Trakl and Adorno
Georg Trakl was an important poet a century ago, and recent decades have seen his œuvre slowly retrieved from the obscurity that had clouded its earliest days. Influenced by his searing expressionism, Rilke puzzled over Trakl’s unique ability to express historical barbarism in such a concisely poetic, but open-ended, way; Jim Morrison’s gloomy songs imitated his celebration and mourning of the decline of Western civilization, indicating that Trakl’s expressionist 1912 was a crucial moment for art — long forgotten already by the early 60s and in need of an adequate history. Adorno’s comprehensive Aesthetic Theory is in part this historical clarification of that unprecedented moment: Trakl is a main character in Adorno’s important concept of the enigmatical.
Artworks are enigmas. They contain the potential for the solution; the solution is not objectively given. Every artwork is a picture puzzle, a puzzle to be solved, but this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation, the preestablished routing of its observer.
The philosophy of art is bound up with art’s necessarily incomprehensible social character:
Those who peruse art solely with comprehension make it into something straightforward, which is furthest from what it is. If one seeks to get a closer look at a rainbow, it disappears. Of all the arts, music is the prototypical example of this: It is at once completely enigmatic and totally evident. It cannot be solved, only its form can be deciphered, and precisely this is requisite for the philosophy of art.
Adorno discusses the incomprehensible in light of the shudder:
The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended.
…
Art holds true to the shudder, but not by regression to it. Rather, art is its legacy. The spirit of artworks produces the shudder by externalizing it in objects.
Portrait of Georg Trakl, 1914. NYRB.
How art’s apparent ridiculousness is a protest against reality:
The more reasonable the work becomes in terms of its formal constitution, the more ridiculous it becomes according to the standard of empirical reason. Its ridiculousness is, however, also part of a condemnation of empirical rationality; it accuses the rationality of social praxis of having become an end in itself and as such the irrational and mad reversal of means into ends. The ridiculous in art, which philistines recognize better than do those who are naïvely at home in art, and the folly of a rationality made absolute indict one other reciprocally; incidentally, when viewed from the perspective of the praxis of self-preservation, happiness — sex — is equally ridiculous, as can be spitefully pointed out by anyone who is not driven by it.”
Echoing Nietzsche, Adorno points out that art challenges intentionality and social morality:
All the same, the ridiculous elements in artworks are most akin to their intentionless levels and therefore, in great works, also closest to their secret. Foolish subjects like those of The Magic Flute and Der Freischütz have more truth content through the medium of the music than does The Ring, which gravely aims at the ultimate. In its clownishness, art consolingly recollects prehistory in the primordial world of animals. Apes in the zoo together perform what resembles clown routines. The collusion of children with clowns is a collusion with art, which adults drive out of them just as they drive out their collusion with animals . . . the constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art.
...
The enigmaticalness of artworks remains bound up with history. It was through history that they became an enigma; it is history that ever and again makes them such, and, conversely, it is history alone — which gave them their authority — that holds at a distance the embarrassing question of their raison d’être.
…
All artworks — and art altogether — are enigmas; since antiquity this has been an irritation to the theory of art. That artworks say something and in the same breath conceal it expresses this enigmaticalness from the perspective of language.
Fool’s Cap Map of the World, c. 1580. Wikimedia.
And reflects on the status-quo’s rejection of art on moral grounds:
It is impossible to explain art to those who have no feeling for it; they are not able to bring an intellectual understanding of it into their living experience. For them the reality principle is such an obsession that it places a taboo on aesthetic comportment as a whole; incited by the cultural approbation of art, alienness to art often changes into aggression, not the least of the causes of the contemporary deaestheticization of art.
