{"id":6547,"date":"2021-06-24T15:47:46","date_gmt":"2021-06-24T15:47:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/?p=6547"},"modified":"2021-10-23T13:38:55","modified_gmt":"2021-10-23T13:38:55","slug":"anthony-mellors-winter-journey-introduction-and-ten-poems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/6547\/anthony-mellors-winter-journey-introduction-and-ten-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthony Mellors: Winter Journey – introduction and ten poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

Winter Journey<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Winterreise: Untriangulieren Leben)<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Daniel zur H\u00f6he<\/p>\n

Translated by Anthony Mellors<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u2018Outside, one has a hundred eyes; at home, hardly one\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTRODUCTION<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

I wer thinking how some fents poals and a gate make all the differents.<\/p>\n

Russell Hoban,\u00a0Riddley Walker<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Like an iceberg, there is more of a trig point below the surface<\/p>\n

than above it.<\/p>\n

Daniel zur H\u00f6he,\u00a0Jedem das Sein: Conversations in the Beech Forest<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

To say that Daniel zur H\u00f6he\u2019s version of the\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>\u00a0plays fast and loose with Wilhelm M\u00fcller\u2019s verse would be an understatement. More of an homage to Schubert\u2019s re-ordered and partially rewritten settings of M\u00fcller\u2019s twenty-four poems, at first glance it seems to offer little to the reader looking for a commentary on German Romantic lyric and the Lied tradition. Consequently, my English translation of zur H\u00f6he is anything but a guide to the most beautiful and profound of all song cycles. I should like to think, however, that it does provide a twenty-first century \u2018accompaniment\u2019 to the Schubertian vision of wandering, introspection, exile, and political repression, just as zur H\u00f6he\u2019s strange poems extrapolate from the original a vision of paranoid, eroticized subjectivity, born in the ideological struggles and contradictions of the Cold War and maturing in the terminal crisis of late capitalism (terminal here meaning,\u00a0pace<\/em>\u00a0Freud, also interminable). Moreover, the musical dimension of the project is problematic. Clearly, zur H\u00f6he has attempted a kind of translation into his own tongue of the song cycle rather than the poems in isolation, yet he has neither followed the prosody of the lyrics nor tried to imitate their musical interpretation, and in any case a complex structure made up of words and music cannot be converted back into words alone. Instead, he has built into his poetic fantasia a pattern of musical analogues which, random and capricious as they seem, form an allusive network of verbal images, metonymies, and puns entertaining the conceit of writing as a form of \u2018composition\u2019.<\/p>\n

Since completing\u00a0Winter Journey<\/em>\u00a0in 2014, the author has disappeared from view, leaving behind a handful of literary works, a scant official paper trail, and a couple of abandoned social media sites. His Leipzig home looks occupied, yet he has not been seen in public for years, and the love of his life, Johanna Stenson, denies any contact with the poet following her sudden departure from the city in autumn 2015. As far as we know, zur H\u00f6he has barely moved outside a small but important ring of German cities including Berlin, Weimar, Leipzig, and Dresden, none of them very far from his birthplace of Dessau. As a student in Berlin, he lived in the working class district of Pankow, so all his residences are situated in what used to be the DDR. He spent many years living in semi-rural isolation in an ancient house in Schraplau (at the time of writing up for sale, including the two pedal organs owned by the poet and presumably kept there by the present owner) with its metre-thick walls and yellow tile stoves, before relocating 80 km away to a modest apartment in Leipzig. The speed of change in these former communist cities has been extraordinary, and while zur H\u00f6he has welcomed the demise of the corrupt East German bureaucracy with its fatally flawed economic model (restrictive and monetizing in uneasy measure), he is highly critical of its replacement by a \u2018free market\u2019 managed by a globalizing bureaucratic power, its repression subsisting in its mantra of delivering commerce at all costs, and its chief virtue being that it is not as corrupt as many other economies \u2013 such as the UK. Berlin has clung to its decadent, techno-obsessed counter-culture for a very long time after re-unification, and its outsider-chic status has lingered even with the return to capital status. Property prices and rent are well below that of the\u00a0b\u00fcrgerlich<\/em>\u00a0outpost of Munich, which somehow also manages to feel more Hitler-tainted than Berlin:\u00a0gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten<\/em>. Rentiers and foreign investors have been relatively slow to see the potential for gentrification in Berlin, yet they are always quick to recognize the crucial difference between the white-faced minstrelsy of hipsters and the unreconstructed \u2018prolets\u2019, and inevitably the capital\u2019s low rents are yielding to the forces of social cleansing. Sensing this hollowing-out of cultural value, zur H\u00f6he escaped into the countryside before re-entering the lion\u2019s den at one remove by moving to Leipzig. An important factor in the poet\u2019s lack of\u00a0wanderlust<\/em>\u00a0is his conviction that nowhere else in the world do you find the uncanny conditions in play in the former East Germany, the centre of a central European country that is arguably the capital of Europe and also the most marginal and out of phase place in Europe. It\u2019s as if everyone has forgotten that Leipzig, Jena, Dessau, and \u2013 especially \u2013 Weimar were at the heart of the Romantic culture we still inhabit, filtered through modernism and the postmodern yet still vitally of that self-divided subjectivity and its communities. Biedermeier, revolutionary, possessive, neurotic, conservative, libertarian, projective, the post-Enlightenment sensibility has now become so \u2018post\u2019 it is threatened at the start of the twenty-first century by its own nightmares: the figure of the sociopath as a model for the successful individual, all too capable of separating fantasy from \u2018the real world\u2019, yet determined at all costs to realize its fantasies; the return to a Hobbesian view of human nature, displacing Rousseau; and a new form of rentier entrepreneurship, which exploits the human capital of its workers, blurring the line between \u2018engineering\u2019 as technology and social manipulation. zur H\u00f6he\u2019s obsession with the urtexts of the manic, melancholic modern citizen \u2013\u00a0\u00a0the subject constituted by capital yet outlawed by it\u00a0\u00a0\u2013\u00a0\u00a0can be said to be motivated entirely by his exile, his experience of disunity at the heart of reunification. In Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden, like nowhere else in the \u2018west\u2019, one sees history enacted, and the poet cannot resist dissecting the process of his cultural\u00a0Spaltung<\/em>.Dessau is now firmly on the map as the location of the Bauhaus, and it was in a small house on the suburban T\u00f6rten Estate designed by Walter Gropius that zur H\u00f6he was born in 1960. His parents were typical working class residents of the estate, less than impressed by the austere design and keen to upgrade the basic facilities. Their son and his younger sister Monika (who became a fashion designer) were evidently in love with the Bauhaus aesthetic from an early age, and by the time the DDR authorities \u2018rediscovered\u2018 Bauhaus Dessau in the mid-70s, the adolescent zur H\u00f6hes were already nostalgic for the steel doors and windows and the earth closet of their birthplace (which had already gone by 1960). Central Dessau was pretty much wiped out by Allied bombing in 1945, after which it became one of the major industrial centres of the DDR, crammed with\u00a0Plattenbau<\/em>\u00a0(concrete slab) architecture. Yet its flat countryside is full of woodland and parks, including the\u00a0W\u00f6rlitzer Gartenreich<\/em>, a vast landscaped area developed in the late eighteenth century in the English style. This classical fantasia is conflated in zur H\u00f6he\u2019s mind with the domestic and civic monuments of early modernism, and it is significant that Wilhelm M\u00fcller, poet of\u00a0Die Sch\u00f6ne Mullerin<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0Die Winterreise<\/em>, was born in Dessau \u2013 and in 1794, about the same time as the Garden Realm came into being. For zur H\u00f6he, Schubert\u2019s settings of M\u00fcller\u2019s poems in\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>\u00a0(1827) are the fundamental expression of the displaced, melancholic, phallic subjectivity he sees at the heart of modern Europe; the song cycle is the defining moment of the Romantic sensibility and avant-garde enough to prefigure many of the aesthetic gestures of modernism and its popular declensions. Like Dessau itself, it forms a strange fusion of the classical and modern.<\/p>\n

