Mimesis of Everyday Life in the Kunstgespräch of Büchner's Lenz
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Anna Guillemin Mimesis of Everyday Life in the Kunstgespräch of Büchner’s Lenz: Realist Aesthetics between Anti-Ideal and Social Art This essay redefines the blueprint to an aesthetic program espoused in Büchner’s Lenz. This aesthetics finds its place between anti-ideal and social art. It calls for a mimesis of everyday life that conceives of realism in terms of vitalism. Such an aesthetics revolves around a series of liminal figures and focuses on threshold moments between life and death, change and standstill, generation and manifestation, thus reconfiguring the paradoxes inherent in mimetic representation. The aesthetics is at once experi- mental and empathic; it engages the spectator sensually as well as socially; and it finds reverberations of the creation in the work of art. Comparisons with the idealism advanced in the works of Winckelmann and in Goethe’s commentary on Diderot’s Essai sur la peinture, as well as with the plea for social art in Saint-Simonianism, demarcate the parameters of the program. I. In his groundbreaking study of representation, Mimesis, Erich Auerbach argues that western literature made a crucial step towards greater realism when, in the early nineteenth century, it emancipated itself from the rule of a separation of styles.1 When writers like Stendhal and Balzac chose tragic heroes from the ranks of the indiscriminate and the everyday, they broke the tenet that preserved tragedy for the highest social sphere. Modernism, in Auerbach’s estimation, advanced this mimetic program significantly by moving literature from a serious consideration of contemporary social reality into the realm of full-fledged domestic realism and its depiction of the ordinary, random detail. When Mrs. Ramsay, in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, measures a stocking she is knitting against the leg of her son James, the detail is used not as a plot device but as an everyday moment in and of itself, infused with mean- ing and tinged with tragedy. The random moment (“der beliebige Augenblick”) allows realism to achieve a level of egalitarian, inclusive humanity previously unavailable. When it comes to this fleeting moment, marked by the mundane, Auerbach is adamant: “Je mehr man ihn auswertet, desto schärfer tritt das elementar Gemeinsame unseres Lebens zutage [. .]”.2 1 Erich Auerbach: Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur. Bern: Francke 1946. 2 Auerbach 513. 136 Auerbach concentrates on the achievements of the French nineteenth century in narrating this dismantling of the separation of styles – Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, the Goncourts, Zola – as well as the French and British twentieth century – Woolf and Proust – while dismissing German writers, especially the Classical authors Goethe and Schiller, for their ongoing lack of serious engagement with contemporary social reality. The limitations of German realism, its inability to portray contemporary economic, social and political reality as anything beyond quiescence, can be seen, in Auerbach’s estimation, in the full spectrum of writers, from Jean Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gotthelf, Stifter, Hebbel, and Storm to Fontane and Keller. Within German literature, Auerbach sees only two exceptions who could have broken free from this trajectory had death not claimed them before their time – Heinrich von Kleist and Georg Büchner.3 Writing Mimesis in wartime Istanbul, Auerbach may not have had editions of their works handy. For in considering Büchner’s few surviving statements on aesthetic realism, Auerbach could have discovered an aesthetics of the everyday, of the socially marginal, of the secular and the profane, of the ordinary and domestic that in many ways accomplishes what he seeks. The comparatively small body of works left by Büchner does not include an aesthetic program as such. A number of documents, which could have contained clues about this program, have not been preserved. A diary of sorts, found in Büchner’s affects after his untimely death at age 23½ in Zürich but never mentioned again, is reported as offering “reiche Geistesschätze” and potentially also notes on literature and the arts.4 Büchner also translated two of Victor Hugo’s plays (Lucretia Borgia and Maria Tudor) into German for an edition undertaken by the publisher of his drama, Danton’s Tod. While it seems likely that he and his mentor Gutzkow exchanged letters on modern French playwrights, none has survived. With such losses, and these are only documents known to have existed, it almost comes as a surprise that two of Büchner’s letters to his parents comment on literature. But both are written primarily in order to defend Danton’s Tod against the charge of impropriety leveled by early critics, and likely to be shared by a conservative family.5 Apart from oblique references to nature and life, to form and beauty in the scientific writings, in particular the famed “Manifestation eines Urgesetzes, eines Gesetzes der Schönheit” (FA 2: 158), all that is left are passages in the literary works, taken to be poetic self-reflections – the so-called conversation 3 Auerbach 421. 4 Qtd. in Walter Grab unter Mitarbeit von Thomas Michael Mayer: Georg Büchner und die Revolution von 1848: Der Büchner-Essay von Wilhelm Schulz aus dem Jahr 1851: Text und Kommentar. Königsstein/Ts.: Athenäum 1985. P. 137. 5 FA 1: 403–404 (May 5, 1835) and FA 1: 409–411 (July 28, 1835)..