'von einen sprachen'. Poetologische Untersuchungen zum Werk Ernst Jandls by Michael Hammerschmid, Helmut Neundlinger

Abstract

Reviews 215 at times, the book nevertheless combines detailed analyses with an eloquent overview of the relationship between national identity and art from thedistanced expert perspective of a British scholar. Furthermore, itmanages to address most of thediverse tendencies thatbecome part of the Second Republic's new identity, thus inspiring stillmore interest in this period ofAustrian literaryhistory and its heterogeneous ways of expressing the cultural climate through text. Queen Mary, University of London Heide Kunzelmann 'von einen sprachen'. Poetologische Untersuchungen zum Werk ErnstJandls. By Michael Hammerschmid and Helmut Neundlinger. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag. 2008. 226 pp. 24,90. isbn 978-3-7065-4411-5. Ernst Jandl was probably best known in his day for his visual-cum-acoustic concrete poems and witty 'surface translations': i.e. as the author of mat hart lieb zapfen eibe hold (1963), Laut und Luise (1966), der k?nstlicheb?um (1970), and such powerful Sprechgedichte as schtzngrmm and ode auf N. Yet as his prize-winning radio play F?nfMann Menschen, written in collaboration with Friederike Mayr?cker in 1968, suggests, there were more sides to this ever-metamorphosing writer than the received image reflects.One of the achievements of Hammerschmid's and Neundlinger's poetological investigations is to have established the parameters for a clearer appreciation of the range, diversity and ingenuity ofJandl's various phases of intense creativity, from Andere Augen (1956) to his swansong: the rigorously constructed stanzen in dialect (1992). The early poems of his transitional period in the 1950s, Chapter 2 argues, need to be seen in historical context as 'ein Innehalten und Bestandsaufnahme der Verh?ltnisse' (p. 57). After a brief evaluation of the early work, Hammerschmid and Neundlinger offer a likewise brief account of Jandl's concrete poetry in order to proceed to the bigger picture presented in their introduction: 'W?hrend in der experimentellen Poesie die Sprache selbst auf dem Spiel steht, um in Laut und Schrift permanent erweitert und in ihren Ausdrucksm?glichkeiten ausgelotet zu werden, leitet die heruntergekommene Sprache zu einer poetisch-spielerischen (Selbst-)Kritik des Schreibens alsT?tigkeit ?ber' (p. 13).The firsthalf of their studyfleshes out this claim by offering a series of evaluative and contextualizing 'Untersuchungen zur heruntergekommenen Sprache und zu ihrenQuerverbindungen innerhalb von Jandls Werk' (p. 15). The allusion in the present study's deliberately ungrammatical title to what Jandl called 'die heruntergekommene Sprache' reflects the authors' thesis that this inventive form of quasi Austro-German pidgin, with itsoftenmisunderstood echoes o? Gastarbeiterdeutsch, offersa key to all the ensuing paradigm shiftsinJandl's 'Poetik des existentiellen und literarischenNullpunkts' (p. 11).As the authors point out, the afterword to gedichte an die kindheit (1977) already emphasizes the programmatic importance of Jandl's interest in 'fehlerhaftes,widerspr?chliches in der Sprache' for his ongoing experiments with poetry and related genres. The present study demonstrates this through close readings of his principal works written in 'die heruntergekommene Sprache' (tagenglas [1976], die bearbeitungder m?tze [1978] and dergelbe hund [1980]), aswell as his play die humanisten (1976), the 2l6 Reviews Sprechoperin 7 Szenen: Aus derFremde (1978), and the stanzen cycle which brought to an abrupt conclusion the systematic experimentation with new linguistic possibilities and literary sub-genres. Hammerschmid and Neundlinger highlight many of the advantages of 'die heruntergekommene Sprache* as a major breakthrough after Jandl's anxiety that with concrete poetry his writing had somehow reached a dead-end. They present his work written in such a seemingly dysfunctional discourse as essentially a deliberate dual strategy: 'Man muss sie gleichzeitig als elaborierten, hochliterarischen Code und als antiliterarischeKetzerei untersuchen' (p. 15).Their interpretationsbring out the individuality, thematic range and linguistic diversity of Jandl's poems in 'heruntergekommene Sprache', where the protagonist of each Rollengedichtbecomes unique in terms of diction, predicament and response. The medium is shown to illuminate various facets of the general human condition, while at the same time offering Jandl a new way of compensating for various personal and artistic crises. As any reader of thepresent study soon discovers, Jandl's innovative deployment of 'heruntergekommene Sprache' is a source of both amusement and language renewal, the resultant poems being characterized by a vein of social criticism as well as functioning as an indirect form of artistic introspection. The same...