Winterreise<\/em>\u00a0is an obsessional work that treats romantic love as a symptom of existential crisis rather than as an end in itself. Throughout the cycle, we cannot tell whether the wanderer has been jilted by the bourgeois object of his affections or has in essence rejected himself. In spite of his ritualistic observances of erotic despair, he seems motivated by the apprehension of a more primordial lack in being, intimated by the rustling linden tree and then manifested in various self-immolating reflections as the death drive. These histrionics are a familiar feature of the Romantic descent into decadence as mapped by Mario Praz (when not articulating the differences between aristocratic and Biedermeier conceptions of interior decoration), and were\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>\u00a0merely an early account of such paroxysms, it might have remained maudlin and generic. Yet its uncanny underdetermination claims a manic \u2018Romantic\u2019 sensibility while chipping away at its identity, displacing affects even as it indulges them. And if its faux-v\u00f6lkisch lyrics seem typical of sentimental\u00a0Hausmusik<\/em>, the cycle is far removed musically from the domestic and commercial banality of both the contemporary salon and modern\u00a0Schlager<\/em>. From the stark, estranged opening of \u2018Gute Nacht\u2019 through the chromatic ironies of \u2018Der Lindenbaum\u2019 to the gaunt minimalism of \u2018Der Leiermann\u2019, the compositions anticipate fractured, introspective rock ballads and the pared-down, repetitive structures of post-serialism. Even the form is ambiguous: unlike Schumann\u2019s\u00a0Liederkreis<\/em>, op. 39, which is structured by mood and symbol rather than narrative order, Schubert\u2019s monodrama is both genuinely cyclical (in that it returns to where it begins) and uncannily open-ended (in that it remains inconclusive).<\/p>\n

