who's afraid of anacoluthon?

Who's Afraid of Anacoluthon?Author(s): Jan MieszkowskiSource: MLN, Vol. 124, No. 3, German Issue: Emotionality (Apr., 2009), pp. 648-665Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29734532Accessed: 19-08-2016 03:51 UTC

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Who's Afraid of Anacoluthon?

Jan Mieszkowski

Had ye been there?for what could that have done?

?John Milton, Lycidas

The goal of this essay is to describe an emotional dynamic that is intrinsic to language rather than simply represented by or expressed in it. Beyond the familiar models of linguistic praxis?positing and performance; reference and signification; formation and deforma? tion?I will attempt to articulate a notion of linguistic affectivity, or

more specifically, linguistic auto-affection. The initial focus will be on the traditional but vexing figure of anacoluthon, a breakdown of grammar or syntax that is often mistakenly treated as though its manifestation reveals nothing about language. I will then turn to a reading of Gottfried Benn's "Requiem," a text in which the relations between disruptions of syntactic norms and discursive affectivity are explored in detail.

From the Greek for "lack of sequence," anacoluthon is typically defined as an abrupt change in the syntax or grammar of a statement, as when a sentence begins in the first person but suddenly switches to the third person or a transitive verb appears but fails to be followed by a direct object. Anacoluthon is often associated with aposiopesis, in which a sentence breaks off, never to continue, and anapodoton, in which a sentence begins with a subordinate clause that is not fol? lowed by a main clause. In these cases, rhetoricians speak of the initial syntax or grammar creating an expectation for the completion of a pattern that is then thwarted when another grammar rears its head. Anacoluthon is regularly linked with feelings, but not in the terms I propose to delineate. Figures of interruption are celebrated for what they convey about the volatile emotional state of their speaker, since

MLN 124 (2009): 648-665 ? 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


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it is maintained that one can infer from the "sloppy" grammar or syntax that the producer of the utterance is not fully in possession of his or her linguistic faculties due to overexcitement, distraction etc. Language breaks down, but the fault is said to lie with the speaker rather than with language itself. By this line of reasoning, the proper use of words is tantamount to the overcoming of emotional factors entirely Anacoluthon is thus praised as a stylistic asset when it appears in Shakespeare or Racine, where it is lauded as an inventive way of expressing a character's feelings. In cases where the expressive inten? tion of the figure is not obvious, anacoluthon is simply written off as a blunder, an indication that an author or translator had not fully mastered the rules of, for example, subject-verb agreement. Either way, as long as overt grammatical or syntactic disruptions are treated as products of a writer's skill or incompetence, they remain an effect of forces external rather than internal to language. Many linguists follow a similar strategy in relegating anacoluthon to

the realm of language use and assuming that it has nothing to tell us about grammar or syntax as such.1 In this way, it is treated as a flawed verbal performance, a phenomenon of spoken discourse that occurs when someone changes course in the midst of a sentence. A writer who was to pen such an abrupt alteration in form would simply edit his or her line?unless, of course, he or she was deliberately trying to illustrate confusion or an oral exchange.2 Described as "unplanned speech" or "self-correction during speech," anacoluthon is seen as a trace of the spontaneity of the process by which an individual produces and revises propositions rather than a window onto an essential feature of signification.3 By definition a disruption, anaco? luthon is nonetheless understood with models designed to affirm the sovereignty of the sober, competent speaker over the discourse s/he employs. For rhetoricians and linguists alike, language as a system of articulation and representation is thereby starkly contrasted to the play of emotional dynamics, which make their influence felt only by upsetting the proper functioning of verbal systems. If the goal is to study language, it seems that one would do best to ignore the vicis? situdes of feeling entirely.

JSee the entry on "anacoluthon" in David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics (New York: Blackwell, 2003) 23.

2 See Bernard Marie Dupriez, A Dictionary of Literary Devices: Gradus, A-Z, trans. Albert W. Halsall (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991) 35.

3 See Hadumod Bussmann, Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics (New York: Routledge, 1996) 20-21.


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Of course, such accounts of anacoluthon raise as many questions as they answer. No rhetorician or linguist would maintain that discus? sions of metaphor or metonymy were somehow not part of the "real" study of language. Why, then, should so-called "figures of interruption" be any less germane to the conversation? One can also ask why the disequilibrium in evidence when one linguistic schema unexpectedly emerges within another should be understood as the effect rather than the cause of the physiological or psychological state of the language user. Finally, if the successful use of anacoluthon to represent the emotional state of a speaker looks exactly like the misuses of language to which those with less command of the rules of grammar or syntax put it, is it unreasonable to suspect that the very idea of using and abusing language is intimately connected with what we understand as the affective order of human experience?

