Konstruktionsprinzipien von Georg Trakls lyrischen Textwelten von Károly Csúri (review)

What could it mean to 'understand' Georg Trakl's hermetic and enigmatic poetry, which appears on the surface as a series of striking yet opaque images conveyed in a musical language? One approach, of course, would be to read Trakl's œuvre as an exemplar of one or many of the various poetic tendencies around the turn of the twentieth century: Symbolism, Decadence, or (as has most often been done) Expressionism. A significant feature of Trakl's work, which it shares with these poetic movements, is precisely that it (mostly) resists all but the most ambiguous references to concrete times and spaces, focusing instead on natural and mythical scenes, eras, and cycles. Yet an analysis that wholly avoids confronting the semantic-referential level of Trakl's texts remains unsatisfactory, not least due to the author's infamous wartime experiences and early death.

In this volume, Károly Csúri charts a course between two previous scholarly approaches to understanding Trakl: the cognitive and the historical-biographical. He begins by contextualizing his project with respect to the work of Gebhard Rusch and Siegfried Schmidt, who, in Das Voraussetzungssystem Georg Trakls (1983), elevate the very difficulty or impossibility of understanding Trakl (Schwer- oder Unverständlichkeit) into its own principle of (in)coherence ("Dunkelheitstopos") through a cognitive-schematic approach that describes precisely the problems faced by readers of Trakl while avoiding the thorny problems of literary interpretation (11–13). In contrast, Csúri's approach combines a New Critical conception of Trakl's text as an organically unified whole with a cognitive reading that treats Trakl's poems as literary "text worlds" (or fragments thereof) with their own schematic modes of creating coherence. By focusing on the internal and intratextual literary logic of Trakl's poems, as opposed to highlighting the difficulty of finding correlations between the texts and the empirical or historical world (as in Rusch/Schmidt), Csúri produces a convincing and comprehensive holistic reading of Trakl's work. In doing so, he also avoids the tendency of some strains of cognitive poetics to reduce literature to a series of decontextualized tropes or schemata.

According to Csúri, the basic "principles of construction" underlying most of Trakl's poetry can be reduced to the following structuring schemata: 1) diurnal and seasonal cycles (Tages- und Jahreszeitenzyklen); 2) acts which create "transparency" between "spheres" or eras (Transparenzakte); 3) the division of a (sometimes implicit) lyrical subject (Ich-Spaltung); and, finally, 4) processes of decline/decay and virtual attempts at their transcendence (Untergangsprozesse und ihr[e] virtuellen Überwindungs- oder Transzendierungsversuche) (26). Crucially for Csúri's argument, the processes inherent to these poetic schemata do not correlate to the real world outside the text. The concept of "sunset" as a structuring principle in a poem by Trakl has little in common with an actual sunset.

Often, Csúri's schemata are readily apprehensible on the semantic level. For example, it is clear from the title alone that the poem Dämmerung has something to do with diurnal cycles. At times, especially in the case of the other three categories listed above, the schemata are cloaked in highly figurative language and are therefore identifiable as structuring principles only through the critical intervention of the author. Sometimes this results in permutations that are as dizzying as they are shrewd. For example, Csúri reads Kindheit, the first poem in the Sebastian im Traum cycle, as "die Kombination des seelischen Verfalls mit seiner virtuellen Transzendierung in der Figur des gespaltenen Ichs […], die vorwiegend im Medium der Tages- und Jahreszeitenwechsel visualisiert wird" (93).

One situation in which Csúri convincingly demonstrates the potential of his method is in his analysis of Grodek, which is at once perhaps Trakl's most famous work and one of his (seemingly) most concretely referential (344). Despite the fact that the title names the location of the battle that Trakl witnessed before his mental breakdown, Csúri demonstrates that the poem itself is more reliant on the...