Various translation issues abound. The most obvious one is primarily graphic in nature: the crossword puzzle standing in for \u2018Im Dorfe\u2019, here called \u2018Global Village\u2019. I\u2019ve had to compose a completely new, parallel puzzle to complement the original. In theory, the spirit of the thing is retained even though the layout and letter has had to change. But thank heavens zur H\u00f6he didn\u2019t compose a cryptic puzzle, in which case anything resembling a translation would have had to be abandoned. German is full of idiomatic turns of phrase which don\u2019t translate easily. This will hardly come as a surprise. Therefore I\u2019ve tried to find English substitutions that make some kind of sense in terms of the overall \u2018logic\u2019 of a poem and its place in the sequence. The first lines of \u2018S\u00fc\u00dfe Tra\u00fcme\u2019 present a good example here, in which the fox and the hare say goodnight to one another. While the phrase allows zur H\u00f6he to allude to the original title of the first song in the cycle, \u2018Gute Nacht\u2019, it means that the stranger or wanderer is lost \u2018in the middle of nowhere\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0I should have liked to keep the figurative colour of the original, but for the sake of sense in English prefer \u2018the back of beyond\u2019, effectively blurring the distinction between space and time, which is one of the procedures of zur H\u00f6he\u2019s cycle. The poem\u2019s title could have easily been rendered as \u2018Sweet Dreams\u2019, so here is an example of an expression that stays the same across German and English; perhaps perversely, however, I have chosen the title \u2018Night Night\u2019 in order to keep the poem\u2019s allusion to M\u00fcller\u2019s original as well as zur H\u00f6he\u2019s cod-sentimental rewrite. Throughout, I have been troubled by the problem that any translation risks making the original language disappear; it is always an appropriation and should not therefore be misrecognized as a medium that attempts anything more than carrying over the original into another, different yet related, form. No matter how much it ends up departing from the original it should not play fast and loose with the text, but be as faithful to the original\u00a0in spirit<\/em>\u00a0as it can be. As we shall observe in the case of the musical score, \u2018interpretation\u2019 is inevitable, and translations \/ interpretations are necessarily multiple, especially over time; but this does not mean that they should neglect the need to disclose the truth of the text, no matter how fugitive and fleeting that disclosure may turn out in the end.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, English is already in place, and even a cursory reading of the sequence reveals zur H\u00f6he in dialogue with poets as diverse as Coleridge, Frost, Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, and John Cooper Clarke, as well as songwriters such as Bob Dylan and David Bowie. Gene MacLellan\u2019s \u2018Snowbird\u2019 morphs into the LaFlammes\u2019 \u2018White Bird\u2019 (both from 1969), \u2018Ring of Fire\u2019 looks back to \u2018Der Sandmann\u2019, Arthur Lee rubs shoulders with John Martyn, RZA with Art & Language, and throughout there are capricious English \/ English and English \/ German correlations. To get the sense of variation, I have tried to ring some of these changes myself: if \u2018Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening\u2019 inevitably remains the same title in the original and in my \u2018translation\u2019, \u2018Incomer\u2019 (a term used in both German and English) turns into the East Anglian vernacular \u2018Blow-in\u2019.<\/p>\n

Other titles have different dynamics. The \u2018excess pleasure\u2019 of \u2018\u00dcbersch\u00fcssiger Genuss\u2019, for instance, has been imbued with a more forthright Lacanian sense (\u2018Surplus Jouissance\u2019) to emphasize the psychoanalytic bent of the sequence, which is evinced in a number of allusions to the Dream of the Burning Child in Freud\u2019s\u00a0Traumdeutung<\/em>\u00a0and Lacan\u2019s\u00a0Four Fundamental Concepts<\/em>, and suggested obliquely in the oneiric knocking that occurs in \u2018Allegorie des Winters\u2019. zur H\u00f6he is not a surrealist \u2013 in fact he has argued that the history of surrealist poetry has been hamstrung by its disinclination to stomach figurative\u00a0d\u00e9r\u00e8glement<\/em>, and nowhere more so than in English writing \u2013 yet there is a powerful strain of surreal association at work in his work, a delirium of correlatives acting as a kind of straying guide or\u00a0Irrlicht<\/em>. He sees the\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>\u00a0as a toy box containing what Walter Benjamin calls \u2018the debris of a former world\u2019, and as a flea market full of part-objects to be recommissioned or recombined, much as Lacan found in Parisian brocantes the origin of Lautr\u00e9amont\u2019s festering amalgamations. The Romantic missed encounter, which we still call today a \u2018relationship\u2019, becomes in\u00a0Winter Journey<\/em>\u00a0something like the description of the \u2018sex drive\u2019 in\u00a0Seminar XI<\/em>, where Lacan presents an image of the drives as a montage, a machine with \u2018a dynamo connected up to a gas tap\u2019, from which \u2018a peacock\u2019s feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful\u2019.1<\/sup>\u00a0(At the same time, zur H\u00f6he is rarely quite as imagistically random as the surrealists. He is perhaps too Teutonically sociological in his approach to poetic pathology, realizing that the \u2018pretty woman\u2019 in this fantasy is, like the \u2018Stiff Kitten\u2019 and the \u2018Junge M\u00e4dchen mit ein Electra-Komplex\u2019 in \u2018Nachr\u00fcsten\u2019, a dubious male projection of femininity. Therefore, surrealist brio must be tempered with Western Marxist dialectic and the kitsch surreality of the German lifeworld, with its fragments of vestimentary space and \u2018pharaonic heaps of mining slag and battered schnapps factories\u2019.2<\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0Eldritch tropes of derealization are everywhere related to the history of lyric as song, reminding us that, as Daniel Tiffany argues,<\/p>\n

Romanticism in both its German and British formations helped to elaborate, to be sure, the archetype of poetic kitsch, yet the histories of antiquarianism and imposture really began with the ballad revival in Britain during the first two decades of the eighteenth century<\/p>\n

and \u2018the \u201cdistressed genre\u201d of the counterfeit folk-poem made available a new palette of eccentric and even spurious poetic diction.\u20193<\/sup>\u00a0Theodor Adorno insists that the poet Eichendorff (1788-1857)<\/p>\n

achieves the most extraordinary effects with a stock of images that must have been threadbare even in his day. The castle that forms the object of Eichendorff\u2019s longing is spoken of only as the castle; the obligatory stock of moonlight, hunting horns, nightingales, and mandolins is provided, but without doing much harm to Eichendorff\u2019s poetry. The fact that Eichendorff was probably the first to discover the expressive power in fragments of the\u00a0lingua mortua<\/em>\u00a0contributes to this.4<\/sup><\/p>\n

