Georg Trakl died young, at 28, after caring for wounded soldiers during World War I. Were dying soldiers, and life, too much? – after a suicide attempt, averted by others, hospitalized, he died of cocaine. Perhaps an accident; but in one who trained as a pharmacist to feed his addictions? Life: like that for Trakl. He had incestuous relations with a younger sister, held jobs for minutes, found reality a terror, life a conflict, made addiction routine, attempted suicides, occasional.
If life ran dark for Trakl, his poems, more variable, range passionate to calm, with a taste, sometimes, for the flourish of invocation. “O dark pain of death.” Beyond fluctuating moods and outbursts, Trakl’s late poems seem filtered through a broader stance, a reserve. Behind this he waits, watchful, impersonal, still.
His writing can be plain. “The sun comes over the hill each day.” Yet enigmatic. Synesthesia, other devices, put terms to unusual uses: “Shadows search the hill for sounding gold.” He is impersonal. “Dew blossoms on the face.” But not flat. Dabs of color burn. “A fish redly rises in the green pond.” “The maple rustles red.” Soul dark, adjectives can be luminous: “shining,” “soft,” “delicious.”
He is physical. His writing, often changeable: meanings flicker, restless with contradiction. But the physical qualities of his writing are constant: its urge of rhythm, terse melodies, textural meat, saturated colors. Pictorial substance, emotional force ensure its greatness. If concretely imagist, Trakl’s imagery is narrowly, contradictorily, repetitively obtuse. Colors abound, but are simple, repeated: red, blue, green, gold, white, silver, black dot his lines. So with angels, thorns, and round eyes, ringing and clanging, snow, cold; and moons, silence and darkness, occasional cries. If images insulate raw emotion, his remove, mesmeric tone, permit him observation, truth. In later work, he describes self objectively, his pronouns impersonal, as if he were elsewhere: purely, without self.
1. Phases of Trakl’s Verse
If ambiguity riddles Trakl’s verse, its phases are clearer. Chronologically, Kemper, others, identify four (in Williams 1991, 27-36). After a period combining impressionism and Jugendstil, in 1909, Trakl took up Reihungsstil (row style), a form evolved from disparate Teutonic origins. In it, endstopped lines are independent thoughts. But his meaningful unit is the sum of his lines, of the poem as instant, forcing readers to meld multiple images to one concept – root of tendencies in his later verse. With Reihungsstil, drawing on Hölderlin, Novalis, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Trakl’s work matured by late 1912.
Trakl’s third phase evolved a style increasingly paratactical. Reihungsstil fading, sentences, clauses, images caged in lines no longer. Enjambment overflows once endstopped lines, diction grows more fractured. Sentences more flowing, diction densifies, syntax implodes. Abbreviated nonsequential phrases articulated by eccentric punctuation, irrational conjunctions: his writing declines in coherence by the standard rules for decoding language. From “The Wanderer”:
The sleeping footbridge arcs the mountain stream, a dead face follows the boy, sickle moon in rosy ravine
far from praising herdsman. From old rocks a toad stares through crystal eyes, the blooming wind awakes, the avian voice of the deathly and footsteps green slowly in the forest.
This recalls tree and beast. Slow stages of moss; and the moon, that glowing sinks in grieving waters.
Another trend concentrates Trakl’s diction: abandoning meter and rhyme for free verse, vocabulary narrows. Iterated in the poems, nouns and adjectives fewer yet frequent turn symbolic. Apparently. With over-determination rampant in Trakl’s writing, his symbols — meanings unclear, or cancelled by contradiction — are scarcely symbols: often, they stand for more than one thing. Significance changing, they can mean their opposites; which changes with context, relation. Better call them images. Too, his content changes, turns inward, exploring his self. Outward, his forms turn asyntactical, paratactical, synesthetic, contradictory, neologistic.
Trakl’s fourth and final phase (1914) saw changes more in structure than subject, style. Some poems take a more urgent pace, emptying the “boundlessly inexpressible” plains Rilke saw between lines and stanzas in earlier works. (Lindenberger 72, 108) Even as Trakl confounds an elevated tone with sometimes sordid imagery, he sometimes abandons the hypnotic calm of phases two, three and rushes through stubby lines with breathless energy. In “Summer,” “Spiritual Dusk,” lines shorten, drive into the next. “The Tempest” ends:
Fear, you poisonous viper, dark one, die in the stone! As tears plunge in wild torrents, storm-compassion, echoing with droning thunder snowy summits ring. Fire anneals torn night.
These cases, uncommon; more often, Trakl holds to longer lines. Under increasing influence from Friedrich Hölderlin, his voice drifts remote, incantatory, lustering his verse with the visionary antique. “O how old is our kind.” Throughout his phases — settings, landscapes evolve. From phase two’s spatial compression of crowded cities and intimate gardens to phase three’s foothills and plains, he retreats, in phase four, to distant mountains (Kemper, 30, 33, 34). In moving from near to remote, he withdraws from personal to abstract even as his theme of decline descendss steepening slopes.
2. Views on Trakl
Trakl confuses. With early works caged in the conventional structures of romantic poesy, in the late, language grows odd, terse, enigmatic. Grammar and syntax disjointed, he conflates space and time, obscures meaning with verbal compression. Sometimes critics, puzzled, make his works found objects. They make them uninterpretable, devoid of rational meaning and sequence, analyze Trakl’s words as physical experiences valued for their euphony of rhyme, alliteration; their assonance of vowels, syllables; their quixotic succession of feelings, their hypnotic chanting rhythms.
Other critics love the complexly schematic, follow Trakl’s concatenated interlock of figure, image, and word into obscure meanings that grow increasingly distant from clarity; perhaps also from Trakl’s poetic intentions, conscious, not. Sometimes, critics explicate the obvious by following trails of technical expertise (linguistic, psychological, statistical) to emerge at what the corpus is about; although what a poem is about, less certain, though their work can be redeemed by its facts and data, substantive background for informed interpretation. Or their interpretive schemes and codes attribute to his work meanings that make him subtle Christian, secretive penitent, landscape structuralist, or near-mute crusader against urban decay, the regimentation of modern life.
Of quests for sense in the verse, let us evaluate a few: Detsch’s quest for unity; Lindenberger’s delineation of patterns; Leiva-Merikakis’ assertion of Christianity; Williams’ tracing of paradigms.
3. Detsch
Trakl left little theoretical overview of his work. Internally, it is not prone to abstraction, generalization, leaning instead to what seem concrete if bizarre depictions of his experiences, mental, emotional. Defining which: not easy. Nevertheless, critical theories abound. Without direction from Trakl, the principal contention of Richard Detsch’s Georg Trakl’s Poetry: Toward a Union of Opposites, is that buried in Trakl’s contradictory, illogical language is a central urge toward unity. Trakl, he thinks, implicitly bases his work on a unity explicit in the work of Goethe, Rilke, Heidegger: an underlying unity of world phenomena.
Thus, Detsch searches Trakl for a unity analogous to that in Heidegger. He thinks Heidegger’s “concept of ‘Abgeschiedenheit’ (seclusion, detachment) as unifying center of Trakl’s poetry is appropriate if one realizes he means death in a nonphysical sense” (79), that is, death taken as a proposed metaphysical “unifying principle which draws the past and the future, birth and death, into a whole.” (78) How identify this principle? Detsch, addressing how Trakl’s poetry possesses underlying unity analogous to that in his three exemplars, concludes, “what Trakl’s poetry doesn’t have … are definite references to the emerging unity.” (99)
A serious point. Detsch wants Trakl’s “emerging unity” empirical; it must instead be read into his work. Detsch fields two arguments that Trakl intends an underlying unity in his work. First, he names literary devices fostering ambiguity — including transitive uses of intransitive verbs; synesthesia; illogical conjunctions; metaphorical comparisons that treat incomparable substantives as synonyms; random juxtapositions of images and nouns; a “blurring of [the] contours” of meaning through the use of verbs that, conveying a “dissolving” impression, are applied to inappropriate subjects. (99-113) Second, he invokes others’ quests to unify a disparate world — by Buddhist philosophers, Plotinus, Eckhart, Spinoza, several German romantic novelists, Erich Neumann, Jung, Andre Beguin, Walther Killy, others. (115ff)
How to infer from Trakl’s pursuit of ambiguity he sought unity? No one doubts Trakl ambiguous, but ambiguity seems poor foundation for arguments that Trakl sought unity. Ambiguity, so ambiguous. Or that Trakl — like every writer — used literary devices tells us little of what he used them for. Difficult to infer, that because an author uses illogical conjunctions, he seeks unity.
But it seems Trakl used literary devices less to achieve “unity through ambiguity” (112) than to describe experience. If his psychic development was arrested, then his poems may be analyzed as describing this. This, a simpler, more direct explanation of his odd poetry than making it a quest for metaphysical unity; especially when, as noted, Trakl makes no “definite references to the emerging unity.” (99) Without evidence of “emerging unity,” why propose it? A more apparent characterization of Trakl’s chaotic writing: disunity.
Detsch, generalizing others’ explanations of Traklean verse (Rudolf Schier, Walther Killy, Clemens Haselhaus), notes Trakl’s language lacks “basis in the real world.” (96) Which one? If Trakl describes primitive psychic development, whose contradictions, fragmented selves and objects, coexisting in a dissociative soup, rise to consciousness in unpredictable succession, his language depicts his real. Seeing metaphysics — beyond the real — in the poems seems misguided. His work, however irrational, is opposite: specific, concrete, descriptive. Grounding for Trakl’s irrational language requires nothing beyond real. He avoids metaphysical constructions, struggles in his journals with description. The nature of what he seems to describe seems sufficient explanation of his strange language.
On Detsch’s second argument: citing thinkers who sought a unifying matrix for their experiences is insufficient evidence Trakl did. Parallelism: not proof. For example, taking Gottfried Benn’s selecting Narcissus as modeling the psyche of modern man, Detsch comments, “Trakl’s frequent use of the Narcissus motif indicates this same desire for wholeness.” (117) A simpler explanation of Trakl’s references to Narcissus? That he describes his narcissism. If Trakl searches for an enveloping world unity via poetry, this is not obvious. Occam: cleave to the simplest explanation.
An apparent stimulus for Detsch’s thoughts on Trakl: he is reacting to critics like Walther Killy (Über Georg Trakl, Göttingen, 1967), who view Trakl’s perverse uses of language as often “a mere aesthetic game with disconnected images.” (119) Detsch is correct, I think, to suppose Trakl’s work more complex than this; but without evidence, far journeys in the opposite direction are perilous.
4. Lindenberger
One aspect of Trakl’s work is evident in Herbert Lindenberger’s overview, Georg Trakl. Searching to explain Trakl’s ambiguity and inconsistency, his analyses mirror these qualities. He tackles the problem of understanding Trakl’s work at its most difficult level: grammar, logical meaning. At the outset, Lindenberger’s search is similar to others aiming to read conventional sense in Traklean verse. He approaches, for example, “Helian,” first landmark of the latework, with a tractable mind; but grappling with Trakl’s bifurcated contradictions, he reflects them. (74-75) He looks for a narrative trace in “Helian” by isolating a succession of “dominant imagery … that moves from processes of decay to hints of rebirth.” Post-analysis, he notes that “the problematic quality of the conclusion makes it difficult to postulate any single pattern unequivocally.” A further objection, not addressed: so abstract an explanation tells less what this poem is about than it describes what Trakl’s poems are about. Then, discarding his quest for “dominant imagery,” Lindenberger avers it might be easier instead to trace “specific images” through the poem. He does so: “all of these images would surely support a theory about ‘Helian’ as a poem of death and regeneration.” As it were (75):
Still, despite the indubitable presence of this pattern in the poem, there are other patterns against which it must be measured. If in one sense, the poem moves gradually toward death and then toward rebirth, in another sense it moves back and forth from moment to moment between positive and negative aspects of reality.
This is mindswirl. So great in Trakl are ambiguity, contradiction, layered meaning, readers and critics strive for sense. Trakl’s restless mix of qualifications, contradictions, polarities, limitations, ambivalence, distinctions counter-distinctions, ambiguities genders makes flux without direction. Part of Trakl’s shifting sense and focus, of his deft conveyance of change and variation, are his “subtle qualifications which serve to undermine any generalizations … about the poem’s themes and progressions.” (Lindenberger 75)
Not every poem is riddled with relentless ambivalence, contradiction; which is demonstrated below by the linear development in “Melancholy,” by the regimented alternation of light and dark moods in the stanzas of “Winter Evening.” Still, Lindenberger’s sampling of “Helian” motifs, images, figures, moods, and qualities, taken in series, progressions, or clusters, typifies the diverse organization in much of Trakl’s poetry — and in much of his critics’ work. Apparently successful dissections occur at specific levels, from specific viewpoints, as in Lindenberger’s “the indubitable presence of this pattern in the poem.” But always, more. Seldom are analyses of the poems consistently effective without “subtle” qualification.
In Lindenberger’s analysis, initial confusion is foil for later clarity. But he reaches clarity through a generality that, arching over minutiae of grammar, sentences, the layered details of contradiction, ambiguity, leaves them unexplained. He tackles analysis at broad levels of structure. He analyzes, for example, a poem’s dramatic progression, or its overall picture as a static complex molded (when not destroyed) by the contradictions, the chronological non sequiturs, of its details. But his analyses of poems are so general as to miss the fine grain of their meanings, the meanings of individual poems; too general to unravel the detailed contradictions and illogic of texts that demonstrate how temporary or conflicted Trakl’s meanings can be.
