherent story never emerges; nor does the sequence offer clear traces of a biographical narrative. Without a doubt, Sonnets 127– 152 are addressed to a woman, whereas most of the poems that precede them—with varying nuances, of course—are inspired by same-sex eroticism. The overall impression is not of “episodes” or “chapters,” so much as a polyphonic, tension-filled, and dynamic unity of varying tones. This complex fusion is the characteristic mood pervading Shakespeare’s sonnets. The sound of the voice seeking embodiment and the significance of the poetic images do not meet in wholly complementary—much less static—agreement. Instead, the reality of poetry—and not just of poems that Shakespeare composed—challenges readers and listeners: at every moment, from the first word on, our focus must alternate, without interruption, between subtleties of meaning and nuances of sound. As occurs with poetry in general, we encounter a phenomenon that divides our attention between content and form. A perfect

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correspondence between subject matter and the sounds of poetry can never occur, for they belong to different orders of reality. Our attention may come to rest on one side or the other, or it may oscillate between them. The “agreement” between sense and sound—which criticism of past generations invoked so readily—cannot yield a stable balance, for these elements do not belong together within the same ontological dimension. Our attention may come to rest on one side or the other, or it may oscillate between them. However, a “correct” focus does not exist when one reads poetry. This basic state of affairs may be illustrated without great effort. Sonnets with an especially high degree of semantic complexity or complicated wordplay are poems to whose contents we can do justice only when we refuse to let the rhythms they provide carry us along. This is true, for instance, of Sonnet 136, in which Shakespeare juggles with the multifarious meanings of the verb “will,” on the one hand, and “Will,” the abbreviated form of his own name, on the other: Will will fulfill the treasure of thy love, In things of great receipt with ease we prove.

Another example occurs in Sonnet 145. Here, a sentence that begins in the second verse reaches a definitive—and, of course, surprising—conclusion only in the last line: “I hate” from “hate” away she threw, And saved my life, saying “not you.”

Just as often, of course, we encounter the problem in inverse form— that is, we experience the impossibility of fully grasping the complex semantic contents of words in their full dimensions because we follow the prosody so closely. I believe that it is so difficult to appreciate Sonnet 18 in its entirety because its special charm lies in the particular intensity of tension-filled and oscillating harmony, in the sense just described. It does not help to isolate individual syntagmatic components for analytical purposes,

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or to combine them with particular images or meanings. In Sonnet 18, the full array of meanings associated with the fading of youth and beauty—to which the poem defiantly demands an end—are brought together with a sequence of continuous rhythm that seems to accelerate gently before ebbing off, toward the end, in reserved pauses: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou are more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease has all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometimes declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st, Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Perhaps now—in reading or reciting the poem in its entirety—we have grasped the complexity resulting from the imbrication of layers from a vanished world more fully than we did at first. Perhaps we can assess more clearly, in tandem with this simultaneity, the sense of condensation and homogenization that the rhythm produces. We have encountered the many dimensions of a past world, which can touch us through these poems and their verses—and which are immune even to incompetent delivery and banal commentary. However, despite all explications about its conditions, the moment of aesthetic experience remains an individual event, which cannot be induced or guaranteed. There is no proof of such events other than the empirical certainty of those who experience them.

a m o r o u s m e la n c h o ly i n t h e n ov e lla s o f m a r í a d e zaya s

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hat is called the Golden Age of Spanish literature coincided with the drama of the Habsburg Monarchy on the Iberian Peninsula: ascent, world domination, and then decline. This dramatic arc begins around the middle of the sixteenth century, after Ferdinand and Isabella—the “Catholic Monarchs”—united their scattered feudal territories into a modern state, and the picaresque genre, in translations and imitations, began to secure a European readership. After the discovery of the New World, the Golden Age reached its luminous peak in the early seventeenth century, whose literary coronation was Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605 and 1615). Subsequently, the “classical age” of Spain falls into a series of military debacles and economic disasters that lasts until 1700. Against this background, there emerged Lope de Vega’s comedies and Pedro Calderón’s “Great Theater of the World,” which brought earthly existence and the hereafter together on stage. Yet this long century is not the great age of literature for Spain alone. It is also the time of Shakespeare, Corneille, Molière, and Racine. Their works have determined what European readers have ex-

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pected from literature ever since. Perhaps their canonization—which seems like natural fact, if not eternal truth—also explains why the numerous female authors of the time received no recognition for three centuries and were rediscovered only in the most recent phase of literary history (when, to be sure, they have been celebrated for programmatic reasons). Among these women writers, we find María de Zayas, who was born into a noble Madrid family in 1590 and, between approximately 1635 and 1650, distinguished herself with two collections of widely read Novelas ejemplares, which famous male writers of the day also admired. Novelas ejemplares—according to expectations passed down from the Middle Ages—are supposed to be short narratives in which knowledge that has been derived from the past (exemplum) is applied to the always-new and uncertain present, for instruction and orientation. That said, Zayas’s novellas are, without exception, love stories in which women—with determination and intelligence, but also under the protection of standing institutions such as marriage and the veil—assert female desire against male domination. Thus, one of her characters goes so far as to report every imaginable detail of a sexual escapade to her husband, only to reassure him that she would never have dared be so open if her story were at all the truth. What, then, was better suited for interpretations of Zayas inspired by feminism than to praise her texts for their “subversiveness”? Only occasionally—in marginal glosses—was it noted that the supposedly “transgressive” author had never achieved a fundamental critique of the social order of her day. However, such quiet expressions of regret never prompted anyone to seek a historically nuanced perspective on her texts. Thus, the most obvious historical point was overlooked: namely the fact that María de Zayas became a truly great writer within the literary conventions of her time—instead of doing so from a position of eccentricity. One can already gather from the prologue to the Novelas ejemplares that she did not participate in intellectual currents that,

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with some justification, have been called seventeenth-century “feminism.” Such “feminism” developed—above all, in France—from the Cartesian understanding of human existence, which—because it relies solely upon thought—neutralizes physical differences between the sexes (implicitly, at any rate). Zayas, in contrast, derived her claim to equality—in a matter that is much less convincing, philosophically— from the Aristotelian concept of “substance” as the fusion of matter and form; because she appealed to the “equality” of matter, the difference between bodily forms was not neutralized at all, but endured. In terms of literary history and aesthetics, it is of greater import to realize that her heroines, who are only “transgressive” in appearance, behave in exactly the same way as most other characters in classical Spanish literature, from the picaresque novel to Calderón’s dramas. With a maximum of virtuosity, they employ all the opportunities of rhetorical deception and disguise that they can. In the process, they become emblems of a world whose modernity could only develop “under cover” (as Machiavelli observed with regard to the Catholic Monarchs) and against the grain of Christian cosmology. In this rhetorical climate, even a woman’s name on the cover of a book could be interpreted as part of a disguise—although, needless to say, nothing indicates we should doubt that Zayas was actually a woman. Perhaps—after the loud waxing and the much quieter waning of feminist enthusiasm—it is now timely to concentrate on Zayas’s novellas from a perspective that takes their language seriously and does not just focus on their rather schematic plots. In doing so, one cannot fail to see how a confusing multiplicity of textual frames seems to block—and even bar—a twenty-first-century reader’s access to the narratives. The dense growth of such frames begins with the reproduction of manifold licenses for publication and innumerable dedicatory poems, on the one hand, and it concludes (among other places) at the end of the first novella, with its premise that the story of the lovesick Jacinta, which begins here, had been passed on to Fabio, a “wanderer

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on the ranges of Montserrat.” In-between, there unfolds what Niklas Luhmann, in a discussion of early modern literature, once called “compact communication”—that is, descriptions of fictional situations of performance and listening. In early modernity, such scenes helped the isolated readers of printed works to become attuned to the worlds they contained. The situation of compact communication that Zayas paints so masterfully is the serao, a literary gathering of young people from the best families, who meet during the Christmas week to while away the hours of their bedridden friend Lisis. Around her bed, they assemble and listen, on “brocade-embroidered cushions of green velvet,” as the beautiful Lisarda—upon whom the sick girl’s fiancé Juan has cast a lustful eye—recounts the sad story that Fabio once heard from Jacinta. The more (or less) subversive plot unfolds without going into any psychological depth—it strikes modern readers, in particular, as mechanical and dry: Jacinta yields to Félix, who is engaged to Adriana; Adriana learns of their dalliance and takes her own life by poison; entirely unaffected by the other woman’s death, Jacinta, that same evening, throws herself into Félix’s arms once again to “console” him; acting upon a well-founded suspicion, Jacinta’s father seeks Félix’s life; he pursues the youth so relentlessly that Félix joins the Spanish army for Flanders, where he meets his death; Jacinta falls in love once more: this time, with Celio; alas, he does not return her affections. The appeal of Zayas’s novellas, at least for us, does not lie in her narratives, which are rather conventional and offer little substance. Instead, it lies in her descriptions, which luxuriate in rhetorical pageantry. Only tangentially do the descriptions have anything to do with realities lying outside the text. At the very beginning of the first novella, the hilly landscape around Monserrat is stylized as dramatic alpine scenery with “peaks of steep mountains,” “bleak paths,” and “the crystalline water of rushing brooks.” When, at the culmination of the tale, the servants of Adriana—who has fallen victim to their jealousy—

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undress her, they discover a farewell-letter to her mother concealed “under a button of bluish gold between her abundant breasts.” Soon thereafter, the reader encounters Jacinta—now “barefoot and scarcely dressed”—fleeing from her father. On the way, the author uses every opportunity the narrative affords to introduce the names of cities and regions, which she promptly decorates with a profusion of adjectives, as if they filled the pages of a book of emblems. The combined effect of these passages recalls the atmosphere of poems by Luis de Góngora, which stimulate the reader’s imagination over and over. Their signals move and point in different directions, yet they never coalesce into a coherent picture of the real world. Instead, the gesture of stylizing description—like the painting and music of the time—generates the intensity of the most varied moods and atmospheres. María de Zayas awaits rediscovery for her masterful summoning of this kind of literary Stimmung. Indeed, the self-reflective sentence with which Jacinta concludes the first novella anticipates Martin Heidegger’s philosophical insight that different atmospheres and moods depend on different configurations that occur between past- and future horizons: “I surrendered to Félix, until death took him from me, and I will yearn after Celio until death defeats my life.” Between fulfillment, which has been lost to the past, and the desire for loving futurity, Zayas’s novella elaborates a dense atmosphere of enamored melancholy. This mood also envelops the young ladies and gentlemen gathered at Lisis’s bedside as they listen, enraptured, to Jacinta’s story from Lisarda’s mouth. And because Lisis senses that the melancholy tone of her love for Juan hangs suspended in the ambient mood of the novella, she sings a sad sonnet to the accompaniment of guitar at the end. The song begins: “Never shall your forgetting destroy my love, for it wears the armor of firm resolve. . . .” Whatever the cost of rediscovering the rhetorical charm of Zayas’s novellas, the effort promises to open a new perspective on most of the works from the great period of European literature that also founded

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the tradition to which she belongs. For too long, perhaps, we have focused on the plots of dramas and narrative prose. In so doing, it seems we have overlooked the fact that names and titles such as Hamlet, Othello, and Lear stand for the intensity of markedly varied atmospheres, in which we may—and should—wish to immerse ourselves. Is the same not equally true of the pathos of Racine’s tragedies, the entirely different register of Corneille’s dramas, the worlds in Molière’s comedies (which hardly present uninterrupted happiness), and, indeed, for the adventures of Don Quixote, “the knight of the sorrowful countenance”?

ba d w e a t h e r a n d a l ou d voic e Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau

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here are engr avings of city scenes from eighteenth-century France in which the flawless geometry of buildings seems to deny human beings their proper dimensions. The figures look lost in the bright space of monumental Reason—as if they were there by accident and, in fact, wholly unnecessary. Material objects take center stage in these pictures, and they always receive enough room to attain their full vastness. Nowhere does this occur in a way that so closely approaches a mood of exhilaration as in the planches—the volumes of illustrations accompanying Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. It is easy to imagine the first-person narrator of Le Neveu de Rameau—who takes the stage by referring to his habit of “taking a stroll, in good and bad weather alike, at the Palais Royal every day at five in the afternoon”—as one of the marginal figures in a field of objects of this kind. Today, the Palais Royal is a remarkably calm square at the center of Paris, behind the Comédie Française. It has remained almost unchanged for the two hundred and forty years that have passed since Diderot—with uncharacteristic secrecy—worked on the manuscript

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of Neveu. Before the Revolution, however, it was filled with politically and economically ambitious parties, artists, writers, and the most beautiful women of Paris. Here, they gathered under the open sky, in cafes, and at newly established restaurants (which did not exist before this time). This milieu fascinates Diderot’s narrator, who, because he considers himself an intellectual—or, in the language of the day, a philo­sophe— also tries to emphasize how far removed from this world his thoughts and movements are: “I sit alone on a bench and give my thoughts free rein; if it’s cold or raining, I go to the Café de la Régence and watch the chess players.” In this same Café de la Régence, the narrator meets Jean-François Rameau, nephew of the famous composer JeanPhilippe Rameau. The man is well known among his fellow Parisians as an “original”—or, in less euphemistic terms, a bum of the elevated variety. His temperament is as variable as the weather. (In the epigraph, from Horace, Diderot invokes the Roman deity of the seasons and elements.) People called Rameau a “misshapen giant” and an “eagle of the spirit with the practical abilities of a turtle.” His protruding lower jaw seemed to be the emblem of his personal philosophy, which centered on eating and pleasures of the table. Rameau describes himself even more mercilessly than his contemporaries, it seems, and he takes manifest joy in provocations that are impossible to top. He calls himself “scum,” “a spoiled mediocrity,” “bootlicker,” “liar,” and “thief.” Above all, he affirms, over and over, that he is “utterly unprincipled” and a “pauper.” There is nothing he will not do to “drink good wine, devour rich meals, cozy up to pretty women, and sleep in soft beds.” Such is Rameau’s philosophy of life, and it allows him to deem himself a thinker of substance for his times. Even more than his convictions and values, the violent tempo of his speech pushes aside—and tramples underfoot—the philanthropic positions advocated by the philosophe-narrator. Rameau commands attention with his deafening, stentorian voice. He hurls salvos of nouns

