Extract: writers and literature Marginal Notes (September 1931) in Tests
The spirit of the poem
We should never lose sight that the ultimate source of all literature is the lyric, even if we refuse to make an issue of hierarchy. The habit of seeing in the lyric poet in essence the writer is well established, if somewhat archaic, and nothing shows more clearly that the verse, the writer is someone whose life takes place in conditions other than ordinary conditions.
We do not know as much what is, strictly speaking, a poem. We did not even its outer zone radiation dominated by the concepts of rhyme, rhythm and verse, sufficient knowledge to facilitate our relationship with the experience of reading, much less are we ignoring almost everything its interior. A specific form, not ordinary combination of performances: reduce the poem to this definition seems prosaic, but of all the means that might move us forward at this time, it is still safest. Thus, a performance not much nicer than others: children from singing on a bridge beneath which float lighted boats and reflections from the banks - and even at an infinite distance from the Draft: Auf der Brücke singen Kinder / Auf dem Strome schwimmen Lichtlein3, a simple inversion enough to Goethe to create these two lines magical Lichtlein Schwier, nmen auf dem Strome, / Kinder singen auf der Brücken. Consider their own pace, easy to drum on a table: it has the importance of coaching, a down and the sound, which contributes significantly to the transformation of print, can not for however, be dissociated from it, and no more autonomous than is the side of a figure. One could go on and explore other changes to these details without finding anything that meaningless isolated, and one would conclude that it is reduced to their sum, and their correlations, which allow the birth, remained mysterious , of the whole. Many people, admittedly, like to see poetry in a mystery, but we can also love the clarity, and in this case, there is still no reason to despair of finding it. Indeed, we read the two lines of the example chosen in their first state, then the state definitive, one realizes after all, alongside his other impressions, that the contraction experienced by externally attachable sentences when they take their rightful place as the formal unity that is created there as a single shot at Instead of the blank diffuse, less an event of a change in extra-sensory logical sense. And what words should be used, if not to express a meaning? The language of the poem also, ultimately, is language, that is to say, before any communication, and if we could learn to see this change in the content of the poem produced by the methods of poetry essentially operation, it would at the same time, all the details that we recognize the poem work without being able to link them together, a kind of axis whose presence would clarify their mode of combination.
Apparently, the arguments in favor of this view abound. The word is less the bearer of a concept, as we usually admit, impressed by the fact that its conceptual content sometimes gets defined, that is, if we do not reducing its definition to a technical term, a seal on a loose performances. Even in a word combination as simple and prosaic as " the heat was intense, "the contents of representing words" heat "," lively "or" was "are quite different depending on whether the sentence A Bessemer converter or stove apartment, on the other hand, is a common point between the intense heat of a stove and our feelings. Not only is the phrase derives its meaning from words, words also derive from their sentence, and it applies to the phrase and page, page and all text. In the language of science itself to a certain extent, but in a very large extent in the lay language, container and contents interfere in shaping their meaning and architecture of a page of good prose proves to logical analysis, not as something static, but as the vibration of a bridge that changes pitch in it. Rest, we know that the clean and the duty of scientific thought, or logical or discursive, or - one might say in the opponent here poetry - true to reality, is to channel as much as possible process of representation, to make clear and inescapable: the logic rules are limited to control this task, which has already become a habit psychological almost unequivocal. We may also waive such monitoring, to make words their freedom, but, again, it will not be pure caprice chair their associations, for if the words have several meanings well, they are related meanings: in one choose one, the other is not further: they never sink into absolute inconsistency. At the conceptual identity of the ordinary use substitutes in some way, in the poetic use, the resemblance of the word with itself, and the laws governing the logical course of thought, an act of attraction. The poetic word is like the man who goes where he feels attracted: he will live for some time an adventure, but this time will not be meaningless, and will have significant efforts to do: because the control of the unstable is no easier than that of the stable.
