H.C. Artmann's Structuralist Imagination: A Semiotic Study of His Aesthetic and Postmodernity (review)

The genre of review forces me to adopt a level of style that the object of this discourse would call "intellectual [sic!]." Artmann had an ironic relationship to the "tüchtigen burschen von der germanistik" with their "Adorno-Deutsch" and "Geplapper" and has stated, "Alles Intellektuelle ist mir fremd." The author of the book reviewed here, which is based on a University of Toronto PhD thesis from 2004, is faced with similar problems. Writing a highly abstract and theoretical treatise about a writer whose essential attitude is one of Bescheidenheit (modesty), who in keeping with that attitude refrains from abstraction and "high theory," and who has a critical attitude towards "intellectuality," involves one in quite a few contradictions, apart from the fact that it leads to a severe dehydration of poetry. Marc-Oliver Schuster is not unaware of the ironies of his undertaking when he writes, "Is our learned reading of the formal-textual relations in terms of meta-text and object-text not a kind of formalist procedure that goes beyond what Artmann's texts provide us?" (221). As the author admits, "Artmann does not show the slightest interest in semiotics" (120). So, in what way does his work "invite" (120) a semiotic approach? The author argues that Artmann's imagination is designed by a structuralist imagination in concord with Saussurean linguistic structuralism, although there is no evidence that he read Saussure. He sees Artmann's structuralism in such paradigmatic formulae as cotext[text], co-notation[notation] [sic!], and the relative primacy of the signifier over the signified. Paradoxically, he also sees Artmann's writing as poststructural because it rejects communication as the norm and because his work is arealistic (not unrealistic; 157). He does know that Artmann himself feels close to Eichendorff's late Romanticism, borrows from rococo and Biedermeier, and in Nochmals Surrealismus describes himself as a surrealist. There is in my opinion little in his work that could not so be described, but, of course, postmodernism is currently more fashionable than surrealism.

Schuster tries to demarcate Artmann's writing from other styles such as expressionism, concrete poetry, pop art, surrealism, and dadaism but notes his predilection for anthropological accounts of magic rituals, myths, folk tales, and fairy tales. Even if one were to accept this, it is strange that the author then also claims that Artmann's work can be linked to postmodernism (even discounting the difficulty of defining that term). No doubt, Artmann emphasizes the mediated and constructed character of his texts, and his work also has parallels to Wittgenstein's work. But whether postmodernity is indeed a theoretical construct is at least debatable, as is whether Artmann's work is postmodern. As the author knows, many critics have maintained that postmodernism is simply a development within modernism, and seen from a neo-Marxist point of view, postmodernism is a superficial phenomenon motivated by the high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation. The author nevertheless attempts to theorize postmodernity and to locate Artmann in postmodernity with such constructs as "Synchrony in Bi-Paradigmatic Opposition to Austrian Diachrony" (165). He differentiates between "structural (static) irony" and "mono-" and "biparadigmatic irony" (123). Another question is whether McHale's description of the shift from modernism to postmodernism as a shift of dominance from epistemology to ontology is sustainable and whether it applies to Artmann in any recognizable form. After all this theoretical exertion, I still doubt that Artmann can be called postmodern in any sense.

Schuster quite correctly warns us against identifying Artmann's lyrical narrators with himself, given his predilections for masks and irony. Schuster also sees "Containment" (196ff.) as one of the essential concepts to describe Artmann's art. Although such theoretical constructs may be useful, they overwhelm Artmann's texts without being able to analyse their specificity. As Schuster knows, Artmann thinks that the concrete is smaller and aesthetically better off without...