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  • Schriftkritik und Bewegungslust: Sprache und Tanz bei Hugo von Hofmannsthal by Yongqiang Liu
  • Vincent Kling
Yongqiang Liu, Schriftkritik und Bewegungslust: Sprache und Tanz bei Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2013. 223 pp.

The struggle recorded in the Chandos Letter to break out of solipsism should be proof enough that Hofmannsthal was anything but a complicit aesthete in a decaying society, but Karl Kraus’s moral force guarantees the continued wide currency of a serious distortion he propagated. Liu’s book traces Hofmannsthal’s misgivings about aestheticism and orders wide-ranging, complex material covering Hofmannthal’s work in a structure that is simple but never simplistic. Liu presents nuanced aspects of Hofmannthal’s writing under two general headings, language and physical movement, as he reads relevant primary documents. By 1903, Liu argues, Hofmannsthal had worked free of self-enclosed aestheticism in the “Gespräche über Gedichte” by fusing the dichotomy of subject and object into a unity: “Mit der Abkehr vom substantiellen Ich-Begriff und der Auflösung der Grenze zwischen Subjekt und Objekt geht zugleich eine Hervorhebung der analogischen übertragungsund Vernetzungsfunktion der Poesie einher” (51).

While not drawing on religion, Liu’s points make clear that Hofmannsthal’s concerns were shaped by his Catholicism. The works in Part I show how searchingly a vision of the power of language to become logos again—the condition whereby the word and the deed are indissolubly coextensive—appears to occupy an increasingly important place in Hofmannsthal’s thinking. Likewise, Part II, with its emphasis on ritualized gesture as a set of symbolic enactments, recalls nothing more clearly than Tridentine ceremony. Hofmannsthal’s vision is intrinsically sacramental, both word and gesture not just representing the action or the object but fusing with them into an indivisible identity.

No matter how often it is asserted that Hofmannsthal despairs of language in itself, that view is nowhere found in his work. Rather, his “Sprachkritik zielt [ . . . ] darauf, deutlich zu machen, wie dringlich eine neue, wahre [End Page 136] Erkenntnis stiftende Sprache gebraucht wird” (36). Hofmannsthal is basinghis objections to the misuse of language on the essential tools of language: reason and logic (35). After all, the very medium of the Chandos Letter is a letter (37), so a blanket condemnation of language cannot possibly be what Hofmannthal was aiming at. “Der Chandos-Brief demonstriert [ . . . ] eine Kritik an der Künstlichkeit der konventionellen, begrifflichen Kategorisierungen und Klassifikationen sowie am Repräsentationsanspruch der Sprache” (39), not a rejection of language itself.

Before the Chandos Letter, Liu discusses Hofmannsthal’s Eine Monographie, better known as the Mitterwurzer-Aufsatz. In mimetic acts (anticipating the writings on dance), the great actor Mitterwurzer causes fiction and reality to fuse. “So kritisiert Hofmannsthal hier [ . . . ] die Repräsentationsfunktion der Sprache und drückt damit seinen Wunsch auf eine neue Sprache aus, in der Zeichen and Bezeichnetes [ . . . ] zusammenfallen” (28). Never is language denied; in fact, the “Sprache der stummen Dinge” that can console and illuminate Chandos (40) is clearly shown to be a language, not just a set of objects to which Chandos assigns arbitrary meanings. Liu points out as a sign of continuity that Hofmannsthal placed his Gespräch über Poesie, which followed the Chandos Letter by a year, under the genre of his Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, “in vielerlei Hinsicht als die Fortsetzung des Chandos-Briefes” (48). In this dialogue, based on Stefan George’s Das Jahr der Seele, the “Sprache der stummen Dinge” is reintegrated into spoken language, the language of poetry. The taxonomic function of language, its use for classifying and categorizing, yields in poetry to symbolic force so that “das Symbolisierende und das Symbolisierte in eins fallen” (48). The object is paramount. “Nicht mehr das Innere des Subjekts, sondern die Außenwelt is hier ausschlaggebend [ . . . ]. Die Auffassung des Ich-Begriffs ist hier statt durch den Weg nach innen durch eine tranzendierende öffnung in ein Außen gekennzeichnet” (50).

The second part, about dance and bodily movement not as replacements to speech but as supplements or alternatives to it, balances the first. Dance is here seen to have captured artistic consciousness at the turn of the twentieth century as a modality promising greater freedom: “Als Kunst...

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