It has been argued that in the course of the poetic work, replacing the deterministic representation of an affect logical thinking, and it seems that a fundamental and emotional tone unit still plays a role in shaping the poem but it is decisive in the choice of words, the intense rational activity as reported by the poets themselves are contradictory. It also explained the difference that affects the same words as they actually use logic or artistic - This was, if I remember correctly, Ernst Kretschmer, in his Medizinische Psychologie, 1922 -, saying they appear here in the full light of consciousness, and there on the sidelines in a mid-zone mid-rational emotional he calls the "sphere". But this assumption - which, moreover, as the "subconscious" of psychoanalysts, too much space designation, is a comparison, because consciousness is a state, not a zone, and almost even a state of exception of the psyche - in turn requires a complement: recognition of the fact that the target tissue, as well as the fabric of our subjective representations, covers the entire said the spectrum between "sphere" and univocal concept. There are words whose full meaning lies in the experience that we need to know: among them, most moral and aesthetic representations whose contents change with individuals and with periods of life, so that fix conceptually, is to risk losing the best. In an ancient text already, I talked about it thought "no ratioïde, both to distinguish it from scientific thought ratioïde considered, that is to say where the power of the ratio is suitable its contents, and to give an autonomy intellectual field of testing and even that of art. The scientific opinion is in fact naturally inclined to overestimate, in artistic creation, from the emotions and the game at the expense of the intellectual part, so that the spirit of literature, which is opinion, belief, feeling or feel, is happy as a lower form of the scientific spirit, made him, certainty, and in reality, these two kinds of mind relate to two areas of living and self-knowledge, whose logic is not exactly the same. The fact that the field of communicable and human communication probably extends no solution continuity, the mathematical language to express emotional, almost totally irrational of the insane does not contradict, but complement this distinction between objects or not to designate unambiguously.
If, excluding pathological cases, we limit ourselves to what still has a value of communication at least for a particular human group, we can be the opposite of the pure concept on this scale, what is called the "meaningless poem" poem without meaning or without cause, as some advocate periodically poetic schools, using arguments invariably questionable particular interest here because it can be really beautiful. Thus these lines of Hofmannsthal Den Erben lass verschwenden / anAdler, Lamm und Pfau / das aus den Hunden Salbôl / der alten toten Frau, they probably present in the eyes of many readers of characters in a poem without meaning: it is also impossible to guess without outside help what the poet wanted to say that removing her mind to their power, and no doubt he will at least partially and for many people in front of many poems. These worms are not beautiful because Hofmannsthal certainly wanted them to say something, though they are not able understand what they say and comprendraiton they might be more beautiful, but perhaps less beautiful. For everything that we can understand their reading is of rational thought and derives its meaning from it. Without doubt one could see there, rather than an example of the power of art, an example of the lack of art on the player. It would then be a complementary experience: for example, put a rack on the lyrical poems of Goethe as expressive, or simply extract by any other mechanical process, every nth word or umpteenth verse, and we would be surprised by the strength of mutilated bodies which result in eight out of ten. What corroborate our idea that the operation is essential poetic shaping of meaning, and it obeys laws that diverge from those of realist thought without losing contact with them.
What enlighten at the same time the problem that the objections raised against the poet's sense of thought profane. This one is his enemy, a form of movement of the mind that also fits well with his own rhythms as different in body movement. It appears perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the opposite extreme of the poem without meaning, in this curiosity that is the didactic poem: with all the aesthetic character of the poem, it does not contain an ounce of sense and at the same time, not a representation that is consistent with rational laws. One has the impression, at least today, that such work is not a poem, but it has not always thought so. Between these two extremes of excess and excessive sense of nonsense, poetry deploys all shades and combinations thereof may be understood as their interference mi-friendly, half-hostile, thinking 'profane' s 'mingling with the thought "irrational" so intimately that what characterizes it, is much less one or the other that their association. That is where we must seek the explanation most fertile of all that has been stored previously under "anti-intellectualism," including its high side and away from this life to own neo-Romanticism as classicism.
