A letter (Hofmannsthal)
A letter , also known as Lord Chandos ' letter to Francis Bacon or Chandos letter , is a prose work by the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal . It was written in the summer of 1902 and appeared in two parts in the Berlin newspaper Der Tag on October 18 and 19, 1902 .
The central themes of the fictional letter are the critique of language as a means of expression and the search for a new poetics . The Chandos letter is also considered to be one of the most important literary documents of the cultural crisis at the turn of the century . It has been the subject of countless interpretations in literary studies .
content
The author of the letter is the fictional Philipp Lord Chandos, who, as a 26-year-old poet genius, wrote here in 1603 to his older mentor, the philosopher and natural scientist Francis Bacon . The young poet can look back on a highly acclaimed early work; but now, after “two years of silence”, he doubts that he is still the same as the author of his poems. He speaks of a "gapless abyss [that separates him from his poetry] and which I, so strange they address me, hesitate to call my property." ( P. 462 )
Lord Chandos initially describes his earlier understanding of poetry ( poetics ) as follows: The core of his poetry was the form , “the knowledge of […] the deep, true, inner form that can only be sensed beyond the enclosure of feats, that of which one can no longer say that it arranges the material, because it penetrates it, it suspends it and creates poetry and truth at the same time [...]. This was my favorite plan. ”( P. 462 ) -“ At that time, in a kind of constant drunkenness, the whole of existence appeared to me as a great unity: spiritual and physical world seemed to me to form no opposition, just as there was no courtly and animal nature, art and inart “( P. 463f ); “I suspected that everything was a parable and that every creature was a key to the others” ( p. 463 ).
But this poetics is now a thing of the past. There is no longer a unity between nature and art, body and soul or language and sensation. These units are permanently torn apart. “My case, in brief, is this: I have completely lost the ability to think or talk about anything coherently. [...] I felt an inexplicable unease just to utter the words 'spirit', 'soul' or 'body', [because] the abstract words that the tongue naturally has to use to express any judgment, fell apart in my mouth like moldy mushrooms ”( p. 465 ).
“My mind forced me to see all things that came up in a [...] conversation in an uncanny proximity [...]. I was no longer able to grasp it with the simplistic look of habit. Everything fell to me into parts, the parts into parts again, and nothing could be encompassed with a term. The single words swam around me ”( p. 466 ). This detailed / dissecting world view leads to the fact that the richness of detail of the object can no longer be adequately grasped by one word. Chandos is no longer able to organize the world through language. For him, the words become "whirls [...] that make me dizzy to look down, that spin inexorably and through which one comes into emptiness" ( p. 466 ).
The feelings, on the other hand, become all the greater, more sublime, more moving. No word has the ability to grasp the "gently and abruptly rising () flood of divine feeling" ( p. 467 ). The “flowing over [or] fluid” ( p. 468 ) of sensation to the object of sensation also dissolves the boundaries of the subject. Subject and language were a unit; now they are in the process of dissolving. Speechlessness is followed by inner emptiness, “indifference” ( p. 470 ).
Because the intense sensation must remain silent: “(T) the whole is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a material that is more immediate, more fluid, more glowing than words. There are also eddies, but those that don't seem to lead into the bottomless like the eddies of language, but somehow into myself and into the deepest lap of peace. ”( P. 471 ) The solution to the language crisis is through outwards to create an inconspicuous, speechless life, to create a new language inwardly (without values-moment of epiphany, lonely with oneself and the objects). The consequence for Chandos is to give up writing altogether and hope for a new language (the language of objects).
classification
Hofmannsthal was 28 years old at the time of publication, the parallel to the figure of the just 26-year-old Lord Chandos is obvious. Like Chandos, Hofmannsthal could look back on a highly acclaimed early work, against which he would now be measured and in the shadow of which he felt unsettled. However, the writing of the Chandos letter was not preceded by a two-year break; In the years up to 1902 Hofmannsthal had constantly produced dramas and stories and worked on a habilitation thesis.
