Reading Colour: George, Rilke, Kandinsky, Lasker-Schüler by Rey Conquer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Colour: George, Rilke, Kandinsky, Lasker-Schüler by Rey Conquer Neil H. Donahue Reading Colour: George, Rilke, Kandinsky, Lasker-Schüler. By Rey Conquer. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019. Pp. x + 272. Cloth £55.00. ISBN 978-1788746755. As the title suggests, Reading Colour addresses an activity, a relationship of engagement, between a reader and a poetic text, that produces a meaning, however differently. As an ongoing activity, the reading of color provides an exemplary exploration of the production of literary meaning and limits of verbal representation in the period of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century German literary modernism. For Rey Conquer, the language of color, whether in literature or in practical use in the world, has “a certain elusiveness with respect to meaning,” which can only be ascertained through careful parsing, attentive close reading, as it “oscillate[s] between semantic richness and emptiness or indifference” (3). The question of how color functions— how it signifies—condenses broader questions of literary signification, and what better place to study such condensation of signifying practices than in Dichtung? The poets of the subtitle make particularly florid (if not also floral) use of color, which, in turn, makes the question of color a good point of entry to understanding the individual poet, the period, and the problem with verbal color. In order to establish the theoretical contours of the discussion, Conquer’s very well-researched study draws upon a broad range of sources from related studies of other literatures (American, French, English, etc.) to studies of cognitive science and perception, natural science (plants, birds, etc.), linguistics, film, philosophy, and especially art history, while keeping the focus on the literary question about color and how it works, framing the problem between the “brute reality of colour” (20) and its “semantic unresolvedness” (20). The cornerstone of the argument for this period is, necessarily, Rimbaud’s poem “Voyelles” (Vowels, 1871), which teases with its suggestions of referential correspondences between language and color— “A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, voyelles” (A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue, vowels)—while highlighting the arbitrariness of such equations. If it were only so easy! Rimbaud channels Baudelaire’s poem “Correspondences” from Flowers of [End Page 619] Evil (1857; not cited by Conquer), in which he imagines a “forest of symbols” where “Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent / Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité, / Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté, / Les parfums, les couleurs et les son se répondent” (Like prolonged echoes mingling in the distance / In a deep and tenebrous unity, / Vast as the dark of night and as the light of the day, / Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond, trans. William Aggeler, 1954). Here, scent, sound, and color intermingle into a unified, synaesthetic, and self-contained symbolic realm. Both poems amounted to manifestos for French symbolism with its hermetic aestheticism, which leads Conquer directly to Stefan George, but not before establishing in the German context points of instructional contrast with illuminating readings of poems by Arno Holz (excerpt from Phantasus, 1898–1899/1916–1929) and Kurt Schwitters Merzgedicht (“An Anna Blume,” 1919). This lineage and these readings demonstrate the new materiality of poetic language as it separates itself from any easily referential or transparent realism in favor of its own textured textuality as object and artifice, paralleling the trend toward abstraction in the visual arts as a manipulation of line and color on/in its own two-dimensional surfaces. The first two of four main chapters examine in prismatic detail George’s brilliant aestheticism and mosaic surfaces of rhymed language (“Gerformt aus feuerrotem golde / Und reichem blitzendem Gestein,” Die Spange); and then Rilke’s exquisite formalism that balances in equipoise the visual and the verbal, surface and depth, image and word, with painterly color as the visual mediation, like his use of grammatical subjunctive on the conceptual level. Whereas these chapters place emphasis on the construction, the fabrication, of the poems, the next two probe the interactive process of reading poems, where color has cut the cord of referentiality altogether in order to forge possibilities of meaning in relation to other words and usages...