Messrs. Land & Trakl
'Two wolves in the sinister Wood / We mixed our blood in a stony embrace
And the stars of our race fell upon us.' [1]
I.
I once published some notes on the case of the Aquarian Expressionist poet Georg Trakl in which I praised his love of silence and admired the blueness of his twilight [2]. No one can deny that there are many arresting - and disturbing - images in his work, as he sets about exploiting the often uncanny ambiguity of the German language.
Wittgenstein was an admirer; Heidegger was an admirer; and Nick Land is also a fan, although he responds in very much his own manner to Trakl whom he regards as an archetypal poète maudit - one who embraced his own lycanthropic nature and thus made a radical break from humanity and its ovine idealism.
II.
In his essay 'Spirit and Teeth', Land celebrates the fact that Trakl offers no hope of redemption - neither in his writings nor in his actual life, which is short and not particularly pleasant, involving incest, depression, and a fatal drug-overdose aged 27.
He condemns Heidegger (and Derrida) for trying to spiritualise Trakl and ignore the libidinal tension in his work; the fact that to write as Trakl writes is to write in blood and with rabid impatience: "Trakl took very little time over anything." [3]
Like Rimbaud, Trakl belongs to an inferior race outside of civilisation; a race that is "irresponsible and nomadic" [4], but which possesses sharp teeth with which to bite.
III.
Land also wrote an earlier text on Trakl, based on his PhD work at Essex [5]. Titled 'Narcissism and Dispersion', it's a reading of Heidegger's 1953 interpretation of Trakl and it arguably provides justification for Land's war against Heidegger's circular hermeneutics and his "repugnant obstinacy and piety" [6].
I mentioned that in 'Spirit and Teeth' Land rejects Heidegger's efforts to spiritualise and pacify Trakl. Well, in 'Narcissism and Dispersion' we witness how Heidegger attempts this by treating language like a closed (narcissistic and masturbatory) loop; something that only ever concerns itself with itself.
Land counters this with an idea of dispersion [Zerstreuung], insisting that what's important about Trakl's poetry is that it allows language to unravel or decompose and leak into a material Outside.
Whilst Heidegger desperately tries to defend Trakl's verse from being read as a symptom of a degenerating, fragmented ego so as to relocate Trakl back into a grand gathering of Geist, Land is having none of this.
For Land, Trakl is not the poet of home sweet home, but of nomadic wandering and his language does not reflect upon itself in quiet isolation; it rapidly spreads like a rash or buzzes like a mad swarm of flies.
For Heidegger, the blueness of twilight indicates a time of peace when the beast has been tamed; for Land, the latter is forever untameable and wild blueness is akin to what, as a Lawrentian, I would term chaos (the desire for which forms the very essence of poetry) [7].
IV.
So, on the one hand, we have Heidegger's reading of Trakl ... one that sanitises the latter by downplaying the drug-induced mania and seeks to pass off the work as a (mystical) affirmation of Being in order to reinforce his own philosophy.
On the other hand, we have Land's reading of Trakl ... one that celebrates the latter by emphasising its feral character and seeks to pass off the work as a (filthy and furious) affirmation of base materialism in order to reinforce his own philosophy.
Heidegger suggests that Trakl’s language is essentially singing the song of a homecoming - the movement of humanity away from its current alienated, fallen state and toward a primordial beginning.
Land says it's a werewolf's howling.
The question is: Would Trakl have preferred Heidegger's reading of his work, or Nick Land's?
Obviously, we can never know the answer for sure - and it's highly probable he would have disliked both - but I like to believe that, if forced to choose, Trakl would prefer the latter and recognise himself a little better in Land's reading which, whilst highly theoretical, nevertheless contains something of the ecstatic nihilism that characterised his writing.
Having said that, Trakl scholars almost universally prefer Heidegger's reading over Land's and Heidegger's work is treated as foundational (even if problematic and at times deeply flawed). Land remains seen (at best) as an eccentric, peripheral figure by the Academy.
The fact that his interpretation of Trakl is highly regarded within certain marginalised circles and subcultures (and on blogs like this) only confirms their idea of Land as someone who arouses fellow lunatics but has very little to offer serious scholars within the field of German literary studies who, much like Heidegger, after reading Trakl's poems are able to simply lay down their books, close their eyes, and enjoy a good night's sleep [8].
