Time Structures: A Reading of Poems by Mrike, Rilke and Benn Author(s): James Rolleston Source: The German Quarterly,

Vol. 53, No. 4 (Nov., 1980), pp. 403-417 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Association of Teachers of German Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/404542 . Accessed: 09/03/2014 09:53
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Time Structures:A Reading of Poems by Morike, Rilke and Benn

JAMES ROLLESTON

It is hardly a revelationto speak of the prominenceof time as an originatingforce in modernpoetry. Since at least Fritz Strich'sbook of 1922' we have been aware of the dominantsignificanceof history and temporalityin the textureof romanticthinking;and the omnipresence in 19th-century of the theme of melancholy and "Verganglichkeit" is a critical of the second rank, My commonplace. especially poetry, argumentis concernedwith neitherof those subjects,althoughit offers throughexamination waysof linkingthem. WhatI wantto demonstrate, the posof specific texts, is the structuralforce of the time-experience, it of that a a balance, transforming sibility through mutuality, self and world can be achieved.Both self and world have a built-intendencyto withdrawfrom each other, to retreatwithintheirown systems:the lyric text is fuelled by the imperativeneed to counteractthis tendency, to achieve both the celebrationof world and an escape from the everthreateningsterilityof the self. With Heinz SchlafferI see the modern as essentiallypost-romantic; even as they inaugurated time-experience temporalityas the basic epistemologicalprinciple, the romantics rewithinan older, moregeneralized mainedtemperamentally cosmology.2 But alreadyin Heine's "Still ist die Nacht, es ruhendie Gassen"(from Die Heimkehr, 1824) we enter a world where the experienceof time drawsthe humanmind inwardto the detailsof otherwisecommonplace emotions and ordinarydomestic surroundings.The negativityof the experienceseems overwhelming;the romantic beliefs in history and "Progressivitat" collapseinto fixationon pastnessand loss, with a culitself: man confronts minatingdisasterin the Doppelganger-experience his image in the mirrorand the one elementin his life that had seemed to link him with communityand meaning,namelytemporalcontinuity, has become a mockeryand an emptiness.The mirror-experience taunts the poem's speaker,transforming time into an hallucination uprooting man from a stable world that derideshim. And yet it can only be within this seeminglynegativedimensionthat of self and world can be imagined. any kind of mutual reinforcement Just how narrowthe aperture is throughwhicha temporalself can reach a temporalworld is conveyed by a juxtapositionof EduardMorike's 403

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infrequentpoetological remarks.In an 1832 letter he writes: "Immer werdeich mich wohl . .. auf eigeneErfindungdes Stoffes zuriickgewiesen sehen, da vom Vorhandenen selten etwas in meinen Kram um es mit einemWortzu sagen, ein krankhaftes Bestreben,die Imagination zum einzigen Organ alles innerenLebens zu erheben."4The self is the sole source of experience; yet, as soon as the self is conceivedas singularand empirical,its inadequacyas a structural principlebecomes "Ich" of Fichteand the roevident.The slippageof the epistemological manticstowardsa purelyprivate,fragmented universemust at all costs be reversed.The task of the self is both to invent the world and be inself and ventedby that world. And amidall the forcesthat are propelling world away from each other, the one precarious linking factor is time.
Die schOne Buche (1842) Eduard M6rike Ganz verborgen im Wald kenn ich ein Plaitzchen, da stehet Eine Buche, man sieht schOner im Bilde sie nicht. Rein und glatt, in gediegenem Wuchs erhebt sie sich einzeln, Keiner der Nachbarn rtihrt ihr an den seidenen Schmuck. Rings, soweit sein Gezweig der stattliche Baum ausbreitet, Grilnet der Rasen, das Aug still zu erquicken, umher; Gleich nach allen Seiten umzirkt er den Stamm in der Mitte; Kunstlos schuf die Natur selber dies liebliche Rund. Zartes Gebtisch umkrainzetes erst; hochstaimmigeBtiume Folgend in dichtem Gedraing, wehren dem himmlischen Blau. Neben der dunkleren Fillle des Eichbaums wieget die Birke Ihr jungfrauliches Haupt schuichternim goldenen Licht. Nur wo, verdeckt vom Felsen, der Ful3steig jaih sich hinabschlingt, Lasset die Hellung mich ahnen das offene Feld. - Als ich unlaingsteinsam, von neuen Gestalten des Sommers Ab dem Pfade gelockt, dort im Gebtisch mich verlor. Fiuhrt' ein freundlicher Geist, des Hains auflauschende Gottheit, Hier mich zum erstenmal, plotzlich, den Staunenden ein. Welch Entziicken! Es war um die hohe Stunde des Mittags, Lautlos alles, es schwieg selber der Vogel im Laub. Und ich zauderte noch, auf den zierlichen Teppich zu treten; Festlich empfing er den Fuss, leise beschritt ich ihn nur. Jetzo, gelehnt an den Stamm (er tragt sein breite~ GewOlbe Nicht zu hoch), lie13ich rundum die Augen erzehn, Wo den beschatteten Kreis die feurig strahlende Sonne, Fast gleich messend umher, salumtemit blendendem Rand. Aber ich stand und rtihrte mich nicht; daimonischerStille, Unergrtindlicher Ruh lauschte mein innerer Sinn. Eingeschlossen mit dir in diesem sonnigen ZauberGiirtel, o Einsamkeit, ftihlt ich und dachte nur dich!

