On the Chaos in Chandos: Hofmannsthal on Modernity’s Threshold

In 1902, Hugo von Hofmannsthal published “A Letter,” in which a certain Lord Chandos writes to Francis Bacon to “excuse himself” for his “complete abandonment of literary activity.”¹ It’s difficult to think of another short literary work in German that has received as much attention as this “founding text of literary high modernism.”² Often, “A Letter” is introduced by literary critics as a straightforward account of falling into a “profound state of speechlessness,” and many commentators repeat Chandos’s presentation of this state, as if this work of literature were nothing more than a description of a character’s breakdown.³ Recent scholarship has avoided the once popular reading of “A Letter” as a “document” of Hofmannsthal’s biographical travails, but many critics still interpret Chandos’s statements as if they recorded a real crisis.⁴ They seem to imagine their task as a Chandos diagnosis. “This character, Lord Chandos, has been taken at his word, which has directed attention away from literary knowledge of the text,” Rudolf Helmstetter writes, and readers, he continues, have “remained on the level of the character and his narcissistic self-deceptions and repeated his misjudgments with more or less empathy and emphasis.”⁵ What would it mean to pay attention to the literary aspect of “A Letter”? What would literary knowledge look like here?

To read “A Letter” as a literary work first requires taking Chandos at his word, retracing his presentation of his crisis, but this can only be a preface to another kind of reading, one that no longer respects the integrity of anyone’s word. Chandos writes that he has “completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently [zusammenhängend] about anything at all” (121, 465). He can still do these things, just not coherently; there’s no speechlessness here. His problems begin with an experience of “abstract words…disintegrat[ing] in my mouth like rotten mushrooms;” he feels an “inexplicable uneasiness even pronouncing the words ‘spirit,’ ‘soul,’ or ‘body’” (121, 465). Words are no longer vehicles, but impediments. They are too corporeal to pronounce with confidence even the word “body.” This crisis comes about as he works on a collection, to be titled Nosce te ipsum, of apophthegmata or aphorisms, which would have included quotations from Chandos’s contemporaries as well as from ancient sources, including the “description” (“Beschreibung”) of architectural works (119, 463).⁶ This plan is made possible, according to Chandos, by his “drunken” vision of “all of existence as one grand unity” (120, 463–64). He feels this when he drinks fresh milk and when he takes in “sweet and foamy nourishment” from books. He insists on his mastery in these situations: some “tousled rustic” brings the milk to Chandos’s hunting lodge, and the books belong to him and are read in his study (120, 464). In his experience of unity, “I had the intuition that everything was a symbol and every creature a key to another, and I felt I was surely the one who could take hold of each in turn and open as many of the others as would open [eine nach der andern bei der Krone zu packen und mit ihr so viele der andern aufzusperren, als sie aufsperren könnte]” (120, 464). This is how he summarizes his intentions:

I wanted to open up [aufschließen] the fables and mythic tales which the ancients have handed down to us and in which painters and sculptors never cease to find mindless pleasure and show how they are the hieroglyphics of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom.

(119, 463)

Chandos insists here on “opening up” things and himself and gaining access to insides and interiorities. But as he proceeds with his “encyclopedic” project, these putative hieroglyphs take on their own life and become “dizzying whirlpools which spin around and around and lead into the void,” which is also a kind of inside (122, 466). He presents this change as a catastrophe, but his post-crisis situation is not all that different from his original state.⁷ In this new relation to the...