Notes
[1] Georg Trakl, 'Passion', in Poems and Prose: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Alexander Stillmark (Northwestern University Press, 2005), p. 302.
These lines are quoted by Land in his essay 'Spirit and Teeth' (1993), see note 3 below.
[2] See the post 'Drinking the Silence: Notes on the Case of Georg Trakl' (17 Dec 2018): click here.
[3] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 175-201. The line quoted is on p. 181.
This essay was originally published in Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit, ed. David Wood (Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 41-55.
[4] Nick Land, 'Spirit and Teeth', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 183.
[5] Land received his PhD in 1987 from the University of Essex under the supervision of David Farrell Krell. His thesis focused on Martin Heidegger's 1953 essay 'Language in the Poem' [Die Sprache im Gedicht] and its interpretation of the poetry of Georg Trakl.
[6] Nick Land, 'Narcissism and Dispersion in Heidegger's 1953 Trakl Interpretation', in Fanged Noumena ... p. 118. This essay first appeared in Philosophers' Poets, ed. David Wood (Routledge, 1990), pp. 72-90.
[7] I'm thinking here of Lawrence's essay 'Chaos in Poetry' - much loved by Deleuze and Guattari - which served as an introduction to Harry Crosby's poetry collection Chariot of the Sun (Black Sun Press, 1931).
The essay can be found in D. H. Lawrence, Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 107-116.
[8] I'm paraphrasing Land's ending to 'Narcissism and Dispersion'. Land regarded Heidegger as an exhausted and ageing philosopher with Platonic instincts who "felt nauseous at the thought of losing control, and perhaps still believed in God". Fanged Noumena, p. 121.
A stirring post which, in one of my many guises as a Traklphile engaged with his work on poetry and malice, I was pleased to look over. However, it does seem to me to trade off a series of uncritical (i.e. unthoughtful) dichotomies - as well as one or two more than ticklish Traklish myths - in need of deconstruction. (Whether or not Land convincingly makes the case that 'deconstruction must give way to decomposition' can be left for another day, but one can hardly proceed straight to the latter via some kind of performative dualism.)
ReplyDeleteWhy, for instance, is 'Geist' (or 'spirit') necessarily to seen as a priori insulated from chaos/the body/dispersion? (Or, if one prefers, why should we assume that materialism is not haunted by the shadow of spirit?) A poet can, like Rimbaud, be both spiritual and a danger to himself and his readers, be 'sick' and 'classical'. Heidegger's project is clearly, in any event, radically different from Land's virulent materialism in his attempt to think language as a (destinal) house of Being. As such, reading him (or reading anyone) involves doing so within the author's own parameters, not putting them on some kind of plane of equivalence. Every committed reading/author, of course, has their own power and necessary limits, and a reading's 'failings' can never ultimately be separated from its 'successes'.
Notwithstanding his drugs, incest guilt, and hallucinatory existence, it is also a myth - or, better, a fallacy - that Trakl was in an endless hurry or state of distraction. In fact, in his short life, he was well known for meticulous revisions of his work (see, for example, 'Grodek' and 'Sebastian in a Dream') and feverish correspondence with his publisher right down to the minutiae of typography - and right up to his cocaine-accelerated end in a military hospital bed in Krakow. Land (and, apparently, the blogger) mainly show their susceptibility to their own idealist cliche of the 'poete maudit' here, therefore.
In sum, and very briefly, the danger is that both Land's and Heidegger's readings become reductive - the former by reducing the poetry to pathology; the latter by bracketing off the violence of its life and obsessions etc. These things are rarely a matter of some kind of Kierkegaardian 'either-or', however; rather, (as Kierkegaard himself recognised), all interesting thought is paradoxically 'both-and' (or, more precsely, 'both-and . .. and').
As Land himself says (from memory) in 'Spirit and Teeth', Trakl was a vampire, but he was also a Christian. In a way that TTA ought to recognise better than most, this is to have one's philosophical cake and at least try to eat it.
PS Also fascinating to note that, while TTA dismisses and disparages as so many forms of lunacy all manner of psychology, mysticism, and supposed pseudo-science with which it is unwilling or unable to engage, this post's opening line puts astrology (Trakl's and the blogger's shared sun sign of Aquarius) front and centre!
ReplyDelete