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Toward a Poetics of Animality: Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Pirandello, Kafka

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Toward a Poetics of Animality: Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Pirandello, Kafka Toward a Poetics of Animality: Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Pirandello, Kafka Kári Driscoll Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Kári Driscoll All rights reserved Abstract Toward a Poetics of Animality: Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Pirandello, Kafka Kári Driscoll Toward a Poetics of Animality is a study of the place and function of animals in the works of four major modernist authors: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Ril- ke, Luigi Pirandello, and Franz Kafka. Through a series of close readings of canonical as well as lesser-known texts, I show how the so-called “Sprachkrise”—the crisis of language and representation that dominated European literature around 1900—was inextricably bound up with an attendant crisis of anthropocentrism and of man’s rela- tionship to the animal. Since antiquity, man has been defined as the animal that has language; hence a crisis of language necessarily called into question the assumption of human superiority and the strict division between humans and animals on the ba- sis of language. Furthermore, in response to author and critic John Berger’s provoca- tive suggestion that “the first metaphor was animal,” I explore the essential and constantly reaffirmed link between animals and metaphorical language. The implica- tion is that the poetic imagination and the problem of representation have always on some level been bound up with the figure of the animal. Thus, the ‘poetics of animal- ity’ I identify in the authors under examination gestures toward the origin of poetry and figurative language as such. Table of Contents Abbreviations iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 I. “Neue Dichtung vom Tiere” 1 II. What Is Zoopoetics? 14 Why Look at Animals? 19 The First Metaphor 26 III. Chapter Outlines 31 Chapter 1 The Root of All Poetry: Animal Sacrifice and the Crisis of Representation 36 I. “Die Gewalt der Worte” 36 II. “Like Water in Water” (Immanence Is the New Transcendence) 46 III. Metaphor and Anthropocentrism 50 Hofmannsthal’s Zoopoetics 54 IV. Suitable for Sacrifice? 69 Chapter 2 A Lick and a Promise: Rilke’s Anthropocynic Encounters 76 I. “Wie ein Hund” 76 II. Rilke’s Zoopoetics 82 Into the Open 87 III. Long Division 95 Broken Promises 103 IV. The Other Side 106 “Vogelruf” and “Weltinnenraum” 109 Blood Work 111 i V. More Broken Promises 116 Close Encounters 121 Chapter 3 Fearful Symmetries: Pirandello’s Tiger and the Resistance to Metaphor 128 I. Of Other Tigers 128 II. Frames within Frames 136 The Lady and the Tiger 140 III. “Più tigre della tigre” 146 IV. Spiders and Elephants 151 V. Resistance to Metaphor 158 VI. Inside the Cage 164 Chapter 4 The Enemy Within: Kafka’s Zoopoetics 169 I. Musophobia 169 II. The Animality of the Text 178 Animetaphor 181 Horsemanship 185 III. “Ein widerspenstiger Boden” 190 IV. Inhabiting the Text 199 V. Wolfshusten 204 Conclusion 210 Bibliography 217 ii Abbreviations References to editions of authors’ complete works are abbreviated as follows: SW Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Ausgabe. Eds. Rudolf Hirsch, Edward Reichel, Christoph Perels, Mathias Mayer and Heinz Rölleke. 40 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1975–. GW Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden. Eds. Bernd Schoeller and Rudolf Hirsch. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986. KKA Franz Kafka. Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe. Kritische Ausgabe. Eds. Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley and Jost Schillemiet. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982–. Individual volumes abbreviated as follows: D = Drucke zu Lebzeiten S = Das Schloß NI = Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I NII = Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II T = Tagebücher B2 = Briefe, 1913 – März 1914 B3 = Briefe, April 1914 – 1917 References to the “Apparatband” accompanying each volume will be indicated by App. (e.g. KKAT App. 358) WA Rainer Maria Rilke. Sämtliche Werke in zwölf Bänden. Insel Werkausgabe. Eds. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Ernst Zinn. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1975. HGA Martin Heidegger. Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975–. KSA Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe. Eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. 