Helmut Heißenbüttel, Texts, Ts. by Michael Hamburger, M. Boyars, 1977.
German writers after 1945 had more reason than most to reflect on the
corruptibility of language and the merits of silence.
Many animadverted briefly - and then settled down to more or less
traditional forms of story-telling or poetry. Others, from the 1950s
on, were more radical, exploring the possibility of fresh starts via
language stripped and re- ordered. Their centre was Vienna but Helmut
Heissenbuttel, born at the opposite end of German-speaking lands in
Wilhelmshaven, was equally radical and more independent of groupings.
Moreover his fascination with the limits and the resources of
language never flagged over almost four decades. Although his own
literary practice and his thinking about literature were never other
than measured and reflective, he became, as the years passed, a
living reminder of those distant, heady days of linguistic
experience.
Heissenbuttel was born in 1921, served in the Second World War until
seriously wounded (he lost an arm) in 1942 and then studied - first
in Dresden and Leipzig, after the war in Hamburg - Architecture, Art
History and German, a combination that may well be reflected in his
tireless interest in typography, layout and in concrete modes of
writing.
In 1957, already author of two volumes of experimental texts
(Kombinationen, 1954, and Topographien, 1956) and a recipient of a
literary award from Hamburg, he became editor of the "Radio-Essay",
a department of South German Radio in Stuttgart. For over 20 years,
until 1981, he was at the centre of a creative enterprise that was a
distinguishing feature of German writing in the 1950s and 1960s - the
radio play was a form that engaged a surprisingly large number of
Germany's leading writers.
The radio play was a natural medium for a writer interested in the
distance between language and the visible, material world. In the
modern, post- realist world language was no longer able, in
Heissenbuttel's view, to reflect or penetrate a reality beyond
itself, no longer anchored by systems of thought and literary
practice. What was needed was "a new and radical nominalism . .
. that takes words as objects, structuring words to form a new
reality, not figuratively standing for something, but like a second
reality".
In practice, Heissenbuttel was neither as prescriptive nor as
divorced from reality as he might sound. He rejected even the word
experiment - it suggested too clear a sense of purpose - preferring
Ausprobieren ("trying things out"). In much the same
spirit, he published his poems and other pieces from 1960 onwards in
Textbucher, thus avoiding any kind of genre definition. His
refocusing on language as language might seem impoverishing - he
quotes more than once Paul van Ostaijen's claim that "the most
beautiful poem about a fish is the word fish" - but he
demonstrates with great virtuosity and in a variety of forms how far
a return to linguistic basics can enrich the range both of poetry and
of short prose.
Even a poem like the following, creating visual order out of a
trivial occasion, makes something memorable out of one man, one
bench, one hand, one dried biscuit - and crumbs:
I Mann auf I Bank
I Zwieback in I Hand
I Hand
in I Hand und
I Mann und
1 Zwieback und
Hand
in Hand und
auf I Bank
I Zwieback
I Zwieback Hand und
Krumel
Non-literary everyday usage, newspaper reports, the language of
politics and bureaucracy supplied Heissenbuttel with his raw material
(his term) for collages of interlocking or interrupted quotation or
for teasingly repetitive demonstrations of language growing circular
or contradicting itself. The results could be taxing (the quotations
were always unattributed) and yet language, however rearranged,
pointed back time and again, often wittily, sometimes menacingly, to
the users of language.
Heissenbuttel was most at home in short forms. He attempted, however,
one full-scale work, the novel D'Alemberts Ende ("D'Alembert's
End", 1970), in which nine people in one day exhibit the
linguistic habits, the colloquialisms, the jargon of their class and
their profession in exchanges which flatten out plot and character in
a tortuous display of language in use. That novel has been more
acknowledged than admired; indeed Heissenbuttel himself, perhaps
inevitably, has enjoyed much esteem (he was awarded the Buchner Prize
in 1969) but little popularity. Yet his dominant presence in the
field of linguistic "trying things out" has been recognised
by generations of young, would-be innovative poets right into the
1990s.
"Everything is possible, everything can still be said" -
thus Heissenbuttel in 1965. It was his motto for decades,
fascinatingly exemplified, and others have adopted it. - Philip Brady
“The Dilemma of Being High and Dry”
by Helmut Heissenbüttel
a man’s high and dry and doesn’t give up hope of spotting land
that’s the dilemma he’s in but he doesn’t like his cousin the
water-colorist does namely color the water
the fact that he’s high and dry is a problem of a more general
nature and as long as he won’t give up this prejudice he’ll tend
to hallucinate banks in place of slopes sea in place of sand being
all wet in place of being all dry wherever he looks he sees
waterlevels and lightand-shadowreflections and wherever he listens he
hears gulls creaming and sirens
he’s developed a liking for occupations like barge captain pilot
sluice keeper coast guard lighthouse man and a dislike for sayings
like water has no bounds keep above water on my plans made his mouth
water a scoundrel of the first water
although he detest nothing more than apologies it happens now and
then that looking backwards or forwards he slips up and argues in a
sort of apologetic way how it has happened to him and others too
namely to live in a world that you don’t see as it is but through
who knows what imaginings
a somewhat complacent man in his midforties who sometimes has a
depressing effect on people around him with a tendency towards
portliness not unfriendly but very much reserved squinting what would
he see anyway certainly not the open sea maybe coastscapes breakers
piers canaland-bridgetorritory it’s got to be the watercolorist had
said water back there at the end of the shor road the house which
would when really be there
—Translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop
_______
English language copyright ©1977 by Rosmarie Waldrop. Reprinted
froom Diana’s Bimonthly, ed. by Tom Ahern, Vol V, No. 3 (1977).
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