taugt. .. ."3 And in a fragment from the same year we read: "Es ist,

Many of MOrike's greatestpoems are of course explicitlyconcerned with time; but I have chosen for discussiona text, "Die schOne Buche,"
that appears more relaxed and stylized, with its fusion of precise detail and the rhythmic formalism of the traditional idyll." However, the word "Bild" evokes the mirror-dimension, the threat of the double, already

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in the poem's second line: this term is a characteristic"marker" in MOrike,bringingin the artist's perspectivehere with deceptivecasualof self and world: on ness. "Bild" names the precariousmeeting-point the one hand it brings into the foregroundthe elaborate mediating in verbalimagery. processwherebythe being of the tree is reconstructed But on the other hand the phrase, "man sieht schoner im Bilde sie nicht," remindsthe readerthat our conceptionsof beautyare reflected backby us onto theirnominalsource,natureitself. Nature'sprovocation of the aesthetic and man's urge for the dynamicsof organic process pursue each other, yet the mutual pursuitcan only end, so it would seem, in the artifice of word and image. Morike'spoem is devoted to breakingthis vicious circle, and the first step is to bring the circle into being as a circle of perfection.Throughthe entireevocationof the tree and its magic circle, Morike keeps the anthropomorphic implications of his images clearly in front of the reader. "Rein," "Nachbarn," "stattlich,""das Aug still zu erquicken,"and of coursethe centralparadox, "kunstlos:" there is no line in which we are not remindedof the organizinghuman sensibility.And in one crucialrespect,the natureof the tree itself, MOrike goes furtherthan he need in aligninghis imagery with the humanrealm.For in spite of or perhapsbecauseof the stylized language,the tree sounds very like an artist. It is the accumulationof details that point in this direction.For the first four lines its isolation is evoked, but thereafterit does not seem isolatedat all: there is no tension in this, merelythe suggestionof an analogywiththe artist'sisolation him to responsibility. at the centerof a worldof thingssummoning This is heightened of the treefromline 5 onwards: by the inactivity impression the reader'sperspectivebecomes graduallyalignedwith the tree's, the elementsof the circleare displayedmovingoutwardsfrom the tree'scenter, and the details become richerthe further we move from the tree itself. The tree seemsto observeand to organize,but to lack any special qualities of its own that might explain its powers. Above all, it is of moderateheight. It is the task of other, "hochstammigeBaume," to ward off the sun. This phrase"wehrendem himmlischen Blau" comes as a gentle climax to a series of verbs that give the only clue to the tree's mysterious power. After the opening, seemingly static words "kenn" and "sieht" we are given nothingbut verbsof process.Even as of a picture,he initiatesthe processof the poet announcesthe regularity breakingthrough the frame: "erhebt," "rUihrt," "ausbreitet," "grilnet," "schuf," "umkranzet,""folgend"-all these verbsimplymotion or change, drawingthe temporaldimensioninto everydetail of the picture. The tree's secretlies in its magicalcoordinationof many different And in the very completionof the circle, with the verb time-rhythms. has reachedthe limit "wehren,"the text movesbeyondit. The artist-tree of its reflectivepowersand opens itself to the poet-observer at the very point whereit seemsto excludehim. For the poet is awareof the fundamental source of energy and growth, the sun. The sun enters the poem gradually, its paradoxes carefully modulated: chaotic in itself, it is the source of all time-scales; impossible to look at,

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it yet defines all space. It is the poet's ability to grasp these paradoxes reflectivelythat finally enables him to enter the tree's circle. The first effect of the sun, however, is to expel him from it. The circle achieves linguistic completion with the phrase "im goldenen Licht," a phrase that invokes the harmoniouslight bathingthe perfect picture;and the word "Hellung" in the next couplet names the effect of the sun as that which surroundsthe picturewith openness,unmediatedlight, and thrusts the poet into it with the sudden sharpnessof the word "jah." The verb "wehren" has alreadyhinted at the sun's destructivepower; what happensat the emptycenterof this poem, as the footpath plunges downwards and away, is a doubleexile for the poet. He is both irrelevant to nature'sown perfectionand, becauseof his intenseinvolvementwith the images of that perfection, confronted with a fundamentalforce, the sun, intent upon obliteratingall the artifices set up to establish humantemporality. "Distanz ist das Gesetz dieserDarstellung,"says Renatevon Heydebrand, 8 and the gulf betweenthe two halves of the poem, so carefully disguisedby the stylizedmeter, is immense.With the change of tense, the alreadyformal poem seems to cross the line into a new genre, the epic. These lines are full of story. Betweenthe "Fuf3steig"of line 13 and the "Pfad" of line 16 lies a compressed evocationof whole epics of humanexperience: thereis the suggestionof medievaltemptationin "gelockt," the Dantesqueexistentialcrisis of "im Gebtischmich verlor." Above all there is the move downwardand off-center, as "Ab dem Pfade" echoes "hinabschlingt."As the sun can obliteratehumantime from outside, so the innerself can lose all senseof structure fromwithin. And such loss of self is the very opposite of entry into nature, it is the path to madnessand death. In termsof the poem's time-scalethe period of loss is really largerthan the three lines in the middle suggest. As I noted earlier,from line 5 onwardswe beginto move outwardsfrom the tree itself, as the tree claims for itself in ever greaterdetail the role of in the gradualreturnof artist. There is thus a genuineepic retardation the poet from functionlessexile to the tree, finally consummated in the phrase"Jetzo, gelehntan den Stamm." This journeyis only nominally allows us to perspatial:what the distanceinherentin the tense-change ceive is that the poet, like the treeand yet most unlikeit, is ableto regain his role as poet only throughhis abilityto organizeand blenda multitude of temporalrhythms. This recoverytakes place first througha deploymentof the powersof languagerooted in traditionand myth. What seemed like a limitation in the first part, the intrusion of linguisticcategorieson nature, now becomes a proud virtue as the hints of epic loss are transformedinto explicit images of epic recovery. We know that the empiricalpath to the tree-circleleads upward, but the languagetells us so symbolically, as the poet climbs from Infernoto Paradise:the Goddesslooks up, the
poet looks up at the sky and at the silent birds. And the festive upward motion takes place in a landscape now peopled with the figures of man's imagination, spirits and divinities both pantheistic and rococo. Most