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and verbs at his interlocutor; although they have specific referents, the words all sound ironic coming from him (“the sovereign, the minister, the financier, the magistrate, the soldier, the man of letters, the lawyer, the prosecutor, the merchant, the banker, the artisan, the singing master—all honest people”). Rameau also toys with names that—especially to proponents of Enlightenment—signify scandal and disrepute. Above all, he frustrates the narrator’s efforts at real conversation by taking his questions at face value: “What I’ve been doing? The same as everybody else. Good, bad, and nothing. When I’m hungry, I eat, insofar as there’s an opportunity; when I’m thirsty I drink sometimes; and because my beard grows the whole while, I get a shave now and then.” Hegel was undoubtedly right, in Phenomenology of Spirit, when he affirmed that Diderot wished to occupy both roles within the dialogue at the same time—the “torn consciousness” of the nephew (“Him”) and the “calm, honest consciousness” of the philosophe (“I”)—for the Diderot of the fiction, in contrast to the author Diderot, simply cannot “give as good as he gets.” The self-deprecating irony that the philosopher endeavors to maintain at first (“My intellect must be limited”) dissolves into a sobering account of the situation: “I was confused by Rameau’s power of mind and depravity—the perversity of his feelings and his exceptional forthrightness.” At the same time, the philosopher begins to register that he is less offended by his interlocutor’s convictions than by his “tone”—without, for all that, being entirely able to distinguish between the words that batter him and the cold cynicism that overwhelms his conscience. When Rameau admiringly tells the story of a “renegade” and “traitor” who exploited the friendly trust of a Jew only to terrify the latter with fabrications about the Inquisition and, ultimately, obtain his fortune, the philosopher finally loses his cool: “I don’t know which gives me greater horror—the evil of this man or your way of speaking about him.” The variability of the weather functions as an emblem of Rameau’s

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temperament at the beginning of the text. Now, more and more, the sound of his voice becomes a medium in which his disposition expresses itself and materializes as the dominant mood. Rameau is constantly humming or singing pieces of music that seem to accompany and gloss the themes of conversation. Such vocalizations provide the bridge to an outburst that the narrator experiences as “Rameau’s pantomime.” As we would say today, Rameau passes from a digital to an analog mode of communication: he copies meanings with physical gestures instead of representing them with words. “Rameau took hold of what I said as a pantomime. He threw himself down, stuck his face against the ground, and seemed to hold the toe of a slipper between his hands. He was crying and sobbing. Then he got up quickly and continued in a serious and deliberate tone.” The nephew of the great composer concludes by playing all the parts in an orchestra and mimicking the movements of the conductor. He does so to the point of exhaustion: “the sweat running down the wrinkles on his forehead and down the length of his cheeks mixed with the powder in his hair, came down in streaks, and lined the top of his coat.” By now, Rameau has cast a spell on the actors and their audience; he has won the admiration of the philosophe, who is almost proud of him: “I wouldn’t be worthy to be your pupil,” he avers. Even now, “Him” remains more than a few steps ahead of “I.” Thus, Rameau collapses—for a moment—into gestures of desperate abandon. He “groans, sobs, and beats his fists against his temples.” Only socially marginal parties like himself are condemned to such convulsions, he laments—they, unlike the powerful, are denied any real opportunity to satisfy their desires. In Le Neveu de Rameau, the otherwise static space of eighteenthcentury reason overflows with frenetic life, to the point of bursting. Clearly, it was this atmosphere that prompted Goethe to react, in 1805, with such enthusiasm that—after his friend Schiller had obtained the manuscript from the archive of Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg—he translated the text (which had remained unpublished and

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without a title) and called it Rameaus Neffe. Diderot, he wrote, understood how to “unify the most heterogeneous elements of reality into an ideal whole”; the author had “no peer for vividness, power, imagination, variation, and charm.” In the nineteenth century, when the original was thought lost, Goethe’s translation provided the basis for the first French editions of Diderot’s text. The conversation between the two characters ends as surprisingly and abruptly as it began. Suddenly, Rameau realizes that it has grown late. He hardly has time to say goodbye; leaving the philosopher alone and almost abashed, he heads off to the opera. There, Rameau remarks hurriedly, he intends to hear the music of Antoine Dauvergne (a figure who is long-forgotten today). Purely in terms of historical chronology, an opera by Mozart might have been performed instead. This possibility, while trivial in essence, directs our historical gaze—against the grain of conventional ideas—toward astonishing affinities. In some of his correspondence—including the notorious letters to “Bäsle from Augsburg”—no lesser party than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart worked himself up into a style whose hyperbole and obscenity rival the verbal torrents of the fictional Rameau. Just as Diderot’s character (and, presumably, his historical model) guarded against comparison with his famous uncle, Mozart suffered from the memory of his sensational fame as a child. Today, we know that Mozart’s often humiliating financial problems had less to do with a lack of success or underpayment than the composer’s inability to maintain an extravagant lifestyle for himself and his wife, Constanze. Still, does Mozart not belong to that other space—that other climate of “Enlightenment”—which Rameau’s nephew, in Diderot’s text, embodies so glaringly and lives out so perfectly? Mozart’s sensuous music and devotion to the pleasures of this world are to be associated less with ultra-rational geometry and architecture than with the pictorial worlds of a Francisco de Goya—and especially, the multiplicity of forms and thoroughgoing ambivalence

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of feeling in his Caprichos, where the sleep of reason (a wording that may also be rendered “dream of reason”) engenders a swarm of nocturnal creatures that extend their wooly wings over a dozing philosopher. Mozart’s works may also be compared with a famous scene in D’Alembert’s Dream—another dialogue by Diderot. Here, the mathematician—who was the author’s friend and collaborator—dreams of microscopic life in a drop of water in such a feverish manner that he ejaculates. D’Alembert’s accompanying exclamation bewilders his friend Mademoiselle de Lespinasse: “Oh, the vanity of our thoughts! The poverty in glory and in our works! The wretched smallness of our vision! Nothing is real except drinking, eating, living, loving, and sleeping.” Diderot died July 31, 1784, in an apartment he had occupied for only a few weeks. The new lodgings were on Rue Richelieu. Two years later, the first roofed arcade in Paris was built in the Palais Royal, out of wood. Quickly, it filled with stores for luxury items and a changing array of cafes and restaurants. On engravings made in the following years, this Galerie de bois interferes with the transparency and strict harmony that otherwise prevail in the architecture and arrangement of space. In 1827, it burned down, and the wood was replaced by metal and glass. The atmosphere and moods of an economy that is ours—the highs and lows of rates of production, variable indexes of consumer confidence, and, above all, changes in the stock market—may well have begun in that other world, on the opposite side of Reason, where Rameau’s nephew dwelled.

h a r mon y a nd ru p t u r e i n t h e l i g h t o f ca s pa r dav i d f r i e d r i c h

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n 1774 caspar david friedrich was born in Greifswald close to the Nicolai Church; the house, which was situated near the beautiful buildings of the city’s university, burned down in 1901. Friedrich’s father was a soap- and candle-maker who had come to Greifswald a few years earlier from nearby Neubrandenburg. Since the nearest competition was located in Stralsund—a town that was scarcely occupied—he managed to achieve a certain level of prosperity. At the time—and until 1815—Greifswald belonged to Swedish Pomerania. The late eighteenth century was no highpoint in its history. Greifswald had some five thousand inhabitants; its houses were built in various styles that had emerged since the late Middle Ages, and there was little evidence of the classicism fashionable in the present; fewer students than before—or later—matriculated at the university; few ships sought the town’s harbor. Friedrich must have experienced childhood as a time of painful loss and separation. His mother died in 1781, leaving behind seven children and a husband who mourned her passing too much to wed again; this was not always the case at the time, but his sons and daughters pre-

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Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen. Caspar David Friedrich © akg-images/André Held

sumably understood. Three of the six siblings did not reach adulthood. One of them—Johann Christopher—drowned in 1787 while rescuing his thirteen-year-old brother Caspar David, who had fallen into the water while ice-skating. Seven years later, Friedrich went to Copenhagen to be trained as a draftsman and painter at the Royal Academy. In 1798, he returned to Greifswald for a year, but circumstances increasingly drew him to Dresden. There, in his atelier, he created almost all the works we know today. He achieved a certain measure of national recognition; in life, however, he was not celebrated as one of the great

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artists of the day. Painting, for Friedrich, was a matter of self-application and “conscious work.” The landscapes on his canvases are, above all, those he recalled from West Pomerania, and he often made trips back to his home region. In the summer of 1818, he did so for longer than otherwise: at the age of forty-four, the artist had married Caroline Bommer, a girl from Dresden who would give him three children. The famous painting Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen—a masterpiece of light—can be traced back to an excursion made in those weeks; evidently, it shows Caroline and her husband in the foreground. Seventeen years later, Friedrich suffered a stroke from which he would never recover. He died May 7, 1840, in Dresden.  It is well known that on many of Friedrich’s canvases—for the most part in the foreground of the pictorial space—observers can be seen. Art historians have determined that this is almost always the case in works from 1815 on. In contrast to so many painters, musicians, and writers of his day, Friedrich never had the ambition to participate in contemporary philosophical debates (many of which have become “classics” for us); that would not have suited the form of Protestantism he practiced and lived. All the same, however, the observer-figures situate Friedrich and his works in relation to the epistemology of the epoch. What Michel Foucault, more than forty years ago, identified and described as the “crisis of representation” in The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses) occurred historically as the emergence and institutionalization of a role that Niklas Luhmann has called “secondorder observation.” A second-order observer observes the world being observed; the figures in Friedrich’s paintings make its possible for us, when beholding them, to see ourselves seeing. Precisely this—watching oneself engaged in the act of watching the world—seems to have become unavoidable for Western intellectuals and artists after 1800. We do not know exactly what prompted this profound realignment of the relationship between culture and its material environment; we

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may surmise that it had something to do with the progressive internal differentiation of bourgeois society, in which it became increasingly difficult—impossible, even—to assume that the parties with whom one interacted saw the world in the same terms. The emergence of second-order observation—exemplified by the figures in Friedrich’s paintings—set the long-term tone of philosophical discussion by posing two problems. Contrary to the nature and ways of the rationalist, “Cartesian” subject (cogito ergo sum) passed down from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom intellection is predicated on consciousness alone, the second-order observer rediscovers how his relationship to the things-of-the-world is determined not only by the conceptualizing functions of consciousness, but involves the senses, as well. As a result, the question arises—a question that remains unanswered to this day—what the precise nature of the relationship between experience and perception is. The second problem stood closer to concerns that Friedrich himself acknowledged. This is the problem that arises whenever it occurs to the self-reflexive observer that his perspective on—and interpretation of—the world and everything within it depends on the particular position he occupies. That is to say: in view of a potentially limitless number of perspectives, an infinite array of interpretations and modes of encounter may exist for a given object. Consequently—and this can be clearly perceived in our retrospective view of the first decades of the nineteenth century—there emerged something like an epistemological horror vacui: the fear arose (however rarely the origin or essence of the phenomenon may have been understood) that, in view of a potentially unlimited number of representations for every object of experience, there might ultimately be no referent—no material index within the world—at all. Friedrich was certainly aware of the latter problem, and he tried to provide a solution by means of his observer figures, which offered “correct” perspectives inasmuch as their views on the world are adequately focused and central in pictorial space. Such is the impression I receive from the pathos-laden and colorful painting, Woman Before the Ris-

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Woman Before the Rising Sun. Caspar David Friedrich © akg-images/ Joseph Martin

ing Sun (1818). Reading Friedrich’s relatively sparse commentary on his works, we see how important it was for this artist—who worked in a studio—that painting, as a process of adjustment and bringing-intofocus, offer a way to gain the right perspective on the world. Friedrich described it in terms of “soul” and “harmony”: I must . . . repeat what I have already said so often and in so many ways, namely that art is not—and should not be—merely a skill, even though many painters seem to believe just that; rather, it should really be the language of our feelings and the disposition of our character—indeed, the language of devotion and prayer. . . . Objects are not the important thing, for they are nothing unusual. The fabrications of a master’s hand are not important, either; rather, it is the pouring-forth of what has seized and moved one’s soul purely, deeply,

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and intimately. [. . .] Perhaps the artist loses touch with what has struck him as well-considered and cleverly arranged because he—just like the picture—has dissolved into a state of pure harmony. Sensations have become the law governing him; his mood—his spiritual elevation—can bear no other fruits. The pious man prays by saying nothing—the Highest One hears his words, all the same. Thus does the artist endowed with feeling paint, and those endowed with feeling understand and acknowledge him; even somewhat dull people can at least sense what he means.

In these words, we can see that it was not a matter of course for Friedrich that artists like himself entertained a proper relationship with the things-of-the-world. All the more, then, did harmony become the object of his desire. The situation called for Stimmung—atmosphere and mood. This ideal emerged in the transition from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth, when the great thinkers (Goethe and Kant, among others) sought harmony between existence and the things-ofthe-world—a “proper” relationship that had ceased to be self-evident.

Monk by the Sea. Caspar David Friedrich © akg-images

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 Friedrich and his contemporaries yearned for such moments of harmony, which they no longer expected, much less considered to be guaranteed. Of course, this did not mean that they wanted to hold fast to moments of harmony to the exclusion of all else. Heinrich von Kleist was impressed by Friedrich’s dark Monk by the Sea because he saw how this work presented the impossibility of placing oneself in a “correct” relationship to the sea. In his description of the painting (or, more precisely: his commentary on a discussion that Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano had authored), it becomes clear how the observer-figure on the canvas enabled the viewer of the painting, from his position of second-order observation, to experience a relationship full of tension: It is glorious to look upon an unlimited desert of water in the infinite loneliness of the shore, under a murky sky. One does so knowing that one has sought it out, that one will have to leave, that this is impossible, that everything one needs to live is lacking; yet all the same, one hears the voice of life in the rushing of the tide, the blowing of the wind, the movement of the clouds, and the lonesome clamor of birds. Part of it is the demand the heart makes—a “breaking-off,” if I may, inflicted by nature. This cannot occur in a painting, yet I found what I wanted when I looked upon this one: a demand that my heart made of the picture, as well as the breaking-off it inflicted on me. Thus, I myself transformed into the monk; the picture became the dune.