5. Leiva-Merikakis
Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ The Blossoming Thorn: Georg Trakl’s Poetry of Atonement is characterized by deep, wide-ranging scholarship in historical Christian sources, by frequent on-point characterizations of Trakl’s verse. Regarding the latter, for example, Leiva-Merikakis notes that, in Trakl’s poetry, “We are quite uncertain what the … ‘content’ of [a poem] might be …. we are deliberately denied an object foreign to the poem.” (33) And “…we encounter a broken and fragmentary style that largely dispenses with connectives, often even with verbs, and relies heavily on the mute semicolon. …The world is not presented as a psychologically closed chamber where cause and effect succeed one another relentlessly.” (98)
Leiva-Merikakis’ “mute semi-colon” and comment on causality seem canny hints at Trakl’s apparent project: describing lower levels of psychic development. Yet Leiva-Merikakis’ analysis in other respects: less satisfactory. He attacks Lindenberger’s contention that Trakl’s Christianity is “literary.” (Lindenberger 79) Leiva-Merikakis, in disagreeing, does not refute. To the contrary: “The question of Georg Trakl’s existential Christianity must remain a working hypothesis in this study. …The subjective identity of a person’s soul is not available as such for anyone’s investigation.” (32) Which undermines his claim that Trakl’s verse is, is intended to be, Christian.
Sidebar. That there can be no evidence of “subjective identity” seems wrong. Example. Had Trakl stated he was a Christian writing Christian poetry, this would have gone far to establish how he intended his work to be read. But if conceptual limits on understanding Trakl’s intentions are serious, that he left small evidence of literary, or any, intention makes our limited knowledge of his intentions circumstantial, not conceptual.
Thinking Trakl mute as to Christian intentions, Leiva-Merikakis enlists analogy to mark his verse Christian. He argues: similarities, parallelisms, analogies between Christian scripture or theology and Trakl’s writings constitute (something like) a cause-and-effect relation guaranteeing Trakl’s work Christian. If statements in Trakl are similar to those in scripture and Christian theology, they must mean the same, as in Leiva-Merikakis’ claim that Trakl’s “use of symbolist aesthetics coincides with the Christian ascesis of transformation in Christ.” (31) In his broadest formulation, he maintains anything written in a pervasively Christian context — say, western culture — must be Christian.
It seems wrong to assume — not least in recent times, when secular contexts and the distancing of irony and “literary” references to philosophy, religion, ideology are common — that Christian context makes Christian content inevitable. For example, it has been remarked of Barnett Newman’s “The Stations of the Cross” that “Newman uses his chosen frame of reference only to dictate the number of paintings — fourteen — and to provide a clue to the series’ expressive climate,” and furthermore that “he decided to create a series after he had completed the first two paintings, and he identified the theme after he had finished four.” (Temkin, 229) Yet by Leiva-Merikakis’ thinking, Newman’s title “The Stations of the Cross” would be evidence that Christian content is intended: “The consistent presence of religious language” is an indication of Christian intent. (26) Given that identifying an artist’s “existential Christianity” — that he is Christian — is no part of Leiva-Merikakis’ determination that a work is Christian (32), that Newman was a Jew would seem unimportant. Except it is: personally, historically, avowedly, “The Stations of the Cross” was not religious for Newman — which further confounds the idea that a work’s lodgment in western culture, its uses of Christian tradition and terminology, are sufficient to ensure its Christian character. If there ever was — the Middle Ages? — so universal a devotion to Christianity as to guarantee its artifacts Christian, this may not be assumed now.
Leiva-Merikakis’ central thesis: Christ’s incarnation infused western thinking and creativity with Christianity. “By asking whether there exists a formal correspondence between the intended end of Christ’s saving action of atonement and the end to Trakl’s poetic activity, we may establish with certainty the degree to which his poetry fully realizes, embodies, represents the Christ-form.” (19) He supports this formulation with analogical correspondences: “The consistent presence of religious language in poetry … is the most obvious indication that the work understands itself as existing within a given religious tradition.” (26) In later chapters, more specific supports for his thesis: he understands Trakl’s work primarily as an atonement analogous to the role of atonement in Christian tradition; and he sees Trakl’s tone as analog to that of apocalyptic writers of the first century; of the German baroque.
But as with Detsch’s reading unity into Trakl’s work based on unity in other authors’ work, analogy is parallelism, not proof. Arguments based on “formal correspondence,” on analogy, are no guarantee that similar terms in the dogma of Christ’s incarnation and Trakl’s poetry correspond in meaning. No one disagrees: Trakl used religious language. But the question — how did he use it? — is not answered by his using it. To cite Christian terms in Trakl’s verse begs the central question: what are they doing there? Analogical comparisons dodge questions like, how valid is Lindenberger’s contention that Trakl’s Christian iconography is “literary”? Terms the same do not mean they mean the same. To assert this prima facie, an argument would have to make this conclusion a premise.
Which is frequent mistake in Leiva-Merikakis’ Trakl interpretations: premises incorporate conclusions, making it easy for his syllogistic reasoning to arrive at those conclusions. He thinks verbal parallelisms between Christianity and Trakl are proof of the first in the second. But the thought that analogs — outward forms — consistently indicate inward meaning, that “atonement” in theology must mean the same in Trakl, does not hold. Analogies among meanings assume — not prove — they mean the same. Leiva-Merikakis’ analogical-syllogistic reasoning (that to use Christian terminology means it must be used as Christians use it; and Trakl used Christian terminology) makes his conclusion — Trakl wrote Christian verse — forgone.
Example. Consider one of Leiva-Merikakis’ assertions: “The act of Christian faith is a transformative experience of the whole person.” Therefore, “because the whole person is thus affected by the experience of the rebirth of Christ,” both “the ‘creative’ and the ‘believing’ intellects … coexist in tight subliminal and unreflected unity in the existing subject, so that there is a strict interdependence between faith and aesthetics.” (29) As a result, “the art of a Christian soul will be Christian art, not necessarily by intent, but unavoidably.” (30) The gist: if a person be Christian, his intellect of creativity is strictly interdependent with his intellect of faith; thus everything he is and does is unavoidably Christian. Skipping the dubious metaphysics of his post-Kantian attempt to unite mind and matter by asserting that, if the creative and believing intellects be pressed firmly together, they will “coexist … in unity,” consider: if the closely-reasoned complexities behind Leiva-Merikakis’ theological analogies are to be valid for Trakl, two unlikely assumptions must be made. The first: Trakl adhered to theological beliefs similar to Leiva-Merikakis’ — and not, say, to the internal errors in Christian thought Leiva-Merikakis confirms by his occasional disagreement with them. The second: for identity of content between Christian theology and Trakl’s work to be analogically valid, Trakl must possess a sufficient level of theological sophistication. Yet, in our limited knowledge of Trakl’s life, we do not know (assumption 1) whether his religious beliefs corresponded to those of Leiva-Merikakis; nor is it likely (assumption 2) he possessed a professional grasp of theology comparable to that of Leiva-Merikakis.
Finally, consider Leiva-Merikakis’ premise to this line of argument, quoted above: “The act of Christian faith is a transformative experience of the whole person.” This bases his arguments — on the effects and functioning of the rebirth of Christ on the believing and creative intellects — on a person being Christian. But where is this established for Trakl? — especially given Leiva-Merikakis’ prior assertion: “The question of Georg Trakl’s existential Christianity must remain a working hypothesis in this study. …The subjective identity of a person’s soul is not available as such for anyone’s investigation.” (32) Granted this, what logical (never mind factual) grounds remain for Trakl as Christian, or for his writing Christian poetry?
Most of Leiva-Merikakis’ quoted sources regarding the suffusing power of Christianity (that anything a Christian does is necessarily imbued with Christianity) typically use something like this phrase to convey what might be called the ideal experience of being Christian. But in these sources, this ideal experience does not appear causative: Christian beliefs, environment, culture may not necessitate Christian outcomes. The usual approach of moralists to pursuing a Christian life is prescriptive: he should infuse everything he is and does with Christianity. That it is inevitable he do so because he is Christian is a step beyond; and this inevitability conflicts with the Catholic thought that one chooses, is responsible for actions — for sinning, or not.
More: that Leiva-Merikakis’ maintains a necessary relation between living in a Christian culture (having Christian “intellects”) and being Christian poses three awkward questions. The first regards the reifying tendency of his metaphysical vocabulary. He inclines to discuss metaphysical entities as if physical; but are they determinable, observable, testable? For example, what are Leiva-Merikakis’ “creative” and “believing” “intellects”? And what branch of physiology tells us these “intellects” are “unavoidably” linked, “coexist in … unity”? Discussing the empirical-metaphysical chasm, he jumps the shark and treats metaphysics as physics.
The second issue: as suggested, Leiva-Merikakis’ metaphysical language is too specialized to have much relationship to Trakl’s writings. For example, Leiva-Merikakis softens an implausible contention by backing into it with a complicated question, yet, it is a question he seems to regard as more than rhetorical. “The mystery of suffering as an aesthetic principle: Should we not seek a verification of the Bride’s commiseration with the Bridegroom and her participation in his suffering (participation as con-formation) in the repeated instances [in which] Trakl’s poetry presents the gesture of attendance upon the dead Bridegroom?” (141) One answer is “No.” Trakl occasionally uses “bride” and “bridegroom” with religious connotation, but nothing seems to justify so detailed an interpretation of his language. Where some interpreters have trouble making any sense of Trakl’s work, Leiva-Merikakis makes too much.
A third question raised by Leiva-Merikakis’ thesis of suffusing Christianity — that Christianity necessarily imbues everything a Christian is and does — concerns the logical consequences of his metaphysical formulation. For example, granted that everything a Christian does is suffused with Christianity, when a Christian sins, does he sin in a Christian way? Is this distinguishable from non-Christian sinning? Is sinning suffused with Christianity? In literature, if Trakl were a “true” Christian, would he find it impossible to use Christian terminology “literarily”? If a Christian wishes to write ironically, sarcastically, metaphorically and by that intends his Christian references to be other than what Leiva-Merikakis calls “interior,” genuine, authentic, would his suffusing Christianity prevent him from doing so? The passionate concept — that everything a Christian is and does is suffused with Christianity — may appeal as prescriptive (“should be infused”) of Christian behavior; but taken literally (“must be infused”), does it model complicated experience, does it work in the world?
Other issues may be raised about Leiva-Merikakis’ thought. One, he assumes that Trakl’s work is replete with symbols: “use of symbolist aesthetics.” (31) But the contradictions in Trakl’s verse (little mentioned by Leiva-Merikakis) deprive his images of an essential requirement of symbols: referential constancy. “Gold” or “animal” can hardly symbolize something if that thing changes.
Leiva-Merikakis tends to illustrate his points about Trakl’s verse using early poems or prose-poems, whose greater verbal specificity circumvents a central problem in Trakl scholarship — the ambiguity of Trakl’s mature work. Leiva-Merikakis applies his theories about Trakl to eight poems, yielding interpretations often forced. We mentioned one problem, that he understands Trakl’s images as symbols even as their meanings fluctuate. Another: Leiva-Merikakis ignores changes in a poem’s mood or content when they work against his purpose. Thus, he analyzes “Mankind” as rife with war and chaos in its first half but calmed by “the triumph of peace over chaos” in its second. This bifurcation allows him to assert that Trakl “realizes in the form of the poem Christ’s promise of peace to those who choose to have their reality within the unique form of his redemption.” (36) This polar characterization of the poem’s halves is accurate, broadly: the last five lines change sufficiently in tone and imagery to suggest a turn toward peace and quietude.
But inevitable ambiguity enters: the first three lines of the last stanza of “Mankind” are foil to its deeply negative concluding couplet. This change in tone cancels a clear triumph of peace. Not only do apostles “scream in sleep” in line nine; in line ten, Thomas thrusts his hand into wounds, recalling his faithlessness. Leiva-Merikakis moves to rescue the latter line with the comment that Thomas’ action “recognizes the authenticity of Christ’s deed of peace.” (36) But this — peculiar — understanding ignores the line’s immediate significance: Thomas doubted. The nocturnal screaming in line nine goes unremarked. These two lines make the last half of “Mankind” more pessimistic than Leiva-Merikakis acknowledges. It would appear he fails to acknowledge their dark mood because this erodes the emotional contrast between the poem’s halves on which his Christian interpretation relies.
Leiva-Merikakis’ understanding of “Grodek,” one of his few late exemplars, has two apparent flaws. (118ff) He assigns this poem a program comparable to that in “Mankind”: “a panorama of destruction” and the judgement of a “wrathful God” are succeeded by a reconciliation centered on “the beneficent presence of the sister, whom I regard as the feminine hypostasis of the wrathful God.” (119-220) While the sister in Grodek comes to “greet” the spirits of war’s fallen heroes, this positive interpretation of her ignores she is one of the most persistent and powerful and still ambiguous images in Trakl’s verse, his sister Margarete, with whom he apparently had incestuous relations extending into adulthood. So strong are Trakl’s feelings toward her that even in a poem on World War I (one of Trakl’s least relevant contexts for her appearance), she strides into war like an irrepressible phantom. True, Trakl paints her positive in “Grodek,” but his portrayals of his lover-sister fluctuate routinely between bliss and decay. Even as Leiva-Merikakis’ ignoring the dark relationship between sister and brother is selective, taking her and her incestuous relationship to Trakl as a representation of god seems … inappropriate. This makes Leiva-Merikakis’ argument that “Grodek” ends on a note of reconciliation implausible.