Adorno turns to Trakl’s “Psalm” as an example of how a hermetic lyric is more profound than the social art of moralism and reality principles:
No concept that enters an artwork remains what it is; each and every concept is so transformed that its scope can be affected and its meaning refashioned. In Trakl’s poems the word “sonata” acquires a unique importance by its sound and by the associations established by the poem; if one wanted to envision a particular sonata on the basis of the diffuse sounds that are suggested, the sense of the word in the poem could be missed just as the conjunct image would be incongruous with such a sonata and the sonata form itself. At the same time this would be legitimate, because the word coalesces out of fragments and scraps of sonatas and its very name is reminiscent of the sound that is meant and awakened in the work. The term sonata describes works that are highly articulated, motivically and thematically wrought, and internally dynamic; their unity is a clearly differentiated manifold, with development and reprise. The verse, “There are rooms filled with chords and sonatas,” retains little of this but has, rather, the feeling of the childish naming of names; it has more to do with the spurious title “Moonlight Sonata” than with the composition itself and yet is no coincidence; without the sonatas that his sister played there would not have been the isolated sounds in which the melancholy of the poet sought shelter. Something of this marks even the poem’s simplest words, which are drawn from communicative language; that is why Brecht’s critique of autonomous art, that it simply reiterates what something is, misses the mark. Even Trakl’s omnipresent “is” is alienated in the artwork from its conceptual sense: it expresses no existential judgment but rather its pale afterimage qualitatively transformed to the point of negation; the assertion is that something amounts to both more and less and includes the implication that something is not. When Brecht or William Carlos Williams sabotages the poetic and approximates an empirical report, the actual result is by no means such a report: by the polemical rejection of the exalted lyrical tone, the empirical sentences translated into the aesthetic monad acquire an altogether different quality. The antilyrical tone and the estrangement of the appropriated facts are two sides of the same coin. Judgment itself undergoes metamorphosis in the artwork. Artworks are, as synthesis, analogous to judgment; in artworks, however, synthesis does not result in judgment; of no artwork is it possible to determine its judgment or what its so-called message is. It is therefore questionable whether artworks can possibly be engagé, even when they emphasize their engagement. //
Rebus or picture puzzle from 1870. Worthpoint.
Georg Trakl
from To the Silenced: Selected Poems, translated by Will Stone (2014)
Psalm (For Karl Kraus)
There is a light, that the wind has extinguished.
There is a pub on the heath, that a drunk departs in the afternoon.
There is a vineyard, charred and black with holes full of spiders.
There is a room, which they have whitewashed with milk.
The madman has perished. There is an island of the South Sea,
Receiving the Sun-God. The drums roar.
The men perform warlike dances.
The women hipsway in creeping vines and fire-flowers,
Whenever the ocean sings. O our lost Paradise.
The nymphs have departed the golden woods.
The stranger is buried. Then arises a flickering rain.
The son of Pan appears as an earthworker,
Who sleeps through noon at the edge of the glowing asphalt.
There are little girls in a courtyard, in little dresses full of heart-rending poverty!
There are rooms filled with Accords and Sonatas.
There are shadows which embrace each other before a blinded mirror.
At the windows of the hospital, convalescents warm themselves.
Up the canal a white steamer carries the bloody epidemic
The strange sister appears again in someone's evil dreams.
Resting in the hazelbush, she plays with his stars.
The student, perhaps a doppelganger, stares long after her from the window.
Behind him stands his dead brother, or he comes down the old spiral stairs.
In darkness, brown chestnut trees fade the figure of the young novice.
The garden is in evening. Bats flutter about the cloister
The caretaker’s children cease their playing and seek the gold of heaven.
Final chord of a quartet. The little blind girl runs trembling down the avenue.
And later her shadow touches along cold walls, surrounded by fairy tales and holy legends.
There is an empty boat, which drifts down the black canal at evening.
In the bleakness of the old asylum, human ruins decay.
The dead orphans lie at the garden wall.
From gray rooms tread angels with shit-spattered wings.
Worms drip from their yellowed eyelids.
The square before the church is dark and silent, as in the days of childhood.
On silver soles earlier lives glide by
And the shadows of the damned decline towards the sighing waters.