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important, the sun itself is drawn into this invocation of mythology: it is Pan's hour, "die hohe Stunde des Mittags." If the poet's first achievementis the joyous opening up of the traditionsimplicit in his of his title is as tamer language,his most importantclaimto the regaining of the sun. As he steps up to the tree trunk, he also entersinto a symmetricalalignmentwith the sun, now invisibleoverhead.At this moment we are remindedof the moderatesize of the tree, its humanscale-and the sun itself is now unleashedas the agencybehind this aestheticfulfillment. It is "feurig strahlend," "blendend," yet its effect, when mediatedby the poet and tree now in perfect consort, is "fast gleich messend." The destructiveforce has been overcome, and on this new level of totality the sun is no longer a dangerto be fended off but the fundamentalsource of power that reinforces,as on a sundial, the temporal meetingof man and nature. The poet's final posture is remarkable.Where the whole poem has hitherto been characterized by process and movement, he now claims entry, as it were, into the motionlessintensityof the tree's inner concentric rings; after the poet's reflectivenessimposed the dynamicsof human time onto the tree, the tree has now communicatedits selfcontainedstillnessto the poet. Only in their achievedmeetingcan the world be said to bringits full play of forcesinto being. And as the poet becomesone with the tree, he explicitlyceasesto focus on it and enters upon a new level of openness.Onemustbe carefulnot to placetoo much stresson the invocationto "Einsamkeit,"whichbelongsin the tradition of the idyll; but for the first time a conceptualabstractionis admitted to the poem's language,and one, moreover,whichrecallsthe "einzeln" of line 3 and the "einsam" of line 15 at the precisemomentwhen poet and tree have achievedcommunity.This makespossiblea broadening of the very notion of community, as the poem's dialectic enables the speakerto address"Einsamkeit"in the second person. Clearly,in this word is concentratedthe poem's eritiretemporal interplay:"Einsamkeit" is not a state of being but a processwith a beginningand an end: the beginningis the emancipationof self from the mirrorand from the half-measures of existence,the end is the full entryinto the world'screative process, the attainmentof mutualityand balancebetweenself and world. The evocationof a past vision completesthe circleof the present and permitsthe poet to look once againin the mirror,to look at himself "alone," and to see his mirror filled with the fruits of his own risktaking, the rhythmicworld that has emerged from the chasm at the poem's center.7 Just as the range of experiencein the poetic self seems extended, throughthe interlocking rhythmsof humanand naturaltime, far beyond the limits of a 30-linepoem, so the actualeventsexpandtheirresonance and glimpse. The sealing off of the through a structureof recurrence at the outset is followed by an abruptdistancingand change tree-circle
of perspective, whereupon the circle is gradually reconstituted, by means of very similar images subtly intensified. It is like an epic of memory and forgetting within a barely existent narrative space; and this festive

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is punctuatedby a seriesof glimpses,denoted restorationof equilibrium not initially by words like "jah" and "plotzlich," of time-dimensions it of the are drawnin. but as they part recurrence-patterning, enriching The use of genre-effects also extends the poem's range. The poem reachesa conclusionthat could be called quintessentially lyrical, as the self faces the mirrorof isolation withoutterror.But to get to that point the poem must pass through an elaborateblend of other genres, other kinds of time. As the poet evokes the tree circle it becomes a theater, a coordinatedplay of forces of which he can only be the spectator;and as the exiled spectatormoves to the centerof attention,the genre shifts to epic and meter is deployedto convey the tension of linear advance. The goal of the "story," of course, is reentryinto the theater, which itself is transformed into a place of lyriccompletion.The distensionand of has broughtinto being a genuinespatial the time-dimension recycling certainty.This is a world that is, in Rilke's terminology,anchoredin ongoing "Verwandlung."
Todes-Erfahrung (1907) RainerMariaRilke Wir wissennichtsvon diesemHingehn,das nicht mit uns teilt. Wir habenkeinenGrund, und Liebeoder Hass Bewunderung dem Tod zu zeigen, den ein Maskenmund entstellt. tragischer Klagewunderlich Noch ist die Welt voll Rollen, die wir spielen. Solang wir sorgen, ob wir auch gefielen, spielt auch der Tod, obwohler nichtgefallt. Doch als du gingst, da brachin diese Bthne durchjenen Spalt, ein StreifenWirklichkeit durchden du hingingst:Grtlnwirklicher Grlne, wirklicher wirklicher Wald. Sonnenschein, Wir spielenweiter.Bangund schwerErlerntes und Gebarden dann und wann hersagend aufhebend;aberdein von uns entferntes, aus unsermStOck Daseinkann entrUcktes uns manchmal wie ein Wissen oberkommen, von jener Wirklichkeit sich niedersenkend, so da8 wir eine Weile hingerissen das Lebenspielen,nicht an Beifalldenkend.

