Recursive Mindscapes: Noematic Confusion in the Kunstgespräch of Georg Büchner's Lenz

Abstract

I argue that the famous Kunstgespräch in Georg Büchner's Lenz is less a talk about art than a scene in which Lenz's speech is increasingly confused with the mind of a woman by a window as depicted in the second painting of the Dutch School. By dint of free indirect discourse presented in monologue form, Lenz's mind in effect becomes indistinguishable from that of the woman in the painting—as well as from the narrative voice of the novella's third-person narrator. Specifically, I base this intrusion or perhaps appropriation of the narrator's narrative voice on the near identical depiction of the scene of Lenz's sermon earlier in the text. Against other critics’ diagnoses of paradoxes and enigmas in Lenz's speech, I offer a reading of the Kunstgespräch that identifies “noematic confusions” within the ambivalent phenomenological parameters of these first- and third-person narrative perspectives of the passage to be at the core of the Kunstgespräch's enigmas.