These \u2018effects\u2019 barely translate into another language, and they are perhaps the reason why Eichendorff and German Romantic poets such as M\u00f6rike, R\u00fcckert, and M\u00fcller, all adored by composers of Lied, have never been much appreciated as poets by foreign readers: their stock of faux folk images are simply too German to signify beyond the orbit of their own richly steeped iconography. Outside Germanic culture, the nostalgic parade of castles, maidens, post-horns, forests, and lost gods seems less the maguffin for a proto-modernist exploration of the rustle of language, as Adorno contends, than a kitsch paean to tradition, strangely disturbed yet reified by an archly self-immolating subject. Adorno is determined to rescue Eichendorff from a reductive melancholia, finding instead a generous suspension of the ego, which has no interest in self-preservation. Yet he has to admit that the sentiments in Eichendorff\u2019s poems, as in\u00a0Die sch\u00f6ne M\u00fcllerin<\/em>, are only accessible to those who have internalized their popular settings and glee club renditions, so that many of the lines \u2018sound like quotations, quotations learned by heart from God\u2019s primer.\u20195<\/sup>\u00a0The kitsch element in\u00a0Volkslieder,<\/em>\u00a0then, derives from miniaturized versions of an already simulated idiom, which enters \u2018tradition\u2019 by virtue of its translation into forms less self-conscious than the original. Clement Greenberg\u2019s description of kitsch artefacts as simulations of genuine culture is not only inverted \u2013 \u2018fake lyrics sometimes shape and even transform canonical poetry\u20196<\/sup>\u00a0\u00a0\u2013 but complicated by being simulations of simulated culture, with the imprimatur of God as the kitsch icing on the top. Adorno\u2019s rereading of Eichendorff as an allegorist of dead forms is intended to rescue the poetry from its \u2018prettified\u2019 reputation; yet the dialectics of kitsch anticipate that rereading while suspending Adorno\u2019s insistence on the poetry as \u2018transcendent\u2019.<\/p>\n

Having come to this conclusion, I should like to agree with Adorno that a kind of transformation takes place in the realm of the song cycle, which \u2018avoids the danger inherent in all song, that of prettifying the music by putting it into small genre-like formats, through a process of construction: the whole emerges from the complex of miniature-like elements.\u20197<\/sup>\u00a0Schumann\u2019s cycle of Eichendorff poems achieves this \u2018whole\u2019, paradoxically, by eschewing the cyclical closure of the traditional song cycle (effectively placing it under erasure in the title\u00a0Liederkreis<\/em>) and bringing out the potential of the lyric toward abstraction, dissonance, and non-identity, music exceeding the poetic image and realizing its Mallarmesque \u2018rustling\u2019. At least, that is how Adorno\u2019s commentators tend to summarize his account, and certainly Adorno leans toward characterizing Schumann as an early member of the Second Viennese School. Yet the language he uses in the Coda to the Eichendorff essay is somewhat less edgily modernist. Key terms are \u2018expression\u2019, \u2018balance\u2019, \u2018delicacy\u2019, \u2018feeling\u2019, \u2018symmetry\u2019, and \u2013 to take one example \u2013 the exquisite \u2018Mondnacht\u2019 \u2018approaches the structure of the medieval lyric and\u00a0Meistergesang<\/em>; like an\u00a0Abgesang<\/em>, the last stanza reproduces the poem\u2019s expansive gesture, while the last two lines recapitulate the beginning and close off the transcendent structure.\u20198<\/sup>\u00a0Here, Schumann doesn\u2019t so much as deconstruct Eichendorff\u2019s lyrics as amplify them and extend them tonally into infinity, an appraisal that does little to support more recent musicological claims for the improvisatory nature of Schumann\u2019s \u2018fragment clusters\u2019.<\/p>\n

While such claims are not made for the earlier, more mimetic \u2018rustlings\u2019 of Schubert\u2019s settings of M\u00fcller,\u00a0\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>\u00a0is singular in the intensity of its lyrical, fractured,\u00a0v\u00f6lkisch<\/em>\u00a0yet intellectual, manic, and minimalist transformation of its poetic material. Ian Bostridge notes of \u2018Der Lindenbaum\u2019 that<\/p>\n

[t]hat gentle rustling \u2013 of the leaves of last summer rather than the winter branches of the present, specified later in the poem \u2013 is then itself gently interrupted by horn calls, the Romantic sound par excellence, the call of the past, of memory, sensuality at a distance, \u201cdistance, absence, and regret,\u201d as Charles Rosen puts it in his book\u00a0The Romantic Generation<\/em>.9<\/sup><\/p>\n

If this seems a more orthodox approach than Adorno\u2019s, it is not without its own allegorical and political dimensions. The linden tree, Bostridge suggests, is a symbol of\u00a0Gemeinschaft<\/em>, representing precisely the kind of conservative nationalist sentiments we might expect from such a nostalgic lyric. But within the context of the cycle as a whole, with its oblique references to the repressive Metternich regime (see my notes to \u2018Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening\u2019), the song takes on a refusenik note:<\/p>\n

In the political wintertime of the 1820s, the dreams the dreamer dreams in this song might well be of an idealised past in which Germans of all sorts governed themselves under the linden tree, free from foreign interference or bureaucratic pressure alike.10<\/sup><\/p>\n

As with Eichendorff\u2019s \u2018heartfelt\u2019 poems, however, the wistful, folkloric bent of the song helped to make it popular outside the salon and concert hall, reduced to a strophic pattern by Friedrich Silcher in order to simplify further the folk song simplicity of its main tune:<\/p>\n