In this regard, however, we must add a word. It is not uncommon to hear, and always to people who really have something to say, that great poetry requires a doctrine, an ideological consensus, strong convictions general, to reach its full effectiveness - what implies that very often no more now of great poetry, and this is not without appearance of fairness. It is obvious that energy can more effectively break free and take an expressive form that expenditure for the expression is automatically exempt from a "medium", and the psychological law that requires that the interests ambivalent emotional most often affect one another, speak in the same direction. That whoever wrote it could legitimately have learned by his own experience that one gains access to the full freedom of formal invention than from absolute mastery of the bottom, that this is also true in large for the evolution of the literature, it can admit at least in the sense that works of poetic beauty and pure appear particularly attractive in times when the ideology of flat to serene heights. Franz Blei, who we have already seen so much deep critical, says even in defending these views in his beautiful story of a life, that "poetry, philosophy is also wanting, is detrimental to itself." If it was absolutely correct, we would not expensive in view of the soul that makes the poem an entity capable of increasing intellectual, but obviously, this "radical classicism fulfills the need delineate at least accurately, in a debate thematically so uncertain, his own point of view, pointing to the extreme pole to which it tends. Because even if perfection of the formatting was in poetry, critical, and even in shaping apparently totally free and a stop time, shaping the content provided would still imply modification. Thus n'existet it not a work of art that would be true Catholic to its author, for heresy, at least one or two centuries of hell, and if ideologies to Catholicism after accusing least deviations, is that they are themselves imprecise. The relationship between classical beauty and intellectual ferment is also a report: the very one that has been designated by the fraction "Full of meaning / meaningless." Thus Blei said Swinburne, "and not just him," with such clarity that I can not resist the pleasure of quoting: "We can measure these concepts sometimes bleak, sometimes disingenuous, the importance in all respects from the diction of the poet, as the term is expressed forget, or just collect: himself perhaps forgot. With this style of Swinburne is not just music or sensual. The improviser stanzas shows elegantly constructed, with all its spontaneity, great precision of expression and a perfect safety feature. Our impression that the passage had to be written so and not otherwise is so compelling that one can not imagine the altered verse: she had to climb a wingbeat at this height. "You could describe in more concise and complete the phenomenon, even in the classic poem, transforms the nonsense in direction so that not only sensory experience but the service itself may have" the greatest precision "while burgeoning" conceptions insincere . Nothing to suggest that the gift of thought, reflection or meditation, so closely related to art, is inconsistent with the gift of language that grants are probably of different origin which reach their greater vitality in individuals and at times different, and that the most gifted poets in language often simply a worldview Eclectico-decoration is undoubtedly linked to their taste of language. But the poem was born in these conditions is mostly a work devoid of meaning on a background meaning more or less fantastic: it said without any disrespect, because the scarcity of talent makes it practically moot any distinction of value. In terms of critical theory, however, should get an idea clear, because the willingness of individuals to form relationships with Totality, and if the meaning of the poem is to from a rational interpretation of items and irrational elements as has been exposed, it is important to maintain as much of the demand side.
The significance of the shape
It would mislead the reader to attribute these considerations partial character of all closed, to the extent it exists, their cohesion, so loose it is, can speak for itself. We will complete just a few words about the concepts of form and format that was used. These auxiliary aesthetics have been very useful; lately, especially in the common opinion, it was thought that a beautiful form which was compounded, or sometimes was lacking in a beautiful background - or vice versa, unless both were judged not without beauty. We may recall an anthology of German poetry of the sixties or eighty which dealt very intelligently preface this theme sound principles, followed by a selection of poems entirely bad. Later, we returned to the idea that form and substance in a unit that can not be entirely separate. Today, it is believed that only a bottom may be formed subject to aesthetic analysis: there is no form which occurs on a background, that background appears through a form, and these are these amalgams of form and substance that are elements from which the artwork is built.
The scientific basis of this interpenetration of form and substance, the notion of Gestalt. It involves a combination or a succession of elements given by the senses can produce something that is impossible to express or measured solely by their means. Two examples among the simplest: If a rectangle is formed by its four sides and a melody by notes, is their particular connection that is precisely their Gestalt, endowed with an expressive power that the expressive possibilities of his components explain not. The Gestalten, as also shown by these examples are not entirely irrational, since they allow comparisons and rankings, they do not have less an entirely individual and unique. To use a designation older but still in use, one can also say that they are all provided to clarify that this is not an all-sum, but at the moment they arise, they bring into the world a special quality, different from those of their elements, to which one can add even likely, but not without consequences for the future, that any intellectual transmits a fuller expression of its elements, because a figure has more than one line appearance, and a pattern of five notes speak better to the soul that informs their estate. That said, the most diverse views clash on the way to give the phenomenon of Gestalt in the range of psychological concepts, it is nevertheless confident that this phenomenon exists and that the important properties of the expression Art, like the rhythm and melody of language, are very similar. But if we want to obtain, as will be further interesting conclusions events higher and more complex of life or art, we must not forget that we renounce the same time, temporarily, to the precision that allows only a scientific demarcation problems.
