Annotations for "Hans Egon Holthusen"

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August 5, Afternoon Part One	1:11	Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Campbell and Mr. Collins asked me, by all means, to say something provocative. It did not matter what I said. It mattered only that it should be provocative and that it should have at least something to do with the situation of the novel in our time.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	1:33	Since I could not say no, I decided to consider the novel conference as like a so-called highly GERMAN as the inquiry which precedes canonization and in whose proceedings someone has to play the advocatus diaboli in order to advance against the candidate everything imaginable. I should like to be considered as this advocatus diaboli. And if your breast swells with wrath and indignation, I should ask you to remember that my function is a dialectical one.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	2:17	I myself am not quite convinced that the novel as a genre is finished or no longer possible in the sense that one might say, for example, that in the 18th century, a great theology had become impossible. But I should like to advance a few arguments on the side of this judgment.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	2:40	I should like not for a moment losing sight of the reticence implied in my role of advocatus diaboli to maintain that the novel is not, as is claimed by so many literary critics and above all of course by the novelists, the most significant and important form of literary expression, that we live, as it were, in the age of the novel. That, as I have already said, is merely an act of provocation and a question. At bottom, I am convinced that the novel will emerge victorious from its trial and that the College of Cardinals represented, in this case, ladies and gentlemen, by yourselves will triumph over the advocatus diaboli since we are in a country in which the novel still appears to be in full bloom.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	3:40	I should take as my starting point the simple fact that, among the writers of the first rank in my country, it is impossible to name a single novelist. In making this remark, I do not wish to make an issue of the two grand old men of the German novel, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse. Both of them have been living abroad for decades and are quite out of touch with the most recent developments in our country. And both reached their zenith in the Roaring '20s, more or less at the same time as the great masterpieces of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	4:24	Within the secret of literary activity inside Germany at any rate, the novel does not play a leading role. Of course, there is the normal crowd of prolific and successful writers of novels. But scarcely one of them is capable of prompting in me the feeling to NON-ENGLISH . Scarcely one can affect me in the very center of my consciousness in the same way in which I am affected when I read Rilke, or Auden, or Kafka, or Valery, Most of these novelists are honorable but unstimulating, seem to exist only to satisfy a kind of Arabian night complex. That is the eternal desire of a fanciful public for exciting and touching stories.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	5:18	One never reads them without a certain feeling of impatience and, for the most part, with a slight admixture of bad conscience, as if one were stuffing into oneself too much ice cream. This could suggest the suspicion that the novel itself-- that there was something amiss with the novel itself quite apart from the lack of promising new talent. But there is much to suggest that the impulse to expression among writers of the first rank no longer desires or is no longer able to use the novel form.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	6:00	The experience of the war, for example, the most important theme by far of the younger generation, has so far produced no first rate novel. The best work that has been written about the war has appeared in the form of lyric poetry or personal diaries. It seems as if the impulse to our truth on the part of the writer had suppressed the principle of fiction or we're no longer willing to place confidence in it, as if his emotional intensity shrank from the complication of a plot.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	6:44	The question is, can one convey the sense of situation and the consciousness of reality of modern men in a novel plot? Does there exist at all in our life significant relationship, starting points, climaxes, and above all conclusions? And if no such things exist, why should one, in the development of a novel, introduce make believe equivalents?	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	7:14	It is not a new question. Answers of genius have already been given to it by Kafka, Joyce, and Proust. But it is a question which emerges in you today and perhaps in a more radical fashion than ever before. I further believe that the historical situation in which we are living, or rather the historical experiences through which we have lived, are peculiarly adapted to disencourage an inventor of stories.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	7:51	Must we not confess that we have understood and mastered almost nothing that we have seen with our own eyes, that our imagination does not stretch to cope with the stormy and barbaric history of the 20th century whose witnesses we are? Is the power of the factual and the actual not so overwhelmingly great that the imagination of the artist has no chance?	