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Poetic Maneuvers
Hans Magnus Enzensberger and the Lyric Genre
By CHARLOTTE ANN MELIN Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2003 Northwestern University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8101-1947-5
Chapter One 1. The Politics of Genre
"The OldMasters-believe me, there is no such thing," the poet disguised as a painter muses in the epic poem Der Untergang der Titanic (The Sinking of the Titanic). "I ought to know. For thirty years now / I have been a preserver of all good things: / half an alchemist and half a joiner. / I was unsurpassed as a restorer" (1980b, 68-69). These lines sketch the work of the artist as part magical creation and part practical handicraft-a symmetrical formulation complicated by acts of erudite conservation, which the text elsewhere labels "forgery." Although Enzensberger frequently employs such triadic examples to outline a problem rapidly or assumes a persona to voice positions with rhetorical strength, here the poet's retrospective candor focuses attention on how he crafts his art. That Enzensberger has succeeded, more than his contemporaries, in expanding the boundaries of what is considered lyric speaks to the synergy of his disparate labors as a metaphoric alchemist, carpenter, and restorer. Drawing on theoretical discussions, political debates, and parallel writing projects for the sake of verse, he has revived a public role for the lyric genre and blended this communal function with poetry's today perhaps more familiar capacities for marking how individual experience becomes language.
An old art operating in a rapidly changing world, poetry exists in relationship to discourses emanating from academic, literary, and public culture-venues for collective expression that have aggressively competed in the German postwar context with the space occupied by the lyric genre. Enzensberger frequently dramatizes this predicament in poems by casting the struggles of postwar writers as encounters with foes, imperious scholars, and fellow authors who quarrel about literature. Their theatrical wrestlings and gloomy sermonizing on the future of art mirror the situation of German literature, which after 1945 existed in a climate shaped to a great extent by the ethical assumption that it could serve as an educating force to counteract the effects of fascism, wartime atrocities, and repressive values (Saunders 1999). The cultural disequilibrium that ensued from this political upheaval was richly productive. Self-reflection about the legacy of the Nazi period, openness to international trends, and experimentation with language stimulated the evolution of postwar German poetry. My aim in this chapter is to read such complex conceptual strands in the work of one of the most significant authors of the period as part of the canvas of the lyric genre.
While the ethical dilemmas that needed to be faced after the war created a precondition for Enzensberger's revisioning of literature, they do not in themselves explain how lyric poetry became one of the more powerful components in this project or why internationally the lyric genre proved so tenacious in the late twentieth century. Indeed, as Martha C. Nussbaum (1995, 4) rightly observes in advocating a role for literature in public life, many obstacles hamper the acceptance of art as a tool for commentary in the civic sphere:
The contest between the literary imagination and its rivals can best be focused by starting from three objections commonly made against "fancy" when public policy-making is in question.... First, it will be said that the literary imagination is unscientific and subversive of scientific social thought. Second, it will be said that it is irrational in its commitment to the emotions. Third, it will be charged that it has nothing to do with the impartiality and universality that we associate with law and public judgement.
For poetry, often regarded as subjective and esoteric, these objections have particular salience; in Enzensberger's texts it is precisely that uncanny interface between subversive, poetic elements and cold, public judgment that becomes potent. Employing the evocative capacities of verse, the poeta doctus Enzensberger redirects attention to critical social issues, invariably challenging assumptions from competing disciplines about the limits of the lyric genre's capacity to bring imagination, emotions, and subjective perceptions to bear on public dilemmas. The main body of this chapter focuses on three aesthetic discourses spanning the post-1945 period that facilitate this redirection of poetry-situations in which Enzensberger seizes upon a conservative constraint to artistic autonomy and proposes a radical alternative. These aesthetic discourses, which have to do with time, translation, and literacy, overlapped with one another in the latter half of the twentieth century and have continued into the twenty-first century.
