Heinrich Böll
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1972
Nobel Lecture on 2 May, 1973
An Essay on the Reason of Poetry
It is said by those who ought to know - and by others, who also ought to
know, it is disputed - that in matters which to all appearances are
rational, calculable and achieved by the combined efforts of architects,
draughtsmen, engineers, workers - accomplishments such as a bridge -
there remain a few millimetres or centimetres of incalculability. This
incalculability (tiny with regard to the masses being treated and
shaped) may stem from the difficulty of calculating with the nicest
precision a mass of complicated interlocking chemical and technical
details and materials in all their possible reactions, including the
effects of the four classical elements (air, water, fire and earth). The
problem here seems not merely to be the design, the repeatedly
recalculated and checked technical/chemical/statistical composition, but
- let me call it this - their incarnation, which can also be called
their realisation. This remainder of incalculability, be it only
fractions of millimetres, which correspond to unforeseen tiny
differences in extension - what shall we call them? What lies hidden in
this gap? Is it what we usually call irony, is it poetry, God,
resistance, or (to use a popular phrase nowadays) fiction? Someone who
ought to know, a painter who had previously been a baker, once told me
that even baking breakfast rolls, which is done early in the morning,
almost in the night, was extremely dicey business; you had to stick your
nose and your backside out into the grey dawn in order more or less
instinctively to find the right mixture of ingredients, temperature and
baking time, since each and every day demanded its own freshly-baked
rolls, an important, even holy element of the first morning meal for all
those who shoulder the burden of the new day. Should we also call this
almost incalculable element irony, poetry, God, resistance or fiction?
How can we cope without it? Not to mention love. No one will ever know
how many novels, poems, analyses, confessions, sufferings and joys have
been piled up on this continent called Love, without it ever having
turned out to be totally investigated.
When I am asked how or why I wrote this or that, I always find myself
quite embarassed. I would gladly furnish not merely the questioner, but
myself as well, with an exhaustive answer, but can never do so. I cannot
recreate the context in its entirety, yet I wish that I could, so that
at least the literature I myself make might be made slightly less of a
mysterious process than bridge-building and bread-baking.
And because literature in its incarnation as a whole, in its message
and shape, can clearly have a liberating effect, it would after all be
quite useful to tell people about the genesis of this incarnation, so
that more people can share in this process. What is it that I myself,
although I demonstrably produce it, cannot even approximately explain? -
this something which from the first to the last line I myself set down
on paper, vary repeatedly, rework, somewhat shift the emphasis of, yet
which as it recedes in time grows alien to me, like something that is
gone or past, retreating further and further from me, even as it is
perhaps becoming important for others as a shaped message?
Theoretically, the total reconstruction of the process would have to be
possible, a form of parallel protocol created as the work progresses,
and which, if done in detail, would probably be many times larger than
the work itself. Not merely the intellectual and mental, but also the
sensory and material dimensions would have to be satisfied, mental and
physical nourishment and metabolism, the mood and flashes of wit
enlighteningly provided, the function of one's environment not only in
its incarnation as such, but also as backdrop. For example, I often
watch sports shows with my mind almost completely blank, in order to
practise contemplation with a blank mind, admittedly a rather mystical
exercise - yet all these programmes would have to be included in their
entirety in the protocol, since after all a kick or a leap might happen
to spark some reaction or other in my thoughtless contemplation, or
perhaps the movement of a hand, a smile, a commentator's word, a
commercial. Every telephone call, the weather, letters, each individual
cigarette would have to be included, a passing car, a pneumatic drill,
the cackling of a hen that disturbs a context.