Some linguists have objected to the grab-bag quality of the defini? tion of anacoluthon as "a breakdown in the syntactic construction of a sentence," complaining that this characterization is so broad that the resulting collection of divergent examples lacks any instructive force.4 Defined as virtually any glitch in grammatical norms, anacoluthon can? not be taken seriously as a specific linguistic phenomenon. A review of the more specific definitions of anacoluthon, however, presents a new set of problems. In some cases, the emphasis is on the way in which the interruption of the original grammatical construction by a new grammatical form renders the initial one incomplete?it is "left hanging," as it were5?whereas other sources seem to imply the oppo? site, that is, that the emergence of the second construction obviates the need for the first to have been finished: "Anacoluthon: changed or incomplete grammatical sequence?could you just . . . oh, it's OK, Eve done it."6 In his oft-cited Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, Heinrich Lausberg describes anacoluthon as an imbalance or asymmetry within a sentence rather than as an outright incoherence or breakdown, suggesting that what is interesting about this figure of "interruption" is precisely that the sentence does continue to function.7 Similarly, in

4Dupriez, A Dictionary of Literary Devices 34. 5 See, for example, Robert Lawrence Trask, A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Lin?

guistics (New York: Routledge, 1993) 14. 6Kirsten Malmkjaer, The Linguistics Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge,

2004) 518. 7 See Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study,

trans. Matthew T. Bliss, Annemiek Jansen, and David E. Orton (Boston: Brill, 1998) 414?1416. See also Dupriez's comments on Lausberg in A Dictionary of Literary Devices, 35.


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the midst of dismissing anacoluthon as mere "self-correction during speech," Hadumod Bussmann acknowledges that it is "also the blend of two different constructions."8 The concession is brief, but decisive. In these terms, anacoluthon is potentially something formative, not just because it is a creative way for a writer to show that his speaker is excited or confused, but because it allows for the emergence of a new kind of linguistic schema entirely. From this standpoint, it is only a small step to ask whether the real interest of anacoluthon may be that it indicates that there are sentences in which multiple syntactic or grammatical paradigms function harmoniously:

He is eating what you call a persimmon. He's going to?I think it's Chicago?tomorrow. John is (I think) a nice guy.9

These formulations are somewhat different from the examples of anacoluthon typically cited from Shakespeare or Racine in that here the interruption of the initial grammatical or syntactic schema is only temporary, i.e., the original line is ultimately continued and brought to a tidy conclusion. At the same time, such sentences suggest that anacoluthon, far from being a mistake with no significance for the study of how language works, may point to something essential about verbal structures. In other words, what happens when anacoluthon is treated not as a glitch in discourse, not as a stumble or a stutter, but as a symptom of the fact that the very notion of grammatico syntactic hegemony on the level of the sentence or clause has to be rethought? What is being protected by efforts to deny that anacoluthon reveals

something essential about the nature of language? One possibility is that a belief in the mono-syntactic, mono-grammatical character of individual propositions is part of an investment in an understand? ing of meaning grounded in the unity of a self. If one looks to the Continental philosophical tradition, however, there is evidence that poly-syntactic dynamics have long been taken quite seriously. In the first Critique, Kant maintains that the Ich denke accompanying all cog? nition is neither a concept nor a thing but an act of spontaneity of which the subject has no real knowledge.10 At first glance, Kant thereby substantially rewrites Descartes' je pense, je suis, but in doing so, he

8 Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics, 20-21. 91 am grateful to John Stewart and his colleagues for these examples. 10 "Das: Ich denke, mu? alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten k?nnen" {Kritik der reinen

Vernunft, Werkausgabe III [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988] B 132).


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does not necessarily challenge the authority of the first-person gram? matical category that coordinates a self and its predicates, presumably the transcendental schema of subjectivity par excellence. In Kant's inheritors, it is precisely the monolithic integrity of this alignment of subject and verb that will be challenged, whether in Fichte 's account of the simultaneity of acts of Setzung and Entgegensetzung, Friedrich Schlegel's call for a syntax that is no longer synthetic, H?lderlin 's understanding of the "hyperbolic" comparisons of the poetic spirit by which it outstrips its own positings and reflections, or Hegel's doctrine of the speculative Satz. In each of these cases, the authority of a given grammatical or syntactic schema to ground the unity and stability of an entity constituted by its auto-relational drives is questioned by the recognition that any articulation of subject and predicate is only one part of a polymorphous dynamic that cannot be reduced to a single formal paradigm.

Some rhetoricians have flirted with similar conclusions when con?

sidering whether the figure of anacoluthon may unsettle the custom? ary understanding of figurai language. In A General Rhetoric, Group p begins with the declaration that anacoluthon is a break in structure that produces a syllepsis ("any rhetorical omission relating to the rules of agreement. . . of gender, number, person, or tense").11 They immediately add, however, that in its extreme forms anacoluthon leads to a "rupture and more radical substitution" whereby the presumed coordination between the two syntactic patterns becomes increasingly "hypothetical" (78). At the limit, anacoluthon effects such an extreme disjunction between grammatical or syntactic patterns that one is tempted to dismiss its appearance as a gaffe, no matter how skillful one presumes its author to have been. The "good" writer who ostensibly knows how to re-craft language in innovative ways turns out to be a "bad" writer after all, someone who is unable to get his or her clauses to align properly. In this way, anacoluthon threatens to de-rhetoricize rhetoric by recasting the figurative as blunder. Anacoluthon is thus both super-figural?the extension of creativity in language use to transformations in the rules of syntax and grammar themselves?and sub-figural, almost too deviant to register as a coherent representational gesture. As a figure for the difference between a departure from literal language and a mistake, anacoluthon is at once the figure of figures and a figure for the dissolution of figure, the collapse of the sustained

11 Group u, A General Rhetoric, trans. Paul B. Burrell and Edgar M. Slotkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981) 77/75.