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	8:23	What is left for us but objectively to document and coolly to reflect on what we have seen? What is left for us apart from the reportage, or in the diary, or, if you will forgive someone who has published a couple of volumes of verse and has had the good fortune to arouse some interest in a handful of readers, or the poem.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	8:51	The poem is an essence and crystallization of a complex moment of living. The poem as an expressive abbreviation and summar of 20 novel plots. I believe that there exists between the lyrical mode of expression and a reflective prose a certain relationship and I believe that it is characteristic of the spiritual situation of our time that we should find in a whole series of authors of the first or of representative rank in quite distinct countries of our civilization a fruitful combination of lyrical and reflective gifts.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	9:37	I think, for example, of TS Eliot, of Paul Valery of Auden, and of Germans like Gottfried Benn and Alexander Schroeder. It is hard to define what the essay has in common with the poem. But I hope that you will agree with me when I say that, in both forms, we find a high degree of stylistic or linguistic density and intellectual tension which distinguishes them from the novel or at least from the classical novel.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	10:12	In the essay, as in the poem, the author renounces the purely material, more or less cause tension of an invented plot, in favor of the more subtle tension which exists between a constellation of intellectual points and stylistic inflections. The imagination of the author outsource the broad hunting grounds of narrative detail and focuses on decisive points in the evolution of a human consciousness. The imagination is no longer concerned with inventing and relating but with understanding and evoking. It is concerned with the question, "what is the situation of man?"	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	11:04	But has this not always been the concern-- always been at an all times being the concern of all art and all literature? Of course. But in the situation of which the modern artist has to speak, the problem of the human condition has become, in a special and acute sense, critical. The questioning by men of man's own nature has become peculiarly urgent.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	11:33	A trend which is common to many of the leading writers of modern literature seems to be the remarkable radicalisation of the questions raised. That is to say the rejection and overthrow of the received and, to our way of thinking, somewhat naive frame of consciousness of our fathers and the questioning of being at all. The word existential occurs to me here, the much abused catchword of our age.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	12:11	The new word, as Ben puts it, that has been there for a few years and which is certainly the most important expression of an inward transformation. It withdraws the emphasis of the ego from the domain of psychology and of INAUDIBLE into the generic, the dark, the concentrated, the core. In such words, I believe we have the evidence of a new situation on which men knows with certainty only the point of the reductibility of mere existence while all else has been lost. The unquestioning scenes of a sense of reality, which went without saying for our fathers, the intelligible world, the doorway to the world, as Rilke puts it, has disappeared from view. The writer asks questions about the very possibility of being. And reality itself has become a problem.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	13:23	When Shakespeare begins his 18th sonnet with the line, "shall I compare thee to a summer's day," or Sir Philip Sidney his Arcadia with, "you goatherd gods that love the grassy mountains, you nymphs that haunt the spring and pleasant valleys," the situation, the self, and the objects of the world, or the mythological background, all belong to a world of experience given, valid, and common to all.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	13:59	The modern poet, however, knows no given situation, no unquestioning repose in fate. What he sings is mere naked being that lives behind the slings and arrows of fortune, mere being alive. In Rilke's conclusion of the ninth Duino elegy, for example the climax of a very great poem, SPEAKING GERMAN, "Behold, I live." All definable situations are left behind for what is here asserted and secured is the consciousness of reality as such.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	14:39	And when in the fifth elegy he speaks of the cheap winter heads of fate, the cheap winter hats of fate, the SPEAKING GERMAN , Rilke is describing fate as a curiously distorting and misleading attribute of the being of man seen through the ironical perspective of consciousness that is without a local habitation and a name. To use a metaphor from modern mathematics, it may be said that this consciousness has, as it were, left the Euclidean space of classical poetry and assumed a non-Euclidean vantage point from which being and reality are no longer unquestionably assured, and given but merely possible, and from which feeling must fight for being in reality and gain and secure them afresh in every new poem.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	15:39	This new non-Euclidean perspective, which appears, for example, in Rilke, is by no means a unique case. We find similar discoveries in Eliot, in Valery, and others. The classical poet is concerned, so to speak, with objects in being.