The “breaking-off ” that the painting—and nature—inflict on the observer is as far as can be imagined from Kant’s conception of the beautiful, which he defined as a “form of the purposefulness of an object insofar as it is perceived without the representation of a purpose.” On the contrary: Kleist’s description has the effect of a mise-en-scène of the sublime, which Kant defines as a “feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy

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of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law.” One should not, then, seek to reduce Friedrich’s landscapes to the sole formula of harmony between man and nature. Rather, they must be understood in terms of a spectrum of observer-perspectives extending from the beautiful harmony of properly adjusted figures, on the one hand, to the sublime displeasure experienced at the breaking-off that occurs between nature and observer, on the other. The three fig-

Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Caspar David Friedrich © akg-images

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Meadows Near Greifswald. Caspar David Friedrich © akg-images

ures in the foreground of Chalk Cliffs on Ruegen strike us as cautious and slightly intimidated—if not as dramatically isolated as the Monk by the Sea. The painter’s young wife sits on the left in graceful uncertainty, not daring to lean too far forward. On the right stands an unknown man; he balances on a protruding root, risking to slip and fall. In the middle—fearful yet curious at the same time (in an almost comical way) as he gazes into the deep—Friedrich himself kneels. High above the gray light, the well-known Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog invites and defies danger, too. Before the middle of the twentieth century, such images of the Sublime would never have been associated with the concept of Stimmung, as obvious as it may now be for us to do so. Until then, a component of harmony was thought indispensable for this dimension to exist, and harmony is incompatible with the Sublime. Friedrich worked with a

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wide range of Stimmungen in the sense the term acquired only later; he did so, that is, in a way that was ahead of the thinking and concepts of his times. When we look at Friedrich’s paintings, the observers they present hold open sites of imagination; from here, we can experience manifold forms of physical contact. In contrast to what is “represented” in texts and images from earlier times—a level of experience that often requires explication and translation into the terms of our own present—Stimmungen from the past can strike us directly and without mediation, provided that we are open for them. Stimmungen are capable of leaping across the boundaries of hermeneutic interpretation, so to speak. If one approaches Friedrich’s hometown today, on the freeway from the south, there is a point that corresponds exactly to the geometric position of the observer looking at the painting Meadows Near Greifswald. There, at the proper time of day, the sunlight meets our eyes in exactly the same way that, once in the early nineteenth century, it must have met the eyes of Caspar David Friedrich.

t h e w eight of t hom a s m a n n’s v en ice

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ccording to working notes, Thomas Mann understood Death in Venice—which appeared in 1912 and soon became a favorite for generations of readers—in relation to the theme of the “tragedy of artistic mastery.” In 1901, at the age of twenty-six, he had published Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family. A decade later, Mann worried whether he would obtain comparable success again. He also reflected on the style and subject matter “worthy” of an author who had met with favorable response from critics and fulfilled the expectations of a broad international readership; therefore, he thought, he could no longer simply follow the most recent intellectual and literary fashions. Georg Lukács’s essay, “Longing and Form,” offered a point of condensation for the debates on the “tragedy of artistic mastery”—a popular topic one hundred years ago. In this piece, the young Lukács drew attention to the “intellectual renewal” that Socrates had experienced late in life, but he drew gloomy consequences for literary authors: “poets will forever be denied such a renewal. The object of their desire has a weight of its own—life that desires its own completion. The renewal of artists always leads to tragedy, for a single form must

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unite the hero and his destiny.” In biographical terms, it is not certain whether Mann had read Lukács’s words; it is certain, however, that the essay captured the situation he faced in concise form. With Death in Venice, the intuition became a literary event. The work’s hero, Gustav von Aschenbach, experiences the beauty of the Polish ephebe, Tadzio, as a fortunate and inspirational event. This may be taken as an overture inaugurating an atmosphere of idealism—a positive initial response to the question of what, possibly, can succeed mastery once it has been demonstrated. Such—Mann believed—would be the protagonist’s openness to the power of pure beauty. Aschenbach’s fall into a state of sin, however—his lapse with respect to the normative idea—occurs in the measure that his “delicate god,” Tadzio, becomes an idol, which ultimately degrades his admirer until the latter is nothing more than a “sweaty and cosmetically rejuvenated boy-chaser.” The fact that Mann, in the summer of 1911, actually spent some time in Venice, where he recorded a “personally lyrical travel experience” that occurred when he encountered a Polish youth, has interested commentators less than the author’s philosophical reflections before writing the novella. Biographical data were—and are—hardly in demand among the learned admirers of an author who, like them, displayed so much ambition and effort to appear learned. Thus, literary critics, to this very day, read Death in Venice primarily as an allegory of the theme of the “tragedy of artistic mastery,” and not—at least not primarily—as the melancholy story of an aging man’s fascination with a boy. Another perspective offered by literary historians is no less erudite: the Nietzschean motif of “death-in-life,” which is manifest in the novella’s contents. Especially given Mann’s professed admiration of the philosopher, there can be no doubt about its presence. However, I am not particularly concerned with choosing between philosophical themes (“death-in-life,” on the one hand, and the “tragedy of artistic mastery,” on the other). Rather, I wonder whether an alert reader who is not fixated on effects (and affectations) of erudition would not be

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drawn to a third way of reading—the kind of interpretation that places greater stock in Mann’s 1911 visit to Venice than in his working through his own self-image as a writer. To the unbiased reader, Death in Venice presents itself, above all, as a series of atmospheres and moods. By no means does experiencing the work in this way exclude the possibility of also considering it as documentation of specific events and circumstances in the author’s life while writing. However, concentration on atmospheres and moods does stand in stark contrast to a mode of reading that focuses on the developments of “plot.” Indeed, if we understand the term to refer to events occurring between characters, Death in Venice hardly has any plot at all. What the text reveals on the level of narrative—especially after Aschenbach’s arrival in Venice—is the protagonist’s growing awareness of the significance and intensity held by his encounter with Tadzio. The characters around him do not change. At the same time, even this process—the aging lover’s dawning awareness—is communicated to the reader less by way of self-reflection than by changes in the meteorological conditions of Venice, which different forms of sense perception amplify. It is here, above all, that Mann’s narrative mastery makes itself felt.  Atmospheres and moods, as we have already seen, are dispositions and states of being that are not subject to control by the individual they affect. Everyday and literary language both associate them—almost obsessively—with changes in the weather or the variation of musical sounds. Stimmung is the most concrete—and, for this reason, perhaps the most “literary”—dimension in which Aschenbach’s passion occurs. The complementary arrangement of meteorological descriptions and the stages of love that he experiences—which extends from Platonic admiration to complete submission (at a distance, of course)—is crafted so ably—with such authorial skill—that the reader hardly notices how improbable the convergence really is. The same is

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even truer of Luchino Visconti’s grandiose film adaptation of Death in Venice. Here, a composer and conductor reminiscent of Gustav Mahler takes the place of the writer; within the “logic of moods,” this substitution cannot be an accident, for it enables the secondary dimension of music to intensify the primary significance of climate and weather. To be sure, what a non-professional reader may think is one thing, and what makes such readings appealing—often, irresistibly so—is another. The literary elaboration of atmospheres and moods, whose structure one need not recognize, makes it possible to be transported, via imagination, into situations in which physical sensation and psychic constitution become inseparable. Whereas individual readers of course remain free to enjoy such a mode of engagement with the text—or, alternately, to subordinate the work’s atmospheres to its rather weakly delineated plot—literary scholars should consider the goal of an approach that concentrates on Stimmung. In the essay mentioned at the beginning of this chapter (which appeared the year before Death in Venice), Lukács offered an impressive response to the question. Of course—he writes—authors are always concerned with the truth. However, the writer who seeks truth in earnest will often find what he has not been looking for at all—that is, he will find life. In this sense—the sense of early-twentieth-century Lebensphilosophie—we will produce no new analytical insights or interpretive truths when we follow the sequence and convergence of states of feeling and meteorological conditions in Mann’s text (states and conditions which are the narrative itself ). In the best of cases, we can amplify the impression of fullness they produce—not effects of edifying, half-philosophical wisdom, but the intensive concreteness of the experience that the work makes possible. Such an approach, however, tends more toward textual commentary than interpretation, for it is less a matter of disclosing the meaning that underlies the narrative than of setting free the potential it contains; this potential enables the reader to inhabit worlds of sensation—worlds that feel like physical environments.

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 If we incorporate scenes that precede Aschenbach’s arrival in Venice (about one-third of the text), the sequence of meteorological conditions may be counted as five acts, corresponding to the structure of classical, high drama. In addition, one encounters the text in a “realistic” way—in the sense of natural science, almost: at the story’s end, the passion and tragedy of the hero occur when he dies of Indian cholera. As early as the second paragraph, the text presents a description (one that is almost elliptical, in syntactic terms) of typical weather in Munich: the condition known as Föhn. “It was early May. After weeks of cold and dampness, a deceptive midsummer arrived. Although only a few leaves decorated it, the English Garden was as humid as if it were August.” On such a day, the chance encounter with a “foreign-looking” man rouses Aschenbach’s “desire to travel.” Aschenbach yearns for an environment he sees in a daydream, which strikes him (and us) as the exotic fulfillment of the Föhn, which is always surprising in its warmth: He beheld a tropical swamp under a moist and heavy sky—humid, lush, and imposing—a kind of primordial wilderness of islands, morasses, and extensions of muddy water; he saw hairy palm trunks shoot up, near and far, from lustful growths that rose from a soil fat and swelling with fantastic bloom; strangely formless trees sinking their roots, down through the air, into the earth in uneven, greenshadowed tides; roots sprung from the trunks and connected to the water or the ground through the air, formed disorienting arrangements; between swimming flowers, white as milk and large as bowls, unknown kinds of birds with jutting shoulders and shapeless beaks stood in brackish shallows, looking to the side without moving. . . . For a moment he saw the phosphorescent glow of a lurking tiger’s eyes. His heart beat in horror and longing.

Two weeks later, Aschenbach departs for Trieste on the night train. From there, he takes a boat for Pola, to “reach an island in the Adriatic

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that had grown famous in the last few years.” He remains there only long enough to realize that he “has not found his destined place.” Here begins Act II. Aschenbach leaves for Venice; the “sky is gray, and the wind is damp” on the journey. “Sky and sea remained cloudy and leaden upon arrival; now and then, a foggy rain descended.” In a gondola on the way to the hotel, he feels “the lukewarm breath of the scirocco” as he “leans back into the yielding cushions.” At dinner, on this first day in Venice, Aschenbach sees a Polish family gathered for dinner; his gaze comes to rest on “a long-haired boy, maybe fourteen years old.” He “realized, with astonishment, that the youth was perfectly beautiful.” Act III stages the tension in the emerging drama of weather and passion as an arc leading from vague moodiness to resolve: The weather did not improve the following days. Wind blew from the land. Under a pale, overcast sky, the sea lay dull and calm and seemed to have shrunk—as the sobering horizon crowded close nearby—so far away from the beach that rows of long sandbanks emerged. Opening his window, Aschenbach thought he could smell the foul stench of the lagoon. Despondency suddenly seized him. That very moment, he considered departing. Once, years ago, after a few cheery weeks in spring, such weather had affected him so severely that he had left Venice like a fugitive. Was the same feverish unease— the pressure in the temples, the heavy eyelids—now coming back?

A few days later, Aschenbach informs the reception that “unanticipated circumstances require him to depart.” On the way to the train, however, his “breast is torn.” He breathes in “the atmosphere of the city, the slightly fetid odor of sea and swamp, which had urged him to leave, in deep, tender drafts of pain.” Aschenbach has long since fallen in love, but it still seems to him that the city alone has captured his heart. At the last possible moment—his bags are already on the way to Como—he decides to remain in Venice. When he arrives at the hotel again, the sea “had taken on a pale green coloration, the air seemed

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thinner and cleaner, the beach—with its cabanas and boats—more colorful, even though the sky was still gray.” Then, Aschenbach’s gaze falls, once again, on “Tadzio, in a striped linen bathing suit with a red bow, returning from the sea, along the beach and boardwalk.” Mann begins Act IV—a brief interlude of happiness for Aschenbach—with a pastiche. As in a rococo novel, the sunny weather of the following morning appears with the scenery and figures of Homeric epic, reworked in a mocking tone: Day after day now, the fiery-cheeked god drove naked; he steered his team of four horses spitting flame through the heavens’ expanse; his yellow ringlets flashed in the stormy eastern wind. Upon the face of lazily swelling Pontos lay a silky white sheen. The sand glowed. Beneath the silver-gleaming azure of the Ether, rust-colored sails billowed before the huts on the beach.

Aschenbach—who has otherwise lived “for august duty, holy and sober service to his everyday being”—allows his senses to be open to a world of sun-filled days. He loses himself in the “balmy” fragrance of plants in the park, the “blueness of the southern sea,” and, above all, “liquid, melting sounds.” Nothing is more delightful than Tadzio’s voice, which becomes a pure melody for the man who cannot understand the youth’s words: “The foreignness turned the boy’s speech into music, a wanton Sun bathed him in a prodigal splendor, and the majestic view of the distant sea served as a backdrop to his figure.” The lover “wished to work in Tadzio’s presence, to take his proportions as a model while writing, . . . in full sight of his idol, with the music of his voice filling his ears.” The following morning, beneath the radiant heavens, Aschenbach has spotted the youth—“alone” and making his way from the hotel to the shore. Aschenbach “hastened his steps,” we read—in order to “make cheerful acquaintance with the boy, speak to him, and enjoy his response, his gaze.” Then, the tense of the verbs changes:

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He catches up with him on the boardwalk, behind the cabanas. He wants to put his hand on his head or shoulder and maybe address a little phrase to him in French. Then he feels his heart beating in his throat. Perhaps it’s the brisk walk, but he is so out of breath that he can only talk in a shaky voice. He hesitates, trying to calm himself. Suddenly, he is gripped by the fear that he has been following the boy for too long. He is afraid he has noticed; he draws near but then passes by, his head sunk.

Here, the narrative glides back into the imperfect tense. Aschenbach dreams another rococo fantasy, seeing gods, goddesses, and cherubs— a series of ”beautiful visions and blossoms in childlike clouds.” After the dream, however, the day that began in a fiery and festive manner, was entirely elevated—and strangely so—mythically transformed. Where did this breath come from, which had descended upon him so gently yet portentously, like a whisper from on high, caressing his temples and ears? Feathery little clouds stood clustered in the sky, like herds of the gods at pasture.

After this surge of enthusiasm, the transition occurs to the “weightiness of life” that comprises the long fifth act, concluding with Tadzio’s departure, under a sky troubled by the scirocco, and Aschenbach’s death by cholera. The “rotting smell of sea and swamp”—which had prompted Aschenbach to stay and opened his senses wide—combines with the “stench of the ailing city.” It is intensified by the “odor of germicidal agents” and the “dull, sweet incense” of votive offerings, which seem “almost oriental.” All of Aschenbach’s half-hearted attempts to take the signs of mortal danger and, indeed, imminent death seriously dissipate rapidly, until it finally becomes clear to him that nothing would disgust him more than breaking the “spell of the dream” that “holds his head and senses captive.” For his senses have been opened so far, and desire and contagion have taken possession of him so fully, that he no longer has mastery over himself. At precisely this moment,

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a wind both tepid and tempestuous started to blow. The rain was infrequent and sparse, but the air was thick and filled with vapors of decay. Fluttering, slapping, and rushing sounds struck the ear. It seemed that a dire race of wind spirits was active beneath the cosmetics covering the face of the feverish man.

