Someone else who read "Lenz"

Mr. Jumbo has posted a long response to Büchner's "Lenz," which I recommend both to those who have read the story and to those who have not. Thanks to him for joining me in reading the novella on January 20!

Meridian

Die Kunst ... bildet ... den Gegenstand einer Unterhaltung, die in einem Zimmer, also nicht in der Conciergerie stattfindet, einer Unterhaltung, die, das spüren wir, endlos fortgesetzt werden könnte, wenn nichts dazwischenkäme.

Es kommt etwas dazwischen.

Paul Celan, "Meridian"

In John Felstiner's translation:

Art forms the subject of a conversation that takes place in a room, not in the Conciergerie prison, a conversation that could go on endlessly, we feel, if nothing intervened.

Something does intervene.

Beautifully, when Celan identifies art as "the subject of a conversation," he chooses the word "Unterhaltung" and not the word "Gespräch" (which he does use later in "Meridian"). You see, "Unterhaltung" can also mean "entertainment." Celan is not usually identified as someone whose poetry one reads and thinks about for entertainment, but I have always derived the greatest possible intellectual entertainment from reading, thinking about, and discussing his work with people. It can be a harrowing experience, discussing Celan, but harrowing experiences are part of what constitutes art—as the age-old concept of tragic catharsis makes clear.

The scene Celan is referring to is in Büchner's "Danton's Death," and the conversation involves several revolutionaries (including Danton) who have been condemned to death. So what "intervenes" here is a death sentence.

There are many ways to read this intervention, but all of them involve a recognition that although art is a matter of "Unterhaltung" in the sense of both conversation and entertainment, art works provide the best material for "Unterhaltungen" when they recognize the imminence of interruption, of "intervention," of death sentences.

Poems can be "lighter than air," but at their best, their lightness points towards something unbearable, harrowing, cathartic.

Lenz

My favorite passage in Büchner's Lenz reads like a desire for photography:

"Wie ich gestern neben am Tal hinaufging, sah ich auf einem Steine zwei Mädchen sitzen: die eine band ihr Haar auf, die andre half ihr; und das goldne Haar hing herab, und ein ernstes bleiches Gesicht, und doch so jung, und die schwarze Tracht, und die andre so sorgsam bemüht. Die schönsten, innigsten Bilder der altdeutschen Schule geben kaum eine Ahnung davon. Man möchte manchmal ein Medusenhaupt sein, um so eine Gruppe in Stein verwandeln zu können, und den Leuten zurufen."

In John Felstiner's translation (from his translation of Celan's Meridian):

"Yesterday, as I was walking up along the valley rim, I saw two girls sitting on a rock: one was doing up her hair, the other helping her; and the golden hair hung down, and the pale serious face, yet so young, and the black dress, and the other girl taking such pains. The Old German School's finest, most intimate pictures can scarcely give an idea of it. At times one might wish to be a Medusa's head, so as to turn such a group into stone and call people over."

Perhaps more precisely, this is a desire for snapshots, and not photography in general. Büchner was writing in the 1830s, the decade when photography began to emerge. Lenz, of course, lived in the eighteenth century, and Büchner's story takes place in 1778, but even then the desire for photography already existed.

My second favorite passage is not even in the text, but in Büchner's primary source, the diary of Lenz's host, Oberlin: "Er hatte eine Wunde am Fuß hieher gebracht, die ihn hinken machte und ihn nötigte hierzubleiben." Büchner does not include the fact that Lenz had a wound on his foot that forced him to stay with Oberlin. For two reasons, I suspect: first, Büchner wants to emphasize Lenz's psychic instability, and the injured foot distracts from that. Secondly, Büchner mentions three times that Lenz harms himself in order to use physical pain as a way of "returning to self-awareness" (or something like that). If Büchner mentioned Lenz's wound, then the self-inflicted pain would again not have the same dramatic effect. The suppression of the wound makes the story possible, as it were.

The third thing I want to know here is a point of contact between Büchner's story and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, which I read a few weeks ago, with its emphasis on "social mimicry" as the means by which one fits oneself into unfamiliar social situations (see my post on the book). At the end of Büchner's story, before the famous "So lebte er hin" with which it concludes, comes this: "er tat Alles wie es die Andern taten."

"He did everything the same way the others did": Lenz compensates for his psychic instability, for what Lethem might call "a form of autism," with "social mimicry," and when it works, then he can "live on."

Finally, poetry as therapy, as Lenz uses poetry the same way he used physical pain, to return to himself: "er sagte in der heftigsten Angst Gedichte her, bis er wieder zu sich kam." In a state of the most terrible anxiety, he recites poems until the anxiety disappears and he is himself again.

Lenz, Büchner, Celan

I did read Büchner's Lenz today, as planned, along with Celan's Meridian. And I prepared to read Büchner by reading the original Lenz himself: Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. I read his story Zerbin.

I'm too tired to think through any deeper comments than the observation that it is fascinating to read three short, intense texts in quick succession from three different centuries. Zerbin is a very eighteenth-century story, and Lenz feels very nineteenth-century (along with its "anticipatory" quality, pointing toward 20th-century developments, it is nevertheless a 19th-century text), while Celan's Meridian speech could hardly have been written before the 20th (before Modernism, to put a period term on it). A fascinating set of texts, on which I will try to comment more in the course of the week.

January 20, Büchner and Celan

"Den 20. Jänner ging Lenz durchs Gebirg."

"On January 20, Lenz walked through the mountains."

January 20 is the date with which Georg Büchner's Lenz begins. I am planning to re-read the story on Sunday, and I invite anyone else who wants to read it to do so as well. If you are not familiar with it, well, it's one of the greatest pieces of prose I have ever read.

The original German is available here.

English translations are available, but not on-line as far as I can tell. See the list on the Lenz page at Wikipedia.

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"Vielleicht darf man sagen, dass jedem Gedicht sein '20 Jänner' eingeschrieben bleibt?"

"Perhaps we may say that every poem has its '20th of January' inscribed?"

A second text to read on January 20 is Paul Celan's "Meridian," the speech he gave on reading the Büchner Prize. If you can't read the German, look for John Felstiner's translation in his "Selected Poems and Prose of Celan."

If you do read either the Büchner or the Celan on January 20, feel free to comment here! And feel free to pass this "call for reading" on.