An Alternative Translation of Die Macht der Gewohnheit by Thomas Bernhard. Scene I.

The Force of Habit

As for me, when I was young I was torn between the Sorbonne and comedy.

                                                        Diderot [in Paradoxe sur Le Comédien]

…but the race of prophets is an extinct species…

                                                                    Artaud

Dramatis Personae

CARIBALDI, the owner and ringmaster of a circus

His GRANDDAUGHTER

A JUGGLER

An ANIMAL TAMER

A JESTER

In Caribaldi’s caravan

SCENE I

Stage left, a piano

Upstage, four music stands

A cabinet, a table with a radio, an armchair, a mirror, pictures

The score of Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet on the floor

Caribaldi is looking for something under the cabinet

The JUGGLER, entering

What ever are you doing down there

The Quintet’s lying on the floor

Mr. Caribaldi

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

isn’t it

CARIBALDI

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

JUGGLER

The beautiful quintet

picking up the quintet-score

By the way

I’ve received the letter from France

sets the score on one of the music stands

Can you imagine it

a guaranteed amount

But experience has proved

one mustn’t accept

an offer

right away

That’s been proved by experience

straightens the score on the music stand

In Bordeaux more than anything

it’s the white wines

What ever are you looking for there

Mr. Caribaldi

picks up the cello leaning against the music stand, wipes it off with his right sleeve and leans it back against the music stand

Dusty

everything’s dusty

Because we’re playing at such

a dusty venue

It’s windy here

and dusty

CARIBALDI

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

JUGGLER

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

Why are we playing here

I ask myself

Why I ask

This is your affair

Mr. Caribaldi

CARIBALDI

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

JUGGLER

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

naturally

Even leaving the cello

exposed to the elements

for a couple of seconds

blows dust off the cello

It’s so negligent of you

Mr. Caribaldi

picks up the cello

The Maggini

isn’t it

the da Salò

the so-called

Ferrara cello

leans the cello back against the music stand and takes a step back; gazes contemplatively at the cello

A priceless

instrument

But naturally it needn’t only

be played

at asphalted venues

North of the Alps

the da Salò

south of the Alps

the Maggini

or

before five in the afternoon

the Maggini

and after five in the afternoon

the Ferrara cello

blows dust off the cello

A dying vocation

suddenly to Caribaldi

What ever are you looking for

CARIBALDI

The rosin

JUGGLER

The rosin

Naturally

The rosin

Over and over again the rosin

because you suffer from those weak fingers

that instrumentalists are famous for

But haven’t you got

another one

a so-called

spare piece of rosin

You know

that as a child

I played the violin

as I child

I had two emerald-green boxes

in each of these emerald-green boxes

I kept a spare piece of rosin

That’s what matters most

always

a spare

do you hear me

If you’re a practicing instrumentalist

you’ve got

to keep a spare piece of rosin

CARIBALDI

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

JUGGLER

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

Mr. Caribaldi

CARIBALDI

Here under the cabinet

it’s got to be here

JUGGLER bends over and joins CARIBALDI in looking under the cabinet

They’re expecting me

In Bordeaux

a five-year contract

Mr. Caribaldi

By the way my plate routine

is a distinctively French routine

Six on the left

eight on the right

one after another

in time to music

And a clothing allowance

as a bonus

I’m wearing

a new costume

Mr. Caribaldi

Parisian satin

Parisian silk

from Alexandre

I’ll have you know

an elegant gravy train

suddenly

But look

there

it’s the rosin

stands up

CARIBALDI

There it is

pulls the piece of rosin out from under the cabinet

JUGGLER

You should buy yourself a second box

in Augsburg

CARIBALDI

Tomorrow in Augsburg

JUGGLER

They’re expecting me

in Bordeaux

Sarrasani

that’s always

a triumph

first class

Mr. Caribaldi

and from Bordeaux

to points southward

to Portugal

Lisbon

Oporto

you know

Caribaldi goes with the rosin to the cello; he sits down and smears his bow with the rosin

By no means a simple matter

for a juggler

who hasn’t mastered

the French language

but I have mastered

the French language

French was my mother’s

native tongue

Pablo Casals always carried

five or six spare pieces

of rosin

Tomorrow in Augsburg

CARIBALDI

Tomorrow in Augsburg

JUGGLER

That extraordinary woman

my mother

who left the church in Nantes

by the way

CARIBALDI equably applying rosin to the bow

Every minute

the rosin

is falling from my hand

and onto the floor

JUGGLER

Your weak fingers

Mr. Caribaldi

possibly

age-related

CARIBALDI

A second box of rosin

JUGGLER

For years I’ve been saying

buy yourself a

a second box of rosin

CARIBALDI

Tomorrow in Augsburg

JUGGLER

Under the cabinet

pointing under the cabinet

Towards the wall

The juggler and Caribaldi look under the cabinet

Always under the cabinet

towards the wall

that’s really quite interesting

Your weak fingers

and the law of gravity

CARIBALDI

For a year or so

I’ve had a hard time

keeping the rosin in my hand

JUGGLER

Your hand

is used to holding the whip

not the rosin

Mr. Caribaldi

Caribaldi unbuttons his dirty tailcoat

The juggler springs to his feet and rushes up to a picture that is hanging crooked on the wall and straightens it and re-straightens it and sits back down