On the morning of his death, Aschenbach feels unwell, and he “struggled with bouts of dizziness that were only half-physical in nature.” He then learns that Tadzio’s family will depart after the midday meal. A “lingering, autumn air” lies over the beach. The lover beholds the beloved one more time as the boy experiences defeat in a wrestling match with another child his age. Ultimately, he gives himself over to the illusion that the boy is “smiling and waving,” and that he now follows him. This is the last thought that occurs to him before death. “Minutes passed before people rushed to the man slouched sideways in his chair. He was brought up to his room. That same day, a respectfully shaken world received notice of his death.” The death within Aschenbach’s life discloses the intensity of life more than its truth.  Readers may find this marked convergence between the protagonist’s feelings and the surrounding weather in the five acts of Death in Venice obsessive or mannered. To be sure, it is too perfect to admit comparison with reality of any kind. However, this drama and its structure correspond to the “romantic-musical consciousness of distant thought,” which Karl Heinz Bohrer, in a discussion of European lyric of the last two centuries, has identified as a signature of literary modernity. He writes: “The particular form of romantic-musical consciousness of faraway thought is apprehended as a language of Stimmung”; its incidence is “even more immediate than the effects of romantic awareness of atmosphere and mood” in works by the “classic” writers of modernity. In this experience of Stimmung, Bohrer continues, onesided synaesthesis absorbs “the double nature of the subject, divided into head and heart” by means of the rhetorical combination of dif-

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ferent forms of sensory perception. To be sure, this effect of “musical self-evidence” belongs more “naturally” (so to speak) to the linguistic potentialities of lyric than prose. All the same, we have seen how Mann summons, by means of a change in verb tenses in prose, the impression of “time standing still,” which is typical of modern lyric and the structural prerequisite for the effects of atmosphere and mood it generates. Besides this temporal effect, the dimension of Stimmung—in prose, at least—seems also to include the amplification of the impression that one is physically enveloped in a material world. In a variation on Bohrer’s intuition, we can ask whether Mann’s prose of atmosphere and mood—reaching far beyond the “tragedy of artistic mastery”—expanded and, in the process, prepared the linguistic possibilities of existential philosophy in the twentieth century. In this case, the writer would have attained matters of philosophical substance under conditions that were entirely different from his learned (philosophical) ambitions. Perhaps the questions that we have grown accustomed to calling “existential” begin in the dimension of atmospheres and moods. As Heidegger wrote in 1927, Stimmung is the “scattering of a quake of being as an event in Dasein.” However thankful we may be for Heidegger’s concise formulation, we must, whenever we encounter phrasings like this, be thankful for the smoother shapes and gentler tones that literature affords.

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he plot of Machado de Assis’s last novel, Memorial de Aires (1908), can be easily summarized. The book tells the story of Aguiar, a high-ranking bank employee in late-imperial Rio de Janeiro before 1889 and his wife, Carmo. What is mentioned, time and again, as their “age” (the fictional author—that is, the narrator—even refers to Dona Carmo as “the old girl”) presumably alludes to a phase of life that, today, we would not consider terribly old at all. They are both in their early or mid-sixties, one imagines; this was Machado’s age when he lost his beloved wife Caroline in 1904. Like the Machados, the Aguiars have no children, and because the author would like us to picture them as kind and nurturing potential parents, he describes their life as one of “reversed orphanhood” (orfandad avessa). Despite their condition, the Aguiars have succeeded in filling the emptiness in their lives with “replacement children” (filhos postiços). Long before 1888 (when the story begins), they helped raise their godchild Tristão; since then, the young man has lived with his Brazilian parents in Lisbon, and the Aguiars have heard nothing from him. More recently, they took Fidélia into their home. She is a beautiful young widow who, after her husband’s premature death, was unable to return to her parents

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because her marriage had been a matter of passion—like the nuptials of Romeo and Juliette—and occurred against their will. The novel’s central event is Tristão’s return to Rio de Janeiro, which, although long in coming, has now inaugurated a period of calm but intense happiness for his adoptive parents. A few weeks before he travels back to Portugal, where he intends to pursue a political career, Tristão declares his love for Fidélia to the Aguiars (and, thereby, to the better society of Rio de Janeiro). Soon, they will be wed, to universal delight. All the same, Tristão is unwilling to renounce his dream of a life in politics. With the promise that he will leave Brazil for only a short time to present Fidélia to his real parents—a promise he may well believe himself—Tristão ships off to Portugal with his young wife and puts an end to the happiness of the Aguiars’ golden years.  This sounds like what Hollywood calls a “bittersweet” story. However, if one has not read Memorial de Aires along the lines of plot, the novel is scarcely recognizable under this generic designation. Summary of this kind necessarily omits what makes Machado’s final work a masterpiece. Such confusion occurred when one of the book’s first reviewers, Almáqui Diniz, complained that Fidélia—whom he considered the “heroine”—was hardly “developed” as a character and claimed that there was “no justification” for the book’s design. The novel’s form is that of the memorial, a collection of memories. Aires—whose first name the reader never learns—is a retired diplomatic counsel who records, at irregular intervals, observations and thoughts about the slow course of his life. That said—and astonishingly, in fact—Diniz’s double misunderstanding was the exception among contemporary reactions to Memorial de Aires. Most readers admired the skill of Machado. At the time, he stood at the height of his glory as the most famous author of the emergent Brazilian nation. His style “was considered as perfect as that of the best Portuguese authors.” Above all, the public esteemed his lightness of tone, even though those admirers were also

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right who—more as an intuition than as the result of analysis—compared his works to those of Flaubert. On the other hand, it seems that hardly a reader has ever tried to explain what, exactly, constitutes the incomparable greatness of this book. In fact, Memorial de Aires has always stood in the shadow of Machado’s earlier novels—even though readers, almost in mute admiration, were convinced of its conspicuous merits. The secret of the novel’s greatness—one of the secrets that remain secret because they are so obvious—lies precisely in its design; Machado’s multi-layered use of the memorial makes the fictional author (the diplomatic counsel Aires) the true hero, not the young woman in love. This hero leads a life of leisure; his thoughts govern the inner feelings and outer appearances one encounters. Aires believes that he has an especially mild and cheerful disposition: “I hate nothing and no one—perdono a tuti [sic], as they say in opera.” Whereas his professional duties and obligations had required that he not trust other people implicitly, now Aires would like to believe in everyone’s honesty; for the most part, he can afford to do so. When I was a member of the diplomatic corps, I believed very little. I was uneasy and always skeptical; one of the reasons for my retirement was that I wanted to believe in the honesty of others. Let people still in the diplomatic corps have their skepticism!

In principle, the perspective granted by his calm life seems to put everything and everyone—under greatly varying circumstances—at a distance. Aires experiences even his own impulses and spontaneous reactions at such a remove that he is only rarely inclined to follow them. He takes the stage in the novel displaying precisely this attitude. His sister Rita—the narrator’s only living relation—is a widow who is happy and at peace with her life and the world she inhabits. She writes to Aires to excuse herself for not approaching him on the anniversary of his return to Rio and suggests that they go together, the following

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day, to the family grave—“to give thanks for your happy return.” The next line, which records Aires’s reaction, gives compact form to his character, which is actually quite complex: “Although I didn’t understand why it was necessary, I wrote to her that I would come.”  Everything grows distant in Aires’s diary—and in a spatial sense, too. Although we only receive hints where, precisely, he represented his country, the places his professional activities brought him are now far away. The dramatic political events in Rio de Janeiro during the years recorded in the journal—1888 and 1889, when the slave trade was abolished and the Brazilian Republic was founded—remain distant, too. At one point, a former colleague invites Aires to a political gathering. After brief consideration, Aires declines because he feels that he owes it to his character and former profession: “My calm ways, diplomatic tact, and my age were more effective than the reins of a coachman would have been, and I said no.” Above all, there is a distance between Aires and the world that Tristão leaves for Rio de Janeiro, and to which he—the young man—will return. It is the European world of high-flown thinking and late-Romantic politics. This environment echoes with the sumptuous sounds of opera, which bring Tristão and Fidélia together at the grand piano of their adoptive parents’ house (thereby fulfilling the implicit promise of their names). At the same time, however, the very distance of the world in Europe—above all, the awareness, which is always present, that it occupies the center of things—keeps the characters removed from colonial culture. Indeed, because he comes from the mainland, Tristão is the only figure who believes that he has something appropriate to say for all that he experiences and feels. It is Tristão who continually speaks to the always-moody Aires about “elegiac” atmospheres and melancholy. Yet can one trust these words and their operatic promises when Tristão’s very name already seems so inappropriate? He is an enterprising young man who is entirely incapable of sadness—just

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as Fidélia (the “faithful”), his future wife, hardly hesitates to forget all the vows of eternal loyalty that she once promised to her departed husband. As opposed to the diplomatic world that Aires has abandoned, the here-and-now of his retired life and diary is the world of post-colonial Rio de Janeiro and environs: parts of town like Flamengo and Botafogo, and neighboring cities like Petrópolis and Nietroi. Yet Aires never describes the rousing landscapes of the city, and not a single word permits us to conceive of the house in which he records all his observations. At one point, his sister asks him for “information about an auction.” She thereby provokes the one time that Aires—with a surprising intensity of feeling—attempts to place a comforting distance between himself and thoughts of his own death: What do I know about that? When I die some day, you can sell the little I possess, with or without profit, with or without my skin; it is not young, it is not beautiful, it is not cared-for, but it will be good enough for a drum or some other rustic instrument.

Depending entirely on what Aires records in his diary, one may feel somewhat ill-provided for in the journey through the novel’s plot. In a very specific way, Aires is an “unreliable narrator.” It is possible to take every word of the novel for an honest expression of the main character, but this party does not write regularly. Sometimes his entries begin with the day and month, sometimes only the day of the week is mentioned, and sometimes there is only a time of day, without any further information. Long gaps of time occur between many entries, and Aires emphasizes, time and again, that such blanks are the result of different emotional and physical states—and not the slow course of events themselves. 9 June. This is the first time that I am writing this month. Not for want of topics. On the contrary. Not for want of time, either. Perhaps for want of desire. Now I’m writing again. Truly, there’s plenty to tell.

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Or, somewhat more dramatically, toward the end of the novel: (Without date.) Now I have not written for many days. First, I felt rheumatism in my finger, then visitors came, then there was nothing to report, then I had no desire. I’m shaking off the airlessness.

Even when the diary-writer has found a rhythm, it can be either painfully or wondrously slow. Aires often returns to early entries, and he is always revising, commentating, and interpreting them: 21 March. I would like to explain yesterday’s entry. It wasn’t fear that made me admire Dona Cesária—her eyes, hands, and, really, everything about her. After all, I’ve already admitted that she has merits. Nevertheless, it is true that the pleasure of criticism and gossip cannot be extinguished by speeches of praise, and this lady never stops irritating me, as beautiful as her teeth may be. No, I never really praised her, except to entertain myself. . . .

Yet something is much more unsettling than the irregular entries and the slowness of the narrator (which can be trying)—there is something that is unsettling in a philosophical way. Sometimes Aires observes that he is writing even though there is nothing in his life for him to write about: 13 July. Seven days without an entry, without a fact, and without a thought. Indeed, I can even say eight days, because I don’t really have anything today to write about. I’m only writing these words so that I don’t forget how to write. It’s not a bad habit at all to write about what you’re thinking or what you’re seeing, even if you can actually only say that you didn’t see or think anything at all.

At this point, the fictional author of Memorial de Aires really does meet up with the real-life writer Flaubert, who, in correspondence with his beloved, coined the famous phrase about a “book about nothing”—a book that would depend neither on plot nor, even, reference to reality. Machado’s novel—that is, the diary of the fictional author Aires—often seems “empty” in precisely this way. However, in contrast to Flaubert,

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who dreamed of a “book about nothing” only as an aesthetic challenge, Aires seems to recommend that regular writing—even writing about nothing and without a clear direction (as if one were wandering) —can give our existence a form: I grew tired writing these pages, as if I had been wandering. I use this word to obtain distance from myself. Once, I even called this diary a good habit. In the end, both these opinions may be defended. And if one reflects properly on them, they in fact lead to the same conclusion. Wandering is a good habit.

Time and again, Aires masterfully demonstrates his ability to give form to the slow course of his everyday life and, moreover, the ways in which he thinks about it. There is yet another—in my estimation, more aggressive—meaning of “nothing” in the text the narrator composes about his life; this meaning is more powerful than “nothing” in the sense of not-referring-to-the-world. Just as his sister and Fidélia have lost their husbands, Aires has also lost his wife. However, her grave lies far away—in Europe. And unlike the Aguiars, Aires does not even have adoptive children: My wife is lying beneath the earth in a Viennese graveyard, and no children came from the cradle of nothingness. I am alone, absolutely alone. The sounds from outside, the carriages, animals, people, bells—none of that exists for me. If anything ever speaks to me, then it is the clock on the wall, striking the hour. Its sound is always late—weak and sad.

 Despite the narrator’s calm mercilessness toward himself, Memorial de Aires is also a novel that speaks tenderly about lost illusions—illusions, that is, that Aires and the Aguiars never really believed in fully. Aires sees the beautiful Fidélia for the first time on his visit to the graveyard, which occurs at the beginning of the book. He tells his sister that Fidélia’s name is unlikely to stop her from contracting a new

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marriage. Rita teases him by suggesting that he might be the very man to put an end to her widowhood. Despite the difference in age, such a union would have been possible in the higher echelons of society in the late nineteenth century, especially in the colonies. Indeed, Aires comes to entertain this very idea—which his sister has not suggested in earnest (and soon forgets)—as soon as he is introduced to Fidélia at the house of her adoptive parents. Even when Aires partially acknowledges his fascination, he still insists that he is only interested in the young widow’s personality. Addressing the pages of his diary, the lonesome observer of the world—and himself—remarks: Hear, paper: the attractive thing about that lady, Fidélia, is mainly a certain form of her disposition, something that resembles a fleeting smile. I have seen it sometimes. If possible, I would like to study her further. I certainly have more than enough time.

Just a few pages later, Aires imagines Fidélia coming to his house to ask whether she should remain alone forever; he concedes that she was not made for widowhood; magically, she confesses that she has been picturing him as her future husband. In his loneliness, it costs Aires some time before he finally “understands” that this is just a dream—and a “funny” one, at that. He regains control over his emotions—at least for a moment—by telling himself that the beautiful Fidélia will remain a widow. All the same, he senses that either jealousy or envy has brought about his change in attitude. When, subsequently, Tristão finally enters the story, Aires has less room for speculation, and he loses the capacity to indulge in further rationalizations that might allow him to preserve his calm way of life. A few days before Tristão asks for Fidélia’s hand (but at a point when a positive response is not yet certain), Aires admits that he cannot be entirely honest with himself: My dear Aires, admit that you were happy when you learned that young Tristão was still uncertain. This joy will not be repeated. Per-

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haps you don’t really want Fidélia for yourself, but it would still rub you the wrong way to know that she feels passionately for him. How can you explain this? You can’t.

 Thanks to such “conversations,” Aires spares himself the need to admit his hopes for a union with Fidélia: after all, he never really permitted the thought that this kind of hope exists in the first place. Everyone is well enough acquainted with the impossibility of suppressing a feeling of loss in situations like this that we sense Aires’s pain in the very words he uses to say that he experiences no pain. From the position he occupies, it is much easier for him to acknowledge the loss that his friends, the Aguiars, experience. Ultimately, the name “Tristão”— which belongs to a man who is, in fact, always happy—obtains its full meaning because Tristão is the one who inflicts a wound on his adoptive parents—a wound that will heal only when they die. Beginning when Fidélia and Tristão announce that they will depart for Portugal, Dona Carmo and her husband seem to realize that their “family life” will soon come to an end. In the final scene of the novel, in the last diary entry (“without date”), Aires enters his friends’ house through a door they have left open. Because he can see their great sadness from afar, he decides not to speak to them. Yet his final glance and the last two sentences of the novel capture the Aguiars’ sadness in a beautiful image: Through the door onto the street, I saw, in their faces and movements, an expression for which I can find no fitting expression. I can only say how the scene affected me. It was as if they wanted to smile but could not console themselves. What consoled them instead was the nostalgic recollection of their own lives (consolava-os a saudade de si mesmos).