The second misinterpretation of “Grodek” by Leiva-Merikakis leads to a similar doubt. It is unclear whether this misinterpretation is a textual misunderstanding or was forced by Leiva-Merikakis’ Christian program for Trakl’s verse. The last two lines of “Grodek” may be rendered:
O prouder grief! you bronze altars, feeding today the spirit’s hot flame a more monstrous pain, the unborn generations.
Leiva-Merikakis interpretation of these lines is found in two comments, that war’s suffering is “for the sake of unborn generations,” and “the meaning of individual suffering can be found only as the individual relates himself to the welfare of those yet to exist.” (120-121) With clarity unusual in Trakl, his poem posits that the greatest pain of war is that, for each soldier killed infecund, his line of unborn descendants is lost. It seems difficult to reconcile this with Leiva-Merikakis’ belief that this poem implies that war’s suffering is “for the sake of unborn generations” when Trakl’s “unborn” are not “yet unborn” but “forever unborn.” It would seem that, behind Leiva-Merikakis’ comment, lies the trope that sacrifice by present people will benefit future others. But he seems so taken by this convention he misses Trakl’s point: sacrificing soldiers lack descendants who therefore do not benefit from their sacrifice — because of it, they “suffer” being unborn; a loss without end, without redemption; and without the positive conclusion Leiva-Merikakis seeks for this work.
Leiva-Merikakis’ adoption of Trakl as Christian seems driven by a desire to strengthen Christianity by recruiting Trakl’s poetry to its service. This resembles creationism’s attempt to capitalize on the power of science by validating Christianity with selected facts. Both endeavors seek support from facts because facts are concrete, reliable, functional; the more so because, since at least Copernicus, fact has become truth’s primary pragmatic determinant in the empirical world. Historically, this path has been perilous for faith because faith, when disputing empiricism and logic, routinely lost ground as empiricism gained power and credibility. But validating faith with facts is problematic. When faith seeks to draw on facts’ credibility to support its beliefs, it commits, on its own terms, a logical error. Faith, attempting to determine the nature of the empirical world based on scripture, treats itself as a higher, more valid knowing than empiricism. But for faith, as in creationism, to support theological beliefs using scientific truths reverses their order of eminence. To rely on facts makes science, not religion, truth’s arbiter. This contradicts faith’s claim to be the superior form of epistemology.
For Leiva-Merikakis to recruit Trakl’s work in support of faith — to make it important for faith that Trakl be a Christian poet — suffers this logical difficulty. To use Trakl’s poetry to validate faith elevates the physical world of poetry to a higher position than faith, which should reign true regardless of Trakl. Establishing faith’s truth by making the higher mode of knowing — faith-based belief — depend on the empirical contingencies of poetry or science is to forfeit the superiority of faith over empiricism. Morally, this is more than illogical. It is faithless to faith.
6. Williams
Eric B. Williams commences The Mirror and the World: Modernism, Literary Theory, and Georg Trakl with a sketch of the centuries’ decline in the credibility of idealistic schemes to unite the dualism of observer and observed. That mind indubitably reflects existence guaranteed pre-Enlightenment thinkers sure knowledge of the world. Confidence in this “specular metaphor” that mind, art, mirror existence, began to erode in the eighteenth century. (1993, 31) Attempts by Kant and the romantics to transcend the gap between existence and our perception of it moved reality inside us, “making nature the product of the transcendental subject.” Yet fear grew that in some sense beyond mind lay stuff. Because our “mode of access” to the world conditions our perception of it, “objective, eternally valid knowledge about the world proved to be an impossible dream.” (1993, 58)
Williams then describes twentieth-century attempts to found language in structures — of language, of mind — which, despite “the implicit idealism of universal deep-structure analysis,” were thought to shape our use of words. (1993, 106) Structural idealism was succeeded by post-structural approaches to language in which meaning arises between reader and text, between speakers, with interpretation “always a form of misreading … where one metaphorical chain is substituted, somewhat illegitimately, for another.” (1993, 112)
In such an environment, “it is … this lack of connection with the world, this referential free play, that gives language its great flexibility” and allows Williams to skip syntax to analyze Trakl’s poetry as paradigmatic. (1993, 112) Williams: “paradigmatic … involves the relation any syntagmatic element may have to other elements and words (or discourses) not contained in the given sentence or text,” — including relations of metaphor and metonymy, the semantics of “connotation, association, or opposition,” morphological elements like suffixes and prefixes — such that “the paradigmatic axis of language … will always reach beyond the bounds of any … text” to “potentially interchangeable units [of language],” to “cultural discourses as well.” (1993, 98-99)
Treating poems as planar, Williams adopts a two-dimensional approach rather than treating poems as one-dimensional linear narratives and thus derives meaning from complex, non-narrative, cross-referential, spatial relations among a poem’s elements. This technique uses constellations of related words, extratextual references and allusions, cultural contexts. His paradigms are constellations of relations inferred from how Trakl uses words, concepts, and images.
In practice, Williams typically parses poems as clusters of words — paradigms — that in Trakl have apparent mutual associations. Thus in “Grodek,” Williams groups words into five paradigms: silence, blue flowers, birds, sister, music. (203) He discusses overlaps among these paradigms, the richness of their referentiality, their close, complex applicability to Trakl’s work. But Williams’ fecund paradigms so thoroughly encompass the contents of a poem, little contrasting material remains to distinguish paradigmatic from nonparadigmatic. So cross-connected, overlapped, intersected, detailed, widespread are Williams’ webs of paradigms, “Grodek” dissolves into minute relations too detailed, numerous to clarify what the poem is about. As he associates large numbers of words with each paradigm, then relates paradigms to one another, one wonders, where is the end? What the meaning? Is there discipline in defining paradigm boundaries? Are paradigms so broad, overlapping, interwoven as to lose individuality? Are there limits that prevent a word from becoming linked to so many others that its diffuse abundance of linkages dissipates textual meaning? In “Grodek,” for example, Williams discusses 19 terms or motifs that relate to the five paradigms above (1993, 298-308):
tones, loud and soft
singing
clinking silence
deathly song
ring (v.) weapons
ballad cry (n.)
blue flower flutes
harmony music
sister birds
blindness
So diverse, limitless in “polyfunctionality,” almost any term can relate to any other. This list’s expansion seems unbounded in the face of its potential poly-referentiality to other Trakl poems, his letters and diaries, writings by others. A more superficial objection to using William’s five paradigms to characterize “Grodek”: their indirect associations to it. There is no bird, music, blue flower in its text — whose links to “Grodek,” discouragingly abstract. And a functional problem: this approach requires a large, detailed knowledge of paradigms to parse Trakl’s work.
A paradigm more focused: “what might be called the ‘Schweigen-schwartz-Kühle’ [silence-black-coolness] group.” As its constituents, Williams cites Hans Georg Kemper’s list (Georg Trakls Entwürfe, 36) of “a whole string of related words” (1993, 267):
black
metallic soundless
coolness dark
crystalline
cold shadow
snowy silence
icy stillness
hard quiet
hardness mute
stony rest
This list is more cohesive, its members more related in meaning, than in the former list, yet their extension is sufficient to raise questions. Does Trakl’s every use of these words in every poem relate to the Schweigen-schwartz-Kühle paradigm? Or a different one, or none? Does each member of this list relate to, imply, all its other members? Only some?
Williams is clear that paradigms overlap; in the first list above, some terms figure in three, four others. (302) But of several paradigms sharing a word, which ones does the word evoke in a given instance? Does a member of multiple paradigms invoke all simultaneously? What criteria decide which paradigm(s) apply to each use of each word in Trakl’s work? Chapters of Williams profusely multiply paradigmatic meanings and relations, thus: “Kemper also observes that Trakl prefers the words” “bony,” “stony,” “crystalline” over “hard.” This adds another term (“bony”) to the Schweigen-schwartz-Kühle paradigm. (1993, 267) Does this burgeoning of paradigmatic analysis, at once fine-grained and universal, lack the ability to define the meanings of particular poems? “There is no sign, or signified, [that] stands above this infinite play of differences.” (1993, 108) Does this “infinite” leveling of verbal significance not make it difficult for paradigms to highlight a poem’s outstanding themes, its principal threads of meaning? How does a leveling approach define what stands out?
Compared to most writing, applying paradigms to Trakl’s work is easy, problematic. Easy: paradigmatic analysis is a nice fit to Trakl’s diction, to his uses of words verging on random. Problematic: per Joseph Calbert, Trakl’s vocabulary is impoverished — small, repetitious — and expanding paradigms easily compass large tracts of it. With relatively little of Trakl’s repetitive texts excluded from Williams’ broadly determined paradigms, they lose power to discriminate, to define central meanings or relations that “stand above” others. Trakl’s vocabulary — small, mutable, multiply determined, polyfunctional, ambiguous, contradictory, self-plagiaristic — is major barrier to his meaning. Paradigms, sharing his vocabulary’s characteristics, are victimized by them: they apply easily to Trakl’s work because they mirror it; but mirroring Trakl does not explain Trakl.
In the end: Williams’ detailed analyses of Trakl’s writings do not distinguish large structures of meaning. In chapters packed with descriptions of verbal relations, word complexes, the overlapping of paradigms, paradigms become so poly-referential, detailed, they fail to arrive at comprehensive interpretations of what poems mean. It is as if a Williams analysis yields not understanding of a poem but a general description of the genus poem. Can a criss-crossing paradigmatic analysis that involves virtually every relation and word in a poem, and that treats these words and relations as equally important, arrive at particulate meaning for that poem? To establish an author’s intention, must not one distinguish which among webs of relations an author means to stress? An important quality of a poem: how its words, phrases, devices, and expressions arrive at an individual understanding of a theme. Paradigmatic tends to treat each poem the same, much the way psychological analyses of poems arrive at the same content for each poem — as illustrating the psyche of the author rather than a poem’s meaning. Can establishing wide webs of possible relations among a poem’s words (and among words of other poems and sources) reveal its individual message?
Paradigms seem to merge into large interrelated webs of words from which poems disappear. One wonders if the creation of paradigmatic structures builds a structure outside, independent, of Trakl’s work. What if one applied this analysis to Richard Feynman? Complexes of related words could be found, but would they tell us anything about physics? Would configurations of Feynman’s words via paradigms reveal what Feynman already says in his statements? Because Trakl’s statements are vague does not signify he thought in terms of paradigms (is that what is claimed; or only that they reveal his hidden thoughts inadvertently?). Paradigms may constitute a formation alongside but independent of Trakl’s sense, coinciding in a shared vocabulary. But is that vocabulary used the same way; does it mean the same in both? More: beyond their lists of words, what does a collection of paradigms mean? Do it tell a cogent story; are paradigms more than lists of related words? Are Trakl’s words better integrated not through an abstract exercise, an academic puzzle, but as descriptions based on the logical discrepancies, inconstancies, of a primitive, alogical psyche? Not a secret, abstract, coded puzzle of paradigms but a description of Trakl’s experiences? The latter is the simpler, more direct explanation of Trakl’s work.
This does not argue non-linear analyses all meaningless. The use of Reihungsstil is noted. A Chinese couplet often requires its lines be integrated spatially — its lines must have parallel grammar, complementary meanings, opposite tones. Different in spatiality, Calbert’s analysis of the micro-spatiality of Trakl’s vocabulary is outlined below. That words may derive meaning from nonlinear references to one another across the body of a text is not absurd; many maintain this true of Trakl’s technique, corpus. Also perhaps true is the idea that paradigmatic groups of words are meaningful. The problem: to make this yield independent meaning for each poem. Williams arrives at masses of complex, equally-weighted word-relations whose abstraction seem incapable of delivering the meanings of Trakl’s poems. Not practicing his preaching, he explains no poem by paradigms.
7. Trakl and Patterns of Interpretation
Critics applying psychological analysis to Trakl’s work, peering through poetry to person, posit emotional arrest, kinds of insanity (Sharp). Trakl’s poems may be artifacts of developmental arrest, mental distress. But reduction to psychology yields more mental diagnosis than literary criticism. Each poem’s analysis tends toward one conclusion: Trakl was troubled. Effective psychology, perhaps, but what of his works’ literary quality? The meaning of each poem? Drawing the same conclusion from every poem tells us little about individual poems; makes the psychological analysis of large numbers of them repetitive, diminishing in interpretive value. Still: studying Trakl’s emotional development yields rudiments of his self, whose poetry may prove less cryptic in light of its maker’s mind.
The most common evaluation of Trakl’s arrested development: he experienced an incomplete separation from primordial maternal unity. Feelings warmed more by her porcelain collection than her children, his mother wandered for days in the expanding space assigned her ceramics, a level of parental attention that left Trakl both yearning for primordial sensuous reunion with “the mother” and uneasy with the heterogeneity and speech-based distinctions of everyday life. His father, less odd, preoccupied by business, was hardly more present. Servants raised the kids.
