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Fate in the Past: Peter Szondi's Reading
of German Romantic Genre Theory
Timothy Bahti
Paul de Man once remarked that what most interested him in
Peter Szondi's
Traktat
"Uber philologische Erkenntnis"—that
methodological position paper that remains, in my opinion, his most
eloquent and capacious statement—was not the general argument
about the place of hermeneutics in contemporary German literary
studies, but rather the more specific question Szondi raised of
whether a passage in Holderljn was metaphorical or not, suggesting
that this question was the most important one, in Hoideriin or with
any other literary text. Years after it was written, Szondi confirmed
this interest when he cited the
Traktat
while asking whether "the am-
biguity is one of the matter itself
{einer der Sache selbst)."'^
I would
like my essay to stand under the sign of this question of metaphorics,
of the metaphorics in Szondi's work as well as in literary texts
themselves, for I believe it will appear to be a crucial aspect; just as I
would like to direct toward Szondi's studies of German romantic
genre theory' the same relating of what we
know
from and of his work
{Wissen)
back to specific
acts of knowing (Erkenntnisse)
that he ad-
vocated, in the
Traktat,
for literary studies in general.'
What we know of Szondi's interpretations of German romantic
genre theory is certainly less here in the United States than in Europe,
for they are scarcely known at all. They can be summarized as arguing
for a progressive development of the poetics of genre, from their
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beginnings m Plato and Aristotle to German idealism, and then
specifically from Kant to Hegel, toward a dialectical philosophy of
history oppositions between formal systems and historical changes,
and between past examples and present praxis, are increasingly
mediated in a speculative philosophy that is finally said to combine
dialectically history and system. This dialectical history of theory can
be traced across Szondi's entire career, from his earliest essay,
"Freidnch Schlegel und die romantische Ironie," written at twenty-
three, to the very late, posthumously-published "Das Naive ist das
Sentimentalische. Zur Begriffsdialektil^ in Schillers Abhandlung," via
his
Holderlin-Studien
and the now-published lectures on
Poetik und
Geschichtsphilosophie
(for which we all owe a debt to Jean Bollack).
Within the domain of German idealism, this dialectic takes the form of
a "crisis" in non-historicist Kantian genre poetics that is eventually
"overcome" in the "triumph" and "completion"
{Vollendung)
represented by Hegel's
Asthetik.*
Kant's third
Kritik
already begins a
"sublation-of-itself"
{Sichselbstaufhebung)
of eighteenth-century nor-
mative
Wirkungscisthetik,^
and the mediation of classicism and
historicism occurs across the individual theoretical projects of
Goethe and Schiller, of Schlegel, Holderlin and Schellmg above all
(but also those of Winckelmann, Herder, and Moritz), as "historical
necessity" enters, most often against the authors' own intentions,
into the thinking of formal systems and dynamizes them to the point
where, in Hegel and, to some extent, m Holderlin, this dynamic is iden-
tical with the historical process itself.'
This very brief outline of Szondi's argument cannot convey
adequately its combination of historical range and interpretative
power While one may want to dispute individual analyses—most
especially perhaps in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, where Schlegel's
irony
is understood as a mode of dialectic (and here we have the re-
cent work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy on the
one hand, of Paul de Man on the other, to help us')—they are always
knowledgeable, informative, and highly persuasive. In the American
tradition of such works as Ren6 Wellek's
History of Modern Criticism
or M.H Abrams' study of romantic literary theory.
The Mirror and the
Lamp,
there is nothing like Szondi's exegetical finesse and his rigor of
argumentation. But in surveying his interpretation of the history of
genre poetics, his history of theories of poetics, one notes the recur-
rence of certain structural terms that thereby mvite a more-than-local
interrogation.