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comparisons between figurative and literal instances of language that allow for figuration to emerge in the first place. At the border of figuration and disfiguration, anacoluthon calls for a reconsideration of what makes any figure a figure, and correspondingly, what makes any syntax or grammar a syntax or grammar.12

In a number of essays, Paul de Man highlights the connections between a rhetorician's approach to the potentially paradigmatic quality of interruptive figures and the rethinking of the Kantian self in Idealism and Romanticism. Focusing on Friedrich Schlegel's associa? tion of anacoluthon with parabasis, De Man writes that "the similarity between anacoluthon and parabasis stems from the fact that both figures interrupt the expectations of a given grammatical or rhetorical movement."13 De Man goes on to invoke Schlegel's paradoxical claim that irony is "permanent parabasis," stressing: 'You have to imagine the parabasis as being able to take place at all times."14 In these terms, anacoluthon is not the exception but the rule; it names the fact that the expectations created by a "grammatical or rhetorical movement" are open to interruption at each and every moment. No grammatical or syntactic line has enough momentum to prevent another "move? ment" from usurping it, which is to say that any grammar or syntax is at best provisional, a gesture toward the paradigmatic rather than a sovereign model in its own right. At the level of the sentence, clause, or even the individual word, the grammar or syntax in force is at best a work in progress, a project that inevitably creates the illusion of a structuring authority that it does not possess. Anacoluthon reveals that where language is concerned, there is always enough directional

movement to guarantee the emergence of at least the semblance of a pattern or a standard, but there can never be enough movement to create a truly monolithic organizing schema that can defend itself against the possibility of usurpation. Language can never relate to itself as the unambiguous power to give form that it presents itself to be.

To understand the full implications of De Man's "grammatical or rhe? torical movement," it is necessary to go beyond the familiar dynamics

12Jacques Derrida writes that anacoluthon is "doubtless more than a figure of rhetoric, despite appearances, it signals in any case toward the beyond of rhetoric within rhetoric. Beyond grammar ^??mgrammar" (Jacques Derrida, "'Le Parjure,' Perhaps: Storytelling and Lying," Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf [Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002] 167).

13 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figurai Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979) 300 n. 21.

14Paul de Man, "The Concept of Irony," Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996) 179.


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of positing, negation and reflection and speak about an irreducibly emotive discourse.15 In the first instance, "emotion" here means neither

an entity's state of being or reaction to inner or external stimulus, nor a condition of pleasure or pain that constitutes an imbalance within a normal affective equilibrium, but the fact that language is constitutively incapable of confirming its own pretensions to being a self-realizing (auto-productive, auto-validating) system. In these terms, one must think of grammar and syntax not as the collection of rules or standards that define the proper forms of language, but as affirmations of the incompleteness of any such rule or standard. In other words, language is a collection of regulations or conventions that can never coincide

with their own dictates, the injunctions that make them what they are. Anacoluthon names the fact that no linguistic norm can be normal enough to reign sovereign, or abnormal enough to strip itself of any pretension to being paradigmatic. Language simultaneously exceeds and disappoints the expectations it arouses. Indeed, language comes into being as this series of overshot and undershot goals and can therefore relate to itself only heterogeneously, as something other than what it "feels" itself to be. This is why any individual anacolu? thon seems to be both an instance of linguistic anarchy and a fully functional?even hyper-functional?formation.

In the Kantian philosophical tradition, the name for such a para system is self-affection, the dynamic in virtue of which language becomes what it is by relating to itself as something that it has not yet become. It is a series of self-excitations that never confirm the stable existence

of the self from which they ought to emanate.16 Language is not an

15 For a far-reaching exploration of allegories of emotion in de Man, see Rei Terada's superb Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the Death of the Subject (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001), esp. Chapter 2.

16In the second version of the Transcendental Aesthetic, Kant describes "die Form der Anschauung, welche, da sie nichts vorstellt, au?er so fern etwas im Gem?te gesetzt wird, nichts anders sein kann, als die Art, wie das Gem?t durch eigene T?tigkeit, n?m? lich dieses Setzen ihrer Vorstellung, mithin durch sich selbst affiziert wird" {Kritik der reinen Vernunft B67-68). Kant's sich Offizieren comes from the Latin afficere: "to affect," "to act upon," "to excite." In these terms, the Kantian Gem?t is the affectus, the mental or emotional condition of a "state of mind" that comes into being only in and by act? ing upon itself, exciting itself, in advance, before it is, properly speaking, there at all. In Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Heidegger explains that for Kant time is "reine Selbstaffektion" and that "die Idee der reinen Selbstaffektion" determines "das innerste Wesen der Transzendenz" {Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3 [Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1991] 190). Heidegger is particularly interested in the paradoxical nature of this dynamic: "Die Zeit ist als reine Selbstaffektion nicht eine wirkende Affektion, die ein vorhandenes Selbst trifft, sondern als reine bildet sie das Wesen von so etwas wie Sich-selbst-angehen" (189). See also Heidegger's Ph?nomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen


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auto-productive force, something that effects itself; rather language is insofar as it affects itself as something that it is not. This is auto-affection as hetero-affection.