All day long I’ve been thinking

about how long you have been rehearsing the Quintet

fifteen

or even twenty years

I can remember back that far

I recall

that the very day

I met you

You were sitting here in this chair

and rehearsing the “Trout” Quintet

CARIBALDI

I’ve been practicing

the “Trout” Quintet

for twenty years

strictly speaking

this is the twenty-second year

A form of therapy

I’ll have you know

Play an instrument

a stringed instrument

my doctor said

so that your ability to concentrate doesn’t deteriorate

JUGGLER

Because there’s nothing you’re more scared of

Than the deterioration of your ability to concentrate

CARIBALDI

One’s ability to concentrate

can’t be allowed to deteriorate

Back then

twenty years ago

my ability to concentrate

had suddenly deteriorated

When I was cracking my whip

no precision

do you understand

when I was cracking my whip

JUGGLER

The horses had stopped reacting to it

CARIBALDI

It wasn’t precise

it lacked

the necessary precision

And now for twenty-two years

I’ve been playing

or rather practicing to play the cello

JUGGLER

And for twenty-two years practicing

to play the “Trout” Quintet

Caribaldi plays a sustained open C

An artist

who practices an art

needs another art a second art

to practice the one art

via the other

the one feat of acrobatic artistry

via the other

CARIBALDI extending his right hand to the juggler

This hand

you see

is my curse

I drop the rosin

withdraws his hand

And my mind

is no longer able

to concentrate

suddenly

my ability to concentrate deteriorates

It’s only my love of circus artistry

JUGGLER

Admittedly

Art

is nothing but reciprocity

Circus artistry

Art

Art

Circus artistry

do you understand

I wonder whether

the rehearsal will take place today

Your granddaughter

is sick

the jester

has something in his throat

and the animal tamer

is once again a victim

of his melancholy

This is a concept

Mr. Caribaldi

a medical concept

CARIBALDI

The last rehearsal

was a scandal

I’m not keen

on ever reliving that

plays a sustained open C

A drunken animal tamer

who has trouble just staying on his feet

a jester who’s constantly

losing his cap

a granddaughter whose very existence

gets on my nerves

The truth is a debacle

JUGGLER

Wednesday is always

a bad day

But even Saturday

isn’t a good day

Even the animals are different on Wednesday

than on Saturday

on Saturday

than on Wednesday

But from people

and especially circus performers

artists

Mr Caribaldi

you really can’t expect

self-control

CARIBALDI

If only we managed to realize

the “Trout” Quintet

successfully

just once a single time

a perfect stream of music one single time

JUGGLER

A work of art

Mr. Caribaldi

CARIBALDI

To make this practicing

into art

JUGGLER

Without incident

such a lovely piece

CARIBALDI

Such a noble literature

I’ll have you know

In this twenty-second year

we haven’t succeeded at performing

the “Trout” Quintet a single time

without a mistake

let alone at realizing it

as a work of art

There’s always one of us

who destroys everything

in a moment of carelessness

or vulgarity

JUGGLER

An inability to concentrate

Mr. Caribaldi

CARIBALDI

One time it’s the violin

the next it’s the viola

the next it’s the double bass

the next it’s the piano

Then yet again I myself get

another of these awful backaches

I double up in pain

I’ll have you know

and the composition falls apart

Once I’ve managed to get the jester

to master his instrument

the animal tamer loses his head

at the piano

or my granddaughter

who of course has been playing the viola

for ten full years

impales herself on a splinter

as she did last Tuesday

When your face is contorted with pain

you can’t play Schubert

and certainly not the “Trout” Quintet

I never could have known

that serving the art of music

is so difficult

plays a sustained note

And I can’t play the Quintet

on my own

It’s a quintet

resumes stroking his bow with the rosin as the juggler talks

JUGGLER

The deep sense of loyalty that I feel

on the one hand

Bordeaux

France Mr. Caribaldi

on the other

A clothing bonus

do you understand

and moving up and down the Riviera

all winter long

and the possibility

of collaborating with my sister

Caribaldi drops the rosin

the juggler picks it up

Everything else

that’s in France

Mr. Caribaldi

It’s impossibly improbable

a windfall

As you know

I am inordinately fond

of the Atlantic coast

of eating fresh mussels

in white Bordeaux wine

hands Caribaldi the rosin

The German language

stultifies over time

the German language

presses down on one’s mind

clutches at his head

Caribaldi plucks a cello-string

The juggler gazes contemplatively at Caribaldi

A bonus clothing allowance

And the French fresh air

Mr. Caribaldi

Caribaldi plays a sustained low bowed note on the cello

The juggler is contemplating Caribaldi even more intensely

By favoring this posture

of the upper body

Casals had reached

his peak

Caribaldi plucks a cello-string

The constant change of air

from being north of the Alps sometimes

and south of them at others

damages the instrument

It’s always needing to be tuned

and always from different points of view

once in each place

an extra time for each type of air

CARIBALDI

An extra time

JUGGLER

But so-called chamber music

runs in your family

as well as in my family

Caribaldi plays a deep bowed note on the cello

And it’s always

the “Trout” Quintet

At its best as you yourself have said

in Prague

at its the very worst

at Theresienwiese

CARIBALDI

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

JUGGLER

At Theresienwiese

Caribaldi plays a deep bowed note, plucks one of the cello’s strings

Art is a medium

for another art

reflectively

It’s always

the last performance

Even before I’ve finished the plate-routine

the tent is being dismantled

looks and points at the ceiling

Because I have to look up

I see

that the tent is being dismantled

Naturally the audience doesn’t notice

this operation

Caribaldi plucks a cello-string

The audience’s concentration

is focused on me

goes to the pictures and the mirror and straightens them

An asset

if you’ve got a French mother

As you know

my father is from Gelsenkirchen

an unfortunate person

for a while he dabbled

in shipbuilding

suddenly

At eighteen I stop

Eighteen plates no more

Suddenly I got scared

Mr. Caribaldi

looks at Caribaldi’s chest

Your waistcoat is dirty

Mr. Caribaldi

Caribaldi plays a deep bowed note

Your waistcoat is dirty

Mr. Caribaldi

CARIBALDI

When you crawl around

on the floor all day

looking

for your rosin

picks up the rosin and smears his bow with it as the juggler talks

JUGGLER

They’re offering to let me

enter the lists alone

for an entire evening

at the sanatorium in Rouen

do you understand

I’ll do my plate routine

and also my routine with the fake poodle

With the fake poodle

CARIBALDI

Your routine with the fake poodle

JUGGLER

That fake poodle routine

that you’ve forbidden me to do

Two years sacrificed to this routine

and then you forbade me to do it

In Rouen I’ll be able to perform this routine

And my sister has been accepted

as my assistant

Sarrasani

Mr. Caribaldi

Your own motto is my motto

Move on

don’t stay in one place

don’t stay in one place

Move on

crying out

I’m going to France

Mr. Caribaldi

CARIBALDI plucks a cello string

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

JUGGLER

Tomrrow’s Augsburg

straightens a picture

Sarrasani