This history of a dialectical progression from
Wirk-
ungsSsthetik
through the tensions within and between various forms
of classicism and historicism to dialectical aesthetics themselves is
continually written as If it were an instance where history acted itself
out in accord with a structure of prefiguration and fulfillment—itself
one of our culture's most fundamental and enduring structures for
making sense of events and their relations, especially those events
called texts. Already m the early essay on Schlegel Szondi could write
that "seen from the perspective of
Gelstesgeschichte,
[the young
Schlegel's triadic
Geschichtsphilosophie]
prepares for the Hegelian
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dialectic "' Throughout the lectures on the history of
Poetik und
Geschichtsphilosophie
in German idealism, the position of one or
another theoretical text is said to be a first step
(Vorstufe)
toward or
an anticipation
(Vorwegnahme)
of Hegel's aesthetics, as Hegel is
regularly announced as the fulfillment
(Erfullung)
of the earlier trajec-
tories When in the late essay on Schiller Szondi finds a "cor-
respondence" between the developments of Holderlin's and
Schlegel's poetological conceptions, and adds that "the analogy
follows from the historical logic of the matter itself"
(sich aus der
historischen Logik der Sache selbst ergibt),"
a critical perception of
"correspondence" and "analogy" is grounded in the "logic of the
thing Itself," and
history
seems to mean little more than that Szondi
stands at the end of its
logical
story The extent to which history is
subsumed within logic—when, as here with Holderlin and Schlegel,
and at many other points in Szondi's history,'° the chronological
development has little or no historical causality behind it, leaving one
with sheer logical temporality, with
chronos
as time rather than as
history—this is even more evident at the end of the same essay,
where Szondi concludes that the relationship between Kant's
categories in his table of categories m the first
Kritik
(alluded to by
Schiller m a crucial note to his
Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung)
"predestines them to be applied to a dialectical
Geschichts-
philosophie,
to Its logical foundation " " The development from Kan-
tian formalism to a Hegelian
Geschichtsphilosophie
is itself a purely
formal and logical
predestiny,
residing already in the "logic of the
matter itself" and needing history only as the fulfillment of this
logical predestination.
Noting Szondi's predilection for the use of prefigural
terms—Vorbereitung,
Vorstufe, Vorwegnahme,
predestination—one
might ask whether his "dialectic" of the history of German romantic
genre theory is not rather more like Schellmg's than Hegel's When he
cites Schelling asserting in the introduction to the
Philosophie der
Kunst
that the history of art manifests "its immediate relations to that
absolute identity wherein they are predetermined
(vorherbestimmt),""
Szondi immediately follows with a remark that summarizes his cri-
tique of Schelling when measured against Hegel.
The presentation of this predetermination of history
IS the task of Schellmg's
Geschichtsphilosophie,
m
which history is "sublated"
[aufgehoben]
to the same
extent that his philosophy accomplishes its task."
History m Scheiling's
Geschichtsphilosophie
is cancelled, according
to Szondi, to the extent that it merely manifests what is "predeter-
mined" in his absolute
Identit^tsphilosophie.
I would suggest that,
whatever his intentions or "task," Szondi's history of German idealist
aesthetics similarly construes history as
\\s predetermination
toward
an absolute, toward the absolute of Hegel's
Asthetik
if not Schellmg's
"absolute identity of the
universum
" History's complexities and in-
trinsic character are cancelled to the extent that Szondi fulfills his
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historico-cntical task of displaying its predetermination toward the
Hegelian fulfillment of its trajectory In another context, Szondi con-
cludes an argument by asserting that "Wmckelmann [appears] to an-
ticipate a dialectical conception of the ideal of art that fulfills itself
later with Hoideriin and Hegel "'• This structure of prefiguration and
fulfillment—is it Schelling's or Hegel's'' Dialectical, and if so, a
Hegelian
Realdialektik,
or of a different kind of structure and opera-
tion"? Szondi hints that our question has to do with the question of
Schein
("appears,"
scheint),
of the
appearance
of history, which shifts
my interrogation of Szondi's "dialectical" history toward a question of
Its aesthetic appearance, for
Schein
is in German idealism
preeminently a crucial feature of the aesthetic realm and experience,
from Kant to Hegel
Szondi could admit several times that his history was an
"ordering" of German romantic poetics "along a path," "so that one
understands them from [the perspective of] the synthesis in which
they are all to be sublated, namely in Hegel's aesthetics," citing with
approval Helmut Kuhn's earlier effort in his
Die Vollendung der
klassischen deutschen Asthetik durch Hegel
'= While conceding that
there was "no obligatory model," "according to which" the aesthetic
systems of German idealism were "constructed," he nonetheless
asserted.