The fabulous rustling in the piano had to go; the melodic line was altered in the direction of greater psychological uplift. You can hear the great Lieder, Mozart, and operetta tenor Richard Tauber sing Silcher\u2019s version, liederhosen and all, in a 1930s movie,\u00a0Das lockende Ziel<\/em>…\u201911<\/sup><\/p>\n

Suddenly we\u2019re back in the kitsch realm of the school choir, the glee club, campfire singing, slap-dancing cameraderie, yodelling \u2018in der Fremde\u2019, and Nana Mouskouri. Before yielding to this division between noble and debased versions of \u2018Der Lindenbaum\u2019, however, we should remember that Schubert\u2019s original version lent itself to a \u2018higher\u2019 form of kitsch as a death-wish lullaby, which, \u2018sprung from the profoundest and holiest depths of racial feeling\u2019, lures Hans Castorp into battle at the close of\u00a0The Magic Mountain<\/em>.12<\/sup>\u00a0The earlier \u2018Snow\u2019 chapter in that novel, with its ambivalent exploration of loss and its fetishization, reads for Bostridge as \u2018a good imaginative and mental workout for singing, or experiencing,\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>.\u201913<\/sup>\u00a0zur H\u00f6he\u2019s preferred \u2018workout\u2019, though, is Mann\u2019s later novel\u00a0Doktor Faustus\u00a0<\/em>(1947), especially the parts dealing with the Kridwi\u00df circle of apocalyptic poets, functioning, as Kirsten J. Grimstad describes it,<\/p>\n

as an intermediary channel from the socially detached artist\u2019s utopia of form that is\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0of this world to an aestheticized worldly political utopia in which emotionally charged effects \u2013 monumental architecture, swelling music, rousing nationalist festivals, banners, flags, mythic symbols \u2013 combined to form a seductive veil hiding the ugly reality of the Nazi state.\u201914<\/sup><\/p>\n

While a critique of fascist aesthetics informs\u00a0Winter Journey<\/em>, there are few overt references within the text to Nazism (a notable exception being \u2018Nachtr\u00e4glichkeit\u2019), the poet concluding that to poetize such atrocities after Celan would be capricious and risks its own kitschification. In any case, zur H\u00f6he is interested in Nazi kitsch primarily in terms of the way it affects what we might call Stasi kitsch, which in turn interests him less as a joke at the expense of the former DDR than as a point which connects the repressive regime of his childhood to surveillance culture in the West today. The Hermetic element in the sequence is a combination of metaphors of secrecy, paranoia, narcissism, and the effects of gentrification, all significant elements composing twenty-first century subjectivity.15<\/sup>\u00a0If kitsch plays a part in this, it is because, as the postmodern mode par excellence, it troubles both classical and modernist facture and inhabits the lifeworld to such an \u2018aestheticized\u2019 extent that people find it hard to distinguish between genuine and fake emotions. Translated into modern youth culture, for example, the Romantic dream of death generates miniaturized epiphanies of self-harming, which paradoxically may not be about death at all but self-preservation (like \u2018Der Lindenbaum\u2019 itself, in the final analysis). The composers of the song \u2018Let It Go\u2019, from Disney\u2019s\u00a0Frozen<\/em>\u00a0(2012), claim to have been \u2018thinking in an emo kind of way\u2019 when turning a narrative of self-disgust and exile into a power ballad. The song\u2019s helium ascent from minor to major mode represents Elsa\u2019s pyrrhic victoriousness as she refashions herself into an ice queen, yet the irony is (apparently) lost on the multitude of teens who\u00a0experience the song as a sugar rush of empowerment. Turning loss into gain is of course a way of coping with feelings of shyness and rejection in a society that values only self-confidence, conventional beauty, and conformity (compare Mann\u2019s emo novella\u00a0Tonio Kr\u00f6ger\u00a0<\/em>(1903) ), yet Elsa rejects the \u2018perfect girl\u2019 image only to make herself over into an even more perfect vision of mainstream glamour \u2013 there are no goth combat boots and assassin hoodies here. Even though\u00a0Frozen<\/em>\u00a0courageously rejects standard romantic fantasies in favour of sisterhood and friendship, it appeals to the same appearance of conformity it criticizes, recognizing that narcissistic defense-mechanisms can be as deceptive as they are empowering. The major mode might be euphoric, but this should not overcome the sense that the bravado of Elsa\u2019s final cry \u2018the cold never bothered me anyway\u2019 is, like her claim \u2018you\u2019ll never see me cry\u2019, a confession of vulnerability in invulnerability. Similarly, the wanderer in Schubert\u2019s \u2018Irrlicht\u2019 asserts that finding his way out of the abyss into which the will o\u2019 the wisp has lured him \u2018liegt nicht schwer mir in dem Sinn\u2019. He\u2019s not bothered, yet we know this can\u2019t be the case. This song, however, deploys a B-minor tonality, and here\u2019s the thing: the meaning of major and minor modes in song is influenced by context, and lyrics sometimes work against the emotive grain of the key.16<\/sup>\u00a0One of Schubert\u2019s innovations was to create an ironic dialogue between the lyric and its accompaniment, and although in\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>\u00a0the piano does more than merely \u2018accompany\u2019 the voice of the wanderer, dogging his footsteps and taunting him with the rustle of external nature, it never emerges as a figure separate from his unstable subjective world. Except, perhaps, as Bostridge suggests, in the last song \u2018Der Leiermann\u2019 \u2013 once again in B-minor \u2013 where the piano imitates the droning repetition of the hurdy-gurdy and projects its player\u2019s bare life as the new horizon of the Wanderer\u2019s existence.<\/p>\n