Mr. Caribaldi

Caribaldi plays a low bowed note

In reality

it’s not about the plate routine at all

it’s not even about me

it’s the violin

Mr. Caribaldi

It’s the “Trout” Quintet

which is nothing without me

You forced me

Caribaldi plucks a cello string

to play the violin

because in an unhappy mood

I said

I blabbed

that I had played the violin as a child

You forced me to take up the violin

again

with incredible ruthlessness

Caribaldi plays a low bowed note

And you forced your granddaughter

to take up the violin

and the jester the double bass

and the animal tamer your nephew

the piano

crying out

You forced us

you forced us

straightens a mirror as if to calm himself down

What’s more your nephew

abhors the piano

suddenly points at the door

Your nephew the animal tamer

once got the idea

of smashing the piano to pieces

with his axe

he didn’t do it

even though the axe was already high in the air

I kept him from doing it

You know how brutal your nephew is

you yourself call him

The animal

No don’t

I said

Maybe a momentary so-called psychotic episode

but just the idea

of the piano lying there smashed to pieces

and just you think of the piano lying there smashed to pieces

by your fleshly nephew

A headache

A headache

clutches at his head

I took the axe

away from your nephew

On this occasion

I treated your nephew

the way your nephew

treats his so-called savage beasts

I walked up to him

Caribaldi plays a low bowed note

I gently coaxed him

I soothed him

Then I promised him

Caribaldi looks up

that I would reveal to him

the secret of my fake poodle routine

Your nephew had the axe raised above his head

like this

mimes the posture

How easy he would have found it

to smash the piano to pieces

in a single blow

You know how strong he is

You know how strong his resolve is

takes hold of a music stand and blows the dust off it

Caribaldi plays a sustained low bowed note

But I couldn’t keep

my promise

Because you threatened to fire me

if I explained to your nephew

the fakery

or rather the artistry

behind the fake poodle routine

I was dependent on your help

the plate routine hadn’t yet been worked out

well enough

for me to be able to get by on my own as a performer

I couldn’t just

walk out on you

I couldn’t allow myself to do that

You blackmailed me

I was once again at your mercy

My nephew plays

the piano

as long as I insist on it

you said

points at the corner

There in the corner

you said that

That was decisive

grabs a note-stand and blows the dust off it

You bully your nephew

as well as your granddaughter

The jester jests only because

you force him to

All these people

are at your mercy

If only these people dared just once

not to show up

not to play

the “Trout” Quintet

But they won’t dare

to commit such an enormity

Caribaldi plucks a string

These people

are at your mercy

they have nothing of their own

and are at your mercy

Even I have never had the courage

not to play

sits down

To the contrary

I egged the others on

clutches at his head

I could smash my own head

for being so inconsistent

Consistency

your concept

Precision

Consistency

those two

your concepts

But naturally you suffer too

and specifically in your own megalomaniacal procedure

from your own ruthlessness

Mr. Caribaldi

And the causes

are your back pains

is your wooden leg

CARIBALDI

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

JUGGLER

Your health

embattled since childhood

Your hypersensitivity

under your brainpan

Mr. Caribaldi

with sudden vehemence

The ailing and the crippled

rule the world

Everybody is ruled by invalids

and by cripples

It’s a comedy

An evil indignity

Caribaldi plays a low bowed note

When somebody like me

an acknowledged genius

shoulders a yoke for over a decade

and all his effort

Caribaldi bursts out laughing

And all his effort is rewarded

with a laugh like that one

pulls a letter out of his pocket

But now I’ve got this letter

from France

The director of the Sarrasani circus has written to me

personally

Caribaldi bursts out laughing

The juggler resumes speaking in a meaningful tone while holding the letter above his head

Who in the course of a lifetime

has ever received an offer like this one

who

CARIBALDI plays four short bowed notes; pushes the cello away without letting go of it; says the following in a peremptory tone

The Maggini

no

the Salo

the Ferrara cello

Don’t you understand

I want the Ferrara cello

The juggler takes the cello away from him

Caribaldi, imperiously

The Ferrara cello

The juggler takes the Maggini cello to the cabinet, takes out the so-called Ferrara cello, and puts in the Maggini cello

Perfection

Perfection

do you understand

nothing else

The juggler gives Caribaldi the so-called Ferrara cello

My nephew

My granddaughter

what fine human beings

And Pablo Casals

what a fine human being

crying out

What fine human beings

what fine creatures

what fine nonsensicalities

every single one of them his own worst enemy

by nature

Monsieur the Jester

what a nonsensicality

Mademoiselle my granddaughter

All these people

whether related to me or not

have cost me nothing but money

and patience

A lifelong test of my nerves

plays a deep bowed note on the cello

Casals

that’s it

smears his bow with the rosin

when I see my nephew the animal tamer

I think

there goes brutality with stupidity

when I see the jester taking a walk

there goes feeblemindedness taking a walk

feeblemindedness is losing his cap

when I see my granddaughter

it’s the contemptible maliciousness of her mother

Give it back

tears the cello away from the juggler, who had momentarily taken it away from Caribaldi to keep him from letting it fall on the floor

Feeblemindedness

Yes

Casals

or Schopenhauer

do you understand

or Plato

plays a sustained deep bowed note

I once dreamed

I was in Archangelsk

without knowing

what Archangelsk was like

And I know nothing but Archangelsk

that’s it

nothing else

do you understand

And now you think

you can go away

crying out

Sarrasani

what’s that

Do your plate routine here

in my troupe

here at this venue

Perfect your art

Never mind perfection

improve it

do you understand

nothing else

Put it

to the test

do you understand

Here everything’s contemptible

plays a sustained note

Listen

completely different

completely different

listen

The Salo

has a completely different sound

than the Maggini

What time is it anyway

Don’t tell me

what time it is

plays a sustained deep bowed note

The Salo

The Ferrara cello

Before five the one

after five the other

plays five brief notes alternating between up-bows and down-bows

The Salo

do you hear

The humidity

north of the Alps

plays a sustained deep bowed note

You’ve got to listen carefully

a completely different sound

But if I play the Ferrara cello

before noon

it has a devastating effect

You’ve got to commit it to memory

I always say that

before noon the one

after noon the other

Like Casals

reflectively

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

JUGGLER

Two boxes of rosin

Mr. Caribaldi

CARIBALDI

But when you’re constantly thinking the way I think

it’s a kind of madness

The one cello before noon

The other in the afternoon

do you understand

It also holds true for the violin

For the viola it also holds true

plays a few short bowed notes

the juggler takes a violin case out of the cabinet and a violin out of the violin case and sits down and tunes the violin

