by W. G. Sebald
MICHEL FOUCAULT, MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION
When, after several panic-stricken attempts, Kaspar emerges onstage from behind the backdrop of a curtain, and at first does not move from the spot in that strange space, “he is the incarnation of astonishment.”1 At the end of what seems to us to have been a long flight he finds himself in a clearing, hemmed in without any way of escape, delivered up to a reality of which he has no concept. He knows nothing about us. It may be that in his colorful jacket, wide trousers, and hat with its band he reminds us of the wide-eyed rustics who used to make Viennese audiences laugh. As wily provincials, these rustics of course knew their way around, not perhaps in urban society “comme il faut” but onstage, where they were never at a loss for either information or an excuse. But Kaspar is still a stranger here and has no companions. The theme of the play, then, is not the fast-moving adventures of the comic character, which are happily resolved in the end, but the inner and inward-looking story of the taming of a wild human being. The result, however, is to cast a critical light on what the development of the outer plot constantly implies in its specific and historical course: the transformation of the unruly clowning into a proper Kasperl play, the attempt, in many ways a hopeless one, to turn an individual who by ordinary standards is uncivilized into a respectable citizen.*
We have to make do with conjectures about Kaspar’s previous life. The novel by Jakob Wassermann tells us that “no one knew where he hailed from,” and that he himself, being incapable of language, could give no information about his origins.2 However, his unheralded, defenceless presence signifies the living provocation of social resentment. We suspect that the speechless creature, as yet entirely untaught, is in possession of a secret of his own, if not actually in a state of paradisal bliss. And that, says Nietzsche, perspicacious in such matters, “is hard on a man. He may ask the animal: ‘Why do you just look at me instead of telling me about your happiness?’ The animal wants to reply: ‘Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say’—but then it forgets even this answer and says nothing.”3 It is rather like that with Kaspar and his prompters in the play. They envy him the blankness of the life he represents, his ability—to quote Nietzsche again—to be “totally unhistorical.”4 At the same time, this special quality is the reason for Kaspar’s strangeness. Hofmannsthal has linked similar conjectures with his concept of “pre-existence,” a state of painlessness beyond trauma in which a barely perceptible happiness, which is mere and simple existence, persists uninterrupted. Wassermann’s novel, too, tries to present this state as something very different from the deprivation of imprisonment. “He did not sense any changes in his own physical condition,” says Wassermann of Hauser, “or wish for anything to be different.”5 Kaspar’s placid existence is illustrated in the symbol of a “white wooden horse … that mirrored his own existence darkly.… He did not talk to it, not even in silent imagined exchanges, and although it stood on a board that had wheels it never occurred to him to push it to and fro.”6 From such a static existence, a life without a history in which one might acquire the art of hearing “wood rotting over long distances” and in which “Caspar could make out colours even in the dark,” he is released into the light of the stage, a shocking and painful transition to surroundings that are qualitatively entirely new, where the “originally prestabilized harmony” is lost and his inner resources prove inadequate.7 Anthropological theory assumes that exposure in a treeless situation where all escape upward was cut off led to the invention of myths. Kafka’s ape, dragged into human society, expresses very similar ideas in his “Report for an Academy.” It is the absence of any way of escape that has forced him to become human himself. “I had always had so many ways out, you see, and now I have none.”8 So the wild boy Kaspar has no choice but to develop, except that in his case, as in the ape Rotpeter’s, the myth does not have to be invented: it is provided for him by his professional prompters. Their disembodied voices have little to do with the optimistic educational theories of the eighteenth century and later, according to which it might be hoped that Caspar Hauser would educate himself to become a liberated, guiltless human being, a natural wonder. If such experiments showed naïve idealism, the general approach to Kaspar resulted only in an illusion of liberation, entirely adapted to existing circumstances. An ego is formed until finally, as Hofmannsthal described it, it slips into another identity, “like a dog, eerily silent and strange.”9