Aires believes that he sees his friends’ efforts to smile and be cheerful. But what really comforts them is just “the nostalgic recollection of

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their own lives.” In my estimation, a correct—if somewhat problematic, in grammatical terms—reading should render the final words as “in their loneliness”; that is, the Aguiars find “comfort in their own loneliness.” Yet the meaning of the Portuguese word saudade is more complex than solitudo, its Latin root, would suggest. Above all, saudade refers to yearning for a past condition that has gone irretrievably missing. Taking this more complex meaning as our point of departure, we might put the novel’s final sentence as follows: “What consoled them was the recollection of their past happiness—happiness they knew was lost forever.” Alternately, we might say, in the form of an existential paradox: “What gave them comfort was the realization that their selves and their lives were lost forever.” The memory of a happy past combined with awareness of present and future loss in a simultaneous experience gives the Aguiars’ pain a form that Aires sees embodied in their appearance: “At the end of the hall I saw they were looking each other in the eye. Aguiar was on the right side, his hand propping up his cheek. Dona Carmo stood to his left, her arms crossed.” It is difficult to say what, exactly, we find beautiful in this picture—the form assumed by the Aguiars’ sadness. I will not linger on psychological speculations, which are inevitably banal. It is certain, however, that Machado offers his readers the possibility of seeing the pain of his characters as something beautiful—and there is nothing cynical about his doing so, for this beauty occurs to readers only if they identify with the characters’ pain.  Today, anyone discussing an author on the periphery of Western culture feels obliged to assure the public that the party in question achieved the same intellectual and aesthetic heights as European contemporaries. In the case of Machado’s Memorial de Aires, it is easy to fulfill this obligation (even though doing so inevitably sounds condescending). For instance, we can affirm that diplomatic counsel Aires is a typical “second-order observer”—that is, an observer who cannot

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avoid watching himself in the act of watching. For this reason, Aires exemplifies an epistemological position that emerged in the age of European Romanticism and played an important role in the reconfiguration of the dominant worldview of the West, which Michel Foucault—for all time, evidently—has baptized the “crisis of representation.” Yet while the achievements of the second-order observer include the discovery that every representation of the world depends on perspective (and, in turn, an infinite number of possible perspectives), Aires, time and again, succeeds in expanding the potential for complexity within the field of observation. After all, he wishes to trust others, he would like to see the world in the way that a retired diplomat should, and—above all—he finds comfort in the realization that his own perspective overlaps, for the most part, with the view of his friends, the Aguiars. Another item to the novel’s credit—in academic and intellectual terms—lies in its proximity to Flaubert’s account of modernity. In an altogether literal sense, no writer of the nineteenth or twentieth century has come closer than Machado de Assis to completing the project of writing a “book about nothing.” However, instead of indulging in this slightly childish game of “influence” or “historical anticipation,” I would like, in conclusion, to posit that Memorial de Aires presents us with an intellectual problem that appears, some two decades later, in Martin Heidegger’s reflections on Stimmung in Being and Time. Specifically, I am referring to Heidegger’s view of temporality as a constitutive feature of atmospheres and moods. To explain what he means by Stimmung, Heidegger writes of “fear” and “anger,” “hope,” joy,” “enthusiasm,” “cheer,” and “boredom.” Then he declares, somewhat surprisingly, that analysis of these different moods will lead to a particularly profound understanding of the “thrownness” of human existence—that is, to a position between “ecstatic” dimensions of time: a future that has nothing to offer but “nothing,” and the past, which, as “tradition,” has always already limited and determined what we may do in the present. Answering

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the question—“What do the various Stimmungen have to do with ‘time’?”—Heidegger seeks to show how, in different ways, they are all formed by something belonging to the existential dimension of the past. From this perspective, we can read Memorial de Aires and Being and Time as convergent texts. I have attempted to show that Machado’s novel is not just a work about sadness, but that it demonstrates how sadness can acquire substance and form between the dimensions—and through the movements—of time. If the Aguiars derive comfort from “the nostalgic recollection of their own lives,” this implies that their present is empty and that they lack a means of projecting the fulfillment of the past into the present. Between an existential future with no “contents,” a present that is empty, and a past that is now going away, time must necessarily move slowly—as if approaching the point of absolute immobility. Yet what, in philosophical terms, is simply a pitiless description of human existence, can, by way of literature, attain beauty even though—and precisely because—it is sad. Without a doubt, sadness belongs to the Stimmungen that are more typical of the late phases of life—when we must rely, more and more, on memories of happy moments, which have now departed, never to return. At the same time—and as if it were part of a strange chiasm—sadness is also an atmosphere and mood that is especially typical of the New World— the colonial world that seems to grow more and more distant from life on the mainland. We have known for some time now that the tropics are really a world of sadness. In Joaquim Machado de Assis’s last novel, this knowledge can become the reader’s own, authentic experience.

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oodstock,” “Liverpool,” “Jimi Hendrix,” “Janis Joplin,” and “the Rolling Stones”—maybe “Berkeley” and “Paris,” too—these names conjure up a sense of intensity; in comparison, everything that followed seems flat and dull. They—the aura they possess—belong to my generation. In laying claim to this past, my generation has dragged on for more than four decades since the late Sixties, condemned to eternal youth. We tell stories of warm summer nights, unable to distinguish what is a dream and what was reality; we return to what those born later like to hear, which has always pleased us; the music and voices from the past electrify one’s skin and call us away from the present. Nothing is more powerful—nothing embodies that whole world more completely—than Janis Joplin’s voice in “Me and Bobby McGee.” Or is it what I found out I wanted to be later—something I now project into the past? Perhaps there was never a time when Janis Joplin was as close as she is in the present—now that age appears irreversible for us. The names and words she sings belong to an America full of charm and landscapes: Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Kentucky, Salinas, Cali-

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fornia. I think of Paul Simon’s gaze upon the Mississippi Delta, which seems as warm “as a national guitar” (a reference he made to the guitars manufactured by the National String Instrument Corporation, which sparkled mysteriously). Such views almost always yielded images of despairing happiness. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” One cannot lose more than what doesn’t cost anything. These words were there for Joplin’s voice, but their author could not have known she would sing them—the singer struck upon the lyrics by chance. Whoever listens, knows there is no other way. The voice sounds like dark metal, vibrating on all levels, full of mourning and hope, and so firm that an entire life can cling to it. It grows soft when memory touches the back of Bobby McGee’s hand and his body, quiet and tender as his breath, warm on the singer’s neck. Then, suddenly, the voice is so lonesome and so full of lost contentment that it collapses; right away, almost, it loses all definition, becoming one with the music. The different registers sound as if they were the only ones possible—as if there were no other way. They settle on one’s skin and hair; if they touch you, you know that this was your youth—when life was beginning and soon would end. The sounds of the instruments are rather average. Experts agree that Joplin never got the musical accompaniment she deserved. Altogether average professional musicians of a somewhat cheap variety (like those who play in high school bands or on the B-sides of shellac phonographs) surrounded her. Joplin’s voice had to break through the instruments and their uniform beat to draw them to itself. The words, voice, and instruments yield something whose essence, like an intricately crafted narrative, defies complete understanding. No low point is lower than the opening bar: “busted flat”—blown-out like a tire—in Baton Rouge, the state capital of Louisiana, whose name promises more beauty than the place has; the singer is as washed-out as her jeans, underneath a sky filled with rainclouds; all this is presented in a voice whose powerful calm no one escapes. “Waiting for the

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train.” Instead, Bobby suddenly appears and thumbs a truck. As the clouds burst, the truck becomes a world unto itself, behind rhythmically beating wipers, as the three travelers head for New Orleans. They sing and play the blues—what is there to talk about, anyway? Bobby’s hand holds hers; the voice that surrounds them is almost shy, out of tenderness. As far as New Orleans, this world is a good one for people who have nothing to lose and therefore nothing to expect: “Feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues.” Now, the voice fills the world the travelers share, like a prayer that is not entirely sure of itself—yet there is nothing more to build on. “Feeling good was good enough for me / Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.” Joplin’s voice runs from a brief moment of raw ecstasy to the point where it dissolves into indefinite syllables. What must have begun as a coincidence in the Louisiana rain, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, transforms into the expanse of a mythical journey from coast to coast; the voice’s power carries over borders, from the coalfields of Kentucky to the Californian sun, as the singer and Bobby, under ever-changing skies, become a couple without secrets. This pair is our youth, holding close and keeping warm against the rest of the world: “Through all kinds of weather, through everything we done / Yeah, Bobby baby kept me from the cold world.” Then, the voice shifts and becomes pain at the memory of what finally happened on the road between Los Angeles and San Francisco: “One day near Salinas, oh Lord, I let him slip away / He’s lookin’ for that home, and I hope he finds it.” Bobby may have vanished just as suddenly as he appeared in Baton Rouge—cursed by his longing for a real home. Or maybe he died on a drug trip, looking for calm and rest high above the clouds. Perhaps he sought to escape the endless freedom of being free to move ever onward. She has known this dream, too, and she does not complain: “I hope he finds it.” However, she has forever lost the freedom of an existence that had nothing to lose—and this freedom went missing

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long before. Now, she would exchange all the days of the future for one day of that happy, brief past: “I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday / To be holdin’ Bobby’s body next to mine.” This is the tragedy that threatens all love and all happiness—the tragedy of seeking happiness in the first place—and, even, the tragedy of believing that happiness exists at all. Happiness, when it is possessed, undoes the great freedom of those who have nothing left to lose. Happiness makes you vulnerable. For this reason, a softer, more open, more alluring, or more delicate voice has never existed. “To be holdin’ Bobby’s body next to mine. . . .” A more despairing voice has never existed, either, for her arms remain empty even as she sings. When Bobby vanishes in Salinas, she regains the freedom of those who have nothing left to lose. Memory, however, transforms regained freedom into eternal loss. The voice assumes a cutting tone, then becomes irresistible sweetness. Finally, it goes over into composed grief: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose Nothing, and that’s all that Bobby left me, yeah But feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues Hey feeling good was good enough for me, hmm-mm Good enough for me and Bobby McGee.

The voice sidles up to the music, unable to find further words. In the present, she dreams about the past; it is as if she were on a third journey—after the one between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and the other one, from Kentucky to California. On this final trip, Bobby’s name is invoked and takes on form and substance, like a song emerging from different sounds. Only one more time can the voice lay hold to more than a name; only once more does it find the words that make the singer into Bobby’s wife and widow; just once more does she sing—as if she were stumbling into the future—words that give form to her loss:

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Lord, I called him my lover, called him my man I said, called him my lover just the best I can, c’mon And a, and a, Bobby, oh, and a Bobby McGee, yeah. . . .

There follows a whole minute of the standard musical background of Joplin’s times. From afar, one hears her voice once or twice more before, at the end—as if saying goodbye and casting a spell in the same breath—she gives her body over to his name, to make him present a final time.  Even without the voice and music, we can see, the words would retain their literary and historical qualities. However, the drama of the song and its power over listeners depend much less on words and images than one might think on the basis of how I have been representing it. The drama of “Me and Bobby McGee” occurs, above all, through the modulations and metamorphoses of Joplin’s voice. Its pathos can also grip listeners who do not understand English, for the song uses words as forms; only in a secondary sense is the meaning of words important. The emotions, atmospheres, and moods that such a powerful voice summons forth are certain; anyone who has heard the song knows what they are, even though we have no concepts that might permit us to grasp them and share them with others descriptively. As a matter of principle, recordings of voices from the past—more than is the case with moving images—reach our bodies under conditions that are hardly different from the way we experience live sound. This technical circumstance may explain why, already soon after its invention, the gramophone became associated with death—or, more precisely, with the survival of the dead. The famous trademark, “His Master’s Voice,” illustrates the matter. The phenomenon was even more pronounced during the First World War, when—to unsettling effect—soldiers left records playing at posts they had abandoned in

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the trenches. In precisely this way, the recordings of Joplin’s songs and voice keep alive the existential Stimmung of youth that has passed—a state that is condensed into two lyrical sequences in “Me and Bobby McGee”: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” and, in contrast, “I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.” The case of “Me and Bobby McGee” and Janis Joplin is singularly dramatic, however. This is not just true because, for many years, Joplin was erotically involved with Kris Kristofferson (who, by the way, initially wrote the song for a male voice, which implies that the part of Bobby McGee was originally a female role). In addition, the recording featuring Joplin’s voice was made in Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles, just a few days before the singer’s body was found dead (on Sunday October 4, 1970), in the Landmark Motor Motel; her Porsche, which was famous for its “psychedelic” paintjob, was parked outside. The reason for her death is supposed to have been an overdose of heroin. Friends had reason to believe that Joplin’s dealer had delivered unusually strong “stuff ” the previous week. On her left breast, Joplin had a small tattoo of a heart. Like many other artists of her time, she had arranged for her body to be burned and the ashes to be scattered over the Pacific. Four decades later, it is impossible for me to say if the feeling of having “nothing left to lose”—or, at any rate, “wanting to have nothing left to lose”—really reached me in its full power years ago. Perhaps a great part of our “generational experience” was, in fact, rather superficial adaptation to convention. Only now, when we have become a generation of often infantile old people—somewhere between our fading parents, against whom we wanted to rebel, and younger people, who have effortlessly surpassed us—only now do we really appreciate what the promises of those months were, which I think back to as if they had been a short, eternal summer. In Janis Joplin’s voice, we recall a freedom we did not sense in the present of the past. The fact that “Me and Bobby McGee” was recorded so close to the moment

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at which Joplin died gives the voice and the atmospheres and moods it calls forth an authenticity that grips us—authenticity in the face of approaching death. This authenticity permits us to sense a broad scar on the formerly suntanned back of our generation that never grew up. We have forever missed our date with Janis Joplin.

si t uat ions

t h e i c o n o cla s t i c e n e r g y o f s u r r e al i s m

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t is difficult to decide whether “Surrealism” was a movement across European borders. Skepticism is justified whether 1920s Germany possessed a style corresponding to the array of cultural gestures that contemporary France developed and cultivated. Or—to put things more cautiously, more precisely, and in somewhat less dense terms—it is certain that “surrealistic” elements, which have passed unnoticed until now, may be found in German literature and art, provided that, for heuristic purposes, one applies concepts derived from the French phenomenon. Ultimately, however, a thorough investigation should yield—more than the discovery of parallels and surfaces of coextension between French and German cultures—a better understanding of their profound differences, which are astounding, indeed. Three entirely different considerations underlie my reflections, which are intended to illustrate this divergence, above all. The first is a fundamental attitude of reserve with respect to the assumption that—at least in European cultures—the same epochal formations can be found in all national contexts. (For example, one understands Spanish litera-

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ture better if one does not seek a fully articulated “Enlightenment” in the eighteenth century; likewise, early modern German literature is better understood if one does not regard it in terms of “the Renaissance.”) It does not dishonor German letters to deny them a “Surrealism” of their own. Secondly, for my view of this matter of literary history, an observation by Walter Benjamin has proved decisive. The remark occurs in his 1929 essay, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in which Benjamin declares that an energy gradient existed between French Surrealism and contemporary German movements. Third—and above all—I am convinced that a gradient of this kind can be better explained if one employs the concept of Stimmung instead of notions and words from that time, which attempted to string together certain programmatic aims and artistic methods (as is the case, for example, in both “Surrealism” and “Dadaism”).  Most European literatures of the first third of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of programmatic projects. “Avant-garde,” “Futurism,” “Creationism,” “Dadaism,” and “Surrealism” name different aspects of the phenomenon. In view of this verbal explosion, literary historians have, for the most part, felt obliged to take seriously all the concepts the movements proposed, as well as the particularities to which they laid claim; accordingly, scholars have sought to rediscover the ways that these notions were supposedly realized by various works—as if artistic and literary practice had adhered to the manifestoes and pamphlets typical of the times. Historically, it is more appropriate and important, in the first place, to describe—and circumscribe—the outpouring of energy that must have animated the programmatic drive within European and American national cultures at the beginning of the twentieth century; secondly, the task is to identify specific points of rupture. I don’t want to belong to those literary critics and scholars of my generation who have invested Benjamin with the robes of a “seer.” However, I appreciate Benjamin’s view, according

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to which Surrealism is a central source of energy with conditions of appearance that vary by national context: The know-it-alls who even today have not advanced beyond the “authentic origins” of the movement, and even now have nothing to say about it except that yet another clique of literati is here mystifying the honorable public, are a little like a gathering of experts at a spring who, after lengthy deliberation, arrive at the conviction that this paltry stream will never drive turbines. The German observer is not standing at the head of the stream. [. . .] He is in the valley. He can gauge the energies of the movement. . . . He . . . has no excuse for taking the movement as the “artistic,” “poetic” one it superficially appears to be.

