Zusammengehaltener Zerfall: Hugo von Hofmannsthals Poetik der Multiplen Persönlichkeit by Sabine Straub (review)

It is a relief to find a book that does not spread any shallow misjudgments of Hofmannsthal, the first that he was a typically languid esthete in a decadent society, the second that he uncritically endorsed that society as an unregenerate conservative. Upholding these untruths requires polemically selective reading, whereas Sabine Straub so thoroughly grounds her convincing theses and arguments in primary research as to create work no less ethically vibrant than it is intellectually rigorous. Thanks to Straub's painstaking documentation, this reviewer understands anew the kinship between the words conscience and conscientious.

Biography, accounts of working methods, and related studies of history and culture are valid only to the extent that they illuminate the works of art (not "texts"; never "texts") writers create. Straub maintains a balance between external influences on Hofmannsthal's works and the works themselves. She investigates the psychic conditions Hofmannsthal (and, by extension, not only he) needed to sustain the exhausting tensions of the creative act: "Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, die so erfahrene Dynamik des zusammengehaltenen Zerfalls als einen Modus von Identität, Bewußtsein und Wahrnehmung auszuweisen, der für Hofmannsthal das ideale Setting gelingender ästhetischer Produktivität bildet" (15). "Suggestion, Dissoziation und Innere Wahrnehmung" (15) are the three main psychodynamic components of Hofmannsthal's experiment in fostering his creativity, leading him to "prolongierte Aufenthalte im Schwellenland zwischen Wachen und Schlaf, Leben und Tod, in hypnotischer Trance und Fieberwahn […] sich aus fortwährender Dissoziation und Re-Kombination zusammensetzende Dynamik eines vielfachen Ich" (15). Straub argues that the elements of Hofmannsthal's personal and artistic makeup "im Identitätskonzept der Multiplen Persönlichkeit zusammengefasst werden können" (16).

This unusual set of theses may make this calculatedly reticent, patrician, quintessentially Austrian writer suddenly look like a figure from E.T.A. Hoffmann or Poe, something out of Doctor Caligarior The Three Faces of Eve. We should remember, however, that Hofmannsthal indeed drew on Hoffmann ( Das Bergwerk zu Falun), and we can appreciate Straub's requisition of these concepts by recalling Oscar Wilde's famous dictum: "Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope, in the interests of Art, it will always remain so." Wilde was responding to an upsurge of interest throughout the Western world in psychic phenomena no longer taken seriously but then passionately embraced in lieu of religion: Consider the fierce advocacy of spiritualism by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Arthur Conan Doyle or the faith William Butler Yeats placed in automatic writing. Psychological processes today (perhaps too cavalierly) dismissed as "crackpot" beliefs at one time animated intelligent, perceptive people by no means gullible or daft.

Hofmannsthal's fascination with pre-or nonrational psychic phenomena plays a central role in his work. Decades ago Michael Hamburger pointed out the direct connection between William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, with its documentation of the conversion process—an inexplicable, total, and instantaneous remaking of the soul—and Hofmannsthal's libretto for Der Rosenkavalier, with the overwhelming and mystical first encounter between Octavian and Sophie. Several comparatists (Sandra Corse, Arpad Szakolczai, Theodore Ziolkowski) have examined Hofmannsthal's interest in the arcane as reflected in his work, especially Andreas, but Straub appears to be the first to make a systematic inventory of Hofmannsthal's sources so as to show their indispensable role in the act of writing, not just in the finished work—or the fragment.

Straub's book is in two parts; the first "widmet sich dem jungen Hofmannsthal […]bis zum Jahre 1907" (19), with emphasis on a therapeutic examination of his artistic self in 1891, "in welchem Hofmannsthal am Ausgangspunkt seiner Karriere die Frage nach den Kriterien dichterischer Identität stellt." He studied spiritism, parapsychology, and medical applications of hypnosis to understand his own creativity, which often depended on "Schreibhemmung als kreative Keimzelle," to quote one section title (105). The necessary barrier set up by notbeing able to...