Medialität und Musikopoetik: Grenzfälle der Sprache im Werk von Gert Jonke by Frederik Schneeweiss (review)

A key statement by Gert Jonke from 1979 is often repeated without the needed modification. Frederik Schneeweiss quotes: "Vor zehn Jahren habe ich mich nicht getraut, irgendwelchen Gefühlen Ausdruck zu geben [ … ] Inzwischen traue ich mich in der Hinsicht mehr. Ich versuche, in meiner Sprache dem Ausdruck zu verleihen, was man Gefühl überhaupt nennt [ … ] Ich versuche eine möglichst musikalische und farbenprächtige Sprache" (383). The standard narrative argues that Jonke tapped the fullness of his expressive resources when he began to incorporate musicality into his work. The author always stressed that he was not creating musical structures with words, stating in 1996 (in Die Überschallgeschwindigkeit der Musik): "Ich mache nicht Musik, ich erzeuge vielleicht nebenbei Musik, indem ich schreibe." But there is more to it. A closer look at Geometrischer Heimatroman (1969), for example, shows it to be a strict rondo, a musical structure Jonke deployed well before the purported starting point of his turn to music. This critic would thus urge that the starting point Schneeweiss establishes for a "Grundlegung der Musikproblematik" (the title of his fourth chapter, 123–212) comes earlier than die gegenwart der erinnerung and Schule der Geläufigkeit.

The author takes on a dauntingly complex topic in addressing structural similarities between any two arts. The polemics began long before Horace's "ut pictura poesis," continuing through Lessing and beyond, and have never let up; Schneeweiss makes the analysis of these parallels the main theme of his study by referring to "Grenzfälle der Sprache" in his subtitle. In pointing out the congruities between Beethoven's monologues in Sanftwut oder Der Ohrenmachinist and Alfred Döblin's essay "Gespräche mit Kalypso: Über die Musik" (388–89), both instancing silence as a main constitutive element of literature and music (exemplified most radically by John Cage's 4'33", Schneeweiss notes, 391), the author bolsters the important basic recognition that words in combination communicate far more than their lexical or denotative functions, provided one realizes, as the late Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler once warned in a lecture on Jonke, that the meanings of words cannot simply be scuttled.

Right at the beginning (11), Schneeweiss lucidly sums up Jonke's characteristic method: "Der Musik kommt im Gesamtwerk Gert Jonkes unstreitig eine herausragende Bedeutung zu. Denn die Klangkunst dient Jonke nicht nur als eine unerschöpliche Inspirationsquelle für seine Themen, Stoffe und Figuren, sondern vor allem als entscheidende Instanz zur Bearbeitung poetologischer Problemfelder." Jonke creates Grenzfälle, then, placing himself on the border through cascades of language, litanies and incantations and hypnotic rhythms, mighty sentences often covering two pages, outlandish Joycelike "thunderwords," lists and catalogues and propulsive repetition. All these devices elevate "meaning," as in music or poetry, to the method and not just the message, to the how rather than the what of expression, well-nigh turning the form itself into the content. Jonke's extravagant zaniness, at the opposite pole from masters of compression like Celan or Beckett, could be called a multiplicatio ad absurdum as opposed to a reductio, an explosive proliferation of language, though, unlike the Dadaists before him, never to the point of abandoning meaning. In his respect for the lexical component, he is more closely akin to his contemporary language experimenters in poetry, especially Jandl.

Critics have sometimes muddled their categories when discussing relations between literature and music, and it is to Schneeweiss's benefit that he observes differentiations (30) outlined by Steven Paul Scher in Literatur und Musik: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes:

a) die dichterische Nachahmungsversuche der akustischen Merkmale von Musik [ … ] von der Lyrik der Romantik über Stéphane Mallarmé und die 'poésie pure' des französischen Symbolismus [ … ] b) literarische Experimente mit musikalischen Form-und Gestaltungsprinzipien wie 'Sonatenform' [ … ]; c) das Phänomen der verbal music, d. h. die Erfindung oder Beschreibung eines fiktiven [ … ] Musikwerkes [ … ] (paradigmatisch ausgeprägt in Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus); d) verschiedene Einzelaspekte; darunter...