Out of Time by Johnson Julian;

Author:Johnson, Julian; [Johnson, Julian;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190233273
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Placing the Self

Being Nowhere

I wander silently, am seldom glad

And my sighs always ask “Where?”

In a ghostly breath it calls back to me

“There, where you are not, there is your happiness.”

   —Franz Schubert, Der Wanderer (1816)1

A stranger I arrived

A stranger I depart again.

   —Franz Schubert, Die Winterreise (1827)2

In an age which celebrated the journey as an affirmation of the self, Schubert’s Winterreise (1827) makes a startlingly negative statement. This winter journey, lacking any destination, follows the protagonist towards a complete exile of the soul. It begins as he leaves the town in which he can no longer find a home, but makes no return to some earlier, happier Heimat. He hurries past every place along the route, driven by an imperative of self-exile whose only sense of direction is ‘away’. In songs like ‘Irrlicht’ (no.9) and ‘Die Krähe’ (no.15), Schubert explores something quite opposite to the teleological and topographical certainties of high Classicism. The pathways taken by Schubert’s wanderer are arbitrary and interchangeable. Though each song displays the outward signs of musical direction and logic (note the insistent repetition of cadential figures), their hollowness is exposed by a recurring tendency to harmonic vagrancy (as in the ambivalent tonal direction in ‘Die Krähe’, with its play on augmented triads). ‘Der Wegweiser’ (no.20) invokes directed motion but turns out to be fatally misdirected; even signposts, it seems, are deceptive. The lack of direction attests to the protagonist’s weakening sense of self-possession. In ‘Lezte Hoffnung’ (no.16) he pins his future on the destiny of a leaf still clinging to the wintry branches of a tree, an arbitrariness reflected in abrupt and unprepared changes of tone and tempo. ‘Täuschung’ (no.19) records a similar abdication of responsibility (‘my only success is in pretence’) as the wanderer lets go his claim to an autonomous subjectivity (the carefree tone of social music-making here is of course bitterly ironic). ‘Der Leiermann’ (no.24), the final song of the cycle, is famously lacking in any direction; the organ grinder’s song goes round and round, without energy or purpose.

At its most extreme, Winterreise charts an erasure of the subject, a kind of internal spiritual numbness that complements the apparent invisibility of the wanderer to the rest of the world. The incremental dissolution of an expressive lyrical voice reaches its nadir in ‘Der Leiermann’, in which the broken vocal utterances, over the mechanical drone of the hurdy-gurdy, are interrupted by rests and twisted out of shape. The increasing expressive silence of the subject (the fourth song is titled ‘Erstarrung’/‘numbness’) is accompanied by failed attempts to leave some record of his passing, to make some mark upon the earth, as the deer leave their tracks in the snow. The ‘good night’ written on his beloved’s gate, the lime tree in whose bark the lovers had inscribed their names, the ice on the stream in which he scratches her name and the dates of their first meeting and parting—all these are ephemeral traces, soon to disappear. The snow will melt, the grass will grow back, and there will be nothing to show the lover’s passing.

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