It’s never yet happened to me

the morning rehearsal

never yet

And south of the Alps

quite the reverse

My granddaughter’s talent

is certainly no great talent

but it’s nice

she dances on the tightrope

nicely

she plays the viola

nicely

A child

And my nephew

a distinct anti-talent

On the other hand playing the piano’s

a medium

for an animal tamer

Interaction with animals you know

in reverse

These never-ending injuries

Tomorrow in Augsburg

I’ll have to find a doctor

tomorrow in Augsburg

The truth is that my nephew

should have become

what he is

a thoroughly

bourgeois existence

I strong-armed him

into joining the troupe

JUGGLER

The mortal bite-wounds

suffered by his predecessor

CARIBALDI

Those mortal bite-wounds

JUGGLER

Leopard bite-wounds

CARIBALDI

We had

to have

the leopards shot

That poor wretch

torn to shreds by leopards

plays a low sustained bowed note

The quintet

seemed lost for good

Then I came up with the idea

of making my nephew

JUGGLER

Of making your nephew

into an animal tamer

and hence into a pianist

CARIBALDI

We had an animal tamer

and a piano player

JUGGLER

The quintet was salvaged

CARIBALDI

The quintet

was salvaged

plays a low sustained bowed note

by the way it wasn’t just that one time

that my nephew had the idea

of destroying the piano

He’s tried to do it

over and over again

JUGGLER

Using unserviceable methods

to be sure

CARIBALDI

To be sure

And don’t be taken in by the jester’s

hypocrisy

he loathes the double bass

My granddaughter doesn’t care for the viola either

You’ve got to admit that you yourself

find playing the violin

simply detestable

Everything is simply detestable

everything that happens

that happens is detestable

Life existence

detestable

The truth is

The juggler goes to a picture and straightens it

The truth is

I don’t care for the cello

It’s torture for me

but it’s got to be played

my granddaughter doesn’t care for the viola

but it’s got to be played

the jester doesn’t care for the double bass

but it’s got to be played

the animal tamer doesn’t care for the piano

but it’s got to be played

And of course you don’t care for the violin either

We don’t want this life

but it’s got to be lived

plucks a string

We loathe the “Trout” Quintet

but it’s got to be played

The juggler sits down, picks up the violin, plays it

Caribaldi plays a few bowed notes on the cello

Let’s have no illusions

no self-deception

plays a short bowed note

What can unhesitatingly be described here

as a musical art

is in reality

an illness

Give me the rosin

The juggler gives Caribaldi the rosin

Caribaldi smears his bow with the rosin

Casals

after a pause

Ridiculous

Art

is always

a different art

the artist

or let’s rather term him

the conjuring artist

of course there are only conjuring artists

a different one

every day

each and every day

Above all

such a person

must not lose control of himself

His uniqueness

must keep company with his madness

without getting dizzy

If he’s the personification

of intelligence

Everything involuntary

must be transformed

into something voluntary

The organs of thought

are the world’s genitals

and the private parts of nature

Partial harmonies

everything is founded on that

plucks all the cello strings at once

we’re not talking about

theosophy here

do you understand

plucks the strings

But the madness of these people

is a different madness

like your contempt

impervious to dizziness on the one hand

contempt on the other hand

A predilection for illness

A victory over life

A dread of death

do you understand

cocks an ear at the body of the cello

Casals does it like this

do you hear

plays a low sustained bowed note

Casals does it like this

A perennial proclivity for sodomy

affecting the mind

In a world

of intolerance

plays a low bowed note

Every word

is an incantatory word

meaningfully

Whichever spirit makes the summons

a kindred spirit appears

drops the rosin; it rolls under the cabinet; flings his right hand into the air and cries out

This finger

this finger is driving me insane

glancing at the juggler

This handsome suit

this fine tailoring

this confidence-inspiring hue

The juggler is on the floor looking for the rosin

We set our organ of thought in motion

in such arbitrary ways

Magical astronomy

grammar

philosophy

religion

chemistry and so forth

The concept of contagion

Sympathy of the sign

with the signified

Probably the rosin

bounced right against the wall

right against the wall

right against the wall

plucks a string

the juggler looks back at Caribaldi while searching underneath the cabinet with both hands for the rosin

Our world-organ can become

anything voluntary

Contingent

Individual

Simultaneously cocks an ear at the body of the cello and plays a sustained bowed note

There

that’s what Casals does

It’s a nervous habit

a nervous illness

believe me

The rosin

Insanity

do you understand

raises his right hand high and nervously twitches all its fingers and exclaims

Suddenly it’s there

suddenly

a morbidity

a nervous morbidity

after a pause

A habit

And look here

points under the cabinet

always in that direction

always under the cabinet

JUGGLER

Communal insanity

Mr. Caribaldi

CARIBALDI

I’ve been advised

to tie it

to a string

and hang it around my neck

plays a low sustained bowed note

Like mittens

do you understand

around your neck

when you’re a child

Enter Caribaldi’s granddaughter with a tub of hot water and a towel

Caribaldi looks at his granddaughter

Ah yes my footbath

Come here my child

JUGGLER

Your footbath

Mr. Caribaldi

The granddaughter sets the tub down at Caribaldi’s feet and rolls up the legs of his

trousers; now one sees that his right leg is a wooden leg; she pulls off his shoe and

sock

CARIBALDI with his left leg in the tub of water

Ah

suddenly

How far are we into the show

Were the animals already on

the monkeys

GRANDDAUGHTER

The monkeys

CARIBALDI

The monkeys

the monkeys

to his granddaughter, referring to the juggler

He’s looking for the rosin

And did you dance nicely

flawlessly

flawlessly and nicely

The granddaughter nods

There’s nothing

better than a hot

footbath

When the water

is just as hot as you

can stand

kisses his granddaughter on her forehead

she takes a step back

suddenly

Of course you feel cold my child

Tomorrow we’ll be in Augsburg

tomorrow’s Augsburg

You must practice

do you understand

practice your dancing

Come here

practice your dancing

and you’ll feel warm

The JUGGLER, who has still not found the rosin

Your grandfather means you well

at heart

The granddaughter stands facing Caribaldi and at his command engages in a dancing exercise that consists in standing once on her right foot, once on her left, on the tips of her toes, standing off to the right, lifting her left leg, etc.; lifting her right leg, letting her left arm fall and vice-versa, exactly like a marionette, with ever-increasing rapidity, as the juggler looks on from the floor

CARIBALDI beating time with the cello bow

One two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

one two

Right stop

the granddaughter stops, exhausted

Caribaldi, barking out orders

Peel apples

Polish shoes

Boil milk

Brush clothes

And show up punctually

to the rehearsal

do you understand

You can go

Exit the granddaughter

Caribaldi, reflectively

Tomorrow’s Augsburg

to the juggler

Have you found the rosin?

The juggler has not found the rosin and is still looking for it

A superfluous

a lovely child

because he knows he is not being watched he hikes the right leg of his trousers up even higher, and as the juggler looks for the rosin he slowly strokes his wooden leg with the cello bow with evidently great relish and says

Casals

Casals

The juggler has found the rosin

Caribaldi lets his right trouser-leg fall

The juggler stands up with the rosin in his hand

Everything is music

everything

The world is

the macroanthropos

The juggler brings Caribaldi the rosin

Caribaldi takes the rosin and smears the bow with it as he gazes contemplatively at the juggler

Experience has shown

that anybody

who crawls around for a while

on a dirty floor

will get dirty

presses the cello bow against the juggler’s stomach

It’s nerves

nothing but nerves

calmly and searchingly plays a deep bowed note three times, then suddenly and irascibly says

A letter

if it’s from Sarrasani

makes you lose your composure

suddenly in a threatening, forceful tone

But I know the story

Every year

you get several

letters like this one

all those letters

offers

a surfeit of offers

plucks several cello strings in succession

I understand

More money

More respect

Once again

our worthy juggler demands more money

and more respect

plucks a cello string

Two are

separated by the third

and united by him

JUGGLER

But

CARIBALDI

Are you calm

It’s always the same

Once people have made a name for themselves

they demand money

and respect

more and more money

and more and more respect

The artists use their art as blackmail material

if that’s not the epitome of perfidy

Suddenly the artists pounce on us

with their demands

plucks two cello strings in quick succession

Even genius itself

becomes twice as megalomaniacal

when money’s involved

pokes the juggler’s stomach with the cello bow

Respect                                                 

Bursts out laughing, but the laughter ceases almost immediately  

Circus artists

but on the whole all artists

use their art as blackmail material

with the utmost ruthlessness

But I’m not impressed by any of it

And your letter from the ringmaster of the Sarrasani circus

is just another one of those hundreds of forged letters

that you’ve repeatedly struck right under my nose

throughout the ten or eleven years

you’ve been with me

Show me the offer

Show me the offer

plucks all the cello strings  few times in quick succession and takes firm hold of his bow, as though he is about to play a note with it

The juggler takes one step back, then another

Only a moron

still takes an artist at his word nowadays

only a moron

End of Scene I

Translation unauthorized but Copyright ©2017 by Douglas Robertson

Die Macht der Gewohnheit premiered at the Salzburg Festival on July 7, 1974.  The only edition of Neville and Stephen Place's authorized translation of the play was published in 1976 and is out of print.