Mind bordering the primordial, Trakl’s writing is said to have tapped a subconscious realm. Whose structure is key: pre-linguistic, apparently based on structures preexisting cause and effect, contradiction, succession, deduction — the temporal logics of conscious expression. It is said his mind was model for his odd organization of poetic discourse. In the later of his few years, access to the primitive opened for Trakl a path to powerful verse, however peculiar.
Some critics ignore psychology, use religion to interpret Trakl’s work (Lachmann, Leiva-Merikakis). But their arguments seem forced, or are grounded in idealist assumptions thinly attached to the world. Especially, they impose a single solution on a poet whose meanings, intentions are multiple, ambiguous, obscure. Their monothematic analyses reduce Trakl’s complexity to inaccurate simplicity.
Other authorities sort meaning by cultural context, textual evidence: they study history, documents, ancillary influences (Williams). Or subject texts to statistical analyses of words (Calbert). Some correlate verse and biography (Lachmann). Yet, with meanings in Trakl’s verse so unstable and, in later works, depersonalized, and with little known of his regimens, habits, and thoughts (outcomes of a life obscure and short), grounding the verse in the life, or vice versa, is, while not without value, doubtful as significant explanation of either. Most often, this approach cites earlier works in which “I” appears, where reference to personal experience is less widely expunged. A contravening approach: understanding Trakl’s words not for meaning but as sounds, stressing euphony, alliteration, sonority over sense (Killy). Or as verbal constellations that find meaning in spatial arrangement (Firmage, Williams): narrative meaning often impenetrable, words’ spatial arrangement becomes much of their sense. Relations of sound, meanings, juxtaposition among Trakl’s words deliver intelligence to the poems.
Some critics use more focused analytics deciphering the Traklean corpus: they postulate structure based on a dominant theme or subject. Steinkamp sees the poems skeletoned on a serial theme of landscape types. Instancing “Anif,” she notes that types of landscape evolve across it in “spatial zones” from rural to urban. While consensus agrees to a broad evolution of landscape type over successive phases of Trakl’s production, Steinkamp’s cart leads her horse: the course of Trakl’s verse is not driven by landscape; landscape more outcome than cause of the work.
Another case: Demet’s espousal of a “Blut” thematic as core to Trakl’s work. He is closer to Trakl’s core than Steinkamp: references to blood, generations, ethnicity, family are frequent. But if not miss, they parallel the point. Blood and incest, often associated in Trakl; but blood is topically derivative from incest. Blood, incest’s vehicle, travels — not paves — the road of Traklean thought.
If not blood, landscape, religion, what drove his verse? In preference to more incidental topoi, a major emotional driver of Trakl’s mature work is incest, a point so extensively documented it scarcely needs elaboration. One may refer to Detsch’s lengthy discussion of androgyny in Trakl’s work, associating it with sexual unity, human unity, unity of good and evil, unity in death; a progression behind which incest lurks large. (1991, 127-134) Incest permeates Trakl’s thought; and life: Detsch comments that Trakl’s publisher Ludwig von Ficker “knew of Trakl’s continuing problems with drugs and alcohol and was convinced that his relations with his sister Grete had been incestuous”; and a letter (10 January 1915) from Carl Dallago, a member of Ficker’s circle, “expresses his chagrin and disgust that [Ficker], who had been importuned enough in his family surroundings by a depraved Trakl, now had to submit to a visit from Trakl’s sister, whose depravity lacked the element of self-restraint [that] had mitigated that of her brother.” (1991, 66) Close union of brother and sister is evident in “that Trakl had repeatedly helped his sister to obtain drugs, to which she, like her brother, became addicted.” (1991, 31) From these and other citations in Detsch, an impression: that Trakl and Margarete were incestuous not only in oblivious childhood; as adults they seem to have been a couple, socially, sexually.
Reserve that some poems treat other topics — even then, incest seems impetus. Thus, while Firmage citing Heidegger labels “departure” a major Traklean theme, what drove departure? (In Williams 1991, 236) Trakl liked leaving; but what is departure without destination, primary cause? Why would he leave; where go? It seems evident Trakl’s prod to departure is guilt of incest; incestual guilt drives him toward oblivion in drugs and death. Departure, yes, powered by incest. Another theme: the broadest theme in Traklean verse is arguably decline, but incest seems mover of that; impetus behind the urge to the bottom. And: reconsider the theme of “Grodek,” poem on war. Even here, incest so permeates the poet’s thinking that, war and incest topically distant, the latter erupts even here. Boldly, as in the appearance of the central image of incest, “the sister”; more subtly in the last line’s “unborn grandchildren.” The latter topic is appropriate to the poem — is its primary point — but also Trakl thought him “grandchild,” wished him “unborn.”
Another poem topically remote from incest is “Kasper Hauser Song.” Nominally, it retails the history of an innocent. But Trakl’s attraction to Hauser (?-1833) lay in Hauser’s uneducated simplicity, pre-Fall innocence, freedom from sin — for Trakl, from incest. Specifically: Hauser personifies the “unborn” pre-incestual state for which Trakl apparently yearned. Incest does not intrude overtly on this poem, as in “Grodek.” It appears in the background, in Trakl being attracted to Hauser because of a purity contrapositive to Trakl’s guilt, with Hauser’s murder symbolic atonement for Trakl’s incest, proxy for his urge to departure, to death. Here and elsewhere, if Trakl’s themes are war, departure, decline, their driver is incest: incessant drumbeat of life and verse.
8. Case in Point: “Melancholy”
If interpretive theories of Trakl’s verse yield Traklean truth, few, if any, yield all of it. Consider the complexities of one example. Walther Killy’s Über Georg Trakl holds Trakl’s lateworks as often devoid of verbal sense; in lieu, he values their words for their physical phenomena: the beauty of their color, rhythm, sound. Yet even Killy — quoted in Williams — admits, while the ordinary sense of Trakl’s words is often small, not always (1993, 273-274):
This piece of difficult verse has not been completely “released from the responsibility of meaning into pure self-declaration as language and sound” that “does not want to be understood in terms of content.”
He speaks of “Melancholy.” There is much to the view that this poem holds to a midground between “released from the responsibility of meaning” and “understood in terms of content.” “Melancholy,” a poem of early 1914, hence late, yet its form pulls rhyme and formal structure from the early work; its distortion of grammar, compression of image participate in the late. Earlier or, like “Melancholy,” traditionally-structured poems are most cited in formal analyses of Trakl’s work: their statements are more normally coded, more accessible to standard interpretative schemes, Freudian, Jungian, New Critical, Lacanian, deconstructivist. The content of “Melancholy” dates later, buried deeply in images whose relations — contradictory, overdetermined — are further confused by irrational grammar alien to logical relations. The intensity of feeling and technical power of the lateworks are clear; their meaning, less so.
Consistent with Trakl’s late style, Williams reads “Melancholy” as having simultaneous, nonsequential meanings — a complex, not series, of ideas; a structure we saw Lindenberger suggest for “Helian.” Williams notes its “seemingly unrelated pronouncements form a collage of imagery,” each of whose elements has “such a degree of autonomy from its surrounding context that its position within the poem would appear to be almost inconsequential.” (250) His approach has validity: the struggle between complex and sequence, between planar and linear, between one dimension and two — frequent in Trakl. Especially, two dimensions dominated Trakl’s second-phase adherence to Reihungsstil. But is favoring simultaneity over progression Trakl’s exclusive or principal structural model, especially for “Melancholy”? Agreeing with Killy, Williams argues this poem has not been “released from the responsibility of meaning” entirely. But Williams does not mean in a narrative sense. He sees Trakl structuring meaning as static, spatial, paradigmatic complex. Images accumulate to an overall impression: bricks sum to buildings. Yet “Melancholy,” more responsive to traditional analysis than Williams supposes, seems more narrative than collage.
Perhaps a major factor allowing “Melancholy” to be seen as non-narrative, “a dense linguistic network … cross-referential, polyfunctional, overlapping” (274), “a criss-crossing paradigmatic play that will never yield semantic determinacy” (278), is that Williams’ subject for this poem is diffusely general (1993, 274-275):
This poem gropes, I would venture, to say something about the deep-seated melancholy that quietly haunts human subjects inhabiting a world of increasing technical-rational efficiency and spiritual groundlessness.
The generality of this understanding of the theme of “Melancholy” tells us little about the poem, what it says; many Trakl poems shrug into so loose a coat as this. The vivid, specific imagery in “Melancholy” contrasts with Williams’ vague description of theme, challenges whether Williams adequately characterizes its theme. Williams’ statement seems less to say what the poem is about than it says that Williams does not know what the poem is about. Not only vague, his description is hedged. Verbiage like “gropes,” “I would venture to say,” “say something about” are small reassurance Williams has a concrete idea of what Trakl says in “Melancholy.” What mean its images? For now, mean not in terms of narrow interpretations of each line; mean more broadly, in that imagery so graphic must refer to things or events more concrete than William’s abstractions. Consider: “A team of horses breaks red into the village.” Granted a metaphor, this striking picture would seem proxy for something as particular as its imagery. Also: while Williams infers Trakl’s theme has “something” to do with urban matters, with technology, efficiency, rationality, how explain the rurality of “horses,” “village,” “animals,” “forest,” “footbridge,” “garden”? “Melancholy” has little aura of modern technology.
While cross-referential wordplay may apply in varying degrees to “Melancholy,’ the point here is not that the poem fails as static, cross-referential linguistic network. It is that mistaking a poem’s subject can obscure its meaning. “Melancholy” is more sequentially logical, more “semantically determined,” taken not as limning ennui over “technical-rational efficiency” but as symbolic description of incest’s course.
Let us take it so. “Melancholy”:
Mutely has the blue soul enclosed itself; entering the open window, the brown forest sinks, silence of dark animals; in the depths grinds the mill, on the footbridge rest spilled clouds,
the golden strangers. A team of horses breaks red into the village. The garden brown and cold. The aster freezes, painted so frail on the fence already sunflower’s gold, nearly dissolved.
Prostitutes’ voices. Dew is spilled on hard grass and stars white and cold. See death painted in dear shadows each face filled with tears, and sealed.
Trakl’s early command of large-scale structure severally characterizes this work independent of narrative. First, “Melancholy” is unified via identical stanzas ruled by traditional rhyme and scansion. Later poems often have free, individually tailored poetic structures rather than fill historical forms with words. Here, tradition is evident.
Second, per Williams, stanzas are vertically integrated. Partly by sound: Traklean euphony — meticulous poem-wide patterns of alliteration, assonance — unites this piece. Partly by drama: if some Trakl poems be polyfunctional linguistic networks, they yet sustain dramatic structure. Including “Melancholy,” such poems crescendo from scene-setting stanzas to climaxes of feeling; often diminuendo to a coda: “last gold of extinguished stars”; “windless, starless night.”
But there is reason to think that “Melancholy” is more, that the linear ordering of its components is not “almost inconsequential,” that invested among its paratactical, Reihungsstil elements is narrative sequence. The opening stanza of “Melancholy” is better fit to “criss-crossing … play” than sequential flow: a succession of apparently coequal, non-sequential images. Yet, it exemplifies broad-scale planning — functions, on that scale, as introductory list of anxious images portending what follows. Perhaps a more narrative interpretation can be found for this stanza? — regardless, its introductory function prefaces what follows.
Introduced by the first, the last two stanzas of the poem are, Williams notwithstanding, narrative sequence, account of incest’s progress. The second stanza opens by extending the first’s list of images with “golden strangers.” But this is more than an image in a suggestive list — it commences stanza two by immediately signifying Trakl and his sister. Phallic penetration of bloody hymen follows promptly: “a team of horses / breaks red into the village.” Their “garden,” haven of idyllic love, is immediately blighted, “brown and cold.” Worse to come: blighted future. “The aster freezes/… sunflower’s gold, nearly dissolved.”
By stanza three, “prostitutes’ voices” signal degradation of a doomed relation. They recall Trakl’s limning of women and sister by extreme contradiction: angels; damned; damned angels. Then follows union’s sterile seed: “dew is spilled / on hard grass and stars white and cold,” an echo of stillbirth, a Traklean incest motif, and sterile semen. What remains? “Death painted in dear shadows.” Near the end, Trakl, his lover turn briefly emotive, “filled with tears.” But “Melancholy” resolves to darkness. Prisoned in “sealed” faces, he and Margarete are impassive watchers of their silenced souls, blighted union, shadowy deaths. So read, “Melancholy” is large-scale narrative that remains consistent with — rests on — the support of irrational, non-narrative Traklean devices: inchoate grammar, polyreference, spatial arrays of imagery, overdetermined meanings. Devices that carry Trakl’s meaning, in disguise.
Williams’ description of the mood of “Melancholy” fits his take on its subject. He describes it with “quietly,” “melancholy,” congruent with the idea that it limns the silent secrets of alienation. This is the poem’s dictional surface: with time, Trakl sought expression more objective, impersonal. Yet “Melancholy,” beneath chill image, hypnotic voice, maintains a wrenching thematic progression: incest, guilt, degradation, death. So coolly disguised, despair more haunting. Earlier poems suffer from exclamation. Later: Traklean calm deepens the silence of screaming.