 The shared “energy”—the international European climate—at work in literary and artistic movements of the early twentieth century was undoubtedly a long-term-consequence of a complex epistemological event that had already occurred by the early nineteenth century. In The Order of Things (Les mots et les choses), Michel Foucault analyzed this phenomenon as the “crisis of representation.” Here, for historicizing purposes, I am again applying the notion in terms of “the emergence of second-order observation”—a concept that Niklas Luhmann originally coined for strictly systematic use. The fact that, beginning with the philosophy of the late-Enlightenment, human experience has become self-reflective is, in my eyes, a reaction to the rapid growth of skepticism concerning the capacity of our organs (in the broadest sense) to provide an “adequate representation” (whatever the phrase may mean in specific contexts) of the world beyond human consciousness. One can understand both the history of Western philosophy of the last 250 years and the history of Western literature and art from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century as so many encounters with this problem. The philosophical dimension is the less dramatic side of the phenomenon: it articulates itself in the topology

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of a growing distance between “subject” and “object” and leads, again and again, to efforts to negate this gap cognitively and practically—or at least to reduce its effects. Literature and art, on the other hand, encounter the problem in ways that, since the middle of the nineteenth century, have often escalated into feelings of frustration and passive-aggressive attempts at self-marginalization (for example, when Baudelaire calls himself the brother of the “hypocritical reader” in the last line of the introductory poem to Les Fleurs du mal [1857]). Soon after 1900—first in Central Europe and then quickly in all Western cultures—these feelings transformed into iconoclastic gestures. It is as if artists—and their works— wanted to say that they were no longer interested in representation, its methods, or techniques, since representation cannot be perfectly true to life, anyway; that they would sooner grasp no reality at all than a reality that is only partial. A key moment in this “turn” toward fractured representation is Dada—a cultural event that was a shared European experience animated by figures such as the Romanian Tristan Tzara, the Alsatian Jean Arp, and the German Hugo Ball. Guillaume Apollinaire, in a 1913 essay on modern painting, describes his times from three viewpoints that meet up with our historical analysis. He, too, sees the energy that has been suddenly released as the effect of a process that started in the eighteenth century and is common European heritage: If this movement, whose origins one can already distinguish in the eighteenth century, seems limited to France, then this is the case because Paris was the capital of art in the nineteenth century. In reality, the movement is not French, but European.

Secondly, Apollinaire understands the growing distance between reality (or what passes for such) and its representations as a paradoxical consequence of experiencing the impossibility of ever giving it a perfect depiction:

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Even in the case of elementary Cubism, the necessary opening-up of the geometric surface will require the artist who seeks a perfect representation of the object—especially in the case of objects with a complex form—to produce a picture that will alienate even those observers who want to understand him and the objective truth of what he means to depict.

Ultimately, Apollinaire turns the rupture of the principle of representation into a claim that non-representational art approaches a higher level of reality and truth: “the new poetic movement . . . rises to concrete and direct lyricism, which authors who merely describe [what already exists] can never attain.” The fact that the shared, European climate of iconoclastic energy took form in ways that vary nationally poses a challenge to historical analysis and nuanced description, and literary historians have never really mastered the subject. By way of at least three national “cases”— Spain, Germany, and France—I would like to indicate how one might proceed. It is conspicuous that, under a Spanish banner (and, for that matter, a Latin American one), the radical step to “grand abstraction” (or, more precisely, “objectlessness”) was never made. This claim can be illustrated by the works of Pablo Picasso. On the one hand, Picasso took distance from object-oriented painting before just about any other artist of the time: there is good reason why his Desmoiselles d’Avignon has been canonized as the first great canvas of Cubism. On the other hand, Picasso never went as far as many of his contemporaries. The same is true of the great Federico García Lorca, who—despite a tendency toward linguistic abstraction in collections such as Romancero Gitano and Poeta en Nueva York—never really completed the break with the principle of extra-textual reference (as it was called for by Dadaism, for example). A remarkable essay by José Ortega y Gasset, “La deshumanización en el arte” (1927), articulates the stakes of keeping this border intact. For reasons that are ultimately ethical, the critic inveighs against radical departures from form: works that are

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too abstract make the connection between aesthetic experience and human life precarious. It is natural to feel tempted to speculate about the reasons for the specific forms of national idiosyncrasies. But what, really, could be considered “reasons”? How do we know that the forms characteristic of nations were more than the traces of institutional sedimentation affecting individual—and, quite possibly, coincidental—developments? I will restrict myself to views to the contrary. As far as the German situation is concerned, there surely existed, from early on and in a decided way, the will—indeed, the desire—to pass beyond these borders into a non-representational dimension. In philosophical, artistic, and literary terms, however, the central concern remained the matter of finding a solution to the problem of the (apparent) distance between subject and object. Among such efforts, Heidegger’s proposal to replace subject/ object topology with the conception of “being-in-the-world”—human existence understood as spatial Dasein (“being-there”)—proved incomparably influential; in this vision, what is comfortably “ready-to-hand” takes precedence over what is “present-at-hand,” which is not quite as close. (Note the philosopher’s obsessive hyphenation!) I consider German “Expressionism,” both in painting and in sculpture, to belong to the same cultural-historical dimension, because it opened considerable space for the play of subjective experience without, however, ever giving up reference to reality as a communal experience. Many such experiments and proposals have been grouped together under the heading of “Conservative Revolution”; Hugo von Hofmannsthal coined the phrase in 1927, when he pointed toward contemporary efforts to find solutions to the problems of the present in cultures of the past and in non-European settings. In this context, the meaning of the word “conservative” stemmed from its opposition to “invented.” Today, in contrast, the phrase “Conservative Revolution” is employed with the political connotation of “proto-fascist,” which does not fully correspond to the historical situation of the 1920s—even though pro-

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to-fascist positions did become part of the cultural spectrum of the Conservative Revolution. The idea of Surrealism—Apollinaire is supposed to have used the word for the first time in 1918—does not fit the dominant tendencies of Germany, nor does it fit conditions in Spain. Surrealism centers on the individual’s encounters with material reality; this perspective is characteristically French, if not exclusively so. Things-in-the-world “act” coldly—and even brutally—because they refuse the observer a “proper” view and do not adapt themselves to fit individual outlooks. Paradoxical concepts such as hasard objectif and épiphanie profane are typical of this climate; they underscore how ontologically different dimensions—between which no mediation can demonstrably occur— exist alongside each other. In this context, human intentions, feelings, and intellectual achievements are transposed onto a level of being that is purely mechanical—as illustrated by, e.g., the idea of écriture automatique, which fascinated the Surrealists. Like the concept of “Conservative Revolution” in Germany, the French notion of “Surrealism” seems initially to have been free of all political connotations. Only at the end of the 1920s did the association between Surrealism and the political Left—which has lasted until today—become established.  No one embodies the Stimmung of early Surrealism—when the movement was not yet politically determinate and restricted—as fully as Apollinaire. He incarnated Surrealism so completely because it is impossible to draw a line between his artistic self-staging and biographical reality. In the letters he exchanged with his friend Picasso, an energy vibrates that makes all the matters their correspondence touches on seem banal and beside the point. Every moment they spent writing presents itself as a period of intensive labor, constantly projecting new projects into the future. Every single letter—in view of the present rushing past—is brief and hectic. At the same time, however, their correspondence expresses the desire for lengthier exchanges. “Above

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all, write me a long letter,” Picasso pled on August 16, 1918—less than three months before Apollinaire’s sudden death. Nor can the two correspondents ever address enough greetings to the other and his spouse (or girlfriend): “Give your wife all my best; and to you I send my purest friendship.” The stations in Apollinaire’s life strike one as staccato bursts in the key of hasard objectif. He was born the son of a Polish nobleman in Rome, in 1880; the father’s name does not appear on legal documents. Apollinaire spent the first two decades of life migrating through Europe. The course of his travels was mainly dictated by his mother (or her whims). Once, he resolved to marry the first woman he met on a train. When the Great War erupted, Apollinaire embraced all things military. After he suffered a head wound, he only wore his uniform more proudly—displaying a bandage soaked with blood. After a long convalescence, he regained his health. A few days before the end of fighting, Apollinaire died in Paris of Spanish Flu. His most characteristic artistic gesture—which is not to say the most interesting thing he did, in aesthetic terms—occurs in his Calligrammes. In these poèmes image, the arrangement of the written or printed graphemes on the white page traces the contours of objects that are also presented verbally. One example is “La petite auto”—a work that tells how, on the day of mobilization, Apollinaire (or, to be more accurate in literary-critical terms, the “lyrical I”) returned to Paris with a friend and a chauffeur. These picture-poems seem relaxed and enthusiastic at the same time; here, the formal device that others would use to voice protest borders on playfulness.  I would like to set the highpoint of French Surrealism—and, if Surrealism was, in essence, a French current of iconoclastic energy that also circulated internationally: the highpoint of Surrealism in Europe—at a time before an explicitly political encoding transformed it into ideology. In my view, the moment of canonization is marked by

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two works: Louis Aragon’s Paysan de Paris (1926) and André Breton’s Nadja (1928). Karl Heinz Bohrer, in the afterword to a translation of Nadja, has already suggested this historical judgment. The central concerns of both texts involve describing and facilitating “profane epiphanies”; here—inasmuch as it is possible to speak in such terms—I recognize the “essence” of Surrealism. For Aragon, the central experience concerns encounters with the material realities of the city—objects and things that make it what it is. For Breton, the central matter involves “meetings” with a human being—Nadja. The milieu is an everyday one, where dehumanization has occurred; apropos of the female figure, one might speak of a general—and, at the same time, a historically specific—condition of “reification.” In the observer—the one within the text (the narrator, that is) and the reader (who occupies an external position)—these moments can trigger sudden moments of ecstasy and even illumination; however, they never come together into a coherent reference point for the work’s contents or the identifications they propose to readers. According to Bohrer, it is a matter of the “tragic insight into the necessary misrecognition of the identity of the other. Commonplace talk about identity—Surrealism suspects—fails to acknowledge that true identity is only attainable for the blink of an eye.”  “Profane energy” seems to provide the conceptual vanishing point for all the reasons Benjamin finds, in his 1928 essay, to explain why French Surrealism is superior to its German correlates. Significantly, he describes Surrealism as energy that circulates throughout an entire nation. That is to say, the situation in France forms a distinct atmosphere and climate: Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways are beginning to age), on godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred window of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action.

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They bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point of explosion. What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at a decisive moment precisely by the last street song on everyone’s lips? The trick by which this world of things is mastered—and it is more proper to speak of a trick than a method—consists in the substitution of a political for a historical view of the past.

As much as possible, one should disregard Benjamin’s obsession with affirming that all his observations are political. This tendency is typical of the time, and it went wild around 1930. In doing so, one can see how references to energy, atmosphere, and climate occupy key positions in what he writes: “insurrection,” “exploding,” “fanatical will,” “language commanding the I,” and so on. Benjamin viewed Surrealism as a force pulsating on the border between sleep and waking, where form-giving, stable productions of meaning are impossible.  In 1931, Paul Nizan translated Heidegger’s inaugural lecture at Freiburg, What is Metaphysics? into French. Although he did not employ this metaphor, Nizan clearly thought that he, too, was standing “in the valley” of an energy gradient that flowed into national cultures—this time, from German philosophy. It is historically significant that his reading of Heidegger’s philosophy focused on the motifs of “nothing” and “nihilation”—to such an extent, in fact, that he presented Heidegger to his readers as the “founder of the philosophy of nothingness.” Nizan understood “nothing” in the sense of the profane epiphanies of Breton’s novel—that is, as the impossibility of providing contours of meaning to existence (in Heidegger’s terminology: Dasein). Ten years later, this experiential gesture would set the tone and mood of the first existentialist novels: Sartre’s La nausée and Camus’s L’étranger. That said, Nizan’s reading transformed the significance of “nothing” in Being and Time into its very opposite. Heidegger had written entirely in the spirit of the Conservative Revolution, with its

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concern for new relationships between the subject and the world. For him, the courage to confront the future of death as an irreducibly individual event—the experience of death as “nihilating”—ultimately becomes an opportunity for Dasein to find authenticity and, in the process, locate an existential dwelling. Only those who do not expose themselves to the radical experience of nothing will fall into the deficit of meaning that Heidegger calls “the They” and “idle talk.” For Heidegger, if one acknowledges the limits of one’s own life as the end of consciousness—an end that is absolute—one can, starting from this low-point, confer form upon one’s own Dasein.  This, however, is just one version of the story—a philosophical one—about the opposing fields of energy that connected French and German cultures in the first half of the twentieth century. Another account of events—one that I would like gesture toward without, however, making teleological claims—might be called “the revenge of the profane epiphany.” This story concerns Heidegger after the “Turn” (whenever, exactly, the change in currency—or voltage—took place). It is Heidegger after the existential analytic—the man who, in his “Letter on Humanism” (1947), answered his French admirer Jean Beaufret in the coldest possible way when the latter asked, after the Second World War, whether “the human”—however modified in conception—was still possible. This same Heidegger had, I think, arrived at a conception of Being that—and here one should not waste intellectual energy on matters of “influence”—displays interesting points of convergence with the vision of profane epiphany in Surrealism. In Heidegger’s late philosophy, Self-unconcealing-Being (das sich selbst entbergende Sein) is the being of individual things in their material and substantial concreteness, unframed by any particular context. Such being “wants” to show itself—perhaps without the partiality of specific perspectives—but this is not the doing of Dasein or human beings. People may well be required as catalysts in this process, but everything

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depends on the movements of Being itself, which is something greater than they are; indeed, they are part of it. At any rate, Self-unconcealing-Being is a constant challenge for Dasein. Therefore it does not dictate meaning—as little as profane epiphany does. Self-unconcealing-Being—like revelation—belongs to the dimension of epiphany. For as long as the ontology of late Heidegger finds intellectual resonance—we might therefore claim—the core essence of Surrealism and its iconoclastic energy have not yet grown entirely cold.