If the real provocation of anacoluthon has to do with the way in which it demands a rethinking of the relationship between language and subjectivity, it is still far from clear how this dynamic of linguistic affect differs from the physiological or psychological states of self relation (self-awareness, self-excitation) normally attributed to human beings. In Allegories of Reading, De Man refers to a passage in Proust in which it is explained that Albertine, trying to deflect interrogations concerning her sexual behavior and the lies she may have told about it, employs anacoluthon to throw off her interrogator. More specifi? cally, she switches from speaking in the first to the third person when recounting past events, as if "it was something that she had witnessed as an innocent spectator, not a thing that she herself had done."17 In "The Anacoluthonic Lie," J. Hillis Miller follows de Man's lead and revisits this passage in an effort to describe how anacoluthon fractures the authority of the self: "An anacoluthon in its self-contradiction [T did'/'she did'] cannot be taken as spoken by a single unitary mind. If we could only remember both beginning and end we should be able to convict its speaker of lying at either beginning or ending, since both cannot be true" (152). From this standpoint, Hillis Miller

might have gone on to rehearse the traditional rhetorical account of anacoluthon as the expression of a break within the self-control of a speaker who is presumed to be overcome with excitement or emotion. Instead, he characterizes the figure as a moment at which one speaker's voice is interrupted by another's: "The anacoluthon . . . brings into the open, by existing as a piece of language that must have two minds at least as its sources, the way the assumption of a single generating mind for any given text may be no more than a convention" (152). In principle, it may be irrelevant whether these "two minds" are one fractured consciousness or two distinct empirical beings. Hillis Miller is not interested, however, in dialogism or heteroglossia but in language as "a mindless machine that has as one of its effects the generation

Vernunft (Gesamtausgabe, Band 25, 1987) esp. 151-52. On Walter Benjamin's reading of the paradoxes of Kantian self-affection, see Werner Hamacher, "'Now': Wralter Benjamin on Historical Time," in The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought, ed. Heidrun Friese (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2001) 161-96.

17Cited in J. Hillis Miller, "The Anacoluthonic Lie," Reading Narrative (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998) 150.


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of a false appearance of some mind ['that of the narrator, that of the author, that of this character or that'] as source" (151-52). In moving from an observation about the presence of more than one "generating mind" to a claim about a unified system, a machine that has no "mind" at all, Hillis Miller's argument?in contrast to the linguist's ideal of a competent language user?challenges any asser? tion of consciousness's priority over language. At the same time, in replacing the "illusion of a single generating mind" with the "illusion" of a single generating machine, Hillis Miller potentially stabilizes the figure of anacoluthon. Rather than treating it as an instance in which language's self-relation forces a reconsideration of what is meant by both language and relation, he subordinates the grammatical clash to a larger system of production and control. The question, then, is whether the impulse to understand words as

the products of some mind?narrator, author, character?is a contin? gency or an essential feature of linguistic dynamics. In an essay about de Man and Hillis Miller, Derrida circles around the problem of why anacoluthon should be characterized as both the most human and the

most inhuman of linguistic events when he pokes fun at Fontanier's definition of anacoluthon because it "banks on the figure of accom? paniment, and speaks, in what is finally a rather pathetic and human manner, of 'letting stand alone a word that calls out for another as companion. This missing companion is no longer a companion.'"? The analysis of anacoluthon is always at risk of discovering that the effort to treat words, clauses, and sentences as words, clauses, and sentences has produced only an account of relationships among human beings. Similarly, Hillis Miller's overarching claim that the grammar of the self is inevitably interrupted by the grammar of language becomes

most disruptive when it is no longer certain if the interruption can be sustained or if the grammar of the self inexorably reasserts itself. Is it possible to avoid speaking in "a rather pathetic and human manner" when one is speaking about language? Or are both the impulse to affirm human control of language and the impulse to affirm language's primacy over the human side effects of the hetero-auto-affective process in which language emerges by relating to itself as something that is always already more and less normal than it "feels" itself to be?

At this juncture, it is far from obvious which models of subjectivity anacoluthon leaves intact. What should be clear is that a language of

18"'Le Parjure,'Perhaps' 182. In Greek, the ak?louthos ("what follows") at the root of anak?louthon has the sense of "a fellow traveler."