What interpretations of “Melancholy” may be trusted as accurate? And if interpretations are multiple for each poem, how make broad sense of Trakl’s work? Firmage contributes to interpretive variety by regarding sonority as key to unpacking Trakl’s meaning (in Williams, 1991, 253):
To listen to its song, to comprehend its movement, is to experience a linguistic harmony that arouses in the reader prelinguistic intimations of the nature of that awakening which is both the climax and the central place of the poem.
Some disagree. Sharp translates from Eduard Lachmann’s Kreuz und Abend: Eine Interpretation der Dictungen Georg Trakls (in Williams, 1991, 254):
Others are moved by the soft sonority of these verses, and without stopping to question what they mean, completely surrender to their sound. They do not want to understand the poems
But if Killy and Firmage praise the physical glory of Trakl’s words, Killy makes it tool “to understand the poems,” “to question what they mean,” while Firmage, purer, takes sound per se as the substance of Traklean messaging.
Lachmann is one of few to offer a unitary interpretation of Trakl. Sharp quotes Lachmann’s précis (in Williams 1991, 255):
Those who penetrate deeper into this poetry rightfully come to see in it an interpretation which is based upon the truth of Christian salvation in a fallen world distant from God.
Sharp is dissatisfied:
Lachmann’s naïve self-assurance degenerates into interpretive caricatures, particularly as they gloss over the disjunctions and sweep aside the ambiguities of their textual objects.
Sharp’s proposal, unitary too, is to read the poems for Trakl’s psychology (Sharp, 1981). We have noted this makes each poem speak the same issue; Sharp’s psychological analysis is a project as meaningless to literature as Lachmann’s Christian exegesis. Compared to unitary solutions (technical, literary, Christian), Trakl’s verse is internally compromised, self-contradictory, rife with ambivalence. He includes not only contradictory descriptions of things and uses of words; subtler ambiguities graze freely. For example, such situational (deictic) forms as pronouns normally establish networks of relations by referring to specific times, places, persons; in Trakl, these become victims of “generalization processes” that replace definite with indefinite pronouns, expanding his pervasive ambiguity not by outright contradiction but by referential vagueness (Calbert, 154). In another form of ambiguity, Trakl, introducing greater remove, impersonality into his work, replaces pronouns with articles: “…one, who bluishly opens the eyes.” In a former edit: “his eyes.” Small wonder Martin Heidegger (“Die Sprache im Gedicht” in Unterwegs zur Sprache) labeled Trakl’s language “ambiguously ambiguous.” (Calbert, 4) Heidegger exults in ambiguity, believes it the essence of his favorite concept — being; a project, however, more tied to Heideggerian philosophy than Traklean art.
So: is Trakl’s work unmapped morass? Not always. “Melancholy” shows his work may sometimes be unpuzzled. Critics concur that poppies are the drugs of Trakl’s addictions. That “the sister” is the sibling with whom he made love. That a narcissistic, sister-brother androgyny frequents his work. That he vacillates between visions of destruction and redemption; between protagonists as murderers or penitents. That schizophrenia, or narcissism, or an incomplete transition from primal unity – or his attempts to convey these – is likely origin of his atemporal tenses and fractured grammar. That abundant stillbirths are fatal spawn of sibling sex and symbols of emotional arrest. That death is Trakl’s release from present turmoil. That Trakl founded his verse in personal experience – yet so deeply wrapped in ambiguity is autobiography that, torn between revelation and secrecy, his ambivalent discourse often makes of poetic meaning a “locked garden.”
Hence, the levels of meaning, and interpretations, of Trakl’s work are various. But in practice, how seems he wrote? He approached, apparently, each poem by applying intuitively what tools, devices, images, constructions suited his immediate need despite differing prior uses. He dodged no inconsistency with the past in the face of present pressure to express. Flexibly, intuitively, he grasped at what worked in a situation, abandoning rigorous systemization in his approach.
This is not to say that his literary outcomes were not carefully calibrated, refined, intended — take Williams’ exhaustive analysis of the intricate paradigmatic in “Melancholy.” (249ff) Awareness of destination is also shown by Trakl’s meticulous revisions, his careful guise of self and sister with plurals and variety of naming, his studied attainment of a distancing voice, by the spatial play of colors, and other devices. And by repetition of themes, subjects, images: Williams mentions “Trakl’s compulsion to revise” (1993, 276) and, quoting Michael Riffatterre, that Trakl “‘rewrites or tries variations because he obeys a repetition compulsion.’” (1993, 277) Thus, Trakl’s verse is not spontaneous. It is labored over. If each poem is meticulously designed, many of their components seem chosen regardless of different uses elsewhere, regardless of ordinary meanings, making Trakl’s body of work inconsistent, ambiguous, contradictory, peculiar. Trakl’s verse is free-floating mix, each moment and word new-born, of itself, without past.
Ironic, that Trakl sought redemption through words, that his greatest peace or penance was pen on paper. Small surprise, he found writing hard as he filled his verse with the exploration of mute worlds, slowly sculpting preverbal mind from the reluctant ore of words. But his knowledge gained remained gift irreversible. Fruit bitten, his verse is full of its tree; often he stands in its shadow, regretful. In the work, dissections of torment and terror may pause for redemption. But hope and meaning unstable, his slide to darkness renews. Driven by incest, guilt, instability, fear, his broadest theme is decline, and winding descent is never long absent from life or verse.
9. Mind and Verse
And what may be said of the Traklean mind? Its effect on the work? While Trakl’s psychology is distinct from his literary worth, yet, his psyche helps unlock his writing’s content, if not its value. Often, critics thought him schizophrenic. Today he, his work, is usually labeled narcissistic. “Mental illness” remains difficult to explicate, including terms like “schizophrenic.” But Lawrence Hedges discusses levels of personality organization, of emotional development, that may serve as heuristics in conceptualizing Trakl’s poetic project. Terming them psychotherapeutic “listening perspectives,” he distinguishes four: schizophrenic, borderline, narcissistic, neurotic. Emotional development evolves; listening perspectives model the principal phases of this process, illustrate the stages at which it may stagnate.
Of the terraced schema of Hedges, the most developed is neurotic, which designates a normally integrated personality organized around a central self. One level down, we have noted the thesis of Trakl’s narcissism: his failure to fully separate from primal union with his mother suspended his psyche between two worlds. Externally, he was stressed by daily realities; which internally drove him yearning toward primal unity with mother. A combination prompting self-destruction. As narcissist, Trakl’s ego was centrally organized, however archaic. Lower, earlier states in psychic development — borderline, schizophrenic — present psychic organizations in which components of the psyche exist uncoordinated, independent; fragments of personality may appear at unpredictable, irrational times.
In line with diagnoses of low levels of psychic organization, Trakl, obsessed with thoughts of life in the womb, thought him “unborn,” not fully delivered to everyday life, not fully a self. Parts of his verse evidence “reunion,” narcissistic yearnings for blissful merger:
Each day the yellow sun comes over the hill. Beautiful the wood, the dark animal, man; hunter or shepherd. — “The Sun”
Truly he loved the sun, which crimson descended the hill, the forest trails, the singing blackbird and the joy of green. — “Kasper Hauser Song”
Evenings on the terrace we were drunk on brown wine. The peach glows redly in the leaves; soft sonata, joyful laughter. A golden boat Elis, rocks your heart in the lonely sky. — “Elis”
Beautiful is the silence of the night. — “Helian”
The warm, holding merger in these passages — tangible. The intrusion of “lonely sky” in “Elis” exemplifies Trakl’s quicksilver moods; is the unsettling world he sought to mask with soothing aquatic rocking. Colored boats, beautiful woods, the sun, and sailing, gliding, rocking pacify fraught verse.
Trakl’s poems also portray him a circus of selves, shifting personae — hunter, herdsman, angel, wanderer, wolf, the sister, the brother, “the one who.” Not clearly one, he was many in serio. And many, none: solipsistic self a multiple, he could but primitively separate self from other. For him, outsiders — more in mind than world — lived internalized. He knew them chiefly as parts of his self. Partly through others within, he lived reflected.
Failing easy access to others, he was often aloof. Dialogue, not a strength; he wove long monologues, mostly to him. His poems, self-conversations. Dissections of internal phantoms were often stuff of his work; he does not examine relations with others. Sometimes he seems as if talking to others — but for Trakl, emotionally, others were him. Often, he writes of his sister Margarete, yet his love for her is hermetic. Four years his junior, his only significant female interest, his virtual double, his mirror: seeing her, he fell Narcissus by the pool in love with him.
Trakl’s emotional development seems to have halted before clarification of his sexual identity; his distinction of male and female seems more verbal than substantive. Hedges (126):
Another area of observation is the lack of differentiation of “sexual identity.” … The diagnostic finding turns out … not to be problems with sexual identification per se but rather problems in establishing many types of identifications and in developing a stable and reliable sense of identity of any sort.
Attracted to his self primarily, to his sister as his double, he portrays the two as exchangeable androgyns. In the twinned context of blended identity and the shuttered world of narcissicism, he merges brother, sister. “A shining boy, the sister appears.” “In a broken mirror, a dying boy, the sister appears.” Not separate being but his self-extension, he gave her a piece of his mind. Otherwise, excepting his mother, women had little to do with his feelings or verse. Prostitutes: for lust. Except for an old one, occasional auditor of Traklean monologues.
If the world hammered Trakl’s door, he hardly answered. Averse to association, his friends beyond literature, art were few. In terror of others, his employment in business and government lasted days, or hours. He hated cities: packaged humans. But more than their humans bothered him, or their smoke, decay, their regimentation. It was their presence outside him, his difficulty in grasping their endless complexity. He preferred the peace of inner worlds.
I believe it must be terrible to live always in full consciousness of the animal instincts that whirl constantly through life. I have experienced, smelled, touched the most frightening possibilities within me, have heard the demons howling in my blood, the thousand spurred devils that drive flesh mad. What horrible nightmare!
Gone! Today this vision of reality has sunk to nothing again; things, far from me, their voice still farther, and I, all living ear, listen again to the melodies within me, and again my winged eye dreams images more beautiful than all reality. (Adapted from Lindenberger 1971, 31.)
Fearful of outward, Trakl fled in. In this letter, so solipsistic is paragraph one, even external realities transmute to demons within. In paragraph two, he whirls to the other extreme, primordial bliss, the visual world of his “winged eye,” to the original synthesis of self and mother. Events behind “Kaspar Hauser Song” exemplify the womb-like fusion of others’ selves with his. He retails the saga of Hauser, who, in 1828, age about 18, appeared in Nuremberg mysteriously. Five years later, mysteriously again, he was murdered. Taught to speak, it transpired Hauser was raised strapped to a basement floor. While poorly adjusted to everyday life, he knew his floor: thought it part of him. Trakl demarking, like Hauser, self from other with difficulty, identified with him.
The extreme unmediated mood shift between Trakl’s paragraphs above: clue to his emotional arrests. Which not only impeded his clarification of personal identity and encouraged the flowering of ambiguity, ambivalence, uncertainty; they limited his understanding of degree and gradation. For Trakl, others like him, the world tends toward extreme divisions, black and white. Intellectual, analytical functions grow with emotional development, but Trakl, not shy on intellect, seemed unaware of his missing middle, how to scale worldly realities as he bounced between heaven and hell.
If we distribute experience on a bell curve, pure experiences, black and white, lie where the curve-ends approach zero; the grays of quotidian realities bulge its middle. But Trakl appears to have measured experience by inversing reality. People typically discriminate finely among the multiple experiences that constitute the bulk of reality’s grays. To judge from writings like that above, Trakl’s experiences lay at extremes, filling his work with opposites. This may have led to an odd imbalance: if white is good, and grays are shades of evil black, in a bipolar world, grays convert to black. Hence, gray — most of the world — is evil. A threatening prospect, fertile ground for paranoia: Trakl’s polar stance made the world a horror — as in paragraph one of his letter. His reaction? He yearned for the blissful enwombment of paragraph two.
Trakl’s primitive emotional development and inadequate coping tools explain not only his search for bliss but his paranoia, his “demons howling,” his “thousand devils,” his terror of the uncertain, of an ambiguous world in which complexity outflanks comprehension. Polar extremes riddle the poems. His verse is couched in opposites, contradictions; in blacks and whites, redemption and damnation, agony and calm. Ordinary scenes only glint in Trakl’s work:
At evening fisherman gathered heavy nets. — “Elis”
In pure hands, the farmer holds bread and wine and fruit ripens peaceably in his sunny room. — “Helian”
…crowds of poor women. — “The Heart”
…fire spits in the forge. — “Landscape”
The shepherd calls the timid herd. — “Lament I”
Rafters shaped by the carpenter; in the dimming valley grinds the mill. — “Year”
…guard posted on the plaza. — “Under Way”
Not his job, sailing everyday seas. For him, verse, like life, was primeval bliss, or evil threat. But more: his categories would flip, exchange, transmute, fluctuate. Gold might signify the pure, the bright, or the gruesome, tawdry; and black might signal womb-like peace, or death. More: black could mean gold —
Onto your temples drips black dew last gold of extinguished stars . — “To the Boy Elis”
Trakl’s verse is trembling flux, its euphorias under threat of downward slides into fights with demons, or the reverse. A hovering uncertainty that any meaning might change to another. He often made use of dichotomy; in “Winter Evening,” this turns structural, regular, showing his poetic control. Each stanza’s two couplets formalize values on a negative-positive axis, the first couplet dark, the second, sanguine. One:
Many of those who travel far come to this gate by gloomy paths. Golden blooms the tree of grace sprung from earth’s cool sap. — “Winter Evening”
The degree of ambivalence in Trakl’s work, its pull toward extremes, is strong, ironic. Failing to grasp the degrees of difference that define, make most of us comfortable with, ambivalence, relativity, uncertainty, he operated at experiential extremes. Not grasping ambiguity, ironically, he permutes it endlessly. Descriptions of hellish or heavenly extremes, or both at once, confuse readers.
