Hermétisme et Protestation. À propos de l’œuvre de Georg Trakl

Abstract

Hermetism and contestation This study of Trakl sums up the conclusions of a French «Thèse de Doctorat d’Etat»... Trakl’s production is presented here in its chronological development as well as in its self-contradictory bi-polarity — decadence vs. metamorphosis. The interpretation focuses mainly on the poet’s situation within the history of civilisation, on his anti-bourgeois attitude, which defines the meaning of his work. Trakl’s hermetism is interpreted as a painfully experienced protestation which entails no «engagement» but rather the isolation of the poetic parlance within an aesthetic invention and the most extreme differentiation from the average form of speech-communication. Trakl takes his place in a line of poets who represent (very clearly since the 18th. century, and more particularly in the case of the «poètes maudits») an anti-culture of irrationality, of aestheticism, of the inner Ego. From the angle of social politics, this sort of protestation could be taken for pseudo-radicalism. Nevertheless the poet maintains a tension, the easing of which is not to be found at the level of social economics, but whose concern is instinct and culture in a wider sense — so much so that one is bound to wonder whether this contestation is not in fact responsible for the deeper insecurity. In fact Trakl portrays himself as a victim. In the poet’s attitude here this study emphasises the extremely clearly-expressed consciousness of the historical situation, in which he sensed the marks of the oncoming catastrophe of the World War. In self-sacrifice («bleeding to death») resided for him apparently the ultimate realisation of the poetic art and of self-transmission. Complete absence of communication means lunacy. The poet who lives and speaks contrarily to the norm plays the part of a «lunatic». And yet the very poem also demands of the reader that he makes this transmission possible, he has to collaborate in the changing of the conditions which led to «lunacy».