A Translation of "Fragen und Scheinfragen," a Lecture on Modern German-Language Literature by Ingeborg Bachmann

Questions and Pseudoquestions

Ladies and gentlemen,

Curiosity and interest: I believe I can be certain that these are what have drawn you to this room.  They spring from the desire to hear something about the things that preoccupy us—in other words, to hear judgments, opinions, and discussions about objects that we ought to find satisfying on their own, in virtue of their existence.  In other words, to hear something that is comparatively weak, because everything that is said about works of art is weaker than the works themselves.  This is true, I think, even of the most exalted productions of criticism and of everything fundamental and foundational that has wanted to be said from time to time and wants to be said time and again.  It is said for the purposes of orientation, and we desire to hear it for orientation’s sake.  If nothing else, writers themselves have always evinced the greatest interest in the testimonials of other writers—in diaries, notebooks, letters, and theoretical disclosures, and, more and more often recently, in the unveiling of the “mysteries of the artist’s studio.”  As recently as thirty years ago the Russian poet Mayakovsky apprised his readers that they had the right to insist that poets not take the mysteries of their métier with them into the grave.  Today there is scarcely any longer any danger of that; lyric poets in particular are not stingy with announcements, but a complete consensus is not in effect…a poem is made, brewed, built, assembled, even in our time.

Be that as it may, you are being abundantly enlightened, and you are even being afforded a view of mysteries that are nothing of the kind.  The varieties of curiosity are as numerous as the varieties of potential disappointment, and all of this may serve us as a provisional excuse for the false hopes that you are forming and that I am forming as I gather up my courage and tender the opinion that while nothing whatsoever may be taught from this lectern something may be awoken from it—namely, the active contemplation of the despair and the hope with which a few readers—or are there actually many of them?—take stock of themselves and of contemporary literature.

“Questions about Contemporary Literature”—this title was chosen for an initial series of lectures, and when I was about to begin my work, well-nigh incapable to the very end of finding a starting point for this attempt, which makes me decidedly uneasy, I mulled over the title once again.  Does it really mean that we should be dealing here with questions that have already been posed?  If so, then which questions, and where were they posed, and by whom?  Or are even answers supposed to be given?  If you really know what authorities are like, do you really believe there are any of them who will deal out questions and deliver answers here?  And above all, what questions could actually be worth considering?  Should we deal with questions like the daily newspapers tossing them back and forth in their arts sections, or discuss those that are dealt with at academies and congresses, or should we, in an even more progressive vein, give serious consideration to the questionnaires on the radio or to the literary Christmas puzzle corner?  To name just a few of these: “Should the subject-matter of a book be handled cold-bloodedly?”  “Is chronology in a novel still possible in the age of the theory of relativity?” “Must modern literature always be so dark?”  “Ad hoc dramaturgy.”

Or should the less noisy, less attractive questions be posed in the way they are posed in the domain of literary criticism, with deliberation?  May we dare, untutored and lacking in specialized knowledge as we are, to seek help there?  There the life savers are readymade—empathetic interpretation, historicism, formalism, socialist realism.  Who wouldn’t want to be rescued there, at nobody’s expense!  Even psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, sociology, have bids to offer, have questions about literature to pose.  Everywhere there are axioms, positions, points of view, slogans, intellectual- historiographical keywords, among which one may discover something—and also learn how to discover it.  But there is no keyword adequate to the needs of the person who must come forward at the present moment and who is feelingly aware of all the works, the ages, that lie behind him—even the works of most recent creation, the ages most recently bygone; and he dreads being obliged for want of erudition to fall back onto a few private experiences with language and with the constructs that have been branded as literature.  And yet of course experience is his only schoolmistress.  However trifling it may be, it is perhaps no poorer a counselor than a body of knowledge that passes through a great many hands, that is often used and abused, that often uses itself up and coasts along on empty, unrefreshed by a jot of experience.

Most importantly as far as the writer is concerned there are questions that seemingly lie beyond the ambit of literature—seemingly because their smooth translation into the language of the literary problems with which we tend to be familiar leads us to regard them as secondary; oftentimes we don’t even notice them.  These are questions that are destructive, redoubtable, in their simplicity, and when they have not arisen, nothing whatsoever has arisen in a work.

When we look back on the past half-century, on its literature with its chapter-headings of Naturalism and Symbolism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Imagism, Futurism, Dadaism, and a great deal that refuses to fit under any chapter-heading, it seems to us as though literature has been developing in a completely miraculous albeit somewhat inconsistent manner, exactly as it always has done, as it did in earlier ages—first there was Sturm und Drang, then Classicism, then Romanticism, and so forth; it is not especially difficult to acquire a working knowledge of these periods; but the present leaves a fair amount to be desired; we cannot properly see how it is developing, where it is headed; nothing is getting any clearer, not even the sense of a direction or directions.  It is the same problem that confronts us in connection with contemporary history; because we are too close to it, we cannot get a comprehensive view of anything; only once the clichés of an age have vanished do we discover the language of an age and become capable of describing it.  Even of today’s clichés only the most powerful ones reach our consciousness.  If we had words, if we had language, we would need no weapons.

As far as literature is concerned, I need of course only remind you of what has been talked about most in recent years and continues to be talked about most at present.  On the one hand you hear the lament over the loss of the center, and the labels borne by these center-bereft literary products are as follows: illogical, too calculated, irrational, too rational, destructive, anti-humanistic—in other words, every conceivable negative designation.  On the opposite hand their proponents speak a vocabulary that is to a large extent quite similar to the other one; the negative designations are brazenly appropriated, or new ones are created—and so, thank God, and, indeed, to our relief, they talk of the illogical, the absurd, the grotesque, anti-, dis-, and de-, destruction, discontinuity; there are the anti-play, the anti-novel; so far nobody has said anything about the anti-poem, but perhaps somebody may do so yet.  Alongside them more traditional products trot along at a leisurely pace, accompanied by a more traditional form of criticism employing a vocabulary reliant on such words as craftsmanship, creativity, and substance.  You can finish the list as you choose.  And that nervous, hope-pregnant period after the war has been assaulting us with even more words, like deforestation, calligraphy, degree zero, existential, sites of being, foreground and background, and initially our generation witnessed the recrudescence of the struggle between politically committed literature and art for art’s sake, this time as a direct consequence of the political catastrophe in Germany and the associated catastrophes in the devastated neighboring countries, nurtured by our premonition of new catastrophes to come.

And so we have the choice; we need only give utterance to our enthusiasm about the one type, our abhorrence of the other, and pitch camp on the side that appeals to us.  Perhaps you are asking yourself where this pressure on you to participate as a combatant in the theater of war is going to come from, or whether you are even going to be roped into maintaining a neutral, objective stance—this for the sake of pleasing everybody, of not causing any scandals.  Because every writer finds himself in a complicated position, whether he admits this to himself or not; he lives in a network of favor and disfavor, and it is impossible to be blind to the fact that literature today is a stock exchange.  But this statement was first committed to paper not by me or even in our time at all but rather by Hebbel, Friedrich Hebbel, in 1849.  In such matters the times do not really change all that much.

