Of Fish and Men: The Importance of Georg Buchner's Anatomical Writings

Even a cursory glance at the critical literature (and in Germany, at the feuilleton pages of the important newspapers) reveals that there currently exist two images of Georg Büchner, barely recognizable as representations of the same author. On one (very crowded) side there is Büchner the social revolutionary, who participated in the insurrections of the 1830's; the fiercely realist author who took social inequality in all its squalor for a poetic subject; the anatomist who looked at corporeality and mortality with an unflinching eye. On the other (more sparsely populated) side there is Büchner the philosopher-poet, who is concerned with the essence of "Dichtung": the inexplicably accomplished genius who died at the age of 24, the poet of deviance, errancy, and madness. Two institutions are chiefly responsible for the construction, administration, and distribution of these images. The Forschungstelle Georg Büchner at the university of Marburg, where the image of Büchner as a "proto-communist" was outlined in the 1970's, now edits the critical edition with a view to cement, in long volumes of notes and commentaries, Büchner's realist credentials. ² The Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung annually awards Germany's most prestigious literary prize in Büchner's name and expects the winners to reflect, in their acceptance speech, on their relation to the author. Paul Celan's speech Meridian from 1960 is not the only, but it is the most powerful exposition of Büchner as a "poet for poets."

I do not claim that the chasm between these two images can be bridged by reading Büchner's anatomical treatise on the nervous system of the barbel, the Mémoire sur le système nerveux du barbeau of 1836. ³ But I do think that by defining the problem Büchner tried to solve, and by investigating whether his solution was successful, the nature of their incompatibility can be further elucidated. I will try to show that, for historical and systematic reasons, the treatise is very much concerned with the question of correspondence, both in anatomy and, implicitly, in rhetoric and poetics. To put it briefly: in contrast to his predecessors and contemporaries (such as Goethe or Lorenz Oken), the possibility of aligning the metamorphic power of nature with the metaphoric power of language has become deeply problematic for Büchner. This misalignment is most obvious in the fact that the Mémoire is divided into two parts—the first descriptive, the second philosophical—and that there is no valid transition from one to the other. (It is this split between description and interpretation that is mirrored in the opposing camps of Büchner scholars.) By orienting my reading of the treatise towards the semiotic and rhetorical concerns of Büchner's science, I seek to open up a perspective on his literary writings that is not dominated by metaphorical inference, the very procedure he experienced as problematic.

The Context

With the choice of topic for his dissertation, Büchner sought to contribute to the solution of a silent, but nonetheless poignant problem in early nineteenth-century brain anatomy. The cerebral hemispheres were generally seen as symmetrical, but an adequate reason for this symmetry had not yet been found. Early explanations had assumed the signature of the creator in this structure, who communicates with the world in the idiom of geometry. Descartes then tried to center the symmetry of the brain in the pineal gland, which did double duty as both a spatial and a mental point of origin. After Descartes, the question of how the form of the brain relates to the nature of cognitive processes accompanied all anatomical and physiological research. Even after anatomy had liberated itself from religious and philosophical suspicion, the lure of collapsing mental and physical phenomena within a "seat of the soul"—the ontological argument!—proved irresistible...