Look of Things by Strathausen Carsten;

Author:Strathausen, Carsten;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2003-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Gestures of Speech

The previous reading of Hofmannsthal’s poem may serve as an introduction into his reflections about the process of linguistic signification. Hofmannsthal’s early works are self-reflexive about their own constitutive mechanism as language. They thematize the play of presence and absence, identity and difference that enables textual meaning and allows for various interpretations of a given text. At the same time, they lament the concomitant loss of an unequivocal sense that allegedly remains preserved in spoken language alone. Speech is granted priority because it is said to preserve the undifferentiated origin of a corporeal meaning in which sign and referent, spirit and matter have not yet been divorced. The voice inaugurates the originary ground upon which the written sign can subsequently take place and establish itself. But yet again, the primordiality of speech finds its most adequate expression in a poetic text whose goal is to prove visually that language matters and enjoys a physical presence of its own. For Hofmannsthal, the voice and the body of language are intertwined and codependent, and “Vorfrühling” calls upon the material presence of signification as physical evidence of the inherent ability of language to speak itself. The task of the literary critic consists precisely in resisting the temptation to dissolve this paradox—the friction between spoken and written language—in either direction. A study of Hofmannsthal’s works cannot simply privilege one of the poles, nor can it be anchored in a positive or identifiable ground outside the self-referential play of signifiers at work within the literary text. Any such efforts are themselves based upon the constitutive interplay of speech and writing they seek to explain. This, at least, is the early Hofmannsthal’s Aestheticist stance vis-à-vis poetic and critical language. In the following, I shall try to contextualize the above reading of Hofmannsthal’s poem by reference to his other writings around 1900.

The most programmatic endorsement of this magical understanding of language expressed in “Vorfrühling” can be found in Hofmannsthal’s brief comments in “Eine Monographie” (1895) about the actor Friedrich Mitterwurzer whose language, Hofmannsthal contends, is free of the reified speech patterns that dominate public discourse:

Wenn wir den Mund aufmachen, reden immer zehntausend Tote mit. Der Mitterwurzer hat seine Beredsamkeit das Schweigen gelehrt. Er hat die zehntausend Toten totgetreten, und wenn er redet, redet nur er. In seinem Mund werden die Worte auf einmal wieder etwas ganz Elementares, der letzte eindringlichste Ausdruck des Leibes, Waffen wie die Zähne und die Nägel, Lockungen wie das Lächeln und die Blicke, reine sinnliche Offenbarungen des inneren Zustandes. (“Eine Monographie”; RA; GW I: 480)

Whenever we open our mouth, ten thousand dead talk as well. Mitterwurzer has learned his eloquence through silence. He has trampled the ten thousand dead to death, and when he talks, he alone speaks. In his mouth the words once again become something elementary, the last intense expression of the body, weapons like the teeth and the nails, temptations like the smile and the looks, pure sensuous epiphanies of an inner condition.

The “ten thousand” dead that usually

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