15 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999. iii Acknowledgements Although writing this dissertation did at times make me feel “wie irgendein gänzlich von Menschen losgetrenntes Tier,” I could not have done it without all the help, sup- port, and encouragement I received along the way, and for which I am very grateful. I would first of all like to thank my advisors, Mark Anderson, Andreas Huyssen, and John Hamilton, who have all been very enthusiastic about the project from the beginning and have pushed me to isolate and engage more directly with the issues at the heart of this dissertation. I am also grateful to Eckart Goebel and Oliver Simons for their thoughtful and productive comments during and after the defence. Thanks to a generous grant from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University in Berlin, I was able to spend a full year in Germany, which was of immeasurable benefit to this project, especially because it allowed me to participate in a number of conferences and other animal-related events, such as the Cultural and Literary Animal Studies (CLAS) colloquium in Würzburg, organised by Roland Borgards, Alexander Kling, and Esther Köhring. The stimulating exchange of ideas and methodologies, and the rich and detailed feedback I received on my work there was invaluable to its further development. I would also like to thank Tyler Whitney, whose thoughtful comments and criticisms have helped to make this dissertation infinitely better. iv Special thanks go to my parents and sister Kate for their unending patience and support, and to Harry, who accompanied me on many a long walk as I pondered the question of the animal, and without whom I probably never would have begun to wonder about Malte Laurids Brigge’s dogs in the first place. He was in many ways the inspiration for this long journey. Sadly, he did not live to see it completed. And finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my wife Susanne. I cannot begin to say how her love, support, encouragement, patience, and criticism have helped me bring this project to completion. This dissertation is dedicated to her. v 1 The first subject matter for painting was animal. Probably the first paint was animal blood. Prior to that, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal. —John Berger, “Why Look at Animals” Introduction I. “Neue Dichtung vom Tiere” Sometime around 1900, a fundamental shift occurred in the way animals were rep- resented in works of Western literature, art, and philosophy. Authors began to write about animals in a way that was unheard-of or even unimaginable in previous epochs. Traditionally, animals had fulfilled a symbolic, allegorical, or satirical func- tion. But in the period around the turn of the twentieth century these animals begin, as it were, to “misbehave” or to “resist” the metaphorical values attributed to them. There is a conspicuous abundance of animals in the literature of this period, and this animal presence is frequently characterised by a profound and troubling ambiguity, which is often more or less explicitly linked to the problem of writing, representation, and language—specifically poetic or metaphorical language. In 1918, the Austrian literary scholar Oskar Walzel published an article enti- tled “Neue Dichtung vom Tiere” in which he too noted “eine nicht unbeträchtliche Verschiebung” in recent literary depictions of animals. “Uralte Gewohnheit der Fabel ist, vom Tiere zu reden und den Menschen zu meinen,” Walzel wrote, citing as an example G. E. Lessing’s treatise Von dem Gebrauch der Tiere in der Fabel (1759), which argued that animals serve as a sort of symbolic shorthand, since the “allgemein be- kannten und unveränderlichen Charaktere der Tiere” (Lessing 1:93) make the moral 2 lesson of the fable far easier to grasp than the infinitely more varied and ambiguous characters of men. “In neuerer Zeit,” Walzel continued, “wird das Tier um seiner selbst willen dichterisch erfaßt. Es soll nicht länger nur als bequemes Mittel dienen, in abgekürzter Form den Menschen zu versinnlichen. Es will sein eigenes Recht finden. Es möchte seine eigenen Leiden und Freuden zum Ausdruck gelangen las- sen” (53). Walzel’s diagnosis is limited to the symptoms of this seismic shift in the literary representation of animals. He cites numerous examples of works by contem- porary French, German, and Scandinavian authors, but says little to nothing about what might account for this development. So what had changed? Six years later, in 1924, Virginia Woolf famously asserted that “on or around December 1910, human character changed” (38). The somewhat hyperbolic precision of this assertion is a deliberately facetious comment on the inherent arbitrariness of any such strict periodisation. “I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg,” she wrote. “The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless.” All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, politics and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes in 1910. (38) I would argue for placing it a decade earlier, and I would like to add a relationship to the list: humans and animals (including the putative hen in the hypothetical garden). In this dissertation I will examine the paradigm shift in the representation of animals in the literature of this period by means of an examination of the place and function 3 of animals in the works of four modernist authors: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Rainer Maria Rilke, Luigi Pirandello, and Franz Kafka.
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