Although recent history commanded much attention among younger German writers after 1945, fascism was a topic assiduously avoided in one of the most influential studies about the genre of lyric poetry to appear immediately after the war, Emil Staiger's Grundbegriffe der Poetik (1946), later translated as Basic Concepts of Poetry (1991). Staiger eschews the obvious problem of how to express the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (mastery of the past) in poetry by defining the lyric genre as associated with Erinnerung (individual memory). Against this background, Enzensberger's rejection of Staiger and cultivation instead of an aesthetics of Momentaufnahme (capturing the moment) constitutes a response to the ostensible neutrality of academic discourses, for the Momentaufnahme style links the temporal character of individual experience with representation of historical context. A second, related discourse about aesthetic autonomy gains momentum slightly later in statements by translators and poet-translators such as Enzensberger about their craft. Sentiments voiced by this group of writers mark a gradual evolution that continued through the 1970s, freeing poetry fromprescriptive definitions of its utility as the mere tool of postwar reeducation efforts. Displacement of discussions about artistic autonomy from the lyric genre to a companion field, literary translation, amplifies arguments about the independence of writers. After considering why Enzensberger promotes creativity as a trait to be especially valued in translations (at times more openly than in his writings about poetry itself ), I turn to recent remarks by the author concerning literacy. Amid dire predictions about the marginalization of poems and calls for aesthetic quality that suggest a narrowing of audience, Enzensberger's assertion that poetry serves an essential human function can be read as an effort to expand again the purview of the lyric genre. His impassioned remarks anticipate the stunning revival of the lyric genre in the 1990s, a development marked by the fashionability of certain verse types and poetry events.
Poetry and Memory
The frequency with which postwar social, aesthetic, and academic discourses erected limits to poetry in German-speaking areas is startling, even in studies purporting to define the lyric genre in terms that cut across national boundaries. Those forces brought to bear on poetry as an institution involved its mechanical production, consumption, and eventual academic evaluation, and they grew out of the painful changes set in motion by the German collapse. Discomfort with aberrant values often seems to lurk behind the fatherly advice dispensed by literary historians in the first postwar publications of the late 1940s. Studies of poetry by Wolfgang Kayser and Emil Staiger, which exerted an enduring influence, thus invite reappraisal of their authors' concern with justifying their integrity as scholars.
In prefatory remarks to his concise handbook of meter, stanzaic forms, and rhyme, Kleine deutsche Versschule (Little German Verse School [1946]), Kayser prescriptively tells readers, "Finally, the booklet is directed toward the young poets. For that time is surely past when one believed that the poet creates in complete freedom and should not permit himself to be constrained by anything" (Kayser 1946, 6-7). "Lyric poetry is unhistorical," Emil Staiger observed that same year in Grundbegriffe der Poetik (Basic Concepts of Poetry), "has no foundation and no consequences. It speaks only to those who can empathize; its effects are of a fortuitous nature and pass, as a mood passes" (Staiger 1991, 130). The most famous imperative of the time, Theodor W. Adorno's "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" (1967a, 34), was penned a short time later, in 1949. The normative sentiments that guide these comments are quite the opposite of what one might imagine Bertolt Brecht hoped would result from his famous plea "An die Nachgeborenen" ("To Those Born Later") from Svendborger Gedichte (Svendborg Poems, 1933-38), which beseeched future generations to think tolerantly about those who struggled through times that were dark for literature: "Ihr, die ihr auftauchen werdet aus der Flut ... Gedenkt unsrer / Mit Nachsicht" (Brecht 1967a, 724-25).
For Grundbegriffe der Poetik, Staiger was intent on defining the genres of lyric, epic, and dramatic poetry in terms of categories of time. Lyric poetry he associated with the past and with processes of individual memory, Erinnerung. Epic style, by contrast, he considered grounded in the present and a mode of representation, Vorstellung (a word that can also be translated as "presentation" or "performance"), which involved the showing of details through the eyes of a narrator who experiences events alongside the described protagonists. Finally, dramatic style corresponded (according to Staiger) to the future, for it relies on Spannung, a gradually unfolding tension about what will occur next. Staiger's examples for this genre configuration included lyric poetry by Goethe, Mörike, Eichendorff, and Hölderlin, the epics of Homer and Schiller, and dramatic passages from Sophocles, Corneille, Schiller, and Lessing. Pressing the terms "present," "past," and "future" into service as analytical categories, Staiger acknowledged that his choice entailed a certain kind of assumption (Vorurteil). He also conceded a natural fluidity among the genres, especially in the case of lyric poetry, which, he noted, has elastic capacities because, in his estimation, "a lyric poem, precisely because it is a poem, cannot be just lyric. It participates to varying degrees and in different ways in all genre concepts and only a predominance of the lyric in them causes us to call the verses lyric" (Staiger 1991, 178).