Covered by this proviso, we can boldly say that the effort of adding all that the soul receives or emits characteristic of 'shaping' Elementary, also contributes to the proper administration of all tasks of our lives. He is one of the many features of intellectual economy which tend, by various means, to simplify work and reduce the effort, right from the level of physiology. The "One-Two-Three", which enables the conscripts performing any gymnastics to separate the phases of the exercise eventually becomes a kind of corporeal form easily replicated without analysis, and the mind learns little differently. This production forms can also be seen in the life of language: it is undisputed that one who uses words and phrases according to their meaning and the fullness of their meaning remains incomprehensible to most of his fellow citizens, because they they do not use language as an articulated, but which are preserved. It is found in the intellectual life as in the emotional life, as in all the details personal behavior. Let us imagine, if realistic examples do not make us afraid, the most banal dental procedure in every detail of broken bone parts of the body, introduction of sharp fangs and toxic materials, injections in the gum, opening of internal channels and finally extirpation of a nerve, therefore, practically, a piece of mind! - And we will be delivered to overwhelming terrors. The trick to avoiding this torture the mind is simply not to represent decomposed, but to replace it with the coolness of the patient exercised, the unit round, smooth and familiar called "treatment root, which attaches to no worse than mild discomfort. Exactly the same thing happens when one hangs on his wall a new picture: it draws the eye for a few days, after which absorbs wall and was never more noticeable, although the overall impression given by the wall has probably changed a bit. One could say, to put it in fashion in literature, that the wall effect is "synthetic" and the table for some time, a dissociating effect or "analytical" and that the greater whole, the wall has almost completely absorbed the smaller table. The term of " habituation which is just generally not sufficient to explain the process because it does not account for its active role that is obviously to allow the continued living "between his four walls" to devote himself with a force inentamée in a stable at its particular task. Process which can probably imagine the greatest extent: for the peculiar illusion that we call "sense of wholeness of life" seems to be also one of the bulkheads of the mind. As these examples show, the formation of these wholes is not only, of course, the case of intelligence : All means at our disposal to contribute. Hence the importance of these "events (alleged) all personal" ranging from how they cut short an embarrassing situation with a shrug, to how we write a letter or treating others: no doubt this 'shaping' of living matter does not contribute much, next to the action, thought and this trend latecomer named ordinary sense, to facilitate the work of man. If unable, if for example, as we say today, a neurotic, his missteps - hesitations, doubts, inhibitions, anxiety, inability to forget, etc.. - Can almost always be interpreted also as an inability to develop the forms and formulas that 'help life easier. Returning to the literature, it will be understood to some extent the deep unease What causes the "analytical mind". When they defend themselves against the dissociation of the formulas emotional or intellectual changes which do not appear urgent, man, and humanity itself, defend a law similar to that of nocturnal sleep. On the other hand, excessive swallowing of "wholes." Is also characteristic of stupidity, especially the stupidity morality, that excess is the splitting of the weakness of character. There is no easier to find the balance of this combination in our lives than to find in literature, the right balance between intellectual analysis and narrative naive whose charm lies in its comprehensiveness.
By resorting to these considerations, the concepts of all, Gestalt, form and layout, we have been doing as if they were identical: they are not. Originating from different areas of research, they differ in that they refer either to different aspects of the same phenomenon: closely related phenomena. But since we are not here that uses a foundation for exploring the concept of irrationality in art and why his relationship with the rational is not mere opposition, he is allowed to stick Single topic without worrying about grades, and even the round again. Due to various influences, in fact, the last generation has gradually substituted the traditional pattern of psychic me extremely rationalistic scheme modeled, involuntarily, on logical thinking - pattern that was partially maintained in legal thought and theological and that we could be described as authoritarian centralist psychology - an image of decentralization: the man would take most of its decisions not rationally, intentionally, or even quite consciously, but as a result of reactions of elements somehow closed "complex of return" as they have been appointed as * [* Note RM: Not to be confused with the notion of "complex" in psychoanalysis. If this test avoids the use of psychoanalytic representations is, among other reasons, that literature has made them a spell insufficiently critical, as she despises the "School Psychology", most often, by sheer ignorance of its possibilities
application. ], Which would respond to such and such circumstances, perhaps it would be the whole person who acts, consciousness is merely to follow. This design should not be understood as a "decapitation" On the contrary, it only confirms the importance of conscience, reason, person, etc.. The fact remains that for many acts, including the most personal rights, rather than being driven by his ego, leads him to his suite one occupant in the journey of life , an intermediate position between captain and passenger. However, it is precisely this particular situation between body and mind occupied shape, Gestalt. Consider a few lines expressive geometric complex or the serenity of an ancient Egyptian faces: the shape that emerges from this particular machine is no longer a simple and sensible impression is not yet an unambiguous conceptual content. One is tempted to say that the body is not yet fully transformed into spirit, and it seems that the very thing that exalts the soul, for the elementary experiences of sensation and perception, such as, abstract, pure thought, because of their connections with the outside world, virtually exclude the soul. So it is perfectly legitimate to see in the rhythm and melody a spiritual entity, while recognizing their immediate power over the body. In dance, body movement is dominant, but it beats the spiritual as a shadow play. Theatre has no other purpose than to give a new speech itself, in which it acquires a meaning it did not own. But experience is summed up perhaps in the fact that many intelligent men show themselves as impervious to the art that the feeble-minded, while the other hand, men who can define infallibility beauties and defects of a poem, and guide their action on it, are unable to handle the logical language. It would be wrong to see in this particular aesthetic capacity, it is perhaps ultimately a function of twin thought, closely related to it, even if their extreme manifestations differ.