10. Trakl as Visual Artist
Melancholy” has shown Trakl’s work sometimes interpretable as linear narrative; yet we have seen Williams assert the later work may often be analyzed as spatial complex in preference to narrative sequence. Whether poems conform to Williams’ “criss-crossing paradigmatic play,” it seems clear that Traklean thought is spatial at finer scales, that his uses and selections among words, no less his imagery, reflects a spatial perception of existence as a visual sensorium: manipulating images like a visual artist, he distributes them in space. This spatial array, other aspects of Traklean language, treat images, words, as chips in Demet’s “mosaic” (In Williams 1991, 168):
Every one of Trakl’s poems reminds one of a mosaic in which each seemingly isolated and unconnected detail takes on an ever-increasing and disconcerting autonomous value and imposes on the reader a sentiment of … alienation, of penetration into a foreign world, of an apparent but yet inaccessible logic.
With Williams, Demet disagrees in an important respect. Rather than seeing inter-referential play among a poem’s components, Demet calls them “isolated,” “unconnected,” “autonomous,” qualities that depict the “alienation,” “inaccessible logic” of a “foreign world.” Demet’s description of Traklean verse: a closer match to the chthonic levels of psychic development Trakl seems intent to convey. One may counterargue by distinguishing verse from content: that Williams’ paradigmatic play — poetic structure — better conveys pre-rational thought. Either way: much is spatial in Trakl. Distributing sentences nonsequentially, tenses atemporally, he disrupts linear relations; instead, distributes key words over spatial fields. His distribution of words aside, his vocabulary reflects a visual-spatial bias. In comparisons of vocabulary in Trakl and Rilke, Joseph Calbert notes Trakl’s preference for pictorial stasis over temporal action. In the lateworks, Trakl prefers it everywhere — in his use and choice of verbs, nouns, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, punctuation, tenses, syntax. One example: among Calbert’s paradigm samples of Rilke and Trakl, Trakl’s conjunctions, less than half Rilke’s; an absence that ambiguates grammatical relations, not least sequence. (118-119) Reducing conjunctions increases verbal density, pictorial concentration. Prepositions, too, have a sharp tilt to pictorial stasis — in Calbert’s sample of Trakl, 72 percent are of place or space; eight percent, temporal (116).
Pictorialism is enhanced by the present tense, the stasis of now: 108 uses by Trakl of “is” and “are” (ist, sint) are comparable to Rilke’s 105; Trakl’s seven uses of “was” and “were” (war, waren) are rare compared to Rilke’s 91. (Calbert, Table 19, 123) If Trakl prefers an endless present to temporal depth, he also seeks inaction. Banishing the past tense of “to be” helps reduce its use by 41 percent compared to Rilke: 115 uses of “to be” in Trakl’s sample, 196 in Rilke’s. Avoiding verbs deepens the stasis of Trakl’s nouns and adjectives: curbing action, he heightens imagery. Substantially confining tenses to the present is enhanced by reducing “the use of compound tenses (‘future’ or ‘perfect’),” which are “extremely restricted in Trakl.” (Calbert, 126) And if Trakl emphasizes space and place over time and tense, places “are usually … general and non-specific.” (170) “The spatio-temporal context seems to be that of a general, timeless present.” (163)
Freezing time in the present, Trakl proliferates words of being and substance — nouns, adjectives, intransitive verbs. Weeding out transitive verbs, he increases syntactic, semantic density; or nominalizes verbs as participles and gerunds; or frustrates their required objects, their need to take action on things, by omitting them (200). In concord with this, “the low frequency of objective cases (expressing the object of active verbs) contrasts with the abundance of locative cases” (201). He favors placement-at over action-toward, enhancing stasis.
When verbs depart the present tense for temporal depth, Trakl arranges them in atemporal arrays that frustrate progression through time. In “Elis,” a man fishing in the past is cancelled by a shepherd whose verb clings to the present:
In the evening the fisherman gathered his heavy nets. A good shepherd leads his flock by the forest edge.
Even bound by the present, he may lack sequential logic:
… and there mightily embrace him cool blue and the burning descent of autumn,
still house and fables of the forest, law and measure and the lunar paths of the dead. — “Song of the Departed”
As here, Trakl’s work perform less well as narrative succession than as juxtaposed imagery. Time destroyed, or severely lamed, Trakl’s abundance of nouns and adjectives, his dearth of verbs not tensed in the present, increase his writing’s spatio-visual content, its figures and images. Which have limited variety: nouns and adjectives recur, their repetitious imagery adding to the static spatio-pictorial load on Trakl’s language. Altogether, Calbert’s many examples of atemporal devices show that Trakl favored language promoting ambivalence over concrete relations, an undefined present over temporal depth, nominalization over activity, imagery over narration.
Thus, Trakl’s images are few, repetitious, spatially ordered; as in visual media, where few and repeated forms are often a significant element of stylistic identity. Some visual arts present sequentially: film, dance, literature, calligraphy. Calligraphy’s circumvention of visual stasis is borrowed from the narrative of language — it graphs language. This, Trakl reverses. His treatment of language as spatial seems founded on his fixation in a visual phase of emotional development in which reality is founded on vision, not time. If Trakl’s psyche is irrelevant to analyzing his writing’s quality, it is important basis for its structure, meaning.
Trakl, portraying an inner mind based heavily on spatial array, and apparently finding that sequential language constrained his expression, worked systematically to create a language more visual than average. Evident in his drafts, he moved, placed, replaced images as a sculptor might substitute shapes; a calligrapher, words; a painter, compositions. His poems, in part, are pastiches of imagery. And rather than conjure fresh images to convey the flux of life as narration, his poems push a small, determined set of images into new uses, often contradictory. As Firmage puts it, in a poem, each contradiction among the uses of a term “creates a resonance both within itself and with other elements of the poem,” that is, with elements or terms that are “repeated again and again with such disruptive effects” that “readers are shunted from a rational to an emotional apprehension of what is spoken”; an apprehension based more on a visual than linear understanding of words. (In Williams, 1991, 246)
Trakl’s spatial, vision-based grammar, vocabulary, supports Killy’s thought: that Trakl’s verbal content often may be understood as released from the “responsibility of meaning” and thereby be appreciable for its physical richness, its colors, textures, patterns. The analogy to vision discussed here is not pushed so far as Killy’s. It is not put forward to explain the extent and nature of overall meaning in Trakl’s poems but his diction’s details, his uses of images, tenses, intransitive verbs, locative vocabulary. The visual model also numbers among Trakl’s devices yielding mazy ambiguity. His spatial, vision-based vocabulary and grammar present haunting imagery not easily clarified as to meaning. Firmage: “It is frequently characteristic of Trakl’s poems to hinge upon a central ambiguity or collection of ambiguities.” (In Williams, 1991, 242) Ambiguity so complicates Trakl’s work, no single theory of his work explains everything, while virtually every theory explains something.
Hawkey notes Trakl sought a sensuous, visual synthetic of imagery preceding the distinctions of the verbal analytic: “Syntax, too, a word in time, a way of coding, classifying, without which might we have a more visible way of seeing….” (93) Ironic that Trakl sought visual bliss through the temporality of writing, of syntax, that his greatest release was pen on paper. Small surprise he found writing hard, coaxing words into pre-verbal descriptions of internal visions. But the knowledge he conveyed lacked solace, a durable peace; took a course irreversible: fruit bitten, his verse is full of its tree; often he stands in its ominous shadow, regretful. In the work, torment may pause for redemption, panic for calm. But with hope, meaning, and psyche unstable, the slide into darkness renews. Driven by incest, guilt, instability, fear, his broadest theme is decline, and winding descent is never long absent from verse or life.
11. Glimpsing the Unknown
What was Trakl doing, what describing, when he wrote poems? Arguably, his goal of his confusing, irrational verse was to depict the earlier conditions of psychic evolution. To sharpen Williams’ general idea of Trakl’s broad regression to a visual sensory primordium: it seems Trakl attempted to describe his experiences of psychic disorganization.
Evidence of psychic primitivity in Trakl: repetition. His reuse of imagery, vocabulary, and phrasing, extensive. Thus, Lindberger labels ‘Elis’ pastiche: virtually every line, drawn from a prior poem. (89) Williams expands the point. Not only does “Decline” exhibit “abounding parallel imagery” (internal borrowing) but “various permutations and combinations of virtually every image in ‘Untergang’ [decline] … show up in … dozens of poems.” (1993, 206) The external and internal appropriation in Trakl’s “self-plagiaristic” verse (Killy; in Williams 1993, 206) points to a characteristic of arrested development, notably borderline organization: social normality is cloned by borrowed behavioral responses.
Borderline individuals, opaque to intuitive understanding of social behavior, adopt what seem appropriate social responses from their environment, form them into a pastiche, a self-simulacrum. Philosophical maxims, standard explanations, ideologies, sayings, facts, rules are accumulated into what Hedges, adopting Winnicott, terms a “false self.” (115) A false self — behavioral armor — is a set of coping mechanisms defending a borderline against threats rising from developmental inadequacies. Behavioral armor may be high-functioning; but it lacks a characteristic of higher levels of emotional development: a central self. Borderline development, without organic grounding in a self, is a pastiche of rigidly accepted materials: programmatic responses whose inflexibility makes it difficult to adjust to new circumstances, to evolving environments. Lack of integration and flexibility may lead to inappropriate reactions in social environments, to behavior tinged by the strange. The faster and greater is change, the more likely is loss of emotional control, borderline panic, exposure of inner disorganization. Should behavioral armor collapse, individuals may regress to more chaotic states, with disorganization — the absence of meaning — a constant peril.
The mood shift in Trakl’s letter above is typical borderline coping with difficult externalities: borderline panic, despair, helplessness in paragraph one; in two, a firm reassertion of protective armor, renewed stability oblivious to prior dismay. Hedges mentions the “ever present tendency in the borderline personality to form … some type of ‘psychological merger’ experience with other persons or situations.” (119) That Trakl can write objectively about this experience is evidence that a degree of narcissistic ego development allowed him a platform of observational objectivity from which he experienced, observed, described this see-saw of panic and merger. Trakl’s mostly normative, rational letters have been cited as evidence his eccentric poetry signifies no serious emotional inadequacies; yet his letters harbor borderline and narcissistic descriptions. While their language is conventionally grammatical, the moods, reactions, emotions they describe — Trakl’s — can be other than normal.
If Trakl described borderline phenomena from a narcissistic stance, too, this letter illustrates his narcissism. Restoring behavioral armor post-crisis, Trakl is infused not only with narcissistic bliss but with his ego-based perception that his joy is detached from reality, is in his head: “…the melodies within me … images more beautiful than all reality.” (Adapted from Lindenberger 1972, 31) Hedges observes (119):
Narcissistic … transferences require a level of development where at least an archaic cohesive self is present. Both of these features (ie, an Oedipus complex or a cohesive self) are lacking to a greater or lesser extent in borderline personality development.
Trakl’s psyche, fundamentally narcissistic, had regions of, or allowed him insight into, borderline and schizoid organization.
That a narcissistic ego permits distancing is important to Trakl’s poetry. It premises a central organization that was ground from which Trakl investigated less evolved material. From a narcissistic ego-platform, his verse apparently strives to understand, depict deeper, more chaotic levels of personality organization — the visual, irrational phenomena of the pre-verbal. His venture: describe wordless realms in the unsuitable medium of words. By comparison, borderline personalities lack an ego base for observing, distinguishing, outside and inside worlds; and they suppress introspection and awareness of psychic disequilibrium and emotional panic in favor of the comfort of merger states. Narcissists, neurotics may also experience threats to central organization, yet they have a self, a fortress, around which to organize a stable interior from which to analyze, describe, process, build on experience. In poetizing his observations, Trakl wrote to a friend that “it is not easy … to subordinate myself unconditionally to that which is to be represented, and I will always … have to correct myself … to give truth its due.” (Williams 1993, 258) In his “correct myself” to present the “truth” of “that which is to be represented,” it seems clear Trakl did not invent material or turn writing into hermetic literary play; an ego-based platform allowed him objective observation. He observed an internal environment, then organized, compulsively reorganized his writings to accurately “represent” his observations. Summarily: it seems a narcissistic ego formed a relatively stable base from which Trakl could inspect the unstable, irrational borderline and schizoid worlds that evolve prior to the formation of self, extracting from these observations much of the material of his verse.
