Markish, Trakl, and the Temporaesthetic

Introduction

Synaesthesia, briefly stated, is that species of metaphor which uses the vocabulary of the data of one sense to describe the data of another sense—for example, "a green smell" or "a soft flavor." It is not a novel poetic technique and has a decent pedigree in the Western literary tradition. With the development of European expressionisms in central and eastern Europe in the years surrounding the First World War, among all of the various innovations of form, treatments of the self, and philosophies of language, synaesthesia, too, began to be employed to startling effect, toying with those once discrete sensory boundaries. In general terms, "The adjective," writes Richard Sheppard on the fundamental building block of expressionist metaphor, "the principle agent of description, was to change function: instead of describing the impression made by the external world, it was to bring forth the hidden metaphorical dimensions of the poet's subjective vision."¹

Building on this characterization of figurative language, the purpose of this essay is twofold. First, after a preliminary discussion of the literary and linguistic foundation of synaesthesia, I will develop the idea of temporaesthesia, that is, the perception of time as an element in the concrete sensory world of expressionist metaphor. I argue, second, that this synaesthetic category is a potentially potent tool for assessing not only a particular poetic vision, but also a poet's view of history informed by it.

The first issue to address is why, in the dizzying array of modernisms, focus on expressionism. First of all, the answer begins again in Sheppard's statement about the adjective in expressionist poetry. One key strand in the twine of expressionist poetry is the emotional deformation of a perceived reality which is imposed back on that reality. It is a poetry, in other words, which seeks to turn what is subjective to the perceiver into objective reality. Frames of reference in the poetic world were thus liberated from representational conventions of impressionist or symbolist language. Second, expressionism was a markedly "decentered" movement. Speaking of German expressionism, for example, Neil H. Donahue notes that "The atmosphere of subversive excitement was not centered in any one city, as was the French avant-garde in Paris (where Expressionists were also active), but rather it spread through regional cities [ . . . ]"; it was an electric and eclectic atmosphere with "collective but disparate dimensions."² This was as much the case for the Yiddish expressionist incarnations as the German ones. However, whereas this decentering was symptomatic of the literary cultural attitude of the German-language poets, for the Yiddish poets, as we will see, it was also a thematic nexus.

Now I do not hold that generalizations must pertain to the whole of a nebulous movement (or better a sluice of interpercolating movements) when derived from observations of two poets. Rather, what I hope to achieve is a portrait of the potential of a given technique. To do this I will look at the works of Perets Markish, one of the premier Yiddish expressionists, and compare them with those of Georg Trakl, one of the early German expressionists. The choice is not fortuitous. Georg Trakl, who lived from 1887 to 1914 and spent most of his life in his native Austria, was a key figure in early German expressionism; his poetry is marked by a minimalism of subtly altering permutations of imagery and language. Perets Markish (1895–1952), on the other hand, lived a remarkably peripatetic life, living in (and traveling through) many of the centers of Eastern European Jewish cultural life. The poetry of his early career—the poetry on which I am focusing here, from roughly 1917 to 1922—is also a kind of minimalist expressionism (especially when seen in contrast both to his own output later in life, and to a contemporary maximalist Yiddish expressionist such as Uri Tsvi Greenberg), often marked by a similarly compact set of themes, imagery, and language. Not only are their literary lives bookended by the First World War in Eastern Europe—Trakl was an army medic who died by his own hand in 1914 after witnessing the war's unspeakable brutality...