Review
It may not, of course, confuse poetry and shape. Because scientific thought also has a shape, not only ornamental shape of his more or less beautiful presentation, usually wrongly praised, but an internal form, organic, which is manifested in the fact that this thought, even in its most objective, is never heard by the person who receives exactly as the author intended, but is still undergoing a transformation that adapts to the understanding of each. In this area, however, form lags behind relative to the background invariant, purely rational. But in the test already in the "considerations" or "thoughts", the thought is entirely dependent on its shape, and it was noted above that this dependence is related to the merits that accesses the representation in a real trial and not pseudo-scientific. In the poem, finally, it is necessary to express what it is that the form in which it expresses. Here the thought is as a purely contingent gesture unless it arouses feelings that they are not, almost exclusively, meaning. In the novel and drama, however - and in the intermediate forms between test and treated, the test is a pure abstraction almost unprecedented - the thought, discursive ideas appear naked. Nevertheless, these passages in a narrative always gives a disagreeable impression of impromptu intervention moved, confusion between the performance space and private space of the author unless they are also the nature of a formal element . And it is precisely in the novel, because it is more likely that no other art form to reflect the intellectual content of an era, we can observe the better the difficult problem of their integration, measuring the complexity of overlapping and sometimes overlaps seeking to solve.
So it is a truism that the words of the poet or novelist has a meaning 'high' this is not one to state that meaning is not the ordinary meaning "more" that elevation, but a new significance which should not be confused with the more original it No 'is independent. The same applies to other means of expression, more strictly formal, literature: they also communicate something, but in their implementation, the relationship between what they communicate, and what remains somehow related intransitively phenomenon is reversed. One can see in this process both the adaptation of the mind to areas on which reason has no control, that Adaptation of these areas to reason and speak, in that sustained use or high, which is like the javelin, to reach his goal, to be launched by hand and does not return back. So it comes naturally to ask what is the purpose of this jet, or abandoning the metaphor, what is the task of literature. It is not the intention of this study to comment on this point, but it shows that it presupposes a certain sphere of relations between men and things of literature, specifically, reports, and which its resources are adapted. This is intentional that this "report" does not been described as a subjective expression, but in his relationship with objectivity presupposed. In other words: communicating an experience, the literary work communicates knowledge, this is probably not rational knowledge of the truth - but which is mixed - but one and the other are the result of processes oriented in the same direction is that there are not two worlds, one rational and the irrational other, apart from him, but only one world that contains them both.
Let me conclude these remarks, not by general considerations, but by a very characteristic example, the primitive forms of poetry. It is clear from the comparison of poetry and hymns with archaic primitive rituals that the fundamentals of our lyricism remained virtually unchanged since the earliest times: the division of the poem in stanzas and verse, symmetries, the parallels are found today in the refrains and rhymes, the use of repetition and redundancy as the same stimulus, the insertion of words, syllables or sequences of letters without meaning - that that is mysterious, magical - and finally the fact that the detail, phrase or sentence fragment, only makes sense that its situation as a whole. (Even the suspected role of originality is its counterpart, as these dances and songs are often the privilege of an individual or community who hold the secret or sell very cheap!) However, these old songs to kinds of dance are guidelines for keeping in motion the natural course and influence the gods, their background says what must be done to it, determines the exact form, in order, how to do it. Their form is dictated by the course of the event is their background, and everyone knows that the primitive, even today, much feared for their presumed consequences, errors of form. Through this example and brief explanation, we see that the scientific analysis of the primitive state of the art leads to conclusions quite similar to those that have been learned, regardless of this research, the observing its current state, but the comparison provides the added benefit of making more tangible than can do literary analysis the critical link between content and form, which is that any "how" means "what." The literary authenticity, even today, is an operation aimed at a "production" to a "magic token" and not a repetition of life or life views that are better expressed outside of it. However, while as the "rainmaker" primitive side "bottom", with the centuries has evolved into science and technology and produces its own form long, the side "form", if has also changed direction away from the original magic, did not produce a new "bottom" separate. The bottom of the literary work has remained more or less its ancient form, and although this background, in detail, can bind to a variety of changing goals, the first task of the authentic literature does is not to seek a less modern form of faith, since Orpheus lost in his magic on the world.