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self-affection cannot be reduced to familiar apodictic forms such as "je pense, je suis" or "das Ich ist schlechthin gesetzt." For the remain? der of this essay, I will focus on a remarkable effort to articulate an alternative to such transcendental propositions, Gottfried Benn's "Requiem." This poem explores the disarticulation of the spirit and the flesh at the limits of syntactic and grammatical norms. It appeared in Morgue und andere Gedichte (1912), a small collection that quickly acquired the status of a scandal due to its graphic scenes of dismem? bered, decaying corpses that appear designed to parody traditional lyric forms. Benn's repeated use of nouns that are at once everyday

words, vulgar slang, and clinical terms from medical textbooks adds to a sense of artifice?even verbal playfulness?that heightens the tonal ambiguity.19 For every denunciation of the poems as cold and clinical, another critic accuses them of playing havoc with readers' emotions by dwelling on pathos-ridden themes.20 Similar disagreements persist about the content of the works. Whereas some contemporaneous readers denounced Morgue as perverse and disgusting, others declared that the collection offered compassionate insights into the fragile yet

majestic nature of the human predicament. In an equally contradic? tory fashion, Morgue has been alternately celebrated and condemned for an allegedly anti-humanist attack on man's self-exaltation and for supposedly insinuating that one can find beauty anywhere, even in the autopsy room.

Benn's early writings are typically associated with the Expressionist rebellion against Naturalist aesthetics, and the extremities of his syntax are likened to the work of poets such as August Stramm, for whom it is said that the "sheer intensity of language is to generate momentum for a post-bourgeois world."21 On one reading, the disintegration and dismantling of bodies in Morgue does seem to exemplify Expressionist notions of Zerfall, Angst and Ich-Verlust At the same time, the poems aim to present a state of affairs that is orderly and complete in its own

19 Augustinus Dierick writes of Benn's "calculatedly sloppy diction, the irreverence of the vocabulary, and at the same time the coldly professional attitude of the speakers, the precision of their remarks shading into cynicism" (Augustinus P. Dierick, Gottfried Benn and his Critics: Major Interpretations 1912-1992 [Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1992] 3).

20For a review^ of a number of critical responses to the poems, see Dierick, 4?5. See also the responses collected in Peter Hohendahl ed., Benn?Wirkung wider Willen (Frankfurt a. M.: Athen?um Verlag, 1971).

21 James Rolleston, "Choric Consciousness in Expressionist Poetry," in A Companion to the Literature of German Expressionism, ed. Neil H. Donahue (Rochester, NY: Camden

House, 2005) 175.


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terms. In this vein, some early commentaries critiqued Morgue as the antithesis of Expressionism, deeming it "schreiender Naturalismus," "naturalistische Wiedergaben, ohne Kunstwillen niedergeschrieben."22 In what follows, I maintain that these divergent valorizations of the texts arise because Benn's understanding of linguistic affection is incompatible both with the Expressionist clich? of an "emotional" art that would give voice to inner experience and with the Naturalist fantasy of a poetry of images rather than words.

"Requiem" dwells on the theme of autopsy central to several other pieces in the Morgue collection, but it does so in a particularly gory fashion:

Auf dem Tisch zwei. M?nner und Weiber

kreuzweis. Nah, nackt, und dennoch ohne Qual. Den Sch?del auf. Die Brust entzwei. Die Leiber geb?ren nun ihr allerletztes Mal.

Jeder drei N?pfe voll: von Hirn bis Hoden. Und Gottes Tempel und des Teufels Stall nun Brust an Brust auf eines K?bels Boden

begrinsen Golgatha und S?ndenfall.

Der Rest in S?rge. Lauter Neugeburten: Mannsbeine, Kinderbrust und Haar vom Weib. Ich sah, von zweien, die dereinst sich hurten, lag es da, wie aus einem Mutterleib.23

Thematically, the poem is a direct challenge to humanist ideas about the physical and symbolic self and is customarily read as making a

mockery of Christian ideas of redemption and immortality. In place of Jesus, who is born of a virgin and later reborn, the text offers corpses and the quasi-rebirth of dead matter from women who are anything but virgins. The requiem, the "mass of the dead," thus becomes a mass for those who are not returning because they were only flesh and blood and, unlike wine and wafers, will never metamorphose into the body and blood of Christ at the celebration of the Eucharist.

The shattering of bodies is thus an allegory for the shattering of idols and graven images, and in this way, the poem stages a clash between Catholicism and Protestantism.

22 See Joachim Dyck, "Es gibt keine Hoffnung jenseits des Nichts," in Gedichte von Gottfried Benn, ed. Harald Steinhagen (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1997) 14.

23 Gottfried Benn, S?mtliche Werke, Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. Gerhard Schuster and Ilse Benn, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1986) 13.


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"Requiem" also dwells on the central motifs of Foucauldian bio power. In keeping with the tradition of anatomical dissection as a spectator sport for budding clinicians, the poem presents autopsy as a theatrical scene; but it is also figured as a step in the formal investigation legally mandated in cases of violent death or suicide, an elaborate show whereby the state seeks to confirm its authority over the vicissitudes of life and death.24 In the first instance, the tone of the

verses bespeaks a profound familiarity with illness and mortality. This is neither the representation of a shock (ing) experience nor the macabre ramblings of a would-be suicide. Still, the language is far from purely "objective." If the "ohne Qual" in the opening stanza belabors the obvious, since the inanimate corpses presumably feel nothing, it also hints at the potential for an emotional investment that would exceed a purely dispassionate, clinical relationship to the "matter" at hand. Furthermore, like the other poems in Morgue "Requiem" highlights the gendered feature of its corpses, as if the task of the lyric were to confirm the intimate connection between desire and death and to

highlight the fact that the spectatorial interest of the medical student or investigator can easily lurch into more perverse voyeurism.