It might seem that "Todes-Erfahrung" is a most improbablechoice among Rilke-poemsto illustrate any kind of mutuality between self and world. It is a nervous, insecuretext in which the early death of a friendforcesthe poet to put everything he has achievedinto question;we are far indeedfrom the magisterial of "die schoneBuche." progressions
And yet it is precisely under pressure like this that the intensity of

Rilke's determination to make a world out of human time becomes most apparent. For despite his esoteric language, Rilke's aesthetic goals are

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fairly steadilyin focus and, as Jacob Steinerhas arguedin the context do not changethat much throughouthis career:the things of language,8 that are invisible, emotions and ideas, are to be made visible and the thingsthat are visible, from statuesto flowers, are to be drawninto the invisible permanenceof language. The problem with the schema, of of the self, its tendencyto break out of course, is the unpredictability the craftsman'srole; and Rilke came increasingly to see time, the discordant and destructivecommon elementof self, world and language, as both the necessary mustbe erected groundon whicha poetic structure and the fluid continuuminto which it must project itself. Rilke's language is quite explicit on the need to release the inherenttemporality within "die Dinge" in the course of their poetic or sculpturalrealization: "Es gab keinZurlAcktreten bei Rodin, sondernein immerwthrendes Naheseinund Gebeugtsein das Werdende. Und heuteist dieseEigenOiber art in ihm so starkgeworden,daBman fast sagen kOnnte, das Aussehen seinerDinge sei ihm gleichgtfltig; so sehrerlebter ihr Sein, ihreWirklichder Erde, sie kreisenum sie."' As Rilke fuses the idea of perfectclosure with the mutual absorption of self and world into a single creative becomesclear:at the very process,the analogywith MOrike's enterprise heart of apparentlystatic perfectionthere is constantmotion, and only the human experienceof time and death can recognizeand respondto the challengeof that ceaselessmovement.To evade the challengeis to risk an extinctionwhichin Rilke'swork is almostthe oppositeof death. For Rilke, as for Morike, Heine's mirror-expeiience, the horrorof time Rilke articulated that experience suspended,is ever-present. throughthe figureof the doll, in his 1914essay entitled"Puppen:" "Ihr gegentiber, da sie uns anstarrte, erfuhren wir zuerst (oder irr ich mich?) jenes Hohle im Geftihl,jene Herzpause,in der einerverginge,wenn ihn dann nicht die ganze, sanft weitergehende AbNatur, wie ein Lebloses, Oiber grtindehintiberhotbe."'0 Am I sayingthen that we are witnessingan endlessreplayof the same modern artistic imperatives?This is a difficulty with any concept of tradition, one that especially afflicts the theory of modernism:after Mallarm6,the theoryimplies,thereis little new to add, as poets are said to craft theirverbaltoys from word-playsand cleverinversionsof traditional motifs, seasonedwith a dash of hallucinatory hysteria.I havelong found this imageof poetryunconvincing, a productof the recenttyranny of Franceover modernGermanpoetics." And indeed I propose to reclaimGottfriedBenn, an ambivalent denizenof the modernistcamp, for my version of a modern tradition. A poetry that recognizesthat the modern self has no alternativebut to reinvent,rediscoveror reaffirm the world may develop certain structuralpatternsbut is otherwiseunof historyand natureaccumulate likelyto repeatitself. As the repetitions and the possibilityof transcendence continuesto recede,the elementsof
self and world, while they cannot disappear altogether, can express themselves on a scale ranging from almost total dominance to almost total disintegration. Interestingly, in the texts under discussion, it is Rilke keit, ihre allseitige Loslosung vom Ungewissen .
.