But let us cast aside both partisanship and neutrality and try to find a third way: an obstacle-strewn exodus out of the Babylonian confusion of tongues.

The first and worst of these questions that I have spoken to you about and that cannot but impinge on the writer concerns the justification of his existence.  To be sure, the individual writer in our midst, invigorated and seduced as he is by his own vocation, is seldom quite conscious of this question; often he becomes conscious of it only late in life.  Why write?  To what end?  And to what end, given that missions are no longer handed down from on high and no missions of any kind are forthcoming; nobody pretends as much any longer.  What is he to write about, for whom is he expressing himself, and what is he to express to human beings in this world?  Can he, who is himself more thirsty for knowledge, for interpretation, and for meaning than other people, make do with any interpretation, any meaning, or even with a description, no matter how clear-cut it seems to him?  Is language his medium of appraisal, and is he always appraising, and every time he bestows an appellation is he appraising people and things, and appraising them in a way that isn’t completely indifferent, or reprehensible, or damnable?  And is his mission, if he dares acknowledge it to himself (and nowadays he can only acknowledge it to himself!) not capricious, confused; however hard he may exert himself, does he not always end up selling the truth a bit short?  Is not all his activity a form hubris, and must he not incessantly be mistrustful of himself, of every word of his own utterance, every goal of his own setting?  The fact that this question has long since ceased to be of more than biographical interest to those who preoccupy themselves with literature and its victims is disconcerting.  For once one has begun to talk about the “death of literature,” to ponder such a possibility gluttonously or invidiously, as if literature itself were of a mind to come to an end, or as if this end were its final subject, one cannot fail to take into consideration where the preconditions for such an end have always inhered.  They have inhered in the writers themselves, in the pain they have felt at the thought of their own inadequacy, in their guilty consciences.  In his last years Tolstoy condemned literature, poured scorn on himself and on all geniuses, accused himself and the others of engaging in every sort of devilry, of being arrogant, of sacrificing truth and love, and vociferously proclaimed his intellectual and moral bankruptcy to all the world.  Gogol burned the sequel of his Dead Souls.  Kleist burned his Robert Guiscard, concluded himself a failure, and committed suicide.  In one of his letters he wrote: “A great need has been stirring within me; unless I satisfy this need I can never be happy; it is the need to do something good.”  And what is betokened by Grillparzer’s and Mörike’s silent discontinuation of their labors?  External circumstances can scarcely be made to explain anything here.  And Brentano’s flight into the bosom of the church, his recantation, his repudiation of all the beautiful things he had written?  And all those recantations, the suicides, the instances of willful muteness, the madness, silence upon silence emanating from a sense of sinfulness, of metaphysical guilt, or human guilt, debt, a debt to society emanating from indifference, from a lack of something.  Every kind of inadequacy accosts us long before the period we must deal with today.  It seems to me that in our century these plunging descents into silence, the motives for these descents and for the reemergence from silence, are of greater importance for the understanding of the linguistic performances that precede it or follow it, because the situation has become more critical.  For the first time the dubiousness of literary existence is now faced with a state of uncertainty in the aggregated relationships.  The actualities of space and time have been worked out; reality is constantly awaiting a new definition, because science has deformed it beyond recognition.  The intimate, trusting relationship between I and Language and Thing has been badly shaken.  The first document in which self-doubt, despair about language, and despair about the alien preeminence of things that can no longer be comprehended is the famous “Lord Chandos Letter” by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.  This letter also marks Hofmannsthal’s unexpected turn away from the pure, magical poetry of his early years—a turn away from aestheticism.

“But my honorable friend, terrestrial notions elude me in the same fashion.  How can I possibly delineate for you this peculiar spiritual torment, this rocket-like ascent of the fruit-bearing branches beyond the reach of my outstretched hands, this recoiling of the brook’s murmuring waters from the touch of my thirsty lips?

My plight, in short, is as follows: the ability to think or say anything coherent about anything whatsoever has completely vanished from my possession.

At first I gradually found it impossible to discourse on any elevated or general topic and in attempting to do so to form my lips into those words to which everyone is accustomed to have recourse without scruple.  I felt an inexplicable disinclination even to utter the words spirit, soul, or body.  I found it impossible for my mind to produce an opinion on affairs at court, on proceedings in Parliament, or on any other subject you care to name.  And this was by no means owing to diffidence of any sort, for as you know I am habitually frank to the point of rashness; rather, the words to which the tongue is obliged to have recourse as a mere matter of course crumbled away like moldy mushrooms in my mouth.”

And he continues:

“But gradually this rescission spread like rust, devouring everything it touched in all directions.  Even during familiar home-baked conversations, I came to find all the opinions that are casually vented with an air of downright somnambulistic certainty so questionable that I was obliged to cease taking part in such conversations altogether.  I was filled with an unaccountable rage, a rage that I only barely managed to conceal with great difficulty, when I heard such sentiments as: this affair will turn out well or badly for this man or that one; N. the sheriff is a wicked man, T. the parson a virtuous one; M. the tenant farmer is to be pitied, his sons are wastrels; another man is to be envied, because his daughters are good housekeepers; one family is coming up in the world, another one is in decline.  All of this seems to me as unprovable, as mendacious, and as perforable as anything can possibly be.  My spirit compels me to see everything that is mentioned in such a conversation from a perspective whose proximity is downright unsettling. Once I once saw a piece of skin from my little finger through a magnifying glass: this piece of skin resembled a stretch of open countryside full of furrows and hollows; I now seemed to be seeing human beings and their actions through such a glass.  I no longer managed to apprehend them with the simplifying gaze of habit.  Everything that came my way crumbled into pieces, the pieces into smaller pieces, and nothing was compassable by a concept anymore.  The isolated, individual words were floating all around me; they congealed into eyes that were staring blankly at me and that I am obliged to stare back at: they are whirlwinds that I cannot look into without feeling dizzy; their rotation is inexorable, and to pass through them is to attain union with the very void itself.”