The table upon which I am writing this is 76.5 cm high, its top is
69.5 by 111 cm. It has turned legs, a drawer, seems to be seventy to
eighty years old, was a possession of a great-aunt of my mother's, who,
after her husband had died in a madhouse and she herself had moved into
a smaller flat, sold it to her brother, my wife's grandfather. And so,
after my wife's grandfather had died, it came into our possession, a
despised and rather despicable piece of furniture of no value, knocking
around somewhere, no one knows exactly where, until it surfaced during a
move and proved to have been damaged by a bomb: somewhere, at some time
or other, a piece of shrapnel had bored a hole through its top during
the Second World War - already it would seem to be not merely of
sentimental value, but an entry into a dimension of political and social
history worth relating, using the table as an entrance vehicle, in which
connection the deadly contempt of the furniture porters who nearly
refused to bring it along would be more important than its present use,
which is more of an accident than the stubbornness with which - and not
for reasons of sentiment or memory, but rather for reasons of principle
- we kept it from reaching the refuse dump, and as by now I have written
a few things on this table, I might be permitted a passing attachment to
it, with the emphasis on 'passing'. Not to mention the objects lying on
this table; they are incidental and exchangeable, also accidental, with
the possible exception of the Remington typewriter, model "Travel Writer
de Luxe", produced in 1957, to which I am also attached, this means of
production that has long since lost all interest for the tax
authorities, although it has played a major part in their acquisition of
such income, and still does so. On this instrument that any specialist
would regard or touch only with disdain, I have written at a guess four
novels and several hundred items, and even so I am attached to it not
only for that reason, but again because of principles, as it still works
and proves how small the writer's opportunities and ambitions for
investment are. I mention the table and the typewriter in order to
demonstrate to myself that not even these two necessary utensils are
completely understandable to me, and were I to attempt to elucidate
their origins with the necessary exact correctness, their precise
material, industrial, social process of production and their origins, it
would give rise to an almost endless compilation of British and West
German industrial and social history. Not to mention the house, the
space in which this table stands, the soil on which this house was
built, especially not to mention the people who - probably for several
centuries - lived in it, the living and the dead, not to mention those
who bring the coal, wash the silverware, deliver the letters and
newspapers - and especially not to mention those who are close, closer,
closest to us. And yet mustn't everything, from the table to the
pencils, that lie there in their history in its entirety, be brought in,
including those close, closer, closest to us? Will there not be enough
remainders, gaps, resistances, poetry, God, fiction left - even more
than in building bridges and baking rolls?
It's true and it's easily said that language is material, and
something does materialise as one writes. Yet how might one explain that
- as is occasionally demonstrated - something like life appears, people,
fates, actions; that this incarnation occurs on something so deathly
pale as paper, where the imagination of the author is linked to that of
the reader in a hitherto unexplained manner, a process that cannot be
reconstructed in its entirety, where even the wisest, most sensitive
interpretation remains only a more or less successful approximation; and
how indeed might it be possible to describe, to register the transition
from the conscious to the unconscious - in the person writing and the
person reading, respectively - with the necessary total exactitude, and
furthermore break it down into its national, continental, international,
religious or ideological details, not neglecting the continually
changing proportions of the two, in these two - the person writing and
the person reading - and the sudden reversal where the one becomes the
other; and that in this abrupt shift the one is no longer to be
distinguished from the other? There will always be a remainder, whether
you call it the inexplicable ('secret' would also be fine), there
remains and will remain an area, however tiny, into which the reason of
our origins will not penetrate, because it runs into the hitherto
unexplained reason of poetry and of the art of the imagination, whose
incarnation remains as elusive as the body of a woman, a man or even
merely of an animal. Writing is - at least for me - movement forward,
the conquest of a body that I do not know at all, away from something to
something that I do not yet know; I never know what will happen - and
here 'happen' is not intended as plot resolution, in the sense of
classical dramaturgy, but in the sense of a complicated and complex
experiment that with given imaginary, spiritual, intellectual and
sensual materials in interaction strives - on paper to boot! - towards
incarnation. In this respect there can be no successful literature, nor
would there be any successful music or painting, because no one can
already have seen the object it is striving to become, and in this
respect everything that is superficially called modern, but which is
better named living art, is experiment and discovery - and transient,
can be estimated and measured only in its historical relativity, and it
appears to me irrelevant to speak of eternal values, or to seek them.
How will we survive without this gap, this remainder, which can be
called irony, be called poetry, be called God, fiction, or resistance?