. sie stehen nicht auf

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ratherthanBennwhose "self" comescloserto the pole of disintegration. If one appliesto Rilke's text the structural model of the self's transformations derived from Morike, it does in a sense "work." A lowkeyedopeningleads to an anguishedsenseof exile from a self-contained sanctum, here the mysteryof death; from stanza 3 onwardsthere is a gradualand painful reconstitutionof the self throughcontact with the mystery,culminatingin an illumination.But this sequenceis basically all of them partialand unscaffolding for a series of transformations, featureof this probing,intimatepoem is that satisfying.A remarkable the word "ich" nowhereoccurs in it. The self is implied by the firstperson pluraland the second-personsingular,as if it is taking literally in line 4. Of deathone can only speakthrough the word"Maskenmund" but the of death offers a complexopportunity masks; very universality to take its frighteningintimacyinto an experienceof community.Initially the reversehappens:all masks slip. The momentof death undermines all the linguistic gestures through which living beings conventionally express themselves. The impersonalphilosophicalself of the openingis succeededby the self as actor in a futile moralityplay. Ironically the self can now claim a communitybetweenits own time-dimension and that of other people: for death makesa mockeryof all human temporalpatterning.And yet, very much as Morikewas able to rebuild his experience of time fromthe grovethat had deniedit, so it is a particular death that begins the restorationof some life to the humanpuppets on their stage. There is no comfort in this new life: Rilke's languagein stanza 3 enlargesthe alreadyvast distancesbetweenthe living and the dead with its reiterationsof "gingst" and "wirklicher."The glimpsed death "reality" is by definition remote, at one with the ever-receding realm. And yet this stanza does effect a transformation in the poem's of death's texture,all the morestrikingbecausethereis no compromising negations.The first three words of the poem, "Wir wissen nichts," are now modified: we do know something,we know that death has to do with the intensificationof our own world, pure negation is in some senseidenticalwith pureaffirmation.And Rilkeis speakingnot of paradise but of a temporalzone: "Grtine," "Sonnenschein,""Wald," all of the named entities must be conceivedas involved with process and change. In short, even as death mocks and negates human time, it opens onto the fullnessof the world'stime, althoughonly for a momentary glimpseand only at an immensedistance. Immensebut not infinite; the power of Rilke's poem owes much to the reversionin stanza 4 to the puppetstage: death cannot teach us to live. And yet the texturehas changedagain. The characters on stageare uncertainand ignorant,but they are no longerfalse: the roles they play do indeed come from outside, but they are strugglinghonestly to fill them, to relate their "gestures" to some kind of orderly time-scale, "dann und wann." This meansthat the gulf betweenthe inadequacy of human time and the fullness of death's "Wirklichkeit" is not after all
absolute. The words "bang und schwer" imply that the actors are performing, however feebly, with some knowledge of death's presence;

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conversely the dead woman's existence is "entriickt" but not completely other. The distance between death and life has generated a time scale of its own, a zone of revelation in which man can after all touch the knowledge of his destiny. This time is given emblematic reality by the enjambement between the final, stanzas, and the exposed position of the word "Wissen" offers a last tentative response to the poem's opening line. There is no denying the awkward language of the final stanza: "sich niedersenkend" seems unfocused, "hingerissen" banal and "denkend" a clumsy note to end on. Yet it is possible without sophistry to justify this awkwardness in terms of the poem's central images of acting, learning and knowing. The open ending, the vision with its temporal limits, enables the text's speaker, still in the plural voice, to face outwards towards the world, without the confidence but with some of the existential achievement of MOrike's persona at his tree. The mirror of life no longer reflects back merely the annihilating image of empty human time. Looking at the text in the light of the formal categories derived from MOrike's poem, one finds patterns similar yet less seamlessly organized. Thus the relationship of glimpse and recurrence is virtually thematic in its importance. The first stanza, with its multiple negatives, is precisely a denial of the glimpse: the distance, the journey of death is invoked, but it generates no time-dimension, hence no valid emotion; as the indifferent abstractions pile up, the language becomes lifeless and, in a careful symmetry with the enjambement linking the last two stanzas, the movement of the verse is just sufficient for'it to tumble over into the second stanza. Here is the recurrent world, the world without distance; the closure is not rhythmic but claustrophobic, the death-experience that could not be legitimately glimpsed is now omnipresent. At the same time the poem is struggling to impose a timetable, a limit on the emptiness of human action: "Noch ist die Welt voll Rollen . . . solang wir sorgen. . . ." The central stanza offers the decisive glimpse, recovered as it were from a past which the poem seeks to translate into meaning. The parallel with Morike's shift to the past tense is suggestive: the mysteries both poets are confronting cannot be penetrated as enigmatic present states; human time must be deployed, the world from which man is exiled may be reentered only if it is reimagined as the final chapter of his story. With stanza four the circular world returns, and indeed the play of life, so close to lifelessness, is reenacted yet again in the last stanza, this time of course in harmony with the glimpse, now become potent memory. It is important to note that nothing new, no supernatural vision occurs in the poem: Rilke has taken hold of the one trace that death has left in the world, a moment of "Wirklichkeit" that existed only in time, and surrounded it with the repetition of ordinary time in a manner so intense, so uncompromising, that a blending of time-scales is finally "geleistet," in Rilkean language. The transformation can only be momentary, but it is now "manchmal," the hopelessness of recurrence is breached. The word "spielen" occurs three times: initially it is strictly theatrical, the playing of roles, then it is used without a qualifier,

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probingly. Finally life itself is "played," as a child plays with it. Childhood for Rilke is the source of death as terror, as absence of life; but childhood regained through a confrontation with death's reality is perhaps the most precise Rilkean image for living in time. Certainly the moralistic elements in the poem, the awkward phrases about seeking applause, suggest a prescriptive intent, analogous perhaps to the weight of meaning placed by Morike on the word "Einsamkeit." Precisely because these poems reach their own goals through the articulation of a time-dimension for which they must struggle, there is a powerful impetus within their language to project this achieved time into the world beyond the poem.
Eingeengt(1953) GottfriedBenn in Ftlhlenund Gedanken Eingeengt deinerStunde,der du anbestimmt, wo so viele GllickeTrauertranken, einerStunde,welcheAbschiednimmt, Trauernur-die Sturm-und Siegeswogen, Niederlagen, Graber,KuBund Kranz, Trauernur-die Heereabgezogen, sammelnsie sich wo-wer weil es ganz? Denkedann der Herzenwechselnd Traumen, andereGotter,anderesBemlihn, denk der Reiche,die Pagodensaumen, wo die feuerroten Segel bllhn, denkeandres:wie vom Himmelerben Nord und Slid durchFunkenund durchFlut, denkean das grosseMammutsterben in den TundrenzwischenEis und Glut, eingeengtvon Ftlhlenund Gedanken bleibtin dich ein groBerStromgelegt, seine Melodieist ohne Schranken, trauerlos und leichtund selbstbewegt.