zur H\u00f6he has been anxious not to crowd his reading of \u2018Der Leiermann\u2019, knowing that almost any supplement to the original destroys the space necessary for its minimal, (in)conclusive lyricism. This must seem rich coming from a poet who has to all intents and purposes trampled over M\u00fcller\u2019s faithful homage to the\u00a0Wunderhorn<\/em>\u00a0tradition and extended the\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>\u00a0remit out of all proportion to its folk simplicity. Nevertheless, by the end of the cycle, zur H\u00f6he manages to return to something like a folk idiom with \u2018Der \u201cLeier\u201d Mann\u2019, although, as the title indicates, this is in a characteristically bracketed way. \u2018Papa\u2019s bag was full of shit \/ and we still ain\u2019t hip to it\u2019 runs a fugitive plaint from the early years of hip-hop, and the modern poet strives to register the history of popular lyric as a form of\u00a0d\u00e9tournement<\/em>\u00a0or culture jamming. But it\u2019s also a desire to be faithful to what Bostridge calls the \u2018anti-music\u2019 of this piece, which has inspired recently a non-classical tradition of cover versions in addition to unorthodox performances that reach back to its conceptual origins. Even here, though, innovation is too often too additive, from the inevitable overkill of Covenant\u2019s techno anthem to the carefully wrought paroxysms of \u2018Improvisation \u2013 Schubert Transgression\u2019 by Laurence Malherbe, Laurent David, and the Kadenza Quartet. Thrilling those these are, they are too busy, somehow too \u2018musical\u2019, and one is left yearning for the uncanny iciness of the original piano version. Schubert composed for the fortepiano, and performances on contemporary instruments reveal the droning, clanking repetition of the original accompaniment, bringing the whole piece back in tune \/ out of tune with the hurdy-gurdy. Strangely, a real hurdy-gurdy sounds more lyrical than the fortepiano, as can be heard in the fine recording by Mirkovic De-Ro and Loibner. In criticizing wild interpretations of the song, I do not mean to reject modern interpretations in favour of mistakenly objective notions of the authentic. As Adorno argues in \u2018Bach Defended Against His Devotees\u2019, interpretation is not a supplement to the \u2018original\u2019 work but the condition of its temporal development: \u2018[t]he musical score is never identical with the work; devotion to the text means the constant effort to grasp that which it hides.\u201917<\/sup>\u00a0Bach\u2019s compositions are not pickled artifacts \u2013 they anticipate their realization by new performances and new technologies. And while Bach\u2019s preference for the pliability of the tonally poor clavichord over the harpsichord and early piano provides an insight into his conception of\u00a0The Well-tempered Keyboard,<\/em>\u00a0this hardly restricts the work\u2019s disclosure to performances on an instrument that now signifies (as a \u2018period\u2019 instrument) in a dynamically different way from its use in the eighteenth century. Similarly, a performance of\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>\u00a0on archaic instruments looks two ways; if the creaking fortepiano revives the work\u2019s folkish resonances, its \u2018authenticity\u2019 is really a novelty experienced only because we are used to the greater range of feeling allowed by the pianoforte, which now seems to have been invented in order to realize the dynamics of Schubert\u2019s compositions.<\/p>\n

So when we find the lyrics of popular songs flickering like will o\u2019 the wisps in and out of zur H\u00f6he\u2019s \u2018Leiermann\u2019, the intention is I feel not so much born of a desire to appear \u2018postmodern\u2019 as to register both with and against the grain of the Schubertian legacy, a need to acknowledge its powerful influence on non-traditional folk idioms (e.g., \u2018there\u2019s a shadow running through my days \/ like a beggar going from door to door\u2019) and to counter the vapid appraisal of Schubert as the inventor of the pop ballad, which emerges as a desperate attempt by conservative members of the classical music community to make dark, complex songs accessible to an easy listening audience. Just as Bach\u2019s inventive keyboard music instantly dispels the image of a composer of fusty church music, Schubert\u2019s tonal world, transfigured by chromaticism, intervallic cells, and dissonance, is neither Biedermeier nor populist but the beginning of a new tradition in which the art song erases the distinction between popular and classical forms. This is perhaps why zur H\u00f6he, while satirizing\u00a0Schlager<\/em>, respects Nico and Jackie-O Motherfucker as much as Hugo Wolf and John Cage. There are various \u2018classical\u2019 works informing\u00a0Winter Journey<\/em>, such as Mahler\u2019s\u00a0R\u00fcckert Lieder<\/em>, Schumann\u2019s second\u00a0Liederkreis<\/em>, Schoenberg\u2019s\u00a0Erwartung<\/em>, and Birtwistle\u2019s opera\u00a0Punch and Judy<\/em>, yet only lyrics which touch upon Schubert\u2019s icy thematic are directly quoted or alluded to in the text, their evocation of winter connecting one way or another with the \u2018romance\u2019 of the Cold War and its legacy, given a political edge that zur H\u00f6he identifies with Schubert\u2019s facture.<\/p>\n