Countries, too, are always only approaching what they claim to be,
and there can be no state which does not leave this gap between the
verbal expression of its constitution and its realisation, a space that
remains, where poetry and resistance grow - and hopefully flourish. And
there exists no form of literature which can succeed without this gap.
Even the most precise account do without the atmosphere, without the
imagination of the reader, even if the person writing it refuses to use
it; and even the most precise account must omit - why, it must omit the
exact and detailed description of circumstances that actually are
required for the incarnation of the conditions of life... it must
compose, transpose elements, and even its interpretation and its working
protocol are not communicable, if only because the material called
language cannot be reduced to a reliable and generally comprehensible
communicative currency: so much history and invented history, national
and social history, and historical relativity -which would have to be
included - weighs down every word, as I have tried to suggest via the
example of my work desk. And determining the range of the message is not
only a problem of translation from one language to another, it is a much
more weighty problem within languages, where definitions can entail
world views, and world views can entail wars - I would merely remind you
of the wars after the Reformation, which although explicable in terms of
power politics and hegemony, also are wars about religious definitions.
It is therefore, by the way, trivial to claim that after all, we do
speak the same language, if we do not also demonstrate the load that
each word can bear at the level of regional, and frequently even local
history. For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds
stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand
very little.
Politicians, ideologists, theologians and philosophers try time and
again to provide solutions with nothing remaining, prefab solved
problems. That is their duty - and it is ours, the writers' - since we
know that we are not able to solve anything without remainders or
resistance - to penetrate into the gaps. There are too many unexplained
and inexplicable remainders, entire provinces of waste. Builders of
bridges, bakers of rolls and writers of novels normally finish their
jobs, and their remainders are not the most problematic areas. While we
struggle over littérature pure and littérature engagée - one of the
false dichotomies to which I shall return in a while - we are still not
aware of - or are unawares diverted from - thoughts about l'argent pur
and l'argent engagé. If one really observes and listens to politicians
and economists talking about something as supposedly rational as money,
then the mystical, or perhaps merely mysterious area within these three
occupations already mentioned becomes less and less interesting and
astonishingly harmless. Let us take, merely as an example, the amazingly
bold recent attack on the dollar (which was modestly called a dollar
crisis). Naive layman that I am, something occurred to me that no one
called by name: two countries were deeply affected, and most
emphatically found it necessary - if we assume that the word 'freedom'
is not merely a fiction - to do something so remarkable as to support
the dollar, i.e., were asked to open their coffers; and these two
countries had something historic in common, namely their defeat in the
Second World War, and they are both spoken of as having something else
in common: their industriousness and diligence. As for the person it
concerns - the one who jingles his pocket money or flashes his tiny
bankroll - can't it be made clear to him why, although he is by no means
working less for his money, it fetches less bread, milk, coffee, miles
in a taxi? How many gaps does the mysticism of money offer, and in which
strongrooms is its poetry hidden away? Idealistic parents and educators
have always tried to convince us that money is filthy. I have never
understood that, because I only received money when I had worked (always
excepting the large sum that I have been awarded by the Swedish
Academy), and for anyone who has no choice other than to work, even the
dirtiest job is clear. They provide a living for the those close to him,
and for him, too. Money is the incarnation of his work, and that is
clean. Between work and what it brings in there admittedly is an
unexplained remainder, which vague formulas such as to earn well or to
earn poorly are far less successful at filling than the gap left by the
interpretation of a novel or poem.