To Kaspar, the anonymous voices of the media to which he is constantly exposed mean “alienation in the sense of a passive submission to invasion by others.”10 Something in him cracks; he becomes vulnerable and begins to learn. At first Kaspar’s reactions to the refractory nature of the inanimate objects around him and his own incompetence as a human being are those of a clown. His hands get stuck down the side of the sofa, the table drawer falls out at his feet, he becomes entangled in a chair, a rocking chair tips over and Kaspar runs away, terrified, for every new lesson is a new horror to him. A clown merely performs an amusing act in the “tension between the serious mastery of objects that has been learned and his own deliberate clumsiness,” but to the uneducated Kaspar such acts cannot be foreseen and relate not so much to the mastery of inanimate objects as to his own training.11 Handke has written, of the circus, that the audience’s enthusiasm is never really free “because the imminence of shame or horror is always present”; something could easily go wrong with the act.12 “With a clown, however, the misfortune that is so embarrassing in all other circus numbers is planned as part of the act.… His accidents are not awkward but comic. Indeed, it is an embarrassing sight if he does for once, unintentionally, succeed in mastering inanimate objects. The sight of a clown who fails to fall over a stool or who can sit down easily in an armchair … is embarrassing.”13 Kaspar’s clumsiness, however, is far from intentional, and the accidents he suffers are only very superficially comic. He soon learns to avoid them. But he has still assimilated enough clownish behavior for us to be almost embarrassed by his correct reactions as the action continues. What looks like progress is really nothing but the gradual humiliation of a trained creature who, in approaching the human average, begins to resemble an animal gone mad. Kaspar’s éducation sentimentale is also his case history, and from it we finally gain insight into the pathological connection which inevitably exists between the possession of property and education. For do not things have names only to help us to grasp them better, as if the blank spaces in the atlas we have made for ourselves out of reality disappear only so that the colonial empire of the mind may grow? “As a child,” Henny Porten remembers during Ritt über den Bodensee (“The Ride Across Lake Constance”), “if I wanted something, I always had to say what it was called first.”14 Kaspar soon realizes that this is where the secret of mastering things lies; he becomes eager for information so that he will gain a little more power. Musil’s claim that knowledge is related to greed and represents a despicable urge to hoard, as “the fundamental and favorite expression of capitalism,” could be the critique of a development such as Kaspar’s once he understands the point of learning.15 It is not that he makes a conscious choice between naïveté and enlightenment, but the strange words that he uses in order to master strange things force themselves on him like commands and latent threats against which he cannot defend himself. Nor does he yet recognize the voices of society as something different, something outside him; instead, they echo within him as the part of himself that became strange to him when he was cast up in this new, overbright environment. Social maxims and reflections overwhelm him as compulsively as if they were his own individual delusion. Consequently, he obeys them.
The merciless education of Kaspar obeys the laws of language. The reason why the play could be described, says Handke, as “speech torture” is not just that other people talk to Kaspar until he loses what might be called his sound animal reason. More precisely, in this learning process, speech itself features as an arsenal containing a cruel set of instruments. Kaspar�
�s very first sentence helps him, as the prompters explain, “learn to divide time into time before and time after uttering of the sentence.”16 Tension arises, and with it a foretaste of the torture. Kaspar learns to hesitate as he speaks, and the voices show him how that hesitation can make painful incisions where they do not belong, separating the parts of a sentence: “The sentence doesn’t hurt you yet, not one word. Does hurt you. Every word does. Hurt, but you don’t know that that which hurts you is a sentence that. Sentence hurts you because you don’t know that it is a sentence.”17 What the prompters demonstrate through speech can be transferred, becomes an act of incision, the vivisection of reality and ultimately of a human being. Within it, the diffuse pain of being unaware becomes the keen torment of experience. In the obsessive attempt to find a reason for the animation of life, a world of images is divided into its anatomical components. This is the nature of speech operating successfully. Its grammar can be perceived as a mechanical system that gradually carves the crucial terms on the skin of the torture victim, and the torture arises from the combination of its apparatus with the organism. Kafka described the prerequisites for this process in his story “In the Penal Colony,” and Nietzsche, in discussing mnemonic techniques in the Genealogy of