This existential politics helps to explain why zur H\u00f6he \u2013 at least for the time being \u2013\u00a0\u00a0has gone into hiding. The\u00a0Winter Journey<\/em>\u00a0poems, with their obsessional implication of domestic surveillance in all aspects of social and intimate life, suggest that the poet has gone off-grid as a way of resisting the new global order of subjection. He becomes the Wanderer: de-phallic, dispossessed, and risking social death in order to overcome alienation in a way he cannot yet articulate. Moreover, zur H\u00f6he is a highly educated man, urbane, immaculately dressed, possessed of an elegant if slightly autistic mien and a precisely articulate if slightly affected speaking voice; yet he calls himself a member of the\u00a0Lumpenproletariat<\/em>, that class Bakunin described as being \u2018almost unpolluted by bourgeois civilization\u2019 and Marx, less approvingly, identified with \u2018ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie\u2019 as well as decayed rou\u00e9s,<\/p>\n

vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars\u2014in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call\u00a0la boheme<\/em>.18<\/sup><\/p>\n

It\u2019s perhaps no coincidence that the \u2018literati\u2019 find themselves next to \u2018organ grinders\u2019, a term often conflated with \u2018hurdy-gurdy players\u2019. No coincidence, either, that in Martin McDonagh\u2019s extraordinary film\u00a0In Bruges<\/em>(2008), the \u2018hitman\u2019, kitsch representative of the outsider in Hollywood mythology, turns out\u00a0\u00a0to be haunted by \u2018Der Leiermann\u2019. zur H\u00f6he, then, not only rewrites the outsider poetic, he lives it, exploiting his paranoia and negating it in the hope of transporting his readers to a place beyond the pure misrecognition of the lonesome subject. If\u00a0Winter Journey<\/em>\u00a0doesn\u2019t quite achieve its\u00a0aufhebung<\/em>, which is dialectically impossible anyway, it nevertheless avoids the pathos into which so-called literary works have descended, fetishizing\u00a0\u00a0and maintaining the subject of loss in political apathy. It would be simplistic to say that \u2018serious\u2019 art resists the euphoric trick of turning minor into major modes. To be sure, what we call the literary novel (as opposed to genre fiction) usually goes in the opposite direction, to the point of inane self-parody, and there\u2019s a particular \u2018voice\u2019 that goes with conservative anecdotal poetry, which affects a dying fall as the poem\u2019s culmination, as if the natural state of art were regretful, elegiac, descending down to darkness on extended wings.\u00a0Winterreise<\/em>almost qualifies as an example of this tendency, being \u2018a work devoid of any happiness or even tranquility\u2019 though not without its strivings and revelations, its glimmers of hope, no matter how illusory they turn out to be.19<\/sup>\u00a0And yet, and yet…the difference between these \u2018dying fall\u2019 works and critical negativity is not always easy to define, but I would say it has something to do with a resistance to the constituted real on the part of an engaged work. The literary novel and the anecdotal poem treat reality as a natural fact, which the form of the work represents without irony or ambiguity, and the reader is invited to empathize with this fact, to accept its pathos as the heart of existence. The work disavows its own artifice, it wants not to be a work of art but a window onto reality \u2018itself\u2019. Truly negating works, however, retain the joy of artifice. No matter how miserable their subject matter, they treat the real as mythical, contingent, ideological, something that cries out for intervention and transformation at the level of imagination and praxis. Poetry says \u2018fuck you\u2019 to Julian Barnes and the literary novel, just as it sticks its fingers up the noses of the new puritanical avant-garde, the academics, the subjectivists, the anecdotalists, and the instagram ego-massagers. Its mode of critique is the suspension of sense, its lack of \u2018expression\u2019; it does not compute, it does not therapeut. Its emotions are possible worlds, not an indulgence in content platitudes and formal stock-responses. The art of the outsider, therefore, can never be allied with tribal affiliations, no matter how radical and \u2018innovative\u2019 these claim to be. The moment innovation becomes a shibboleth, it begins to take on the characteristics of an orthodoxy it disavows; before long, the clerical exponents of the avant-garde will fail to be able to read any text that diverges from a set of easily assimilable formal traits. To some extent, innovative literature merely inverts the order of the mainstream, naturalizing tendency in art: where the latter sees only expressive content, poured into utilitarian form, the former seeks expression through form alone, while policing content for signs of the expressive conservatism it rejects. If the horizon of the mainstream is resignation to the powers that be, that of the avant-garde is helpless anger. This anger \u2013 as a rejection of the status quo \u2013 is all too often circumscribed, splenetic,\u00a0\u00a0and repressive. Torn between a belief in libertarianism and a liberal desire for social justice, it condemns any form of self-expression not conforming to the righteous anger it theorizes. Rimbaud, Artaud, Cendrars, Lautr\u00e9amont \u2013 these are all cherished figures of the wildly, subversively innovative. Yet their impulses are useful to the current post-neo-avant-garde only to the extent that they can be codified and scrubbed ideologically clean for the purposes of peer review in today\u2019s creative industries.<\/p>\n

Whatever zur H\u00f6he\u2019s work achieves, if anything, it is surely dedicated to the overthrow of writing as \u2018industry\u2019. Not a rejection of the commercial so much as a deep distrust of the tendency towards homogenization and the instrumental-professional. Poetry today takes place within tribal communities where expectations of form and expression divide taste, criticism, and politics to the extent that the work of a poet valued by more than one \u2018tribe\u2019 will generate quite different interpretative contexts.\u00a0\u00a0At a certain level, there is no getting away from these affiliations and structures, their qualities and their limitations, and I should be dishonest if I said I was indifferent as to whether zur H\u00f6he\u2019s poems and my versions of them are seen as conservative or innovative. If poetry is to achieve anything genuinely new, it should prove equally distasteful to both mainstream conservatives and those who fetishize innovation at the expense of having something to say. Therefore, if it is to resist orthodoxy, it must risk being hard to assimilate to the values of the tribe. Poetry does not purify the dialect of the tribe but messes with tribal idioms and the belief that those values are in way pure. If its horizon is then the creation of a new tribe, so be it, just as long as it manages to resist the cant of creativity for a few fleeting moments.<\/p>\n