Compared to the unexplained gaps of money mysticism, the unexplained
remainders of literature are strikingly harmless, and even so there are
still people who with criminal frivolity let the word 'freedom' roll off
their tongue, where submission to a myth and its claims to power is
unequivocally demanded and obtained. They then call for political
insight, precisely when insight and perception about the problem are
blocked. On the bottom line of my cheque I see four different groups of
numbers, 32 characters in all, two of which resemble hieroglyphs. Five
of these thirty-two characters are meaningful to me: three for my
account number, two for the branch of the bank - what do the other
twenty-seven represent, including quite a few zeroes? I am certain that
all of these characters have a rational, meaningful, or as that lovely
phrase would have it, an enlightening explanation. It's just that in my
brain and my consciousness there is no room for this enlightening
explanation, and what remains is the cipher mysticism of a secret
science which I have more trouble penetrating, whose poetry and
symbolism remains more alien to me than Marcel Proust's Remembrance of
Things Past or the "Wessobrunn Prayer". What these 32 digits demand of
me is trusting belief in the fact that everything is quite correct, that
there remains no unclarity and, if I only were to make a slight effort,
it all would be clear to me too; and yet for me something mysterious
remains - or perhaps fear, much more fear than any realisation of poetry
could produce in me. However, no successful currency policy is clear to
those whose money is involved.
Thirteen digits on my telephone bill, too, and a few on each of my
various insurance policies, not to mention my tax, car and telephone
numbers - I won't take the trouble to count all these numbers that I
ought to have in my head or at least written down, in order to be able
to note my exact place in society at any time. If we quite happily
multiply these 32 digits and the numbers on my cheque by six, or let's
give a discount and multiply them by four, add in the numbers of one's
birthday, a few contractions for religious affiliation, civil
status--have we then at last grasped the Occident in the addition and
the integration of its reason? Is this reason, as we perceive and accept
it - and it is not only made enlightening for us, but actually
enlightens us - perhaps merely an occidental arrogance that we have
exported to the entire world, via colonialism or missions, or in a
mixture of them both as an instrument of subjugation? And for those
affected, aren't or wouldn't the differences between Christian,
socialist, communist, capitalistic outlooks be small, - and even if the
poetry of this reason does at times enlighten them, yet doesn't the
reason of their poetry remain the victor? What did the greatest crime of
the Indians consist of, when they were confronted with European reason
exported to America? They didn't know the value of gold - of money! And
they fought against something, against that which we even now are
fighting as the most recent product of our reason, against the
destruction of their world and environment, against the total
subjugation of their earth by profit, which was more alien to them than
their gods and spirits are to us. And what indeed could have revealed to
them the Christian message - the new and joyous tidings - in this
insane, hypocritical smugness with which on Sunday people served God,
praising him as the Saviour, and on Monday once again opened the banks
right on time, the places where they administered the only idea they
truly believed in, that of money, possession and profit? For the poetry
of water and wind, of buffalo and grass, in which their life found its
form, there was only scorn - and now we civilised Westerners in our
cities, the end product of our total rationality - for in all fairness
it must be said: we have not spared ourselves - we are beginning to
sense just how real the poetry of water and wind actually is, and what
is incarnated therein. Did, or does, the tragedy of our churches perhaps
indeed consist, not of what the Enlightenment might have designated as
unreasonable matters, but in the despairing and desperately failed
attempt to pursue or even overtake a reason that has never been and
never can be merged with something so irrational as the incarnated God?
Regulations, law texts, approval of experts, a figure-laden forest of
numbered regulations, and the production of prejudices that have been
hammered into us and set out along the tracks of history teaching, in
order to make people ever more estranged from one another. Even in the
extreme western reaches of Europe our rationality is in opposition to
another, which we simply label irrational. The horrifying problem of
Northern Ireland nevertheless consists of the fact that here two kinds
of reason have been entangled and hopelessly attacked one another for
centuries.
