Freud, de l'Acropole au Sinaï. Le retour à l'Antique des Modernes viennois by Jacques Le Rider

Abstract

284 Reviews speaking its own incomparability with what is to be expressed, but in general he concentrates on poetological poems and rarely refers to themechanisms of the poetry at hand, rarely demonstrates howRilke foregrounds human-made, artistically made language as it constructs the poetic world. But L?wenstein does manage to convey that the laterOrphic imagination is already activated here in the earlywork where external 'things' are made into images of thepoet's inner life. This 'Poetik des Vorwands' ('pretext', something in disguise, pp. 145-80) sees the poet articulating not just theworld or himself but himself through theworld. As images the things in the poems are no longer denotative but connotative and dynamic. The things have become language, 'Vorwand', 'Gleichnis', 'Metapher', surpassing the earlier 'Stimmungslyrik' and transcending themselves as things, gesturing towards the unsayable emotions and 'Geheimnisse' (pp. 152-53) of the poet. L?wenstein then introduces the crisis in Worpswede, where nature refuses to become the 'Vorwand' ormetaphor for the poet's spiritual condition, and Buch der Bilder,where individual objects press forth in their 'Eigenwert', offering in theirdif ference a figurative form of expression thatpoints to an unknowable interior.Here he links in,but does not demonstrate, the non-signifyingmusicality and 'Schweigen' of the Stunden-Buch. L?wenstein sets the scene, then, forRilke's middle period. Here the thingsare consciously constructed in themeasuring of form to thingbut they are still external equivalents for inner experience, and L?wenstein righdy argues that Rilke is not attempting objective depiction. He rejects the terms 'Dinggedicht' and 'Erfahrungsgedicht', although he does not direcdy state that this isbecause neither describes the balance between subjectivity and objectivity, the 'Sagen' and 'Bilden' thatRilke is trying to achieve. L?wenstein's chapter summaries are useful, his footnotes excellent, and he continually refers towhat is coming in the laterwork and to thewider context of fin-de-si?clepoetry. Unfortunately, however, he rushes through the poetics ofRilke's middle period without showing the poems themselves. From thispoint onwards the analysis becomes more vague, with terms and statements left unexplained; for instance,when arguing that the poems 'Wendung' and 'Waldteich, weicher, in sich eingekehrter' leave the desperate, trapping gaze of themiddle period behind and seek a relation of 'love' with theworld, he fails to indicate how this 'Schauen' has become disfiguring and to define this poetics of love. L?wenstein's introduction claims that the term 'poetics' inRilke criticism is over-used, and that his studywill focus only on poems which demonstrate a poetics in both theory and practice (p. 26). He does not abide by this, rarely showing how thepoems work as language. He does, however, convincingly show the early work unfolding into the poetics of theNeue Gedichte. University College London Marielle Sutherland Freud, de l'Acropoleau Sinai'.L? retour ? l'Antiquedes Modernes viennois.By Jacques Le Rider. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. 2002. viii + 305 pp. 22,00. isbn 2- 3- 5 958~ ? The dedication of the Viennese 'Moderns' to the 'new' and the 'youthful'went togetherwith a fascination for the past ? notably theRenaissance, and to a lesser extent theAustrian Biedermeier.In between producing books on Viennese diaries (see AUSTRIAN STUDIES, 12, 2OO4 285 AustrianStudies,n [2003], 225-26) and Schnitzler (Arthur Schnitzler ? ou laBelle ?poque viennoise[2003]), Jacques Le Rider has traced the storyof their interest in themore distant past of theAncients. It is a lucidlywritten and very readable study, and at the same time so wide ranging that a review can only hope to oudine some of the ground covered. The pivotal figure is Sigmund Freud, who reacted to the influence of Nietzsche by undertaking a 'systematic deconstruction' of Dionysus and Prometheus (p. 27); in pursuing Freud's intellectual journey Le Rider provides a survey of the taste and educational culture of a whole generation. The starting-point is the resistance to Weimar classicism in late-eighteenth-centuryVienna, by contrastwith the 'Tyranny ofGreece over Germany'. A century later the architecture of theRingstrasse is still more imitative of the Baroque than ofAncient Greece, the parliament being the only one of the historicist public buildings to evoke Greek models. At the same time the theatrical figure that captured the imagination ofMakart was not derived from Greece...