“ t r ag i c s e n s e o f l i f e ”

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oday still, we associate the third decade of the twentieth century—which, in cultural terms, was probably the richest—with the vibrant image of the “Roaring Twenties”: a time as explosive as it was intense, whose taboo-breaking remains provocative in many ways, even now. The life of the modern metropolis suddenly emerged—first in New York, but soon also in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Moscow, Tokyo, and Chicago. It held the rest of the world in its unswerving and obsessive spell; just pausing to stop and think seemed to contain hints of death. The Roaring Twenties strike us as a frenetic dance—this, at any rate, is an image of the times, and it has not faded. Perhaps it was a dance on a hidden volcano. Yet because we equate dancing with being alive, and being alive—without any real justification—with happiness, it is necessary to take a second look. Doing so, we sense that a climate of despairing uncertainty and deep disorientation characterized the decade. This lack of orientation occurred, above all, in an existential dimension—that is, in individual life experiences and the manifold philosophical and artistic articulations that followed from them. A

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backdrop is provided by socialism—despite the revolution in Russia, perhaps it had already run its course for the most part—as well as nascent fascism. These massive ideologies gave rise to the greatest collective sense of certainty that modernity has produced. Although socialism and fascism—along with various efforts to renew Christian teachings—were or became mass movements, the optimistic messages they offered (for very different reasons, of course) hardly penetrated the sphere of individual existence. If we can trust accounts from the years between 1920 and 1930, they hardly occasioned happiness. Even as a distant horizon of embodied existence or the topic of philosophical speculation, happiness had largely lost its status as a point of reference and possibility. It is no coincidence that Max Scheler, as early as 1922, inveighed against contemporary philosophy’s oblivion in an essay entitled “The Betrayal of Joy.” Time and again, the evacuation of happiness called forth defiant attempts at protest of this kind—however, they remained mere attempts and empty gestures.  How had the world—the Western world, at least—fallen into such a mood of insecurity and despair after the happy beginning of the twentieth century, which had often—and gladly—called itself the Belle Époque? Hardly an adult in the 1920s would have failed to point out the effects of the Great War—an astonishing fact inasmuch as this conflict (above all in Russia and the territories formerly occupied by the Habsburg Empire) had led to events of national and social liberation; the prospect of just this had unsettled the permanent self-celebration of the Belle Époque. If one compares photographs from the summer of 1914 and the winter of 1918/1919, one sees the same generation of men and women. In just a brief span of time, they have aged—not by years, but by decades. These people are both careworn and hardened. The empty faces of German soldiers in Berlin, who returned defeated (but still marching in columns, of course), hardly differ from the expressions of French soldiers parading in Paris. It seems that almost no one

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in Europe could muster the energy to participate in the projects that Woodrow Wilson, above all—the President of the United States with an academic pedigree—magnanimously inaugurated (by creating the Yugoslav state, for example). On the other hand, there were only few veterans of the war who did not wish to change their lives from the ground up—e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, who liquidated his enormous financial inheritance to devote his energy and attention to philosophical and philanthropic projects. Today, especially since the years between 1939 and 1945 have made the conflict between 1914 and 1918 into the “First” World War, it is no longer immediately obvious what changes in the world were so shocking that they had such a profound impact on individuals’ understanding of their lives. The question is all the more fascinating in view of the fact that the destructiveness of the Second World War—above all, its effect on civilians—cut incomparably deeper than that of the First; the intellectual and existential reactions after the truce in 1945 seem astonishingly reserved. Even if it is impossible to arrive at an explanation of this contrast, one should consider, first of all, an experience that occurred in millions of different forms, which some of the great writers who participated in battle—such as Ernst Jünger and Louis-Ferdinand Céline—lent literary form. It was the so-called Materialschlachten that took place from 1915 on and new weapons—the machine gun, for example—that gave rise to the feeling that individual courage and intelligence did not even improve soldiers’ chances for survival. Here, there occurred the first “death of the subject” of modern times: the role of the hero vanished. It had been predicted—and, moreover, one is inclined to observe today—that the end of heroism would create happiness by lightening the weight of existence. From the perspective of the Social Democratic values and ideals of European middle classes today (which seem so self-evident), this interpretation is not to be rejected; however, in the years after 1918, it would not have been plausible—or, formulated differently: sufficiently heroic—even to Socialist intellectuals.

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In addition, there is the fact that, above all in the Danube Monarchy and Germany—but elsewhere, too—the main result of the implosion of the hierarchy of social estates was the disappearance of the forms of authority that, until this time, had guaranteed order. Without distinction, it affected nobles, the higher echelons of the bourgeoisie, judges, clerics, professors, and many other social positions. The results are described in works as different as the concluding volumes of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu and Heinrich Mann’s Professor Unrat. Both of these disruptions were further intensified by the economic crises that struck as if they were natural disasters—above all, the inflation at the beginning of the 1920s and Black Friday on Wall Street at the end of the decade. All these scenes of crisis were held together in a “set” by an atmosphere that had an epistemological basis: the feeling that the subject of cognition and the world of objects, over the course of the nineteenth century, had grown farther and farther apart—to the point that even the pre-theoretical certainty of being in contact with the world and the things within it had been exhausted.  The climate after the Great War expressed itself in a metaphor used time and again that “the ground had vanished from underneath one’s feet.” It provoked the reactions and styles of thought that soon—after the Symbolist poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s introduction to a new translation of 1001 Nights into German—came to be known as the “Conservative Revolution.” This phenomenon has remained in memory today exclusively as the matrix in which fascism originated. This does not match the facts, for the scope of the Conservative Revolution and the horizons of movements that arose in this context—because their goals were much more fundamental in nature than those of fascism—extend far beyond the narrow compass of a political project. The Conservative Revolution was animated by the sense that the most basic condition for the continued existence of human existence—

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namely, one’s certainty about one’s relationship to the outside world— could be achieved, if at all, only by a turn away from the present, by reaching back to the archaic and elemental. This self-staging was more dramatic than the way socialism defined itself; in the 1920s, on account of the October Revolution, the latter movement still harbored optimistic thoughts about the future. Moreover, the Conservative Revolution took the stage in a way that matched the defeatism that had been triggered by financial world crisis. The question of individual or collective happiness stood far in the background.  In Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, which was written in 1926 and published the following year, the idea of Stimmung—atmosphere, climate, and mood—plays a remarkable role, at least in quantitative terms. This work was both the philosophical condensation of the problematic and a reaction to the atmosphere, climate, and mood of the times. On the very first page, Heidegger—on two historical levels, so to speak—tries to find the way back to a primordial situation by quoting a sentence from Plato’s Sophist, which offers a reproach to contemporaries that the understanding of what is called “being” has been lost: Clearly, you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression “being.” We, however, who used to think we understood the word, have now become perplexed.

Behind “Being,” Heidegger remarks, stands “the question of the meaning of Being.” This question was to make his philosophy a matter of ontology—and command his thought—for the next fifty years. “Oblivious of Being” does not mean only a life lived without the answer to the question, but also—and above all—a life that lacks feeling for its elementary, irreducible importance. Nineteenth-century philosophy had been fixated on the impression that “Subject” (in the sense of “individual consciousness”) and

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“Object” (in the sense of “things-in-the-world”) were drifting apart more and more. The phenomenology of Heidegger’s mentor, Edmund Husserl, promised to address this condition and deliver new certainty about what defined Subject and Object. Heidegger, in turn, simply did away with the epistemological binary by replacing the Subject/Object schema with the idea of “being-in-the-world.” His term for human existence is Dasein (literally, “being-there”). As the component-word da indicates, Dasein includes bodies and space (in opposition to philosophical ideas passed down in the Cartesian tradition). The concept of “being-in-the world” emphasizes that Dasein is “always already” situated in, and familiar with, a concrete environment—and not in a state of ever-growing distance from the world. In reference to the historical situation—and in terms that are scarcely metaphorical: Heidegger’s philosophy began by offering to restore to individual human existence the “ground that had vanished from under one’s feet.” Being grounded is a precondition for happiness—which is not to say its fulfillment; strictly speaking, happiness had suffered no “loss” in Being and Time.  Heidegger transformed a primary framework from an epistemological one into an existential one. Within it, he identified and described an array of existentialia—one might say: irreducible and basic dynamics constituting human existence. Wholly in opposition to Enlightenment philosophy, Heidegger did not claim that these dynamics would necessarily lead to happiness or a sense of completion for individual lives. However, they came as close as possible to a conception of—and even a prescription for—human happiness as was possible at that moment of history. Identifying existentialia made it possible to signal modes of being that impede these dynamics and, in so doing, might summon forth unhappiness. From this understanding of Da­sein—that is, individual existence as being-in-the-world and, therefore, the irreducible condition of sharing existence with other human beings (who are, in turn, Dasein in their own right)—Heidegger devel-

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ops the dynamic (the existentiale) of “care,” which consists, above all, of different modalities of solicitude for others: Solicitude, which leaps in and takes away care, is to a large extent determinative for being-with-one-another and mainly involves providing what is ready-to-hand. There is also the possibility of a kind of solicitude that does not so much leap in for the Other as leap ahead of him in his existential potentiality-for-being—not in order to take away his care, but to give it back to him authentically.

Among the motifs identified in the existential analysis of Being and Time, “the They” is particularly well known (in communication, “idle talk” provides its aggregate form.) The self is always at risk of losing itself in this element of compromised existence: The self of everyday Dasein is the They. We distinguish the They from the authentic Self—that is, the Self that we apprehend as belonging-to-itself. In everyday existence, individual Dasein has been dispersed into the They; it must find itself again for the first time.

Ultimately, all temptations to turn away from grasping the authentic Self—whether they come from idle talk, distraction, or curiosity—seem to derive from the primordial fear of confronting death in its “mineness.” From the perspective of individual Dasein, death is a merciless, absolute end that destroys all possibilities beyond the border it sets to individual existence. Clearly, this figure of thought contains a doubly condensed experience of the Great War. First, it expresses the sense that the classical convergence of heroism and the triumph of the Fatherland had ceased to be. Second, when death occurred in the trenches or in a Sturmangriff, it was less a sacrifice to the nation than the simple—and indifferent—negation of an individual life. Finally, mechanized weaponry gave Heidegger’s formulation, “anticipation of death” (literally, “running forward into death”), a coldly specific meaning. Only the resolution to face such challenges without sparing oneself—according to Being and Time—can make it possible to realize the

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authentic potential of Dasein. At first, this appears to be a matter of resigning oneself to a joyless destiny that is simply a part of existence. Remarkably, however, in the courage to face death, there appears a possibility for freedom: When, by anticipation, one becomes free for one’s own death, one is liberated from being lost in possibilities that have imposed themselves by accident; one becomes liberated in a way that, for the first time, enables one to understand authentically and choose, from among . . . what lies ahead, the one possibility that cannot be avoided. Anticipation reveals that the uttermost possibility of existence lies in giving itself up; thus, it breaks the grip of all that limits Dasein.

Heidegger’s existential ontology of the 1920s does not come closer than this to the realm of happiness or fulfillment. In correspondence with his friend Elisabeth Blochmann, the philosopher wanted to see “joy of existence” in her readiness to enter upon the existential possibilities and challenges of femininity. Here, however, it was a matter of averting the danger of falling into an inauthentic existence; no other means of disclosing—much less achieving—happiness was in evidence.  Miguel de Unamuno’s Del sentimiento trágico de la vida already appeared in 1913; however, because the book inadvertently but uncannily anticipated the mood of the 1920s, its popularity and influence did not ebb in the following years. In this work, a single, specific kind of experience opens a broad horizon of dysphoria: the yearning—indeed, the desire—for eternity, which will forever remain closed to mankind. On the one hand, the story of Christ’s resurrection had provided reason for hope; the Son of Man conquers death. On the other hand, the life-affirming impulse of Christianity is contradicted and stripped of power at every turn by the ruses of rationality and reason—beginning with the allegorical interpretation of crucifixion as redemption from original sin. The tension between vitalism and reason accounts for an

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array of daily disappointments that Unamuno groups together under the heading of the “tragic feeling of life.” Nothing he discusses is actually tragic in the complex sense of ancient Greek thought. Instead, the phrase expresses the fundamental assumption that dysphoria cannot be eliminated, and the author’s view includes all kinds of human experience—especially those of modern times. As a matter of principle, it is impossible to change these negative conditions—this negative climate. Those positive moments and possibilities of existence that can be identified form islands, so to speak, within the tragic feeling of life. Unamuno’s contemporaries speculated, time and again, about inspirations the author had drawn from the philosophical tradition when writing this book (and others). Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard provided the most frequent references. Unamuno shrouded himself in vagueness—which said as much as it did little. As a result, he earned a reputation for all-encompassing erudition, at least outside the world of academic philosophy. However, Unamuno’s works resonated with his contemporaries’ mood for reasons other than his familiarity with the philosophical canon. This occurred because of the fundamental contradiction between a never-ceasing desire for happiness and the simple assumption—whatever motivated it—that it was impossible for this desire ever to be fulfilled. The semantics of contemporary valorizations of the “deed”—a popular notion at the time—also correspond to this mood. When speaking of deeds, the issue was not whether actions were intended to—or did indeed—accomplish practical objectives, but whether they belonged to a conception of existence that preserved itself by resisting inauthenticity. In other words: the idea of the deed belonged to an aestheticizing understanding of life; it was a conspicuous part of the “tragic view.” The historical rhizome of the 1920s associated exotic regions at geographical extremes with positive possibilities for Dasein. The joy of life was sought on mountain peaks or the tops of skyscrapers. Deeds were called for in Spain—which still counted as a marginal location