How many provinces of disparagement and disdain has history
bequeathed to us? Continents are hidden under the victorious sign of our
rationality. Entire populations remained strangers to one another,
supposedly speaking the same language. Where marriage in the Western
manner was prescribed as creating order, people ignored the fact that it
was a privilege: unattainable, inachievable for those who worked the
land, the people called farmhands and milkmaids, who simply didn't have
the money even to buy a pair of sheets, and if they had saved up or
stolen the money, wouldn't have had the bed to put the sheets on. And so
they were left untouched in their illegitimacy; they produced kids
anyway! From above and from the outside, everything seemed completely
settled. Clear answers, clear questions, clear regulations, catechism as
delusion. But please, no wonders, and poetry only as the sign of the
supernatural, never the natural. And then people are surprised, even
long for the old ways of life, when the disparaged and hidden provinces
show signs of revolt, and then of course either the one party or the
other must gain material and political profit from this revolt. Attempts
have been made to bring order into the still unexplored continent called
sexual love by means of regulations similar to those provided budding
philatelists when they start their first album. Permitted and
nonpermitted caresses are defined down to the most meticulous details,
when suddenly, to their mutual horror, theo- and ideology confirm that
on this continent which was regarded as determined, cooled and ordered,
there yet remain a few unextinguished volcanoes - and volcanoes are
simply not to be extinguished with tried and tested firefighting
equipment. And just think of everything passed off, foisted off on God,
this much-abused and pitiable authority: everything, yes, everything
that was a problem: all the guides for inescapable misery in social,
economic or sexual form pointed to him, everything despicable,
contemptible, was palmed off on God, all the leftover &"remainders", and
yet at the same time he was being preached about as the Incarnate,
without considering that one cannot place the burden of man on God, nor
the burden of God on man, if he is to be considered incarnate. And who
then can be surprised if he has survived where godlessness was
prescribed and where the misery of the world and one's own society was
put off to an unfulfilled catechism of equally dogmatic form and a
future that was ever further away, and ever further delayed, until it
turned out to be a dismal present? And once again we can also only be
reacting to it with insufferable arrogance if we here presume to
denounce this course of events as reactionary; and similarly, it is
arrogance of the same kind if the official custodians of God claim as
their own this God who appears to have survived in the Soviet Union,
without clearing away the refuse dump under which he is hidden here, and
if they cite the appearance of God there as justification for a societal
system here. Again and again, whether boasting of our convictions as
Christians or atheists, we wish to capitalise on one pigheadedly
represented system of ideas or another. This madness of ours, this
arrogance "in itself" again and again buries both: the incarnate Deity,
who is called God become Man, and the vision set in its place, that of
the future of the entirety of mankind. We who so easily humiliate
others, we are lacking in something: humility - which is not to be
confused with subordination or obedience, let alone submission. This is
what we have done to the colonised peoples: transformed their humility,
the poetry of this humility transformed into their humiliation. We are
always eager to subjugate and conquer, hardly a surprise in a
civilisation whose first text in a foreign language has long been Julius
Caesar's De Bello Gallico, and whose first exercise in self-satisfaction
- unequivocal and clear answers and questions - was the catechism, one
catechism or the other, a primer in infallibility and in complete,
pre-fab, pre-explained problems.
I have got a bit away from the building of bridges, baking of rolls
and writing of novels, and hinted at gaps, ironies, fictive areas,
remnants, divinities, mystifications and resistance of other regions -
they appeared to me worse, in greater need of illumination than the
slight, unilluminated corners in which not our traditional reason, but
the reason of poetry - as in for example a novel -lies hidden. The
roughly two hundred figures, group by group (including a few codes),
that I ought to have in exact sequences, in my head, or at least on a
piece of paper, as a proof of my existence, without exactly knowing what
they mean, incorporate little more than a pair of abstract claims and
proofs of existence within a bureaucracy that not only claims to be, but
actually is reasonable. People refer me to it and teach me to trust it
blindly. May I not dare expect that people do not merely trust in, but
strengthen the reason of poetry, not by leaving it in peace, but by
absorbing a bit of its calmness and the pride of its humbleness, which
can only be a humbleness towards those below, and never a humbleness
towards those above. Regard for others, politeness and justice reside
therein, and the wish to recognise and be recognised.