It is perhaps becoming clear what links these three disparate poems: it is the attempt to confront ultimate mysteries without flinching and to imagine the level of human time on which they can be approached. For MOrikethe mystery is self-contained nature, for Rilke the blankness of death, for Benn the enigma of history. We have seen how Rilke and MOrike deal with the terror of the mirror-experience by reclaiming the possibility of human identity from the temporal void: for them the reconstitution of a supportive mutuality vis-a-vis the world is coterminous with the rebuilding of the "Ich," the restatement of a viable individual time-scale. But Benn's mirror-experience is different. What confronts him is not the isolation of self but the horror at the other extreme, namely an excess of connections, biological, social and intellectual, to other human beings. The concept of uniqueness has lost its meaning, although everyone continues to behave as if it were still in force. The result is a

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chaos of human activity without identity. The only context in which Benn feels the word "Ich" can still be pronouncedis that of the selfcontainedpoem, and his powerfulyearningfor the immutable"order" of the poetic self led him to the endorsementof formalistmodernism in "Problemeder Lyrik." However,althoughthis may be considereda low blow, one should not forget that this very same yearningfor order within the human confusion led him 20 years earlier, with equal eloquence, to an endorsementof racial collectivism.The actual evidence of Benn's poetry suggestsa more consistentand continuousfascination with history, with a kind of evolutionarychange far below the surface of humanevents. Poems open up rifts in the earth of dailiness,linking surface phenomenato the movementin the depths of history. Marion Adams has illuminatedthe productivetension between the virtual determinismof Benn'sbiologicalpronouncements, reducinghumanbeings to a genetic dictatorshipof irresistibleand conflicting urges, and his exemptionof aesthetic form from all such determinism,indeed from any criteriawhatever, that might be derived from the contemporary world. She notes: "His primitivism is consistentwith his discontinuous One is metaphysics,since the past surgesup only for brief moments."12 remindedof the momentaryglimpses of the death-realmwhich, for Rilke, suffice to maintainat least the viableillusionof a humanidentity. But for Benntherecan be no suchidentity,becausethe only validhuman time-scaleis totally inaccessibleto the empty rhythmsof daily life. As Adams says: "The only social role that Benn would ever admit for the artist was specialconcentration on the memoriesof the race."'" Does it makeany sense, then, to speakof a mutualityof self and world in relationto Benn? The answeris yes, providedthat both sides of the equation are completely rethought. Benn would like to broaden the significanceof poetic creationand communication,to establishan entirely new time-scale,verticalinstead of horizontal.On the surface of the earth of human affairs there is the human consciousnesswith its yearningto become self; and in the depths of historythere is the only knowabletruth, a truththat has by definitionsome connectionwith the surface world becauseit exists throughhumanaffairs, as an enigmatic concentrationof them. There are no other substances, no transcendentals. Rilke feels much the sameway about the death-realm: it simply has to be possibleto reclaimit for life becauseit grows within life and consists of nothing but life. But for Benn the time-scale,whereinthe lucid compressionsof history could generatea new continuityof consciousness,has to be recognizedas not yet in existence.For both Morike and Rilke the creativeprocess is one of recovery,for Benn it must be one of invention;the invocationsof a fulfilledpast in his poemsare selffrom the historicalrepertoire consciouslyclose to cliche, building-blocks to be reusedin the imaginingof a future. But the way forwardis not one of irrationalism,ratherit involves a tight interweaving of surface
and depth, as they are presently understood. Thus the human self can perhaps be reinvented, but only if its collectivity, its historicity, its provisional evolutionary status are fully acknowledged: "Der Mensch ist