Similar experiences are attested to via such mutually dissimilar visitations as are to be found in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, a few novellas by Musil, and Benn’s Rönne: A Doctor’s Jottings.  And yet we should not dwell on correspondences in literature; rather, we must bear in mind that we are only ever dealing with isolated revolutionary shocks.  People are always saying that certain things are in the air.  I don’t think they’re simply in the air, that everyone can take hold of them and acquire ownership of them.  Because every new experience is made and not pulled out of the air.  The only people who pull them out of the air or other people are those who haven’t made any experiences themselves.  And I believe that when these ever-new questions of why and wherefore that nobody is spared, along with all the questions that follow in their wake (and questions of guilt, if you like), are not raised; that when the act of production itself is unattended by suspicion and consequently unattended by any actual problems, new literature will not come into being.  This may sound paradoxical, because a short while ago we were talking about the cessation of speech and the maintenance of silence as a consequence of the writer’s difficulty in coping with himself and with reality—a difficulty that has merely assumed different forms today.  Religious and metaphysical conflicts have been superseded by social, humanitarian, and political ones.  And for the writer they all flow into the conflict with language.  For the genuinely great achievements of these past fifty years, the achievements that have made manifest a new kind of literature, have come into being not because writers wanted to carry out certain stylistic experiments, because they were trying to express themselves in one way on one occasion and another way the next, because they wanted to be modern, but rather and always when in defiance of every piece of received knowledge a new idea provided a powder keg-like impetus—when in defiance of every formulizable moral proposition a moral impulse was great enough to comprehend and schematize a new ethical possibility.  To this extent I do not believe that today we have the problems that people have been trying to wheedle us into believing we have, and unfortunately we are all too easily seduced into adding our own voices to the wheedling.  Nor do I believe that after the many and significant formal discoveries and adventures that have been made and embarked on in this century (especially at the beginning of this century), there is nothing left for us to do but to write in an epigonic vein, wherein one writes even more surrealistically than the surrealists and even more expressionistically than the expressionists, and that there is nothing left to be done but exploit the discoveries of Joyce and Proust, of Kafka and Musil.  After all, Joyce and Proust and Kafka themselves made no use of previously lived, previously discovered experience; and in any case, whatever extraneous material they did use and that is conceivably communicable in seminar papers and dissertations is manifestly the most trivial facet of their work; it either resides on the surface or it has been melted into the depths without a trace.  If we blindly adopt those days’ stipulations about reality, those forms of thought of yesteryear, the result can only be a pale imitation and a rather feeble iteration of the great works.   If the only possibility were to continue, to trudge onward and experiment without experience until this came to seem worthwhile, then those cavils that are so often raised against younger writers nowadays would most likely be all too well-founded.  But the rafters are already creaking.  Night comes before day, and the fire is kindled in the twilight of dusk.

Reality always encounters a new language when a moral, knowledge-rich jolt takes place and not when someone tries to remake language itself from scratch, as if language on its own could serve as a goad to knowledge and reveal experience that one has never had.  Whenever someone merely fools around with language to make it feel novel to the touch, it quickly takes its revenge and exposes his design.  A new language must have a new gait, and it can acquire this gait only when it is inhabited by a new spirit.  We think we all know language like the backs of our hands; after all, we are constantly keeping company with it, but the writer does not; he cannot keep company with it.  It frightens him; it is not transparent to him; of course it has an existence anterior to that of literature, active and preordained to serve a use that he can make no use of.  For him it is nothing like an inexhaustible reservoir of material that he can dip into at will; it is not the social object par excellence, the undivided property of all humankind.  Language has not proved itself capable of what he wants, of what he wants to do with language; he must fix its signs within the limits that have been prescribed to him and make it vital within the context of a ritual, impart to it a gait that it can receive in a literary work and nowhere else.  For although language admittedly may permit us to be mindful of its beauty, to be sensible of that beauty, it is compliantly subordinate to a transformation that neither initially nor ultimately craves aesthetic gratification, but rather new powers of comprehension.

We have spoken of a much-needed stimulus that for the time being I cannot identify as anything other than a moral one in plain view of all morality; we have spoken of a propulsive force to be imparted to an idea that initially couldn’t care less about its trajectory, an idea that desires knowledge and desires to attain something through language and through working through to the limits of language.  For the time being, let us call that something reality.

Once this trajectory has been embarked on, and provided it is not a specifically philosophical or literary trajectory, it will always be a unique and distinctive one.  It led Hofmannsthal to a different place than George; it was distinctive yet again for Rilke, and again for Kafka; Musil was always ordained to follow an entirely different trajectory from Brecht’s.  This assumption of a trajectory, this centrifugation into a path in which [one] thrives and goes to seed, in which nothing contingent is any longer granted access to words and things…when this occurs, I think we have a better warrant of the authenticity of a literary phenomenon than when we scour his works in search of felicitous hallmarks of quality.  Of course quality is heterogeneous, debatable, and over long stretches even deniable.  Moreover quality is now and then to be found in some middleman’s poem, in a good short story, in an attractive, clever novel; it is not in short supply; there is certainly no lack of experts, even today, and there are flukes, or oddities, or deviant productions on the fringes that can become personal favorites of ours.  And yet only a trajectory, a continuous manifestation, a mathematical constant, an unmistakable world of words, a world of characters, and a world of conflict, is capable of prompting us to see a writer as inescapable.  Because he has a trajectory, because he pursues his path as the only one out of all possible routes, desperate under the compulsion to make the entire world into a world of his own, and guilty of the presumption to define the world, he actually exists.  Because he knows and says to himself I am inescapable, and because he cannot escape himself, his mission discloses itself to him.  The more he begins to know about it, the more distinct it becomes to him, the more his work is accompanied by a secretly or avowedly theoretical agenda.  We often hear people say that while Rilke was undoubtedly a great poet, the world-prescribing and worldview-evincing content of his poems need not concern us in the slightest, as though it were a deductible surplus in the form of some fairly pernicious embellishment.  The only important thing, they say, is the individual well-turned poem, or even the individual well-turned line.  We hear people say that Brecht is a great writer, one of our greatest-ever dramatists, but that one must ever-so amicably forget or vehemently regret that he was a Communist.  In crassly barbaric terms: pretty words are what matter most; the poetic part of poetry is nice; we like it, especially the plumtrees and the little white clouds.  Hofmannsthal’s overweening effort to renew the haggard European intellectual tradition yet again in his work even as this very tradition was giving way to a vacuum strikes many as wasted labor, and yet without his fictive points of reference his plays never could have been written and his faculty of judgment would have been impotent as an organizing force in his essays.  In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time, Proust virtually underwrote the entire work in a theory, reflected on the genesis of the work, appended an apologia for it to it, and one could well ask, to what end?  Was that necessary?  I sincerely believe it was.  And why, I once heard somebody ask, has Gottfried Benn not spared us his formulation of a radical aesthetic, this blueprint of his world of expression, these fanatical keywords—intoxication, intensification, the monologic I?  But did he really have any other possible way of giving prominence to that handful of poems whose merit the questioner was willing to acknowledge?  Are the essayistic episodes in Musil’s Man without Qualities really not intrinsic to the work?  Can we imagine it in the absence of its foundation of a utopia that is doomed to failure, or its search for a “clear-eyed mysticism?”  Isn’t the book what it is only thanks to all its ratiocinative experiments?

I have not made mention of all these things in order to preempt the formation of an opinion about individual writers and their errors, their monomaniacal obsessions.  I have done so, rather, in order to remind us all, in the midst of our disoriented bemusement, of the signs by which we are most likely to recognize the new, the emergence of a genuinely literary writer and of a genuine form of literature.  We will recognize them in a new, comprehensive definition, in a legislative effort, in the covert or overt promulgation of an inescapable idea.

Admittedly only images are timeless.  A thought, being rooted in its time, perishes with its time.  But precisely because it perishes, any thought of ours must be new if it is authentic and if it wishes to bring anything into effect.