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	16:03	The modern poet ponders over the mere existence of being. He looks at himself and is shocked by the fact of his mere incarnation. He has found a new sense of wonder and, in this amazement, a new dimension of senses is revealed to him. But if we are to ascribe to this new sense of being on a certain level of distinction, as certain if not an absolute general value, then the prospects of the novel may well appear slight.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	16:41	Existential, is the death blow of the novel. Existential is the NON-ENGLISH, says Benn in one of his recent prose works, a bold, radical, a daring but inspired sentence, which gave me the courage in the first place to play the advocatus diaboli among you.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	17:05	But who is Benn, you may ask, to dare to say such a thing. Let me repeat, if I may, a few remarks that I made a fortnight ago in a talk on German literature of the present day. Benn is today recognized in Germany as the most outstanding lyrical poet indeed with Ernstuner and Bear Brecht as one of the most important of the German writers.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	17:31	His work is a swan song of the great expressionistic generation. His theme is the tension between a heavily emotionally charged biological outlook on the one hand and an icy intellectualism on the other. On the one hand, the welling up of creation, the phallic, the urgent, the European yearning for escape to the South Seas, the drunken flood of precocious conditions.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	18:07	On the other hand, the biting negative, which intellect opposes to nature. His prose, which is for the time being more interesting for us as his poetry, is the most individual mixture imaginable of reflective narrative and descriptive elements. It is a style of expressive evocation which shatters the syntactical unity and juxtaposes the fragments in a haunting jazz rhythm, a style which uses scientific and philosophical language but which also includes echoes of technical and military terminology, as well as the language of art and literary criticism, and of INAUDIBLE , and Civil Service German, and of course slang from the Berlin gutter.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	19:07	It is a style of the city which offers its objective correlative to the world of technological civilization in which we live, lit up by flashes of irony, of parody and cynicism, incredibly precise and at the same time rhapsodic, lyrical, and, on the whole, peculiarly moving. Whenever the withering and robust cynicism of the author brings forth its most fantastic flowers, there are to be find the most wonderful of cadenzas, the most ravishing poetry.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	19:49	Benn's prose is, as far as I see it, a unique attempt to produce purely poetic effects with purely prosaic means. He does it by achieving the maximum of density of subject matters and careful calculation of rhythm.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	20:13	It is an attempt to overcome the classical narrative principle of the mere addition, the naive and then, and then, of the traditional epic, and thus to resolve the problem of an absolute prose, a prose, that is to say, what is no longer simply communication but pure poetry, which has rejected time and syntax and all idea of coherence within a plot, and which emerges directly from the voiceless depths of the soul, like a poem. A prose beyond space and time as the author puts it, built up in the world of mere imagination projected on an even plane of the momentary. Its counterpart is typology and evolution.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	21:07	You see Benn is seeking an absolute expression, a world of expression, an GERMAN , which can endure in the senseless circle of time. He seeks a world of expression, I repeat GERMAN, in the place of a world of history, for history for him is a chaos of blood and nonsense, a senseless circle of agonizing vacuities.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	21:36	The only reality in which he believes is the work of art. It is his answer to the form demanding power of nothingness, a phenomenon beyond space, and time, and history, stone, verse, sound of the flute. Thus he affirms Andre Moro's vision that the answer of mankind to the gods on the day of judgment will be a people of statues. I repeat the answer of mankind to the gods on the day of judgment will be a people of statues.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	22:15	For Benn, the enemy is a novel. The enemy is psychology. The enemy is evolution, the servitude of time and syntax, all these inevitable attributes of the classical novel which, in his opinion, must be overthrown in order to make way for new truths and new expression. But psychology was likewise the enemy for Kafka. Psychology, for the last time, this eruption is to be found in his diary. Kafka transformed the novel form into a means of expression of an existential ontological consciousness no longer concerned with psychology. His theme is the mere existence of man caught up in being.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	23:10	His figures are no longer characters with subtle psychological ramifications. They are colorless, anonymous. They are called simple K only with the letter K, surveyor K or chief clerk K. They are not characters but puppets in the game of metaphysical thought. They are the geometrical position from which the metaphysical quant and paradoxes can be read. It would be possible, in addition to this, to show that as early as Proust, the dimension of time is suspended.