So there can be no question of a crisis in Hofmannsthal's linguistic ability to express himself; the letter is rhetorically very cleverly worded. Rather, it must be read in the context of his own work as an artistic manifesto ( i.e. poetologically ).
The letter contains a rejection of the "deep, true, inner form" to which Stefan George had sworn him. In contrast to this, he formulates a desire for a means of expression that can overcome the linguistic, "a language of which I do not know one of the words, a language in which the mute things speak to me" ( p. 472 ). The “drunkenness” of early art can no longer be achieved; the utopia of such a new language that is “more immediate, more glowing than words” seems just as unattainable.
These almost mystical formulations form the basis for Hofmannsthal's poetics after the turn of the century. But they are also exemplary of the numerous heterogeneous attempts by German-language writers to break away from the fin de siècle spelling and take a new direction of modernity .
Hofmannsthal was not the only writer at the turn of the century who found the language inadequate (see language skepticism ). A whole range of art forms flourished in which language was less used: dance , ballet , pantomime , silent film , drama , the art movement of Expressionism and the ornamental art of Art Nouveau . One built on gesture and gesture and the ornament as an expressive means. The body was trusted to convey emotions more completely than language ever could.
expenditure
- A letter. From Hugo von Hofmannsthal. In: The day. Berlin, No. 489, October 18, 1902 (part 1); No. 491, October 19, 1902 (part 2). (First printing.)
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal: A letter. 1901. In: Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The fairy tale of the 672nd night and other stories . Wiener Verlag, Vienna / Leipzig 1905, pp. 97–123 (Hofmannsthal as poorly rejected first edition as a book).
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal: A letter. In: Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The prosaic writings . Volume 1, S. Fischer, Berlin 1907, pp. 53-76 (as part of a first collective edition with changes made by Hofmannsthal).
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal: A letter. In: Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Collected works in ten individual volumes, Volume 7: Stories, invented conversations and letters, trips . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-596-22165-X (edition cited here).
- Hugo von Hofmannsthal: A letter. In: Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Complete Works XXXI. Made up conversations and letters . Published by Ellen Ritter. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-10-731531-1 , pp. 45-55 (authoritative critical edition).
Secondary literature
- Werner Kraft : The Chandos letter and other articles about Hofmannsthal . Agora, Darmstadt 1977, ISBN 3-87008-063-9 .
- Christian L.hai Nibbrig: The rhetoric of silence. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1981.
- Andreas Härter: The decency of silence: conditions for speaking in Hofmannsthal's letter . Bouvier, Bonn 1989, ISBN 3-416-02193-2 .
- Helmut Koopmann : German literary theories between 1880 and 1920. An introduction . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1997, ISBN 3-534-08033-5 .
- Roland Spahr (ed.): Dear Lord Chandos': Answers to a letter . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-10-075118-3 .
- Hofmannsthal Yearbook on European Modernism 11 (2003) (= special volume 100 years of Chandos letter), ISBN 978-3-7930-9355-8 ( publisher's report ).
- Heinz Hiebler : Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the modern media culture . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2340-4 .
- Timo Günther: Hofmannsthal: A letter . Wilhelm Fink, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-7705-3776-9 .
- Andrea Rota: Ernst Mach e le epifanie di Lord Chandos. In: Il Confronto Letterario. Quaderni del dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne dell'Università di Pavia. 44/2005, Mauro Baroni Editore, ISBN 88-8209-393-X , pp. 97-110.
- Wolfgang Riedel : Homo Natura. Literary anthropology around 1900 . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-11-015112-X , pp. 1-40.
- Mario Zanucchi: Nietzsche's treatise on truth and lies in the extra-moral sense as the source of Hofmannsthal's A Letter. In: Yearbook of the German Schiller Society 54 (2010), pp. 264–290.
- Pascal Quignard : La Réponse à Lord Chandos , Éditions Galilée, Paris 2020, ISBN 978-2-7186-0995-9 .