We will never dream of clinging to the world of the ideas of the classical period or to that of another epoch, because these worlds can no longer be of any substance for us; our reality, our quarrels, have turned out to be different from theirs.  However glorious we may find individual ideas of an earlier age, when we call them as witnesses, we do so in support of our own present-day ideas.  Nor should we ever dream of supposing that everything has already been accomplished because a handful of great minds debuted on the scene some 40 or 50 years ago.  It won’t do any good to keep letting them do all the thinking, as though they were our fixed navigational stars.  It won’t do any good to prop ourselves up on the admirable works that were produced in those recent decades.  From them the only thing to be learned is that we cannot avoid making the same kind of perilous debut.  In art there is no horizontal progress but rather and merely the unceasingly new rupture induced by a vertical trajectory.  The media and techniques of art alone are responsible for the erroneous impression that it is making progress.  But something that is truly, actually possible is transformation.  And the transformative effect that emanates from new works inculcates in us a new percipience, a new affective state, a new consciousness.

When art takes hold of a new possibility, it gives us the possibility of learning of where we stand or where we ought to stand, of how we are faring and how we ought to fare.  For art’s blueprints are not drafted in an airless void.  Today nobody is any longer likely to believe that literature can exist independently of the historical situation, that there exists even a single writer whose starting point has not been determined by the givens of this moment in history.  In the most fortunate of cases he can successfully do two things: represent, represent his age, and present something for which his age is not yet ready.  To be sure, there is such a thing as, if not the anxious stasis, then at any rate the intellectual foot-dragging of those who are only capable of receiving the kindling stimulus to do this from afar.  For an entire generation it was Nietzsche from whom an overleaping spark alighted upon André Gide, Thomas Mann, Gottfried Benn, and many others.  For Brecht it was Marx, for Kafka Kierkegaard; Joyce was enkindled by Vico’s philosophy of history, and there have been countless impetuses provided by Freud, and in the most recent period Heidegger has been a major influence.

How might new kindling stimuli come into being?  It is difficult to say.  The specialists, the experts are multiplying.  The thinkers are not forthcoming.  Perhaps Wittgenstein will yet exert an influence; perhaps Ernst Bloch will.  Pure conjectures.

Art as a transforming force…?  “Transformation” in general—that is the question, a question that is but a part of the first, doubt-ridden, formidable question: what do we mean by transformation, and why do we crave transformation through art?!  For we obviously crave something from it!  Art has already been shifted from one site of residence to another an incredible number of times, from the house of God into the house of the ideals, from the house beautiful to the bateau ivre, and then into the gutters, and then again into the house of dreams and into the temple with the hanging gardens, and then onwards into the pseudo-mystical suffocating atmosphere of blood and soil, and further still into the house of humanity and the house of politics.  It is as if it has never enjoyed a moment’s peace, as though no permanent dwelling has ever been allocated to it.  For a while it receives and acknowledges commands, and one fine day it begins to listen afresh.  This is its peculiar version of progress, of migration.

And the writer who wishes to transform—how much is open to him and how much is not?  That is also the question.  He must participate in a drama that has become fully public only in our time: because he has a view of humankind’s misfortune in its entirety, it seems as though he is sanctioning this misfortune, it seems as though he is failing to exert the desired effect.  Because he allows his gaze to rest on misfortune in its entirety, it seems permissible to leave even what is transformable untransformed.  People see the foam on his mouth, and they applaud him.  Not a thing stirs, apart from this calamitous applause.  And I surmise that thanks to the numerous playful shocks that have been inflicted on the public for years, a bad habit has been picked up, an obtusion or an addiction, as to a drug, an addiction to being slightly shocked.  Only the utmost seriousness and the struggle against the abuse of primordial experiences of affliction might yet help us to awake from its fantastic lethargy.  “The people need poetry like bread”—this moving statement, an optative statement, to be sure—was put in writing by Simone Weil once upon a time.  But today people need movies and glossy magazines like whipped cream, and these more discriminating people (who happen to include even us) need a bit of a shock, a bit of Ionesco or the howl of a beatnik, lest they lose their appetite for everything altogether.   Poetry as bread?  This bread ought to grind between their teeth and revive their sense of hunger before it quells it.  And this poetry will need to be honed by knowledge and embittered by yearning so that it will be able to disturb the sleep of human beings.  We are indeed sleeping, are sleepers, out of the fear of being obliged to perceive our world as what it is.

Our existence today lies at the intersection point of so many mutually unconnected realities that are chockful of the most mutually contradictory values.  Within the confines of your own four walls you can cultivate a domestic idyll in the patriarchal vein or libertinage or whatever else you like—outside you’re whirled about in a functional world of utility that has its own ideas about your existence.  You can be superstitious and knock on wood, but the reports on the current state of scientific research and the development of armaments have consoling things of their own to say about the preservation of your security and freedom.  You can believe in the immortality of your soul and expound your own spiritual findings to yourself, but outside you discover other findings; out there the shots are called by tests, by business, by the authorities; out there you are being wholesomely and unwholesomely written up, classified, and evaluated.  You can see phantoms or values; in any case there are a ton of both there, and you can entrust yourself to all of them, if you simply happen to be very good at keeping everything soberly compartmentalized in practice.  Here are inwardness and significances, the conscience and the dream—there the utility function, an absence of significance, clichés, and speechless violence.  Do not base your thinking on one principle; that is dangerous—base it on many principles.

As things stand, in our sheer passive acquiescence, we have already reached the point of allowing the eventuation of a state of affairs that Hermann Broch excoriated in an apothegm of savage fury.  If such is the case, the apothegm is valid; if such is the case, things have indeed come to such a pass.  “Morality is morality; business is business, and war is war, and art is art.”

If we patiently endure this, if we quiescently allow the scornfulness of this “Art is art” to serve as a substitute for the Whole—and if the writers patiently endure it and encourage it through flippancy and a deliberate dissolution of the act of communication with society, an act that is always imperiled and therefore always in need of renewal—and if society withdraws from literature whenever it is imbued with a serious and uncomfortable spirit desirous of transformation, this will be tantamount to a declaration of bankruptcy.  Simply making it possible for people to appreciate a few difficult artistic forms, simply awakening an understanding of art—this prophylactic against art, which is intended to render it innocuous –this cannot be the writer’s function.  Under such shabby auspices none of us would have anything to lose from one another.  Neither art from human beings, nor human beings from art.  In such a case, there would also no longer be any need for any questions.

But we keep posing them anyway.  And we shall pose them in the future so that they will regain their binding character.

THE END

Translation Copyright © 2017 by Douglas Robertson, who thanks flowerville for introducing him to Bachmann’s wonderful lectures.

Source: Ingeborg Bachmann, Frankfurter Vorlesungen.  Probleme zeitgenössischer Dichtung [Frankfurt Lectures. Problems in Contemporary Literature], Munich and Berlin: Piper, 2016. Bachmann delivered this lecture as part of a five-lecture series at Goethe University Frankfurt during the 1959-1960 winter semester and recorded it for Bavarian Radio in April 1960.