In his grave the white magician plays with his snakes.
Silently above the place of skulls God's golden eyes open.
//
SUBURB IN THE SOUTH WIND (Vorstadt im Föhn)
At evening the place lies desolate and brown,
The air impregnated with a grayish stench.
A train thundering from the vaulted bridge
Scatters the sparrows over fence and bracken.
Hovels that crouch. Paths scattered in confusion.
The cluttered gardens full of restless turmoil,
Dull promptings now and the forcing a howl.
A red dress flying in a crowd of children.
Rats whistle near the dump in love-sick choir.
Women bear baskets of entrails, a nauseous
Procession of filth and scab that rises
Up through the slowly darkening air.
And a canal suddenly spits oozy blood
Down the still river from the slaughterhouse.
The south win garbs thin shrubs in brighter hues
And red crawls sluggishly through the slow flood.
Whispers that drown in cloudy sleep. Images
That hover above the gutters as though
Memories called them from lives long ago,
Rising and falling with the tepid breeze:
Out of the clouds rise radiant avenues
Crowded with gorgeous chariots, bold riders.
Then, too, a ship comes into view and founders
On reefs. And mosques, too sometimes, pink and rose.
//
Paula Modersohn-Becker, Girl's head in front of a window, 1902. Oil on Slate. Kunsthalle Bremen.
THREE GLANCES INTO AN OPAL (Drei Blicke in einen Opal)
1
Glance into opal: a hamlet crowned with withered wine,
the grey clouds of stillness, the yellow boulder-strewn hill;
and in the evening hours the coolness of the well—
twin mirror framed by shadow and slime-covered stone.
The highway and crosses of autumn shrink and sink down
into evening, singing pilgrims and blood-flecked bedding.
The form of the lonely man moves inward then, turning,
and through the empty grove, pale angel, he walks alone.
The warm south wind blows from somewhere black. Satyrs entwine
small slender women; monks, the pales priests of luxury—
their frenzy adorns itself with lilies of beauty
and gloom, and raises up their hands to God's golden shrine.
2
With its moist touch, a drop of dew hovers rosily
in the rosemary; breath of sepulchral smells courses
through hospitals loud with wild screams of fever, curses.
Bones rise from the ancestral grave, ruinous and grey.
The old man's wife dances in veilings and slime of blue,
hair all caked with filth and filling up with her black tears.
The boys dream confusedly in withered willow tares
and their foreheads are barren and raw with leprosy.
An evening sinks, tepid and mild, through the arched window.
A saint steps from the black marks of his wounds. Scarlet
snails are crawling in slow escape out of their shattered
shells, vomiting blood on twisted thorns that loom stiff and grey.
3
Blind men are sprinkling incense into festering wounds.
Red-golden vestments; torches; a singing of the psalms;
and girls who embrace the Lord's body like poison fumes.
Shapes stiff as wax pace over smoke and fiery brands.
A skinny, raw-boned simpleton leads the midnight dance
of the lepers. Garden of uncanny adventures;
distortions; grimacing flowers and laughter; monsters
and writhing constellations among the black thorn's tines.
O poverty, beggar soup, bread and sweet leek; the trance
of a life lived in hovels near the edge of the woods.
The grey sky hardens itself above the yellow glades
and obedient to old custom a vesper bell chants.
//
HUMANITY (Menschheit)
Fixed before gulfs of flame, humanity.
A drum roll. Brows of dark warriors, their footfall.
Through fogs of blood, black iron rattling shrill.
Desperation. Night in melancholy skulls.
The shadow of Eve here. The hunt and red money.
Clouds pierced by the light. The Last Supper
Of bread and wine. The home of gentle stillness.
And those twelve men brought together
In the night. They scream under olive branches.
Saint Thomas dips his hand in the gaping scar.
//
El Greco, The Last Supper, 1568. Oil on canvas. Wikipedia.
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