I do not wish to provide new missionary starting-points and vehicles,
but I do believe that in the sense of poetic humbleness, politeness and
justice I must say that I see considerable similarity, I see
possibilities for rapprochement between the stranger à la Camus, the
strangeness of the Kafkaesque official and the incarnated God, who after
all remains a stranger and - if one neglects a few outbursts of temper -
is polite and literal in a remarkable way. Why else has the Catholic
church long - I don't know exactly how long - blocked direct access to
the literal nature of the texts they declare holy, or else kept it
hidden in Latin and Greek, available only to the initiated? I imagine it
is in order to keep out the dangers they sensed in the poetry of the
incarnated word, and to protect the reason of their power from the
dangerous reason of poetry. And after all it is not accidental that the
most important consequence of the Reformation was the discovery of
languages and their corporeality. And what empire ever could do without
language imperialism, i.e., the diffusion of their own language and
suppression of the languages of those ruled? In this - but in no other -connexion
I regard the for once not imperialistic, but supposedly
anti-imperialistic attempts to denounce poetry, the sensuality of
language, its incarnation and the power of the imagination (for language
and the power of the imagination are one and the same), and to introduce
the false dichotomy of information or poetry, as a new version of
"divide et impera". It is the brand-new, but once again almost
international arrogance of a New Reason, which may possibly permit the
poetry of the Indians as an anti-ruling class force, but withholds its
own poetry from the classes to be liberated in its own land. Poetry is
not a class privilege, it has never been one. Again and again
well-established feudal and bourgeois literatures have renewed
themselves out of what they condescendingly called popular language, or,
to use more modern phrases, jargon or slang. This process may readily be
labeled linguistic exploitation, but nothing about this exploitation is
changed by spreading propaganda about the false alternatives:
information or poetry/literature. The nostalgia-flavoured disapproval
perhaps to be found in the expressions' popular language, slang, jargon
does not warrant sending poetry, as well, into the exile of the rubbish
heap, nor all the forms and expressions of art. Much about this is
papal: withholding incarnation and sensuality from others while
developing new catechisms which speak of the only correct and the truly
false possibilities of expression. One cannot separate the power of the
message from the power of the expression in which the message occurs;
this paves the way for something that reminds me of the controversies
about the communion in both forms, controversies that are theologically
rather boring, but important as examples of rejected incarnations, and
which in the Catholic part of the world became reduced to the pallor of
the Host, which could not even be called a real piece of bread - not to
mention the millions of hectolitres of wind withheld! Therein lay an
arrogant misunderstanding, not merely of the substances involved, but
even more of that which this substance was intended to incarnate.
No class can be liberated by first withholding something from them,
and whether this new school of Manichaeism claims to be a- or
antireligious, it thereby takes over the model of the Church as a ruling
class, the model which could end with Hus being burned at the stake and
Luther excommunicated. One may readily quarrel about the concept of
beauty, develop new aesthetics - they are indeed overdue - but they must
not begin by withholding matters, and they must not exclude one thing;
the possibility of transferral that literature offers: it transfers us
to South or North America, to Sweden, India, Africa. It can also
transfer us to another class, another time, another religion and another
race. It has - even in its bourgeois form - never been its goal to
create strangeness, but to remove it. And although one may regard the
class from which it is largely derived as overdue for replacement, yet
as a product of this class it was in most cases also a hiding-place for
resistance to that class. And the internationality of resistance must be
preserved, that which keeps or makes one writer - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- a believer, and another - Arrabal - an embittered and bitter enemy of
religion and the Church. Nor is this resistance to be comprehended as a
mere mechanism or reflex which calls forth belief in God here, lack of
belief in God there, but rather as the incarnation of the relationships
of intellectual history as they are played out between various rubbish
heaps and provinces of rebellion and apostasy... and also as recognition
of their interconnections without arrogance and without claims of
infallibility. To a political prisoner or perhaps only isolated
dissidents in, e.g., the Soviet Union it may seem wrong or even insane
when people in the Western world protest against the Vietnam War -
psychologically, one can understand his situation in his cell or his
social isolation -- and yet he would have to realise that the guilt of
the one cannot be ticked off against that of the other, and that when
people demonstrate for Vietnam, they also demonstrate for him! I know