Morals, thought there was nothing more sinister in the prehistory of mankind than the combination of pain and recollection to construct a memory. But what is taken from the living substance of the individual in the long process of his training to become an articulate, moral human being adheres to the linguistic machine until in the end the parts become interchangeable in function. Lars Gustafsson, who designed an image of the grammatical machine, wonders whether the symbolical value of machinery does not perhaps lie in the fact “that it reminds us of the possibility that our own lives could be something simulated, in a sense resembling the life of machines themselves.”18 A human being, then, is a Stymphalian creature of metal screws and springs, stamping accepted patterns out of the metal of communication, and speech is an apparatus run out of control and beginning to lead a sinister life of its own. Model sentences such as those suggested to Kaspar are reflexes of the cruel treatment to which his sensory apparatus is submitted by its linguistic shaping. “The door springs open. The skin springs open. The match burns. The slap burns. The grass trembles. The fearful girl trembles. The slap in the face smacks. The body smacks. The tongue licks. The flame licks. The saw screeches. The torture victim screeches. The lark trills. The policeman trills. The blood stops. The breath stops.”19 The prompters know this too. At the beginning of the second part, when the injured Kaspar has split by simple division into two contented entities, the prompters utter an apologia for the process that initiates the candidate into a society where everything is regular. “Intermittent smashing / of a stick / on your jug / is no balm / nor a reason / to bewail the lack of law and order / this season / a sip of lye / in your mug / or a prick / in the guts / or a stick / in the nuts / being wriggled about / or something of that order /only pricklier / fearlessly / introduced in the ears / so as to / get someone hopping / and pop in order / by all means / at your command / but chiefly / without being / overly / fussy / over the means— / that / is no reason / to lose any words / over the lack of order.”20
Kaspar is thus systematically socialized. He makes visible progress. But then suddenly he finds himself in crisis. His identity is undermined by the passing of time. “When I am, I was.”21 He formulates this problem of shifting phases in the most confusing variations, constantly mixing up the grammatically possible and the grammatically impossible, his reality and his irritation constantly becoming confused. When he finally says, “I will have become because I am,” we can no longer tell if he has it the wrong way around or is simply expressing hopelessness.22 Kaspar, now uncertain of himself, three times repeats the magical formula “I am the one I am.” But the affirmation sounds wide of the mark. In its abstraction it does not offer anything sufficient to counter Kaspar’s growing doubt of what he represents. As if in alarm he stops rocking and cries, “Why are there so many black worms flying about?” It is an image of the utmost distress. Kaspar is in danger of regression. The stage darkens, and once more the prompters must try persuasion. It grows light again, and they begin to speak. “You have model sentences with which you can get through life.” The light grows brighter. “You can learn and make yourself useful.”23 And the brighter it becomes, the quieter Kaspar is; he is all right again, enlightened, ready for the shock of confirmation, for the test of a total blackout, in which a prompter tells him, “You’ve been cracked open.”24 This time the darkness of the stage is not a fear that Kaspar already has but one that is instilled into him. Only after a long moment does a voice suggest, in the darkness, “You become sensitive to dirt.” When it is light again, Kaspar’s socialization finally seems complete. His alter ego enters with a broom, sweeping the stage. Kaspar is now his own matrix, with unlimited powers of reproduction. More Kaspars appear, clones of his reformed person. But now Kaspar will begin to suffer from this fact, from everything that is repeated, and thus not least from himself. “I was proud of the first step I took, of the second step I felt ashamed: I felt ashamed of everything that I repeated.”25 Only with speech was it the other way around, for, says Kaspar, “I felt ashamed even of the first sentence I uttered, whereas I no longer felt ashamed of the second sentence.” Speech, as it were, had removed his shame, teaching him to become accustomed to identities. The fact that he still remembers it is the beginning of the story he tells of himself toward the end of the play. This story is the clear signal that all is not yet right with him, for “an object is orderly when you don’t first have to tell a story about it.”26 Kaspar’s education thus seems to have failed. He remembers, but too well. He knows not only about himself but about his origin and development, about his indoctrination, the prelude to his despair.