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Anthony Mellors, Norfolk \/ Cambridge \/ Berlin, 2017\/18<\/p>\n

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Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

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1. Jacques Lacan,\u00a0The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.\u00a0<\/em>(Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981), 169.<\/p>\n

2. Simon Winder,\u00a0Germania<\/em>;\u00a0A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern\u00a0<\/em>(London: Picador, 2010), 32.<\/p>\n

3. Daniel Tiffany,\u00a0My Silver Planet<\/em>:\u00a0A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch<\/em>\u00a0(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 9.<\/p>\n

4. Theodor W. Adorno, \u2018In Memory of Eichendorff\u2019, in\u00a0Notes to Literature I<\/em>, 66<\/p>\n

5. Adorno, \u2018In Memory\u2019, 57. Eichendorff features prominently in the Hermann Broch\u2019s 1950 lecture \u2018Notes on the Problem of Kitsch\u2019, where \u2018Abenlandschaft\u2019 is described as lurching from \u2018the most beautiful German lyric poetry ever written\u2019 to \u2018the most insipid and sentimental imitation of popular poetry\u2019. (in Gillo Dorfles, ed.,\u00a0Kitsch: An Anthology of Bad Taste<\/em>\u00a0(London: Studio Vista, 1969), 53-3.<\/p>\n

6. Tiffany,\u00a0My Silver Planet<\/em>, 9.<\/p>\n

7. Adorno, \u2018In Memory\u2019, 73.<\/p>\n

8. Adorno, \u2018In Memory\u2019, 77.<\/p>\n

9. Ian Bostridge,\u00a0Schubert\u2019s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession<\/em>, 115.<\/p>\n

10. Bostridge,\u00a0Schubert\u2019s Winter Journey<\/em>, 120.<\/p>\n

11. Bostridge,\u00a0Schubert\u2019s Winter Journey<\/em>, 122.<\/p>\n

12. Thomas Mann,\u00a0The Magic Mountain<\/em>, quoted in Susan Youens,\u00a0Retracing A Winter\u2019s Journey: Schubert\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Winterreise\u00a0<\/em>(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991),\u00a0<\/em>168.<\/p>\n

13. Bostridge,\u00a0Schubert\u2019s Winter Journey<\/em>, 135.<\/p>\n

14. Kirsten J. Grimstad,\u00a0The Modern Revival of Gnosticism and Thomas Mann\u2019s Doktor Faustus<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Camden House, 2002), 217. See also Chapter 5 of Raymond Furness\u2019s\u00a0Zarathustra\u2019s Children: A Study of a Lost Generation of German Writers<\/em>\u00a0(New York: Camden House, 2000).<\/p>\n

15. The inquisitive reader will find it hard to dispense with Libbrecht and Quackelbeen on traumatic hysteria, the findings of Dwork and Wobber on cryptology, and Burgers and Musterd on gentrification (see Bibliography).<\/p>\n

16. Bostridge\u2019s reading of \u2018Irrlicht\u2019 is less gloomy than that of Youens. Nevertheless, both commentators share a sense of ambivalence in the song, of saying otherwise: \u2018The wanderer\u2019s attitude throughout the cycle so far has been one which seesaws between the expression of true emotion, and a sort of ironic distancing from it, even an embarrassment at it.\u2019 (Bostridge,\u00a0Schubert\u2019s Winter Journey<\/em>, 204)<\/p>\n

17. Theodor W. Adorno, \u2018Bach Defended against His Devotees\u2019, in\u00a0Prisms<\/em>, 144.<\/p>\n

18. Karl Marx,\u00a0The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,\u00a0<\/em>in\u00a0Surveys from Exile<\/em>.\u00a0Political\u00a0Writings<\/em>, Vol. 2. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 197.<\/p>\n

19. Youens,\u00a0Retracing A Winter\u2019s Journey<\/em>, 75.<\/p>\n

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Click here to read:\u00a0Ten Poems from Winter Journey<\/a><\/h4>\n

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Anthony Mellors.<\/strong>\u00a0Recent work includes\u2019Modernism After Modernism\u2019 in Alex Davis and Lee Jenkins, eds,\u00a0A History of Modernist Poetry<\/em>\u00a0(Cambridge University Press, 2015), \u2018Eurydike\u2019 in\u00a0Snow<\/em>\u00a07 (Spring 2019), and Steven Hitchins\u2019s\u00a0Canalchemy Microanthology<\/em>\u00a0(2019).\u00a0\u00a0\u2018 \u201cWilliams Mix\u201d: Collage and Synthesis\u2019 appeared in\u00a0Junction Box\u00a0<\/em>11. Latest project is\u00a0Red Cills Three: Poems of the 2010s<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Winter Journey (Winterreise: Untriangulieren Leben) Daniel zur H\u00f6he Translated by Anthony Mellors   \u2018Outside, one has a hundred eyes; at home, hardly one\u2019   INTRODUCTION   I wer thinking how some fents poals and a gate make all the differents. Russell Hoban,\u00a0Riddley Walker \u00a0 Like an iceberg, there is more of a trig point below […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[59,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Unknown.jpeg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-1HB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6547"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6547"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6654,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6547\/revisions\/6654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}