Trakl’s sub-optimum level of psychic development does not mean his poetry fails in greatness, even in sense; it means he made it from, and about, primitive states. Two points. First, we noted that Trakl’s ego gave him an objective ledge: a narcissistic capacity to objectify and poetize his breaks in composure, his descents to the primitive. Borderlines are reluctant to acknowledge experiences that expose poor personality integration — without an ego platform for doing so, breaks in composure cannot be observed, evaluated, described. Psychic breaks present as collapses into engulfing borderline panics, overwhelming the capacity of observation. Schizophrenics have yet less capacity to rally sufficient psychic organization to enable self-analysis and description, self-awareness. But Trakl’s narcissistic self lent him perspective on narcissistic, borderline, schizophrenic worlds, enabling their poetic depiction. Second: to a degree, detailed mapping of Trakl’s psyche is irrelevant. Individuals can develop areas of their psyches variably: they may be more evolved, or less, among mental functions. Hard to determine now whether Trakl was, or not, in part or in whole, to what degree, schizoid, borderline, narcissistic, neurotic. Fundamental is that Trakl’s psyche showed less than optimum development, and that he had acute insight into lower orders of emotional organization.
We have seen Calbert’s linguistic perspective illuminate Trakl’s limited emotional development through vocabulary and syntactic analysis. He defines categories of words (especially relationship words) that bring out distinctions between average and lower mental integration (46-48). Primitive psyches favor nouns, verbs, their modifiers — content words — while omitting or misusing the logical glue of language, relation words: conjunctions, prepositions. Calbert ranks the writings of seven individuals — five poets, one paranoiac, one schizophrenic — against a normative standard based on their relative use of relation words. While Rainer Maria Rilke’s use of relation words is close to norm, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe above it, Trakl’s contemporaries Stefan George (1868-1933) and Georg Heym (1887-1912) bracket the paranoiac, while Trakl ranks next to last — just above schizophrenic — in his low use of relation words in ratio to content words. Calbert’s analysis suggests: Trakl chose a vocabulary reflecting the low levels of mental organization he strove to depict.
The meaning of verse that frustrates objective correlatives must be obscure; footholds for scaling its walls, few. Critics tend to retreat from the content of Trakl’s verse to poetological discourse about it — structure, biography, psychology, history, precedents, influences, reactions. What Trakl observed, described, seems to have been his internal world. The problem: his descriptions ape his content, which is hard to treat in terms of objective correlatives. Instead, the verse is his reality. Which steers us back to analysis of the poems: poetology, psychology, history. Except that Trakl was poetological — at second level. For most artists in art-making contexts, the influence of forebears, reactions to the past, are critical to their implementation and reshaping of art. But if literary history, the innovations and practices of others, influenced details in Trakl’s verse, they were hardly his primary spur to pen and paper. His urge: describing his experiences, his makeup of mind. The irony: his obscure poetry cannot convey clear ideas of his — unclear — experiences. Instead, he gives us poetry.
12. Ursprache
If Trakl describes his mind, inner states, what were they like? Some psycho-linguists have modeled a basis for early mind: a primary language structuring subconscious realms. If so, Trakl attempted to draw, from this primitive well, his odd organization of language; or he developed a language designed to convey this realm. Hedges (44-45):
Freud defined “primary process” functioning as almost exclusively unconscious and lacking a firm sense of time, order, space and logic. Contradictions and inconsistencies may co-exist in primary process without mutual nullification each other…. “Secondary process” thinking is conscious, logical, cause and effect oriented and sensitive to discrepancy, contradiction and inconsistency.
His mind perched on its rim, Trakl is said to have tapped a primary world in his work, including its structuring by an Ursprache, a primordial language pre-existing the temporal grammar of conscious discourse. We see the result in his disjunct grammar, atemporal confusion of tenses, limited, noun-laden, iterative vocabulary, paratactical accumulation of sentences and phrases, synesthetic sensory mix, privacy of meaning.
Private, perhaps. But a clarity prevails: Trakl rationally pictures irrational realms. Old charges: his work resulted from mental derangement; we have noted this countered by notes and letters grammatically lucid through life: if picturing feelings in turmoil, they demonstrate that Trakl possessed the coherence and observational power of a centrally organized self. Further, the poems, shaped by skill in traditional verse, are secure in their architectonics. “Descent,” for example, is consistent in structure: three stanzas, each of three lines. Moreover: the first two stanzas begin with a two-line sentence, end with a second of one; a pattern carefully reversed in the third. More flexible, many lateworks lack traditional structures: developed on individual logics, their frameworks are more imaginative, consciously wrought — abandoning old forms, they create structure anew.
Dramatic progression in the poems — often carefully planned. Even the Traklean chaos of grammar has been analyzed, to various extents, by intricate critical schemes. These schemes may differ, yet often differ without mutual conflict, a stew of compatible schemes that verifies Trakl’s richness of reference, multiplicity of meaning, complexity of means.
Thus, Trakl deploys irrational expression within rational limits. Diction and grammar, bizarre, are shaped by architectonic schemes. Works by great artists, gone mad, are typically reversed. In the music of Schumann (schizophrenia), Smetana (senescence), Wolf (spirochetes) composed in their aging or madness, often details are vivid; finesse, as ever. It is large-scale control, where Trakl holds firm, that first goes soft with the mind.
If Trakl ignores convention in his detailed diction and grammar, his manuscript revisions are moves in chess: thoughtful, considered. He, systematic, fields reduction, contraction, intensification. Statements, grammatical in earlier drafts, become, in later, hard kernels of meaning so dense as to frustrate their origins without external evidence; a concentration born of depriving verbs of objects confining them to the present atemporally sequencing those that are not blurring the meaning of nouns and adjectives by equating opposites (black to white; sister to brother; purity to filth; and back) excising relational terms — conjunctions, connectives — or fielding them asyntactically using random, ambiguous punctuation replacing definite with indefinite pronouns excising prepositions of time for those of place and contracting metaphors till original comparisons vanish irretrievable (burying meaning in phrases that combine (for instance) adjective of one term, noun of the other — “blue deer”).
Everywhere, Trakl studiously collapses the usual devices of language into irrational nuclei dense beyond ordinary meaning. Among his techniques:
Tenses: dominant present tense; arbitrary sequencing of tenses; asyntactic arrangements of tenses.
It is a light, that the wind has extinguished. It is a country tavern, that a drunk departs after noon. It is a vineyard, burned and black with pits of spiders. It is a room, that they whitewashed with milk. The madman is dead. It is an isle in the Southern Sea, that receives the sun god. Drums roll. — [Present tense] “Psalm”
The motionless sea turns night. Star and dark journey vanished on the canal. Child, your weak smile follows me softly in sleep. — [Present-past-present] “In Venice”
Thorny wilds engulf the city. The moon from doorsills of blood hounds terrified women. Wild wolves broke through the gate. — [Present-present-past] “In the East”
Evenings on the terrace we were drunk on brown wine. The peach glows redly in the leaves; soft sonata, joyful laughter. — [Past-present] “Helian”
…man’s golden form would be swallowed in the icy wave of eternity. — [“Would” without condition] “Lament II”
Organ sighs and hell laughs and dread holds the heart; would behold star and angel. — [“Would” without subject] “Lament I”
Depriving verbs of objects.
…beyond cross and brown hill softly blinds the mirrored pond,… — “Autumn Soul”
Over lane and stubble field a black silence already fears;… — “Autumn Soul”
Contradiction.
…a shining boy the sister appears in autumn and black decay. — “Rest and Silence”
On your temples drips black dew last gold of extinguished stars…. — “To the Boy Elis”
Silver through the eastern gate stepped roseate day. — “Winter Night”
Silencing appears the night, a bleeding animal,…. — “Sevenfold Song of Death”
A night wreath of violets, grain and purple grapes is the year of the watcher. — “Transfiguration”
Excising relation terms; using them illogically.
…and there hissed a blue spring through the earth, that he slowly raised the pale eyelids over his snowy face;… — “Sevenfold Song of Death”
Soon bloom on ruined wall violets, a lonely one’s temples green in silence. — “In the Spring”
…stags tread in the circle of their fire, groves’ ancient grief, from a black wall rise dancers;… — “Trumpets”
In blue crystal the pallid man lives, cheek on his stars; or nods his head in purple sleep. — “Rest and Silence”
Behind him stands his dead brother, or he descends the ancient spiral stair. — “Psalm”
A sick one weeps silver by the evening pond, in a small boat lovers died crossing. Or it is the sound of footsteps of Elis through the grove…. — “The West”
Sister, when I found you in a lonely clearing in the forest, and it was noon and great the silence of the beast;….
Easter bells roseate in the burial vault of night and the silver voices of stars, that a dark madness fell shivering from the sleeper’s brow. — “Sebastian in Dream”
You also grieve, you gentle gods,
and the autumnal gold of the elm. — “In the Park”
Asyntactic or absent punctuation.
Then always there follows, a blue deer, a watcher under darkening trees,… — “Passion”
Autumn decline; and silence in the elderbush. — “Afra”
Where the crumbling path sinks through the shade of autumn elms, far from leafy huts, sleeping shepherds, always the dark form of coolness follows the wanderer over bridge of bone, the hyacinthine voice of the boy, gently recounting the lost myth of the forest, softer a sick one now the wild cry of the brother. — “On the Mönchsberg”
But he was a small bird in bare branches, long bells through nightlike November, the father’s silence, when in sleep he descended the stair’s dim spiral. — “Sebastian in Dream”
Silver water ripples over forest steps, night, and speechless a life forgotten. — “Evening in Lans”
At evening they bore the stranger to the morgue; tang of tar; red sycamores’ slow rustle; jackdaws’ dark flight; guard posted on the plaza. — “Under Way”
Ambiguous punctuation: in which a central phrase is grammatically combined with preceding and succeeding phrases, but the total is asyntactic.
Or there are cries in sleep, when a bronzed angel approaches a man in the grove, the saint’s flesh melts on glowing grate. — “Helian”
Always white night leans on the hill, where poplars tower in silvery tones, are stars and stones. — “The Wanderer”
Great is the silence of the wasted garden, where the young novice wreathes the brow with brown leaves, his breath quaffs icy gold. — “Helian”
O you crushed eyes in black mouths, as the grandchild in soft derangement lonely contemplates the darker termination, the blue eyelids of the silent god drop over him. — “Helian”
Forever the nightbird calls from barren branches above the step of the lunar one, an icy wind sounds on village walls. — “Anif”
…storm-compassion, echoing with droning thunder snowy summits ring. — “The Tempest”
Synesthesia.
Forehead dreams the colors of god,… — “Whispered in the Afternoon”
…forehead, that hears its fear;… — “Along”
…a black silence already fears;… — “Autumn Soul”
Gruesome evening red breeds mighty fear in stormclouds. — “The West”
O gruesome laugh of gold. — “To Those Grown Mute”
Softly chimes the sun in rose clouds on the hill. — “Springtime of the Soul”
By autumn walls, shadows search the hill for sounding gold…. — “Limbo”
A thornbush resounds,… — “To the Boy Elis”
…ore in the mine resounding red,…. — “Lament I”
…blue deer, that resounds under trees,… — “To the Sister”
Blue blossom, softly sounding in the yellowed stone. — “Transfiguration”
…where suddenly blue grows strangely mute,… — “The Tempest”
Surreal imagery.
Long follows the ear the paths of stars in the ice. — “Winter Night”
Then have green woods gathered at evening around quieter huts;…. — “Song of the Departed”
…the thrush summoned a strangeness to decline. — “Sebastian in Dream”
…the year gazing out from tree and deer;…. — “Lament I”
Decay gliding through the aging room;…. — “Hymns for a Rosary: Amen”
…and you move your arms more beautifully in blue. — “To the Boy Elis”
Her smile sinks slowly in the moldering fountain,… — “Under Way”
O you crushed eyes in black mouths,…. — “Helian”
It is a light, that goes out in my mouth. — “De Profundis”
Your body is a hyacinth, in which a monk dips waxen fingers. — “To the Boy Elis”
Cold metal wanders my forehead; spiders hunt my heart. — “De Profundis”
O ye psalms in the fiery rain of midnight, when servants lash soft eyes with nettles,…. — “Helian”
The spirit of evil stares from a silver mask; with magnetic lash light expels stone night. — “To Those Grown Mute”
…defoliated stars. — “In the East”
Omission of articles. German routinely attaches articles to nouns; sometimes Trakl omits them.
[ ] Hour came, when that one saw the shadows in [ ] crimson sun,…. — “To One Dead Young”
[] Moon, like a dead thing stepped from [ ] blue cave,…. — “The West”
…evening, when the blackbird sang on [ ] darkening wall,…. — “To One Dead Young”
[ ] Mother bore baby in the white moon,…. — “Sebastian in Dream”
…a declining generation dwells, prepares for white grandchildren [ ] dark future. — “The Evening”
Then more shining always wakes from [ ] black minutes of madness…
the sufferer on [ ] petrified threshold,…. — “Song of the Departed”
[ ] Star and [ ] dark journey vanished on the canal. — “Psalm”
Substituting indefinite for definite pronouns or articles.