On a formal level, the syntax of "Requiem" might seem to preclude the identification of anacolutha for the simple reason that the sen? tences are minimalist to the point of creating no expectation for a sustained pattern that could be thwarted. More than half the poem is comprised of lines with implied rather than explicitly articulated verbs, and it is not always clear how to fill in the blanks. With "den Sch?del auf," the marking of the skull as an accusative object suggests the ellipsis of a transitive verb, and one is tempted to treat the following sentence, "die Brust entzwei," as if it paralleled this first grammatical form. As a result, while the first two lines of the first stanza unfold under the

aegis of an unspoken "es gibt" (or a more subjective "ich sehe"), the poem seems to switch modes in the third and fourth lines, hovering between a description in the present (or past) tense and a series of low-grade imperatives, as if the steps of a recipe were being spelled out: "Den Sch?del aufgemacht]. Die Brust entzwei [geschnitten];" or "Den Sch?del auf [machen]. Die Brust entzwei [schneiden]." Although there would appear to be no doubt that these operations are executed ("Die Leiber geb?ren nun ihr allerletztes Mal"), it is not clear if the

dissection occurs in an idealized present of the poem's language?in

24 On these questions, see Marcus Hahn, "Innere Besichtigung 1912: Gottfried Benn und die Anatomie," Weimarer Beitr?ge 52:3 (2006): 325-53.


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the "nun" of the writing/reading?or has already taken place, thereby setting the stage for the stanza's final claim.

Behind all of these uncertainties lurks the more fundamental ques? tion of whether the lyric's initial lines are simply a verbal reflection of the dissected elements in the morgue, as if language itself were being chopped up. With the integrity of bodies, syntacto-grammatical para? digms, and even the modalities of time themselves in disarray, one is tempted to seek orientation in the conventional structure of the first stanza's last line and its figure o? geb?ren, but the broader implications of this image are far from self-evident. In addition to containing the poem's first explicit verb, this sentence presents the first obvious use of metaphorical language, and as such, it might seem to suggest that the poem pits the figurai resources of language against the graphic literalism of body parts set side by side. It is equally plausible, however, to describe the sentence as an anacoluthon, a violent interruption of the minimalist forms that have thus far held sway in the linguistic autopsy lab. In the latter case, any account of the pathos?or lack thereof?surrounding this presentation of a transformation of whole bodies into gory pieces and finally into a "birth" must first explain the "feeling" that results when two markedly different syntaxes are juxtaposed with one another.

Of course, the putatively disruptive quality of the last sentence of the first stanza is tempered by the even more jarring sentence at the end of the poem in which the implicit first-person subject of the lyric refers to itself directly: "Ich sah, von zweien, die dereinst sich hurten, / lag es da, wie aus einem Mutterleib." The fact that when this "ich" appears "in the flesh" it speaks in the past tense pits it and the final two lines against the rest of the poem, whose only other two explicit verbs are in the present tense. Rather than being part of an audience following the pathologist at his work, the reader is suddenly contem? plating an account of a past personal experience, and the theatrical overtones of the dissection scene vanish. Moreover, the first-person pronoun speaks not as one entzwei, but as the ocular standpoint from which the entire mess of bodies is viewed. This would appear to be the poem's strongest assertion of the divide between language and the body: "ich" enters as something utterly opposed to the preceding corporeal dynamics, something that semantically and syntactically has eluded the physical logics of dissection.

If the previous two verbs in the poem, geb?ren and begrinsen, were overt metaphors, the appearance of "ich sah" offers not a third glimpse of rhetorical richness but rather the first introduction of vagueness


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into the text. Throughout "Requiem," there is no shortage of terms to describe exactly what is at hand, so it is disarming to be confronted in the closing line with the minimal reference to an "es" lying there. If the richness of the description in some sense set the stage for the ultimate appearance of a first-person voice behind the poem?that is, if the level of detail suggested the specificity peculiar to a singular experience of a particular "here" and "now"? this empty gesture at "if hints that the first-person pronoun is no less under-determined, no less vague and ultimately inexpressive, than "es da." The appearance of "ich" in the text's closing lines thus becomes a pro forma gesture, an ironic deference to an ideology of lyric subjectivity that never held sway here. In fine anacoluthonic fashion, "ich sah" can be no more personal or less mechanical than (an implicit) "es gibt."

With the authority of its "ich" in question, "Requiem" poses itself the challenge of fashioning a s^n-taxis that can give an account of dissection that is not synthetic but ana-\ytic, that is, "dissolvable," like the body parts at hand. Precisely what, then, is dismembering what, and can anyone or anything put all the pieces back together? These questions acquire their most potent form in the second stanza:

Jeder drei N?pfe voll: von Hirn bis Hoden. Und Gottes Tempel und des Teufels Stall nun Brust an Brust auf eines K?bels Boden

begrinsen Golgatha und S?ndenfall.