But despite these modest correctives, when Staiger insisted that lyric poetry inhabits a past time frame, he offered a discussion of poems that follows from the theoretical assumption that poetry must be grasped rather than explained, a bias that Arthur Zimmermann aptly identifies as intrinsic to Staiger's interpretive work in general (Zimmerman 1977, 396). This insistence on a temporal categorization of genre definitions even ran counter to his most important example, the poetry of Goethe, who, Staiger concluded, conceived of poetry as a medium that conveys a sense of active presence. Emphasizing the artistic illusion of process, Staiger enthused, "the person who is immersed in the lyric mood does not take a stand. He glides along in the flow of life" (1991, 78). The appearance of presentness, under this analysis, is a simple illusion of immediacy. To salvage his definition of poetry as a medium of the past, Staiger (1946) determined that poetry must subjectively represent the inner world (Innenwelt) of the poet through its lack of distance from its subject matter (Fehlen des Abstands). Staiger further characterized subjektive lyric poetry as distinct from the epic, which he marked with terms diametrically opposed to those chosen for lyric: objektive Poesie and Aussenwelt. To the epic he accorded the capacity to narrate history via Gedächtnis, intellectualized capacities of memory: "The past as the object of a narrative is stored in that part of the mind from which memories can be recalled at will. The past as a theme of the lyric is stored, as something very precious, in that part of the mind from which memories arise spontaneously" (Staiger 1991, 77).
The conspicuous difficulty Staiger encounters in reconciling Goethe's poetics with his own categories of analysis begs the question of why he insists on definitions that rigidly correspond to temporal frames. When Staiger handles a text so violently, as Benjamin Bennett (1993) trenchantly concludes in his analysis of the famous debate over Mörike's poem "Auf eine Lampe" ("To a Lamp"), another agenda can be assumed. Bennett's appraisal of the Mörike controversy among Staiger, Martin Heidegger, and Leo Spitzer deduces that beyond preserving the notion of lyric poetry as a symbolic rather than allegorical form (1993, 62), the three participants manipulate their readings of the text to vest interpretive authority collectively "in a specific type of naturally gifted and appropriately trained individual consciousness" (67), the literary scholar. Staiger's discussion of lyric poetry, Grundbegriffe der Poetik, has a similar result, for it authorizes the interpreter always to reread the poet-even when the poet is Goethe.
This asserted prerogative raises thorny questions about the hierarchical relationship of critic and poet that Staiger promoted. Zimmer points out that antifascist criticism in exile rejected arbitrary, ideologically motivated interpretation and turned attention toward the poet, a move that at least superficially resembled a nostalgia for the sympathetic readings in which criticism became the servant of poetry (1988, 376). Staiger seems to counter that trend by reasserting the authority of the critic, yet in so doing, he in effect bars the lyric genre from access to recent history and individual experience of the present. At first blush, Staiger charts purely literary categories, but in fact he chooses loaded terms that undermine academic objectivity. The afterword later appended to the study (a guest lecture delivered in Oxford in 1948) cryptically admits that peculiar historical circumstances lie behind it. "If I am to say, in a contemporary poetics written in German, what is lyric," Staiger comments, "then I must honor contemporary German usage" (1991, 201). The situation of contemporary German poetry, however, receives scant attention here, even less than in Kayser's Kleine deutsche Versschule. Skimming over the specifics of the aesthetic hiatus represented by 1933 to 1945, Kayser admitted a historically justified didactic motivation for proposing that young poets needed to learn Handwerkliches, the nuts and bolts of poetic craft. Staiger, by contrast, excludes this history from the domain of lyric poetry. His promising conception of lyric poetry as a genre that broadly directs attention to the past leads instead to a narrowing prescription of what poets and their texts can accomplish. This gambit favors the expansion of conservative, academic authority.
Enzensberger differs sharply with Staiger concerning temporal categories when he cites Grundbegriffe der Poetik in the section of his 1961 dissertation on Clemens Brentano devoted to distinguishing between poetic and empirical consciousness. Noting that Staiger characterized Brentano's work as a project dominated by a passive absence of planning, "in which the random spontaneity of the poet is radically negated," Enzensberger calls that disparagement of Brentano a biased misreading of the German romantic poet's work and reminds his readers that Brentano termed himself the "grösste[r] Dichter des Augenblicks," hence intentionally the greatest poet of the momentary (1961, 122). After reasserting the authority of the poet over the scholar, Enzensberger further emphasizes the importance of the present for lyric poetry. While Enzensberger is primarily concerned with calling attention to the ways Brentano distances himself from his subject matter and manipulates language (with Entstellung), his comments about time intersect with academic and writerly discussions of contemporary poetry that in Germany were delimiting its boundaries as a genre.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poetic Maneuvers by CHARLOTTE ANN MELIN
Copyright © 2003 by Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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