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at the time—in Norway, and in Africa; the supposedly “primitive” art of the continent was all the rage. Above all, Polar Regions represented ideal sites for symbolic action. To dispel rumors that he was effeminate and homosexual—words that were synonyms at the time—the actor Rudolph Valentino not only organized a show fight with the heavyweight boxing champion of the day; the match also took place high on the roof of a New York building. More than any other form of popular art, the German mountain film combined erotic fulfillment and death in a spectacle of intense actuality; countries like Spain and Norway roused a yearning for beauty, heroism, and self-realization, which had an afterlife both in the National Socialist ideology of the “great North,” as well as the engagement of socialist and communist brigades in the Spanish Civil War. The Arctic and, soon, Antarctica became magnetic centers that attracted adventurers who were ready to risk death (which they often met).  In this world—where self-understanding relied on the tragic sense, existential aesthetics, and a drive for experiences of extremes—two lifestyles developed; their relationship vacillated between highly tense opposition and harmonious complementarity. I propose to call them “sobriety” and “ecstasy.” Gestures of sobriety (or, to use another programmatic term of the period: “matter-of-factness” [Sachlichkeit]) did not preclude a certain elegance; for the most part, however, they were characterized by disillusionment and resignation. Where existence had been deprived of every possibility to make monumental claims and assume monumental forms, it still seemed possible to withdraw into modest positions that had always been there. This is exactly the gesture that Heidegger performed when—conspicuously—he retreated to his cabin in the Black Forest; he liked to say that a peasant had let him know, with a simple shake of the head, how wrong it would be for him to seek a career in metropolitan Berlin. Paul Klee and other Bauhaus artists did not stand not too far from Heidegger’s thought (and

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particularly his idea of Gelassenheit—an attitude of reflective detachment) when they sought—in pictures, objects for domestic use, and architecture—to return to the elementary forms and colors imposed by the “things themselves.” To be sure, Gelassenheit and Sachlichkeit always—and often unexpectedly—occasioned experiences of ecstasy and epiphany. This was not just a possibility for intoxication that exotic locales provided. It also occurred in the extreme registers of Surrealism, when it concentrated on the experience of the metropolis, as in Aragon’s Le paysan de Paris and Breton’s Nadja. Likewise—for contemporary engineers and designers—the discovery of the “right” form meant more than success in the abstract; it also counted (at least in latent terms) as an approach to—or even a merging with—the laws of matter and the cosmos. Landscapes and technology were not the only stages for the realization of matter-of-factness, Gelassenheit, and ecstasy (which represented opposing yet complementary possibilities). An aesthetics of Gelassenheit—and, even more, of anonymity—was manifest in the roles assumed by clerks and dancers in chorus lines (whose positions were markedly de-individualized). To function without wishing to stand out incarnated an attitude of sobriety that suited everyday life in the metropolis; some of the more ambitious films of the 1920s seek out these milieus. Subjectively, such configurations of plurality and anonymity—which individuals occupied with an attitude of forbearance—were hardly experienced as sites of happiness. However, they may well have provided zones of relaxation from the contemporary existential gestures demanding ecstasy. This decade—which hardly managed to believe in individual possibilities for “making it,” success, and happiness—was also, as the pendant to sobriety and Gelassenheit, addicted to situations promising danger, intensity, and excitement. Looking death in the eye was by no means only a motif of philosophical reflection. The 1920s were the great age of boxing and bullfighting, which offered exceptional

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levels of exhilaration. Besides boxing and bullfighting, popular sport forms included marathons, six-day races, and swims across the English Channel; these athletic feats tested the outer limits of physical (and mental) endurance. Erotically, too—and in the world of the society dance, which the Belle Époque had regulated so heavily—supposedly natural impulses aroused and amplified the desire for mounting intensity. In this way, the metropolitan world of the 1920s became the scene of a challenging form of sexual freedom that, by posing both physical and affective risks, could scarcely be satisfied. Because it drew on feelings of bland resignation instead of primal energies, sexual experience really was like dancing on a volcano—not just the opposite pole of sobriety, Gelassenheit, and anonymity, but also their other side, which expressed a dramatic form of vexed excitement. In this complex interplay, the exiling of happiness in the 1920s is both a symptom and an emblem of the mood(s) of individual existence.  The 1920s also count—and for good reason—as a time of massive ideologies. To be sure, these ideologies provided a stage for the spectacle of existential gestures—to exhaustion, perhaps, although fascism and socialism renewed their powers of fascination once again in the 1930s. Another reaction to the shock of the Great War was a return to the forms and theological comforts of Christianity. In France, above all, this drive experienced a brief moment of cultural vitality in the Renouveau Catholique. Yet authors like Georges Bernanos and Paul Claudel were not entirely children of their times; rather, they belonged to a tradition of Christian thought that had always sought answers to what philosophy—which is by definition an earthly endeavor—could not provide. After the October Revolution, socialism had begun its long and never-ending march toward communism, which entailed great efforts and many surprising disappointments; however, it never really promised new values or experiences. Now, the revolutionaries of 1917 wanted to become constructive “engineers” of society, culture,

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and education—soon, they had nothing to oppose to state terrorism other than readiness for suicide (out of disillusionment) or the pale melancholy of exile (as in, e.g., Leon Trotsky’s years spent in Mexico). In particular, fascism offered an alluring future to many. In the autumn of 1922, Mussolini staged his takeover of the Italian government, which was intended to fulfill an imperial calling. The Blackshirts’ March on Rome was meant to redeem the nation from decadence. In contrast to the halting steps of the Risorgimento, its strides occurred boldly. Unlike socialism—which deferred a better future until a distant time, when true communism would finally materialize—and unlike Christianity—which renounced the temporal world altogether in hope for the afterlife—fascism acted here and now. The promise of immediate fulfillment may have constituted the fatal attraction that the movement exercised in the 1920s—a decade that, otherwise, hardly knew happiness at all.

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ince the middle of the past century, the manylayered concept—and fleeting phenomenon—of Stimmung has occupied a tense position between opposing philosophical-historical prognostications. Around 1900, art historian Alois Riegl had set forward the idea that effects of atmosphere and mood would characterize the art of the coming age. He arrived at this prediction by observing that the uneducated, modern Stimmungsmensch (that is, a person guided by mood and emotion) esteems objects from the past because they are old—or, to be more precise: he (or she) prizes them for the traces of wear and decay they exhibit, which signify “the way things are.” Stimmung, for Riegl, meant the sense that unrelated phenomena were connected—a sense that expressed, in turn, a yearning for the immediate evidence and theological guarantee of cosmic order that had gone missing in modernity. Half a century later, the Romance philologist Leo Spitzer—under the powerfully evocative rubric of the “demusicalization of the world”—declared that such a framework for existence was lost forever. Against Riegl, but entirely in the sense of their contemporary

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Spitzer, intellectuals and writers agreed that the time of Stimmung had come to an end. In the “Landsberger Fragment” (1944), Gottfried Benn noted: Everything that resembles Stimmung is entirely over and done. Columns of smoke rising and vanishing in the bottomless azure, brown doves soaring, the last rays of sunlight gliding over windows—all that is pure chance, contrived.

In seeming contradiction, however, the very next sentence read: Existence is the mood that moves him, which he demands—hard and unyielding. [. . .] Existential—the new word has been around for a few years. It shifts the weight from the psychological-casuistic ego to what is dark and hidden, to the root. The individual loses attributes but gains weight, gravity, and urgency. Existential—that is a deathblow for the novel.

How was it possible that the fascination exercised by “the existential” should, on the one hand, negate a climate and, at the same time be a literary-cultural climate itself? Benn clearly chose his introductory examples (“columns of smoke,” “azure,” “rays of sunlight”) to illustrate a romantic conception of Stimmung—one conventionally represented through meteorological images—which dissolves in the face of the “hard,” existential demand for a world free of illusion. However, dissipating illusions—doing away with overly emotional moods and atmospheres—does not mean that they are impossible per se. On the contrary: in Benn’s works, “the existential” is a Stimmung that emerges from resistance to Stimmung. A move analogous in structure occurs at the end of Sartre’s La nausée, which, precisely as a novel—contrary to Benn’s assessment—became a key text of post-war Existentialism. The hero, Antoine Roquentin, wishes to stifle all inauthentic feelings in his breast. Hearing notes played on a saxophone, he suddenly realizes that these sounds are “measured suffering” (souffrance en mesure). Roquentin now strives to

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live in keeping with “suffering that has transformed into form and measure—unrelentingly and without self-pity, in strict purity.” Yet this resolution in no way frees him from matters of atmosphere and mood. At the end of the novel, instead of music offering comfort, bleak weather surrounds him: “Night is falling. On the first floor of Hotel Printania, lights go on in two windows. The smell of wet wood rises from the construction site at the new train station: it will rain tomorrow. . . .” Even the “hard” decision (Benn) to adopt a “strict” attitude (Sartre) induces moods; not uncommonly, it entails “bleak moodiness” [fahle Ungestimmtheit] (Heidegger). A development of this kind also befell the movement of Deconstruction, whose existential style—despite the protests of its ever-shrinking ranks—becomes clearer and clearer every day. Just as the followers of Sartre and Camus wished to take on the harshness of a world without God, Deconstructionists made a “post-metaphysical” claim to existence in which language does not have the possibility (in their parlance: the illusion) of referring to realia or possessing stable meaning. Just as occurred in Existentialism, Deconstruction’s active renunciation of pathos turned into captivity within the pathos-laden renunciation of pathos. As had happened in the existentialist indictment of the “injustice” of a world without God, the pathetic mood of refusal transformed into melancholy at the loss of reference (or the illusion thereof ). As if to capitalize on every last aspect of Heidegger’s philosophy of Stimmung, Jacques Derrida—in the introduction to Of Grammatology (1967)—described Deconstruction as a particular conjuncture of past and future. In terms of the past, the “end” of metaphysics had not yet arrived, but its “closure” could already be sensed. As for the future, Derrida affirmed that everywhere—if in scattered and isolated “traces”—“grammatology as a science of writing” offered a break with the domination of the spoken word as the paradigm and guarantor of logic (which meant, for him, the age of illusory reference and

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meaning—that is, of “phonologocentrism”). The messianic gesture of promises that would be redeemed “in the future” recurred as a central gesture in Derrida’s writings, until the very end. Like Existentialism, then, Deconstruction began with claims that it would put an end to deceptive appearances. This gesture was not aimed at transcendental ideas, but against supposedly logocentricmetaphysical illusions about the function of language. Like the heroes of Existentialist literature, Deconstructionists congratulated each other for the ascetic rigor with which they carried out their mission. Even more than Derrida himself, his friend Paul de Man, the literary scholar, was loudly praised for “boring” and “monotonous” rhetorical analyses. While “technically correct and irrefutable,” they “never held any surprises,” but demonstrated, time and again, that belief in linguistic reference to realia was an illusion. Such programmatic austerity—now as then—unfailingly awakens desire for what it rejects. The elementary logic of compensation is made explicit in the writings of Christopher Norris, a particularly enthusiastic—if not always philosophically convincing—exegete of Deconstruction. After voicing his appreciation of the way Derrida had confounded all the epistemological assumptions of Western thought, Norris reassured his readers that Deconstruction did, in fact, offer a “sui generis form of knowledge.” This formulation exemplifies the desire among Derrida’s adherents for order, after all—it is simply a different kind of order than the one that tradition affords. In particular, the word “writing” possesses an aura of promise among Derrida’s disciples. Key terms such as différance and supplementarity—words it was forbidden to define—suggested currents of movement deep in language and texts that could be used against outsiders without any need for proof. Derrida’s most ardent enthusiasts wanted to view him as a prophet, pure and simple. Photos that are still in circulation show a youthful philosopher with ascetic traits, his eyes gazing into the distance, as if he were a visionary. On the last page of a book with a remarkable title—The Prayers and Tears of

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Jacques Derrida—the American philosopher John D. Caputo wrote: At this point of passion and non-knowing, of urgency and undecidability, the prophetic finger, which points to justice, and the finger of deconstruction, touch, like a painting on the ceiling of a new, Jewish Sistine Chapel, in which just this one graven image would be permitted.

But can one really object to the dynamic way that ascetic pathos transforms into affect-laden moods—and moods of prophecy, even? Certainly not in literature, where—under the cover of fiction—precisely this kind of metamorphosis has contributed to the charm and charisma of the heroes of Existentialism. In the academic world, however, other rules are supposed to prevail, which are intended to prevent sentiments and moods from trumping arguments. Small, almost friendly violations of academic taboo belonged to Derrida’s intellectual style. Once, however, he falsely assessed the consequences of such gestures. This led to a loss of face, from which Deconstruction never recovered. In the mid-1980s, after the critic’s death, it was discovered that Paul de Man had written for collaborationist newspapers in Belgium under German occupation. Some of his articles contained anti-Semitic elements. At the pinnacle of his fame, Derrida defended his friend in a text with a very evocative title: Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell. First, he questioned—with the usual Deconstructive skepticism—the claims of de Man’s critics. Did sufficiently “objective” facts about the critic’s past life even exist to justify the public accusation? Then, the aggressive apology adopted a self-pitying, mournful tone: After the period of sadness and hurt, I believe that what has happened to us was doubly necessary. . . . It had to happen one day or another and precisely because of the deserved and growing influence of a thinker who is enigmatic enough that people always want to learn more—from him and about him. [. . .] Paul de Man’s legacy is not poisoned, or in any case no more than the best legacies are if there is

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no such thing as a legacy without some venom. I think of our meeting, of the friendship and the confidence he showed me as a stroke of luck in my life. I am almost certain the same is true for many others.

Many readers who had been favorably disposed toward Derrida took this step from skepticism to Stimmung as a sign that he was ready to suspend the validity of criteria of Reason at will. The pathos of ascetic self-pity seemed to have turned into a self-indulgent license for logically—and morally—arbitrary judgments. Deconstruction had played the first bars of its own funeral march.

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his book is the product of many moods and atmospheres. I would like to thank the following for contributing to the best of them: — Henning Ritter, who wanted more complexity and insisted on giving works pride of place, — Michael Krüger, for not being easily pleased, — Tatjana Michaelis, for exacting precision, — Emily-Jane Cohen, for quick action, — Henry Erik Butler, for much sympathy, — Miguel Tamen, who always sees through me, — Vittoria Borsò and Jan Söffner, whose agreement proved most agreeable, — Heinrich Meier and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, for giving me time for contemplation, — and Laura, Christopher, Sara, Marco, Anke, and Ricky, to whom this book is dedicated, because they all say they cannot live without music.

b i bl i o g r a p h i cal r efer ence s

Note: Whenever possible, translations from languages other than German have been crosschecked against the original; inasmuch as they exist, English-language editions have been added to the bibliographical information provided in the German source-text; for reasons of style, these translations are not always quoted verbatim. R e a d i n g f o r S timmung : H ow to T h i n k A b o u t t h e R e al i t y o f L i t e r at u r e To d ay

Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. Allen W. Wood and H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Lukács, Georg. Soul and Form. Ed. John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. Reginald Snell. New York: Dover, 2004. Vossler, Karl. Poesie der Einsamkeit in Spanien. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1940. Wellbery, David. “Stimmung.” Historisches Wörterbuch ästhetischer Grundbegriffe, Bd. 5: Postmoderne – Synästhesie. Ed. Karlheinz Barck et al. Stuttgart/Weimar: Metzler, 2003.

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f l e e t i n g j oy s i n t h e s o n g s o f walt h e r vo n d e r vo g e lw e i d e

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