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nicht ein Ende, nicht die Krone der SchOpfung, sondern ein Beginn ... das Tierreich ist iiberschritten, hinter sich gelassen, die Emanzipation des Geistigen tastet sich in einen neu sich eroffnenden Raum."14 In this passage the dry historical language shifts towards the spatial, as Benn strives to imagine the emancipation from the aimless treadmill of linear time. But the movement is not a mystical one, not an escape from time: the process invoked in the phrase "neu sich eroffnenden Raum" expresses the necessary synthesis of dimensions in a verbal gesture not so remote, after all, from Morike's entry into the tree-circle. Conversely, when Benn endeavors to articulate the way in which the buried truth of history responds to poetic language, firmly spatial images gradually become temporal. In the following remarkable "Marginalie" we may interpret "geschichtliche Welt" as the movement in the depths of time, "nihilistische Welt" as the frenzied activity of the surface and "Ausdruckswelt" as the world of the poet's language, destined to become the "expression" of the newly imagined time-dimension: "Die Ausdruckswelt steht zwischen der geschichtlichen und der nihilistischen als eine gegen beide geistig erkampfte menschliche Oberwelt, ist also eine Art Niemandsland, zuruckgelassenes Handeln und herausgelostes Gesicht. An Realitat ist sie das Konkreteste ... in der Dichtung, z.B., muf3man allein sein, in die Weite sehen, womoglich Ober Wasser, und Worte heranziehen, Worte, dicht von Sachverhalten, geschichtlich beschwerte, tragische Worte, real wie Lebewesen."15 These lines enact the drama of human possibility: the singularity of humanness gradually becomes imaginable, carved out of time's geological layers by language, by words which no weight of experience can crush into final inertia. As in the time-structures of MOrike and Rilke, Benn is impelled to posit the self-expansion of poetic language beyond its own limits. Such language enters the human wasteland, "geschichtlich beschwert," and makes it possible to imagine a reinvention of the concept of identity within the framework of the new, historically discontinuous time-scale. The phrase "herausgelostes Gesicht," is revealing here; the word "Gesicht" is almost a topos in later Benn, a play on the double meaning of face and vision suggesting that the ultimate product of the compression of human time in the depths is a "Gesicht," a new and strange singleness of being. The poem "Eingeengt" transfers this paradox to the immediacy of consciousness. Precisely because the human being is constricted, compressed within the limited possibilities of a given historical moment, the potential for forging a unique identity, a "Gesicht," exists. The title recalls the atmosphere of Benn's Expressionist youth, for example Stadler's well-known "Form ist Wollust:" willmichverschniiren Form undverengen, DochichwillmeinSeinin alleWeiten drangen. But release is just what Benn does not prescribe. Instead the compression intensifies through the imperative, didactic, rigidly shaped stanzas, drawing more and more imagined experience into the fixity of a historical existence; until finally the experience of history as such can be affirmed and the stream of time into the depths of the human past opens

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up beneaththe consciousness.One cannot talk here of an initial loss of self, becausethe very possibilityof a self is at issue in the poem. But structuralsimilaritieswith the other two poems discussed are readily discerned.In the first two stanzas, the strippingdown of the speaker's world to a zero point is accomplished,preciselynot througha process of exclusion but through its antithesis, a remorselessinclusion in the vacuum of history understood superficially. We cannot escape the the armiesthat "events" of the modernworld, yet almost immediately seemed so permanentvanish from consciousness, seemingly without of the poem struggles trace.The remainder upwardsfrom this abyss, but not throughthe impositionof epic continuity,as in Morike,or theatrical recurrence,as in Rilke. Instead, Benn imposes the paradox of radical discontinuity: only throughthe sheddingof all illusionsof selfhood can a genuineself be imagined.Renatevon Heydebrand's phraseappliesto all three of these poems: "Distanz ist das Gesetz dieser Darstellung;" but whereasboth Morikeand Rilke insist on distancein orderto recapture, at the limits of the imagination,a residualconnectedness,Benn negates all connectionsexcept "das Geistige." One could say that he radicalizes Rilke'susage of "das Wissen:"just becauseour only link to these remoteepochs and geographiesof the past is throughknowledge, that is the reinventionof they can become the basis of the experiment the modernself. Man has lost his centerirrevocably, but he still has his the of its traditions and collective peripheries-and mystery language, memories. It is possible to discerna structureof recurrence and glimpsein this poem, but againthe prioritiesare inverted.Insteadof Morike'sseamless web or Rilke's alternationthere is rigid repetition.For in Benn's world thereis only recurrence, itself can becomethe sourceof a yet recurrence savingglimpse,providedit is insistedon withoutsentimental loosening. Thus the first stanza, very close to daily life, is without hint of any dimensionbut loss; the second stanza, held withinthe flickeringimmediacy of newsreel,also turnsin on itself, but ends in a question.The third stanza is exotic, effortful, "die feuerrotenSegel" are still close to schoolroomencyclopedias.But the imaginationis freed, and the fourth stanzaroamsto the limitingconundrums of planetary history.The shape of historyis unchanged,as is the shape of Benn's stanzas, the world is and death. But throughthe magicof a liberated nothingbut recurrence can and has becomeglimpse. In the last stanzathe languagerecurrence infinite weight of the past has become infinitely light: the long-established analogy of poetry and music, the arts that exist only in time, is deployedto suggestthat whathas hithertobeenlimitedto the categoryof dry knowledgecan become the fluid substanceof a new mode of being. The concludingimage of the "Strom" is of course a topos, a metaphor for life that almost everypoet has elaborated.Here is Rilke's version, in a letterto Lou Salomeof 8 August 1903:"Ich teile mich immer wiederund flief3e mA chte doch so gernin einemBette auseinander,-und
wir sollen wie ein Strom sein und nicht in gehen und grol3 werden... Kanale treten und Wasser zu den Weiden f0ihren ... wir sollen uns

