Rotweißrotes Fleischtheater: Über die Komik in Werner Schwabs Dramen by Silke Uertz-Jacquemain

Abstract

Reviews 167 Quatrains Valaisans and the landscape as ‘soundscape’ between art and nature, and Charlie Louth’s on the metrical form of the bilingual ‘Gong’ poems, where the lyric, in dealing with that which lies beyond the reach of the senses, almost becomes it. As this brief summary shows, there is variety here in what music is given to mean and understood to include. This could be said too of Rilke’s own use of the term, and a number of contributors draw on Egel’s distinction, from her monograph, ‘Musik ist Schöpfung’: Rilkes musikalische Poetik (2014), between ‘MUSIK’, Rilke’s theoretical conception of music as the origin of all art, superordinate to individual art forms, and ‘musik’ as an art form made of sound. Martinec argues that it is precisely Rilke’s lack of technical skill in and connoisseurship of the second of these that allowed for the development of the former. But it is also the tendency to see music in such abstract terms that fuelled his wariness towards it, and he exaggerated this abstraction, for instance in an often-quoted letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé on Rodin, where music is opposed to art as a ‘Nicht-Ver-dichten’ [non-concentration], a ‘Versuchung zum Ausfließen’ [temptation to run/flow out, p. 8] (Salomé thought this unfair). It is when music is poised to become something else that Rilke writes about it with the same attention to concrete detail as in his writing on art; in his work, distinctions between music, sound, noise are, as Eckel points out (p. 118) flattened, indeed also distinctions between sound and silence (Louth, p. 145). In the prose piece ‘Ur-Geräusch’ (1919), which calls for the use of all the senses to capture that which is beyond them, sound is material, hearing becomes touch: as Rüdiger Görner implies in his opening essay, Rilke’s musicality consists in the way sound becomes physically, or imaginatively, present in the reader and listener. As Louth puts it in his recent book Rilke: The Life of the Work (2020), ‘The poem moves, and so it moves us; it reaches out to touch us, and it touches us’ (p. 578), and while the present volume takes seriously Rilke’s tendency to understand music as an abstraction, it seems haunted by this suggestion. Rey Conquer Pembroke College, Oxford Rotweißrotes Fleischtheater: Über die Komik in Werner Schwabs Dramen. By Silke Uertz-Jacquemain. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2019. Literatur und Leben 90. 209 pp. €45. ISBN 978–3-412–51364–1. The works of Werner Schwab (1958–94) perform a continual balancing act between fundamental socio-political critique and the exposition of this critique as itself a matter of negotiation. His texts are neither merely a game with language (‘Sprachspiel’) nor mere social criticism. In fact, Schwab’s works ceaselessly reveal themselves to be both a product of specific societal conditions (for example, Austrian politics, fascism, racism, the family as system, the Catholic church) and inherently deconstructive. Few other authors turn so consistently and convincingly to language as both their vehicle for critique and their subject matter. Reviews 168 In her dissertation, Silke Uertz-Jacquemain aims to analyse the particular humour (‘Komik’) that scholars and journalists alike have identified in Schwab’s dramatic works (p. 15). She takes as her starting point the claim made by Carine Delplanque and Renaud Lallemant (2001) — itself, as she points out, an unattributed quote from a 1991 article by Michael Merschmeier, and an oddly specific reference on which to base an entire thesis — that ‘Schwabs Figuren wehren sich durch Wortgewalt gegen die Weltgewalt’ [Schwab’s characters defend themselves against the violence of the world using the violence of words, p. 15]. Uertz-Jacquemain expounds that Schwab’s dramas use hyperbole to ridicule that which is lacking or deficient. Their humour is thus satire, ‘die bisweilen in Groteske umschlägt und wieder in Satire zurückfällt’ [which at times changes into the grotesque and then reverts to satire, p. 15]. However, in the chapters that follow, this thesis is never really developed, nor is the question of ‘Komik’ properly dealt with. Following a summary of theories of humour...