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	23:58	His La Recherche du Temps Perdu is the heroic attempt through the artistic evocation of time experienced to reach, as it were, a point behind time, like the celebrated ape reaching behind the mirror. But what time is we cannot finally find. One can only apprehend it by a mystic illumination.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	24:24	This happens when Proust in the last volume of his novels, Le Temps Retrouve, perceives intuitively the secret of remembrance in the tactile experience of a minute irregularity between paving stones in a Venetian church and thus finds the difference between time and past, time past and time present, suspended. In this way, he reaches a position beyond the time from which the passage of time no longer exists. And so you see, ladies and gentlemen, that it looks as if the advocatus diaboli had contradicted himself by speaking of a novel which is the negation of the novel.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	25:24	Permit me just a few more remarks. Kafka, Proust, Ulysses are 30 years behind us. And what has happened since then that is really new? I confess that I am a fervent admirer of the American novel and that, like many Europeans, I have for years been a victim of Hemingway and Faulkner. I won't say a victim of Henry James. But is America not an exception?	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part One	25:57	I believe that the flourishing of the American novel is related to the following factors, very superficially-- the youthfulness of American civilization, its historical ascendancy, the integrity of its society. The problem of the novel seems to me to show that American civilization is in a different phase of its development than that of Europe. For Germany, at any rate, this seems to me to be true. And the judgment of Benn, NON-ENGLISH SPEECH, existential that is the death blow of the novel, does mean something, even if it is not to be taken seriously except as in provocation.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	1:12	I only can say that I agree. I agree with you on the-- all the line, you know?	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	1:18	Yeah, you are-- you don't forget that I played a dialectical role. And I know that what you mean, and I'm convinced that the position of men is always the crossroads of the immutability and the mutability of men. But in this case, if you had given this lecture-- I had said the same thing as you said, you see. In this case I wanted to stress certain shocks of consciousness which has-- which have occurred between say-- let's say 1900 and today.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	1:57	And I think that there are certain-- certain mutations in consciousness, and that men can be interpreted as a modern man, as a creature which-- which confronts a completely new situation. I am not-- I'm not an existentialist, and in Germany I always fight existentialism, you see. And all that you say is just to write a complement to what I wanted to say. And I'm not quite convinced that the novel is finished. And I am convinced that if there is a genius who-- who comes-- who is given to us, he will write a new novel. And they write novels, you know. There are men-- there are men who write novels. But it is only to make clear one point and from this corner-- this German corner.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Two	3:13	Yes.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	13:03	INAUDIBLE on Kafka if I may. If I understood you, if I understood you right way, you show a sort of repulsive rejection against Kafka's allegoric style.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	13:21	And you make-- you made a sort of difference between a novel and an allegory. Why don't you accept the allegorical form of a novel? I think it's based on very concrete experiences and it is more realistic than-- than certain novels of the so-called realistic manner. You-- one must not forget that he lived in the ghetto of Prague, and that all his novels are sort of a transfiguration of the conditions in a ghetto, of the jungle of a ghetto.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	14:09	And I think that some of his allegories and parables which he had written in 1910-- as early as 1910-- are a concrete and precise prophecy of what has happened 30 years later all over Europe. And therefore I mean that-- I know a writer in Germany, a very well-known writer who, for example, was three times arrested under each government once. And each time by the same policeman. And that is-- that is his sort of diabolically-- diabolical paradox which is expressed in Kafka.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	14:55	So therefore I think it's very concrete, and if you read it in German you'll see. It's absolutely non-extract-- abstract. Absolute concrete, and the language is full of flesh and flowers and blooms, like-- like flowers on the field. A very sound prose, not modern prose. Very conservative prose, prose which has been influenced-- very much influenced by the best dark bread writers as INAUDIBLE Grimm and INAUDIBLE , and Heber The most solid and-- and conservative. And-- and therefore I felt a little uneasy when you said-- when you said allegoric-- allegorical.	Hans Egon Holthusen
August 5, Afternoon Part Three	15:53	And for the last point, I think that this is a real progress, this Kafkan style, and a symbol for a certain changing of the-- changement of the novel at all. Of the task of the novel and of the form of the novel. A step forward.	Hans Egon Holthusen