Prerequisites — Heissenbuttel
I
It seems to have been somewhat forgotten today that literature does not consist of ideas, images, feelings, opinions, theses, objects of dispute, “objects of intellectual use”, etc., but of language, that it has to do with nothing other than language. And if it has not been forgotten, it does not seem clear what this means. What does it mean?
2
Literature, in terms of its linguistic material, cannot be distinguished from the talk that everyone takes part in day in, day out, and in which the general means of human communication consists. It is called colloquial language. And that means on the one hand something with which one deals and on the other hand something that deals for itself. If you like, colloquial language is the lowest level of language, low in that it is largely determined by practical needs, by the compulsion to communicate as quickly and smoothly as possible. In contrast to this, literature would be characterised by selecting and forming principles.
3
But the fact that literature consists of language also means that this language is a means, something that conveys what wants to emerge and come to consciousness. This means differs from the means of painting and music, for example, in that it is much more pre-formed than colours or sounds. Language encompasses a wide and varied range of meanings. Two components play a role. The words and the sentence-like linking of the words with each other. The words are not unambiguously sign-like, but have, as it were, a courtyard around them. (They are historically- etymologically or socially or individually changeable in their meaning). The syntactic linkage is based on a basic model, that of subject-object-predicate. This basic model states that linguistic engagement with the world takes place under the premise that there is always something to which everything relates and something else that stands opposite this point of reference, but both are connected to each other in the form of action and behaviour. This model has been differentiated many times. A system of subordinations and superordinations reacts to the most subtle stimuli. The smallest nuances become visible. All of this plays a role when one speaks. All of this has always anticipated certain decisions, wherever an attempt has been made to speak in literary, i.e. exemplary, terms. On the other hand, through the exemplary speech of literature and poetry, the general sphere of language has always been changed, modified and renewed.
4
If language itself has provided basic models and schemes for human orientation in the world, literature has always gone beyond this and produced new special models. Special models that serve man’s self-understanding. What distinguishes the literary way of speaking from the general one is the extraction of these special models. The principles according to which this is done were and are derived from the general linguistic rules. The linguistic field is narrowed down according to special rules. These range from the restriction of vocabulary and the prescription of certain syntactic forms (in dialogue and drama) to the complicated metrical constrictions in the poem. The process became so ingrained in the course of time that the principles according to which it took place were paradoxically taken for the thing itself. Anyone who was able to fulfil certain rules (of the sonnet, for example) in a purely technical way had already made a poem. Which was not the case.
5
Something else comes into play. The language of general and practical understanding can only ever be a historically conditioned one. Insofar as the literary “special model” can only derive its meaning from the connection to the general linguistic sphere, it can only ever represent the respective present situation. Rules and principles of literary segregation are historical. At the same time, however, everything that is reflected in language does not happen merely as a result of a change in the practical conditions of communication, but rather because that which has turned away and changed has come to consciousness in literature. The changes in language mean changes in the interpretation of the world. Literature grows out of this process and at the same time drives it forward. The length of time over which certain ideas and rules have been preserved has always depended on how long the circumstances have allowed a constant method of orientation. Time and again, there have been reversals and attempts to renew tried and tested methods. Today, this seems difficult to achieve. The linguistic abbreviation procedures and the motif canon of the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, are already lapsing into rigidity. Anyone who wanted to take Balzac or Fontane as a model today could only do so if our world and its linguistic expression were essentially the same as those of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers. They certainly are not. PRO DOMO
6
When I speak of myself and of what I have tried to say in these sentences, I must say that it seems to me that something fundamental has changed. What has changed could be read in many ways. But if I am literary and if I try to live in the language (our language) in such a way that it answers me, then all the other reasons are none of my business. In what would the answer of language lie? Certainly not in words like atomic bomb, manager, Olympics, etc. (although this may come up again). (although this can come up again), not in socio-critical philosophical themes (such as the talk of the “dull existing”), not in programmes of one kind or another. Rather, I recognise (or think I recognise) that the old basic model of language of subject-object-predicate no longer holds. We still use it. But it is already rigid. It appears worn, crumbling away, weathered. The system of language itself is beginning to become “classical” in the sense of the conservators. Where conservators are at work, a corpse must be expected. All attacks against what is unfamiliar make use of the arguments of conservators. All arguments gather in the postulate of the everlasting. But is it still understood in reality? How is it spoken? Formulaically. How do we react? As if to signals. The difference between what I call myself and what I am not is blurred. Not oriented at all (or from the outside). Can I talk about it?
7
I have tried to talk. I tried to get to the core from station to station. The fundamental thing, which I felt changed, showed itself to me in a situation, in which the literary, the exemplary speech must engage itself expressly and in a special way with the reasons of the language. When the traditional way of speaking eluded us, it was necessary to penetrate into the interior of language, to break it open and to question it in its most hidden contexts. What emerged cannot be a new language. It is a speech that contrasts with the traditional syntax and word usage. Words are interwoven, because the unambiguous identifiability is now finally absorbed into the realm that remains indeterminable in itself. This essential indeterminability factor never lets it come to what one could call image or metaphor. Image or metaphor would be, as something clearly identifiable, part of that language which just eludes. Sentence subjects, sentence objects, sentence predicates fall away, because the experience, which is talked about, stands outside of the unambiguous subject-object-relationship. Only the formulation which leaves one of the links open in the old basic model is able to say something about it. Contexts are not formed in systematic and logical-syntactic interrelation, but from secondary meanings, from ambiguities that arise in the weathered syntax. Uncertainty, alienation, groping in the dark, but also the incomprehensible certainty of the still-present become thematically visible in the worn-out empty phrases and the knotted buzzwords of education, become thematic in the one small particle “denn”. All this does not happen in an “abstract” combination of “linguistic material”, as if instead of blobs, gradients and brushstrokes, words and sentence fragments were now used. All this does not happen as “encoding” of any kind. It happens as an attempt to penetrate for the first time and to gain a foothold in a world that still seems to elude the spradhe. And the border that is reached is not one to the nothingness, to the speechless, to the chaos (whatever the reasons may be that are invented for the pushing to such border), it is the border to what can’t be said yet.
(machine translated from Voraussetzungen — Uber Literatur — Helmut Heissenbuttel published 1966)