On the face falls dew. — “My Heart at Evening”
…a blue smile on the face and strangely cocooned…. — “To One Dead Young”
…as gently he lifts the eyelids above a human one,…. — “Hohenberg”
The white stranger lifted the hands more radiant…. — “Sevenfold Song of Death”
Great is the silence of the wasted garden, where the young novice wreathes the brow with brown leaves, his breath quaffs icy gold. — [Indefinite and definite pronouns with the same referent.] “Helian”
Hour came, when that one saw the shadows in crimson sun,…. — “To One Dead Young”
…and the old one black-mantled carried a rosy child,…. — “Sebastian in Dream”
…the lonely wanders with his stars . — “In Darkness”
Apparition the sleeper descended the black forest,…. — “Sevenfold Song of Death”
Again returns the night and a dying one laments and another suffers for him. — “In an Old Album”
Trakl’s intricate management of words produces irrational results. He so condenses meaning, its root is hardly retrieved; yet process and planning are not absent. Under the opacity of radical contractions, order may be sensed. If just out of reach. One might wonder: once acclimated to this work, accustomed to its ways, in what world are unstable significations, contradictory adjectives, the stasis of verbless phrases, the contraction of meanings, so comfortable, natural? Compare less Traklean-natural imitators: admirers Paul Celan (1920-1970), James Wright (1927-1980), Christian Hawkey (b. 1969). To varying degrees, their Trakl imitations share characteristics: random imagery arbitrarily arrayed; and uneasy borrowings from Trakl that, incongruous with the remaining text, make diction bumpy, inconsistent. In Hawkey’s Vertrakl, for example, his Trakl-odes (unlike his prose ponderings) seem selfconscious, awkward, undigested; and without Trakl’s innate logic they read oddly arbitrary (84):
O where in these winter war zones Are the angst-ridden voles, the…. An herbal-infused wind circles unborn dreams. A dork mutters Milton. The green wagon
Is suffering around the bend And to return from the region of likeness One must learn to unravel April’s wounds.
Hawkey’s diction lacks Trakl’s easy flow, juice; he assembles images without organic tension; that clash in tone and culture: Trakl’s diction would not pair “dork” and “Milton.” Imitators, noting the odd conjunctions, the illogical leaps, of Traklean imagery, miss its unity of repetition, tone, vocabulary. They replicate his practice without a governing discipline, pile imagery in chaotic jumbles. If Trakl was nuts, authentically so: he worked from within. Others, detached from Trakl’s realities, work from without.
If Trakl is strange, it is the strangeness, or dim familiarity perhaps, of the primitive psyche. If black-white furcations in primary processing promote contradictory adjectives, Trakl’s poetry, its revisions, reflect this. In the streaming of Joycean consciousness, words flow with small grammar: how much more asyntactic the nonverbal psyche? Lindenberger claims Trakl “was concerned with the suggestive power of images and lines rather than the exposition of a body of ideas,” a comment redolent of Trakl’s investigations of the primordial visual sensorium. (1971, 80) This is not to disagree that the verse is enjoyable purely as object, as devoid of conceptual content, per Killy and others: Eliot knew Dante great by his sound. It is to add that Trakl’s odd writing describes his reality. An unusual reality, irrational, not experienced by most but real to him and expressed, best he could, with the ill-suited logic of language. But such footing in a reality — absent from Celan, Wright, Hawkey: they seem to lack Trakl’s consistent grounding in a concrete world. To essay a slightly metaphysical proposal from Firmage (in Williams, 1991, 246-256):
Trakl characteristically employs certain techniques to wrench the readers from these customary associations [of words], to force them to participate in the prerational ground of language, to shock them into a perception of the world no longer jaded by presuppositions of the ego.
…so readers may glimpse what Trakl sees. But Trakl distorts language to fit his realities, while his followers do not seem to look at, watch, describe unique realities but use strange language, much of it developed by Trakl to describe his mental realities, to describe our usual one. Or create a reality they imagine rather than see.
Is any of this true? Is Trakl’s logic that of a primordial visual sensorium? The language of someone groping for a prerational ground of language? More broadly, are there explanations of his work as a whole — is there a consistent solvent of his meaning’s dense core? Or are there only the mute, succulent bodies of Traklean words, sensuous in their suchness?
Either thesis, difficult to prove. Innumerable critical attempts to decipher the details of the poems are enough to show that the poems are more than constellations of words lacking cohesion. Yet in their mass, critical theories are particulate rubble. Each grubs painfully at a work or two, or at a stratum of imagery that runs through selected works, or a period of them, or a motif that, widespread, is not key; but in the end, every scheme is ad hoc. No analysis seems to illuminate every aspect and detail of Trakl’s art. That many interpretations of Trakl’s art are valid to a degree clouds the significance of all.
Yet just here, and most important to the poems taken as poetry — not grammar, linguistics, psychology, history — is the deliberate skill behind this language in ruins. This central nut — poetic beauty wrought by skill that conveys a world beyond ken — is the minimal worth of Trakl’s work. Its sensual appeal assonant sonorities intense colors intoning rhythms compressed imagery cycling moods and descriptors ceaseless flux hallucinatory visions snatches of narrative narrow themes obsessive vocabulary: these powers of writing convey with control and beauty the cryptic core of the Traklean mind. Do they not say something of the ancient basements, mostly abandoned by conscious thought, of ours?
13. Wenyuan Xiaoshuo
Trakl’s peculiar imagistic world may be seen reflected, far off, in two types of Chinese tale. Zhiguai (records of anomalies) rose in the Northern and Southern Dynasties (220-589); chuanqi (tales of the marvelous) were first seen in the Tang (618-906). Their common denominator is the strange, anomalous, marvelous. A collective term for both types of tale is modern: wenyuan xiaoshuo (classical tale); which we shall call them here. While western stories of the strange often force readers to decide if a story or parts of it are real, wenyuan xiaoshuo conserve ambiguity. Their art: balancing plots on reality’s edge, not clearly within or without. They tell both worlds as real, in their ways.
Take the wenyuan xiaoshuo “Chu Sheng” (“Scholar Chu”) from Pu Songling’s (1640-1715) Liaochai Zhiyi (Liaochai’s Records of the Strange). (Zeitlin 2003, 8-11) In “Scholar Chu,” Chu, student impecunious, is schoolmate and friend of Chen. Chen, rich and generous, diverts paternal cash to pay Chu’s tuition. On discovering this, his father, less charitable, pulls Chen from school. His father dead, Chen returns to school, finds Chu his teacher. In gratitude for past generosity, Chu proposes to stand for Chen in the imperial exam, gateway to careers in government. In additional gratitude, Chu has his cousin Liu take Chen on a pleasure barge outing, where they enjoy a famous courtesan’s singing. Disembarking, the celebrants traverse a covered walkway, walls overwritten by old passers-by. Chen adds his inscription — the courtesan’s lyrics — and Liu sends him home to wait for Chu.
Returned from the exam, Chu collapses; only then does Chen become aware that the servants who pick up Chu — are picking up Chen. Confused, he sees Chu beside him, who admits being a ghost. Next day, Chen learns that the courtesan on the barge had died before he heard her. Puzzled, Chen revisits the corridor where he brushed her lyrics. From the story:
He saw that the lines he had inscribed were still there, but the ink was faint, almost illegible, as though the words were about to be effaced. Only at that moment did he realize that the inscriber had been a disembodied soul and the lines’ author a ghost. (After Zeitlin 1993, 9)
Chen discovers 1) Chu had been a ghost since appearing to him as teacher, 2) Chen is in the tale as soul (not ghost), 3) cousin Liu and the courtesan are ghosts. Chen: confused. Seeking external proof of recent events, he finds it is he — his writing remains on the wall. But it fades — faint like his soul, which ostensibly wrote it.
Is this story reality? Fantasy? Its strength as literature is the ambiguous presence of each. Its fantastic elements are beyond mundane; its mundane elements support the fantastic.
Zeitlin notes the ambiguities: “We have been led astray by the misleading aspects of the narrative: confusing indications of time, frequent omissions of explicit subjects in sentences, and spatial disjunctions.” (2003, 9) This should ring bells. Both the wenyuan xiaoshuo and Trakl’s verse bridge two worlds — terms and constructs of the logical language of the everyday world struggle to convey facts from a world irrational. Both literatures, despite disparities of language and culture, put similar techniques to similar ends, warping and twisting linguistic conventions to describe experiences inconsistent with the logic and assumptions of everyday language.
Which yields from each bizarre results, in ordinary terms. Trakl, syntactically radical; the wenyuan xiaoshuo, more conventional; its grammar, at least, makes sense enough. Nevertheless, it means to have readers confused; or understand worlds partly surreal. It does so not with grammatical chaos but with logical disjunctions of sentences: leaving things out, implying not stating, leading its readers to assume what they logically ought not.
Two considerations legitimate the verbal illogic in Trakl’s verse and classical tale alike. First: they target strange worlds. Second: they distort the normative logic of language to describe these worlds. Alogical expression of the alogical seems logical.
For example. A point of coincidence between Trakl’s verse and “Scholar Chu,” apparently minor, accumulates significance. A Traklean motif unearthed by Kleefeld (in Williams, 1991) is “hallway” — stairs, entrance halls, vestibules, terraces — transitional spaces that mediate rooms, defined spaces (44 ff.).
On spiral stairs your dress rustles. — “Summer”
The father’s voice, when in sleep he descended the stair’s dim spiral. — “Sebastian in Dream”
Intimate steps on the dim stair,…. — “Under Way”
From dark hall stepped the golden form of a young girl…. — “The Heart”
The lonely stroll softly in the hall of stars. — “All Souls”
…silver voice of the wind in the hall. — “Hohenberg”
Far have the sisters gone to white elders. The sleeper found them at night by pillars in the hall,…. — “Helian”
White voices trailing through gruesome vestibules broken terraces,…. — “The Tempest”
Calm and harmonious is a walk past friendly rooms,…. — “Helian”
Rooms, by Freudian, other analyses, symbolize females, their genitals. Sometimes, a pre-Fall innocent like Kasper Hauser remains in halls, avoiding rooms and women. Other times, halls become crime scenes: places of uncertainty, surreptition, seduction, of ominous sounds and sudden violence that separate — or connect — hunter and prey in scenes of incestuous encounter. Or of other crimes (from “Kaspar Hauser Song”):
…and his murderer sought him.
Spring and summer and beautiful the autumn of the just, his step light past dark rooms of dreamers. At night he stayed alone with his star;
saw, that snow fell into bare branches and in the dim hall the shadow of the murderer.
Silver sank the unborn head.
But what share these hallways of horror with the corridor of calligraphy in “Scholar Chu”? Zeitlin writes:
It is his own writing on the wall that most tangibly registers the crossings of boundaries in the narrative, not only between life and death but between self and other. Significantly, this wall is not the wall of an ordinary building or a room but the wall of a passageway, a transitional zone that ostensibly connects two places but seems to lead nowhere. …the wall itself configures his experience in limbo. The material marks of the ink on the wall have uncannily assumed the status of their writer — disembodied, elusive, in the process of dissolving entirely. This is truly phantom writing, ghostly traces momentarily suspended between presence and absence, inscribed by himself and by a double. Although the narrative carefully roots Chen’s experience in his subjective perception, we are not asked to wonder whether it is a figment of his imagination. The point here is that the subjectivity of Chen’s vision does not cancel out the strangeness of his experience but is rather the means by which it acquires a recognizable form. But that form is by nature unstable, and the record itself is in the process of transformation. (2003, 9-10)
“Scholar Chu” and Traklean verse, with differences aplenty, share essentials. Zeitlin’s phrases speak of these often: “crossing of boundaries; self and other; passageway; transitional; limbo; disembodied, elusive, dissolving; himself and … a double; presence and absence; unstable; the record … in the process of transformation.”
These phrases could have been taken from tracts on Trakl. The similar descriptions in discussions of the wenyuan xiaoshuo, Trakl’s work, seem odd coincidence; except that a story tradition culturally distant and a thousand years older shares Trakl’s problem — describing a world beyond human rationality, ordinarily incomprehensible. In each: strange language conveys strange world. “The material marks of the ink on the wall have uncannily assumed the status of their writer — disembodied, elusive, in the process of dissolving.” A good description of Trakl, his alternate selves, his writing. An inward irrational world is transformed into words that, having “assumed the status of their writer,” are also irrational: confusing, changing, contradictory, “elusive.” “The subjectivity of Chen’s vision does not cancel out the strangeness of his experience but is rather the means by which it acquires a recognizable form.” That is the point: the alien logic, distortions of space and time, unusual sleights of word in these unworldly visions of Trakl and the classical tale are not, within the limits of the rational, irrational. They are rational descriptions of irrational realms.
14. Epilogue
The work and death of Georg Trakl echo Sylvia Plath’s, who put, at 30, her children in a bedroom, her head in an oven. Plath’s language is more modern than Trakl’s: his can linger in the nineteenth century. But they share a remote delivery, broken by outbursts. Mesmeric, they distance the world, till only self remains. But self unbearable, life is a discard.
They wrote their best in despair, under pressure of the end. They share a blunt, factual quality. They fear nor blink. They report: in its level stare at reality, their verse is admirable; its detachment, fearsome. Their final frankness looks without care for consequence. Their work can be loved for its sound, purity, quiet resolve. Yet its origins are clearer now, rising from lives unbearable. Their finest work, too strong for their living, is writ from the dead.
Matthew Flannery
New Brunswick, Highland Park NJ 1994-2022