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zusammenhaltenund rauschen."" Like Benn, Rilke insists that the poet's way into the world can only be throughinsistenceon his autonomy, through the compressionof inheritedlanguage, its release and renewal. But unlike Benn, Rilke wants to reclaimall elementsof the image for the concept of identity. The self is the river, the world is its banks. The boundariesare fluid, the temporality of the riverof central importance:but the landscapeis the same as in the older centuriesof the Westerntradition.For Benn, the chaosof the modernhas devastated the landscape,the banksbetweenself and worldare hopelesslybreached. But there is hope in the fact that the riverhas flooded the landscape:it can obliterate woundsand, moreover,it is still a river.Thereis still direction and current.The humanconsciousnesscan neveragain claim it as an image for individualidentity,but what is now possibleis to tame its shapelessness throughan opennessto its totality,to the depthand multiplicity of the humanpast. Then it can be "in dich gelegt." Indeedit is always present, the verb is "bleibt." But the time-scalegeneratedby the rigor of the "Ausdruckswelt" gives access to the river'scurrent,as Morike'snarrativeof discoveryopens the charmedcircle of the tree. Time is no longer a given, a passivebackground: it has becomeboth man's properelement and his essentialtool in the struggleagainst the of experience.For, when time's perennialmasks of hisdisintegration tory and languageare seized and displacedby poetic speaking,it yields the only possibilityimaginable of reconstituting the supportive mutuality of self and world.
Duke University

'Fritz Strich, Deutsche Klassik und Romantik; oder Vollendung und Unendlichkeit (Munich: Beimeyer, 1922). 2 "Der Weg zu einem totalen, 'objektiven' Erfassen der Welt war dem romantischen Ich trotz der Abwendung vom christlichen Dogma wie vom aufklarerischen Rationalismus nicht versperrt, vielmehr schien er leichter gehbar als je zuvor .. " Heinz Schlaffer, Lyrik im Realismus (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966), p. 10. SMrike, letter to Mahrlen, May 21, 1932; quoted by Gerhard Storz, Eduard MOrike (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1967), p. 19. SMrike, fragment from an unfinished novel; quoted by Storz, p. 222. Dagmar Barnouw's very thorough reading stresses the traditional element, the movement from the closure of the idyll to the closure of the "Dinggedicht." She assumes the stability of the poetic self as a giver of homage. Entziickte Anschauung: Sprache und Realitit in der Lyrik Eduard Merikes (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1971), pp. 137-49. Renate von Heydebrand, Eduard Mirikes Gedichtwerk (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972), p. 39. Christiaan Hart Nibbrig's reading of the conclusion illuminates its underlying tension, the specifically temporal danger of the gaze into the mirror. But his "existential" language seems almost too highly charged: "Das Spannungsverhaltnis von Ich und Welt ist im poetischen Jetzt aufgehoben. Allein dessen FOille droht zugleich auch wieder in die Leere weltloser, in sich selbst gefangener, sich selbst bespiegelnder Innerlichkeit umzuschlagen. Diese mogliche Konsequenz ist spilrbar in dem offenen, stehenden Gedichtschlu3." Verlorene Unmittelbarkeit: Zeiterfahrung und Zeitgestaltung bei Eduard MOrike (Bonn: Bouvier, 1973), p. 299. 8 Jacob Steiner, "Die Thematik des Worts im dichterischen Werk Rilkes," in Rilke in neuer Sicht, ed. by Kate Hamburger (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971), pp. 173-195.

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Rilke, letter to Lou Andreas-Salom6, August 8, 1903, in Briefe, ed. by Karl Altheim (Wiesbaden: Insel-Verlag, 1950), vol. 1, pp. 56-7. 10 Rilke, "Puppen" in Sdmtliche Werke, ed. by Ernst Zinn, vol. 6 (Frankfurt a.M.: InselVerlag, 1966), p. 1069. 1 "Fundamental Neues bringt die Lyrik des 20. Jahrhunderts nicht mehr, so qualitatvoll auch einige ihrer Dichter sind." Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), p. 140. 12 Marion Adams, Gottfried Benn's Critique of Substance (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1969), p. 106. 13 Ibid., p. 105. 14 Gottfried Benn, "Der Radardenker," in Werke, Band 2: Prosa und Szenen (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1958), p. 273. 1" Benn, "Marginalien," in Werke, Band 1: Essays und Aufsdtze, pp. 391-2. 6" Rilke, Briefe, vol. 1, p. 60.

The Heidelberg Festival, comprising a series of orchestral and operatic performances in the castle, has invited the Eastman Philharmonia and its conductor David Effron to be its resident orchestra. The Eastman Philharmonia is the senior orchestra of the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. The performances to take place between July 26 and August 31, 1981, are part of the second annual Heidelberg Castle Festival.

Oskar Kokoschka, the great Austrian painter, graphic artist, scenic designer, and author of pioneering dramatic works, who acquired worldwide renown as one of the "monoliths" of classical modern art, died in his house in Villeneuve on the shore of Lake Geneva (Switzerland) on February 22, 1980, at the age of 93.

Professor Gerhard Croll, the head of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Salzburg, has recently discovered a previously unknown part of the score to "The Abduction from the Seraglio" by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The composition, the existence of which was suspected on the basis of some contemporary sources, consists of 28 bars and Croll calls it "March of the Janizaries During the Entry of Selim Bassa." It is set in c-major for nine brass and woodwinds and two drums (one German, one Turkish). The march, if put in the designated sequence, closes a gap which, from the point of dramaturgical development, has been inexplicable. The composition will be published by Baerenreiter-Verlag during 1980. It has been agreed upon that the music will receive its official premiere during the opening ceremony of the 1980 Salzburg Festival.

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