In reflecting on the changes that have happened to him, Kaspar breaks out of the role that he was given to play. His inquiries take him back to a point when, entering paradise through the gateway of thought, he regains the naïveté of his pre-existence. He remembers uttering his first sentence, and in the nostalgia of such memories he encounters the unconscious perfection of his lost self. “Then once I took a look into the open, where there was a very green glow, and I said to the open: I want to be someone like somebody else was once?—and with this sentence I wanted to ask the open why it was that my feet were aching.”27 Sinking into such reminiscences, he gauges time, seeks the darkness of his life, which is now almost stripped of any mystery, until he comes upon things that are identical with his own reality, not just the reality he has assimilated. He remembers the snow that stung his hand, the landscape that “at that time was a brightly colored window shutter” and was then like a colorful shopwindow, and a gloomy legacy of “candles and bloodsuckers; ice and mosquitoes; horses and pus; hoarfrost and rats; eels and sicklebills.”28 These images, retrieved and re-created from his pre-existence, images in which Kaspar’s earlier life shows a relationship with Sigismund’s in Hofmannsthal’s Der Turm, seem to him like authentic documents of his being. Thanks to them he can say, “I still experienced myself.” The training to which he has been subjected could not entirely obliterate his memory of his beginnings. He can still go back behind what he has learned. The wild metaphors he brings back from such excursions are, in their disparate nature, like the “metaphors of a paranoia … a poetic protest against the invasion of others.”29 The crystallization point of this sign of intended rejection comes at those moments when, as Handke says in Wunschloses Unglück (“A Sorrow Beyond Dreams”), “the utmost need to communicate comes together with the ultimate speechlessness.”30 However, where images escape that paralytic confrontation, they feature, being impenetrable ciphers, as examples of broken rebellion. Their structure is that of the myth in which fact and fiction are, so to speak, inseparably linked together. And like that myth, they “involve the same sort of outrageous distortion … all symbolism harbors the curse of mediacy; it is
bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal. Thus the sound of speech strives to ‘express’ subjective and objective happening, the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ world; but what of this it can retain is not the life and individual fullness of existence, but only a dead abbreviation of it.”31 Literature can transcend this dilemma only by keeping faith with unsocial, banned language, and by learning to use the opaque images of broken rebellion as a means of communication.
* The Kasperl play is the German version of a Punch and Judy show.
Between History and Natural History
ON THE LITERARY DESCRIPTION OF TOTAL DESTRUCTION
The trick of elimination is every expert’s defensive reflex.
STANISLAW LEM, IMAGINARY MAGNITUDE
I drove through ruined Cologne late at dusk, with terror of the world and of men and of myself in my heart.
VICTOR GOLLANCZ, IN DARKEST GERMANY
To this day there is no adequate explanation of why the destruction of the German cities toward the end of the Second World War was not (with those few exceptions that prove the rule) taken as a subject for literary depiction either then or later, although significant conclusions could certainly have been drawn from this admittedly complex problem. It might, after all, have been supposed that the air raids very methodically carried out over the years and directly affecting large sections of the population of Germany, as well as the radical social changes resulting from the destruction, would have been an incitement to writers to set down something about such experiences. The dearth of literary records from which anything might be learned of the extent and consequences of the destruction which is so obvious to a later generation, although those involved clearly felt no need to commemorate it, is all the more remarkable because accounts of the development of West German literature frequently speak of what they call the Trümmerliteratur (the literature of the ruins). Heinrich Böll, for instance, says of that genre in a book written in 1952: “And so we write of the war, of homecoming, of what we had seen in the war and what we found on returning home: we write of ruins.”1 The same author’s Frankfurter Vorlesungen (“Frankfurt Lectures”) contains the comment “Where would 1945, that historic moment in time, be without Eich and Celan, Borchert and Nossack, Kreuder, Aichinger and Schnurre, Richter, Kolbenhoff, Schroers, Langgässer, Krolow, Lenz, Schmidt, Andersch, Jens and Marie Luise von Kaschnitz?2 The Germany of the years 1945–1954 would have vanished long ago had it not found expression in the literature of the time.”3 One may feel a certain sympathy for such statements, but they hardly offset the near incontrovertible fact that the literature cited here, which is