One might assume that in a poem about body parts, metaphorical assertions of identity based on substitution and analogy will inevitably be interrupted by m?tonymie contiguities. The language of this stanza, however, makes it difficult to decide if any given noun is a metaphor, a metonymy, or a literal signification. The phrase "Brust an Brust," for example, is normally a commonplace figure, but here it is potentially quite ghastly in its literality, since in this laboratory setting two torsos may very well co-mingle in a basin. The phrase thus becomes a kind of hyper-literal anti-metaphor that shows just how literal the "literal" can be. At the same time, in the context of the sentence in which it appears, "Brust an Brust" actually does function metaphorically, char? acterizing the relations between brains and genitalia, which do not have chests (and are themselves uncertainly either literal references or metonyms for intellect and desire).

As if this were not enough, in the larger context of the poem "Brust an Brust" "literalizes" a phrase from the third line of the first stanza? "die Brust entzwei"?because now there are two chests. If the syntax


662 JAN MIESZKOWSKI

of the main sentence of the second stanza of the poem is completely ordinary, the sentence nonetheless mocks the idea that a syntax, any syntax, can ground a coherent semantics. In other words, if the goal is to draw inferences about the body parts represented in the second stanza, it is necessary to make specific assumptions about whether the poem's own parts interrelate in precise ways or mix together indifferently, as in a bucket of slop. It is thus not enough to say that the human form and the language of the lyric are set against one another as two competing modalities of signification or reference. It may equally be the case that neither has the capacity to acquire a definite arrangement (a syn-tassein) that would distinguish it from the porous corpses in the morgue.

In the last line of the second stanza, the not-so-whole body parts sneer at Golgotha, the name for the site where Jesus was crucified, a name that the Gospel writers, drawing on Aramaic and Hebrew, inter? pret as meaning "the place of a skull."25 Benn's line is often read as an image of the body blasphemously sneering at the Crucifixion and the Fall, as if there will be no return of Christ and rescue of the sinner, the spirit failing to prove itself mightier than the flesh. Of course, in sneering at the place of the skull, these body parts are also sneer? ing at the skull of the first stanza and at the futility of trying to read

meaning into the ambiguous line "den Sch?del auf." The poem thus simultaneously invites and mocks the attempt to enrich its minimalist sentence with the claim that instead of just being physically opened up (auf-gemacht), the skull is presented (aufgezeigt) as an example or paradigm, or is transcendently auf-gehoben. In short, the argument of the second stanza is that the third line of the first stanza does have a

place for "the skull," but no matter how many different verbs begin? ning with the prefix auf one tries to read into this line, their various meanings will never be able to account for what is so uncertainly meaningful or unmeaningful about their lack of a proper place in the syntax of the sentence.

From this perspective, one can go a step further and challenge the authority of the dissection narrative that serves to chop up the claim of any particular motif to control the scene in the morgue. The insis? tence of numbers in the poem, for example, provides an alternative structuring schema. In the first stanza, the number two predominates ("Auf dem Tisch zwei," "Die Brust entzwei"), three takes center stage

25See Matthew 27:33; Mark 15:22; and John 19:17. The authors of the Gospels rely on the Aramaic Gulgaltha and the Hebrew Gulgoleth, which mean "a skull."


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in the second stanza ("Jeder drei N?pfe voll"), and the lyric comes back to two at the end ("von zweien"). The contrast between two and three is heightened by the way in which the first stanza describes its bodies as implied repetitions of pairs, a symmetry of "M?nner und Weiber," whereas in the second stanza the dominant metric is no longer the pairing of individuals but an equivalence of quantity: one body = "drei N?pfe" of bodily "stuff." This latter equation certainly looks like a parodie jab at the arithmetic of the holy trinity, but it is equally relevant to note that the sequence of numbers across the three stanzas (2, 1=3, 2) is countered by the ominously unspecific opening of the third: "Der Rest in S?rge. Lauter Neugeburten: / Mannsbeine, Kinderbrust und Haar vom Weib." Here, the very idea of counting is confronted with a series of indeterminate forms that neither constitute

an alternative metric nor sum to form a totality. "Der Rest" overtly chal? lenges the coherence of adding natural numbers with a quantity that is exact (it is what is left over, no more and no less) and yet somehow imprecise in comparison to the terms labeled with specific numeric units. In this fashion, "Requiem" literally becomes a dirge or a chant, a repetition of words or images that acquires its authority from an open-ended, list-like quality that defies simple closure. What then, if anything, is left to be "the rest"? Just as the literal

metaphorical relationship became less rather than more stable the moment body parts became its central constituents, so the prolifera? tion of numbers in turn quickly becomes less an organizing principle than a challenge to any claim about what the core forms of the poem are. The first stanza's shift from "auf dem Tisch zwei" to "die Brust

entzwei" is complemented by the adverb kreuzweis(e). Beyond the overt "literality" of a word composed of two nouns, Kreuz-Weise, it is possible to take an even more literal (or "letteral") view of the term and read the word two itself?z-w-e-i, kreuzweis?in which case 1 (word) + 1 (word) = 1 (word) that is 2, with "the rest," the remaining letters, conveniently pushed off to one side. Once again, the problem of parts and wholes reappears. In a poem about dismantling the human body to expose humankind's essential meaningfulness or lack thereof, put? ting together two words that etymologically have nothing to do with "zwei" in order to produce "zwei" nonetheless may have implications for how other words are combined or dismantled, particularly words spelled i-c-h: "Ich sah, von zweien, die dereinst sich hurten, / lag es da, wie aus einem Mutterleib." If the appearance of "ich" at the end of the poem constitutes an implicit claim to have escaped corporeal disarticulation, "ich" does not elude linguistic dismantling. Read at