But the last great aesthetic system of German
idealism which also represents a synthesis of all the
insights and perspectives of the theory of art during
the age of Goethe, namely Hegel's aesthetics, this
system offers a view into the blueprint that—con-
sidered and realized to a greater or lesser extent—
founds the different aesthetics of the age."
If the perspective offered from the
last
such system is understood as
a "synthesis" of
all
preceding ones, yielding historical insight into the
"blueprint" underlying their progression, and yet this perspective
denies that it is of an "obligatory model" "according to which" the
history "constructed" itself, then Szondi is here displaying his
own
critical construction
of the architectionics of German idealism and of
Its historical fulfillment of this predetermination or predestination.
This methodological construction takes on its own aesthetic
characteristics as Szondi portrays the history of German romantic
genre poetics very much like a single literary work of art with its tex-
tual
Entstehungsgeschichte.
m this method of literary study, which
Szondi raised to a fine art, earlier versions of a text are understood
"as its genesis that finds itself sublated
[aufgehoben],
m the Hegelian
sense of the word, on the level of its completion " " Similarly, in the
Entstehungsgeschichte
of German idealist poetics, earlier versions of
the aesthetic system—those of Goethe or Schiller, Schlegel or
Hoideriin—are the genesis of a single work and are "sublated" in the
"completion" offered by Hegel's
Asthetik.
Furthermore, the structure
and operation of this historical development, of this dialectical pro-
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duction of work or system, appear very much within a conception of
German
classical
aesthetics, as Szondi said apropos of Schlegel's
Uber das Studium der griechischen Poesie,
the "historical develop-
ment" across the particular texts is "as it were a growing system of
poetic genres " " Indeed, one can cite a passage from this work of
Schlegel's that Szondi himself quotes, to describe Szondi's own
history
( .) I have sought to determine for each striking ap-
pearance the right place m the great whole of the for-
mation of art ( ) the whole of ancient and modern
art history surprises [one] by its intrinsic coherence,
and It satisfies [one] totally through its perfect pur-
posiveness
{Zweckmassigkeif)"
Each "appearance" of German idealist aesthetics finds its "right
place" in the "great whole" of its history leading to Hegel, and if its
"intrinsic coherence"—what Szondi calls the "predestination" or
predetermination" of its "founding blueprint"—surprises us, its
"perfect purposiveness" may satisfy us But—as the Kantian
language of
Zweckmassigkeit
indicates—our satisfaction with this
history will be aesthetic, and to that extent ought to invite our
epistemological suspicion. Szondi said, apropos of Schiller but with a
broader orientation as well, that "decisive for the judgment of a
poetics should be only the extent to which it is successful in relating
essence and outer form to one another, and presenting their dialec-
tical unity
"'°
In his analysis of the poetics of German romanticism,
"essence" and "outer form"—or the character of a system and its
historical manifestation—are continually related to one another until
their "dialectical unity" is displayed in Hegel And this unity of
essence and form is of course the hallmark of a classical aesthetics
Szondi could only give his interpretation of the history of Ger-
man Idealist aesthetics—which I am insisting is not only a history of
prefiguration and fulfillment, but also an aesthetic construction of
form and content, of historical or material appearance and systematic
essence—to the extent that, like the work of art in a classical
understanding, it displays a final architectonics. In other words, the
history must be understood as closed, finished,
over,
m the closure of
the fulfillment offered by Hegel's
Asthetik
It is from this perspective
that he can speak of the "historical logic of the matter itself," and
understand the "logic," or the aesthetic structure, of the history as
having a dialectical story-line within it. But what this closure denies,
or forgets, or at least obscures, is the characteristic of this dialectic
as something that occurs or happens, as a historical activity before it
IS
history.
Szondi described this aspect eloquently when he said of
the ostensibly "dialectical nature" of Schlegel's "relativizing of the
present toward the future," that it is
negative
insofar as the present is
grasped "as a prepatory exercise
(Vorubung),
as a purely provisional
thing," but that it
becomes positive
as the present is determined "as a
progressive moment."*' Or again, when describing the "mediation of
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