that this sounds utopian, and yet this appears to me to be the only
possibility of a new internationality, not neutrality. No author can
take over alleged or specious divisions and judgements, and to me it
appears almost suicidal that we are even and still discussing the
division into committed literature and other kinds. Not only do we,
precisely when we think that it is the one, have to intervene for the
other with all our might; no, it is precisely through this falsified
alternative that we accept a bourgeois principle of divisions, one which
turns us into strangers. It is not only the division of our potential
strength, but also of our potential - and I'll risk this without even
blushing - incarnated beauty, since it too can liberate, just as the
communicated thought can: it can be liberating in itself, or as the
provocation that it may create. The strength of undivided literature is
not the neutralisation of directions, but the internationality of
resistance, and to this resistance belong poetry, incarnation,
sensuality, imaginative power and beauty. The new Manichaean
iconoclasticism which wants to take them away from us, which wants to
take all art away from us, would rob not only us, but also those for
whom it does what it believes it must do. No curse, no bitterness, not
even the information about the desperate situation of a class is
possible without poetry, and even to condemn it requires that it first
must be recognised. Go and read Rosa Luxemburg carefully and note which
statues Lenin ordered erected first: the first for Count Tolstoy, of
whom he said that until this count began to write, Russian literature
contained no peasants; the second for the "reactionary" Dostoevsky. If
one wishes to choose an ascetic road to change, one might personally
renounce art and literature, but one cannot do so for others until one
has brought them to the knowledge or recognition of what they are to
renounce. This renunciation must be voluntary, or else it becomes a
papal decree, like a new catechism, and once again an entire continent,
such as the continent of Love, would be doomed to a parched sterility.
It is not merely for frivolity nor only to shock that art and literature
have again and again transformed their forms, discovering new ones by
experiment. In these forms they have also incarnated something, and that
something was almost never the confirmation of what existed and was
already available; and if it is extirpated, one gives up a further
possibility: artifice. Art is always a good hiding-place, not for
dynamite, but for intellectual explosives and social time bombs. Why
would there otherwise have been the various Indices? And precisely in
their despised and often even despicable beauty and lack of transparency
lies the best hiding-place for the barb that brings about the sudden
jerk or the sudden recognition.
Before concluding, I must state a necessary limitation. The weakness
of my intimations and explanations unavoidably stems from the fact that
although I question the tradition of reason in which - hopefully not
completely successfully - I was brought up, I am nevertheless using the
means of that very same reason, and it would be more than unfair to
denounce this reason in all its dimensions. This reason has obviously
succeeded in spreading doubt about its allencompassing claim, about what
I have called its arrogance, and in retaining experience in and memory
of what I have called the reason of poetry, which I do not regard as a
privileged, nor a bourgeois institution. It can be communicated, and
precisely because its literalness and incarnation often appear strange,
it can prevent or remove strangeness or alienation. After all, befremdet
zu sein 'being strange' can also involve being astounded, surprised, or
merely moved. As for what I have said about humbleness - naturally only
by way of suggestion - I say it is not thanks to my religious upbringing
or memory, which always meant humiliating when it said humility, but
from reading Dostoevsky early and late in life. And it is precisely
because I consider as the most important literary shift the
international movement for a classless, or no longer class-determined
literature, the discovery of entire provinces of humbled people destined
to be human waste, that I warn you about the destruction of poetry,
about the arid sterility of Manichaeism, about the iconoclasticism of
what appears to me to be a blind zeal which won't even tap up the bath
water before it throws out the baby. It appears meaningless to me to
denounce or to glorify the young or the old. It appears meaningless to
me to dream of old ways of life that only can be reconstructed in
museums; it appears meaningless to me to create dichotomies such as
conservative/progressive. The new wave of nostalgia that clings to
furniture, clothes, forms of expression and scales of feeling only
serves to demonstrate that the new world grows ever stranger to us. That
the reason upon which we have built and relied has not made the world
more reliable or familiar; that the rational/irrational dichotomy also
was a false one. Here I have had to avoid or abandon a great deal,
because one thought always leads to another and we would get carried
away if we were to survey every detail of these continents exhaustively.
I have had to abandon humour, which also is not the privilege of any
class, and yet is ignored in its poetry and as a hiding-place for
resistance.