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the level of the letter and number rather than at the level of the

entity or word, its maiden sentence narrates a movement from one ("ich") to two ("von zweien") to one ("dereinst"); and this journey from "one" as the number of the individual speaker ("I") to "one" as a singular instance ("once") occurs not as a logical or mathematical progression or regression, but in and as the insistence of the letters 'e' and 'i': "zwei, die dereinst . . . wie aus einem Mutterleib." If "ich" is the first-person speaker of the poem, 'e' and 'i' are "der Rest."

Neither a number, a word, nor even a complete syllable, the pairings of these vowels resist the incorporative gestures on the basis of which they would ground coherent sch?mas of individuals and groups or parts and wholes, much less a model of the difference between the physical and the metaphysical. No order?religious, philosophical, linguistic, or medical?can claim eior ??as its unit, its building block, or its name. Together, 'i' and 'e' are "it" ("es"), lying there, and yet they are just as emphatically not "it," since no combination of 'e' and 'i' will ever spell es. This does not mean that the pathologist's dismantling of human

corpses is mirrored by letters that dismember words or words that dismember sentences. To make such a claim would be to reinstate

precisely the organizing systems that are being challenged. The point is rather that if "ich" posits itself as the first-person speaker of the poem, it does so only in virtue of its inability to give voice to ie and ei, that is, through its inability to count "the rest" as the product of its own actions, be they acts of self-production or self-destruction. In Lebensweg eines Intellektualisten (1934), Benn writes, "Wahrscheinlich wird das lyrische Ich immer in zwei Formen erlebt, einer zersprengenden und einer sammelnden, einer brutalen und einer stillen. . . ."26 "Requiem" is more radical than what is characterized by this dichotomy. On its own, the poem's "ich" does not have the authority to burst or to gather, to disperse or to unite. It is as if the first-person pronoun emerges at the end of the text as a belated inference or afterthought, as some? thing that "must" be there since to omit it would be to domesticate the parody of lyric form being pursued. If anything, "ich" is more of a remainder than ie or ei?it is what is left over, lying there, after the play of words, letters and numbers has been allowed to run its course. Paradoxically, then, it is the explicit appearance of "ich" that robs the individual self of any claim to thematic significance in the poem. "Requiem" presents a subject that is articulated in and as its

26 S?mtliche Werke W: 2, 177.


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very inability to be understood as either the active producer or the passive topic of the verses that mention it. Verbal representation can therefore no longer be grounded in a homology between a monologi cal syntax and a model of agency as a coordination of self-positings and self-negations. Instead we have a discourse of affect, a dynamic of linguistic excitation that never confirms the stable existence of a self. If "Requiem" is a dirge, it is not simply "mournful" or "sad." It is more a celebration than a lament, an affirmation of a language of feeling that can never be reduced to a subject's claim to express itself or to be expressed by something ("language") the subject cannot control.

The early critique of the Morgue cycle for not "doing anything" with the images it presents ("naturalistische Wiedergaben, ohne Kunstwillen niedergeschrieben") would suggest that the flaw of "Requiem" is its failure to turn its repeated invocations of dismembered body parts into a conclusion about the physical or metaphysical horrors visited upon humanity or transcended by it. In Benn, however, the uniqueness of a particular motif, word, or even letter is invariably figured as something that is too abstract for its own specificity, something too mechanical to do justice to the singular difference that ostensibly constitutes its significance. The "failure" of this poem is that it simultaneously does too little and too much with its representations, systematizing them with a syntax that can never be analytic or synthetic enough. Inces? santly interrupting any effort to turn its verbal forms into sch?mas for the organization of coherent relations between its parts and its not-so-whole wholes, "Requiem" cautions against taking refuge in the negative insight that one order of meaning is being disarticulated (or "chopped up") by another. However conceived, the poem's bodies are always more and less than the sum of their parts, so to claim that the words of the text are disarticulated by the free play of the letter or that the interplay of words across stanzas fractures the autonomy of the sentence is to reinstate a hypotactic rule of the general over the particular at the very moment it is questioned. If the result is that "Requiem" seems at once excessively pathos-ridden and coldly clinical, extravagantly allegorical and crassly literal, this is because it is a poem that works to undermine the conviction that the power of language lies in its ability to confer significance upon concepts or entities by putting them together or taking them apart.

Reed College


who's afraid of anacoluthon?

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