idea, reality and play - acting in der tor und der tod

Orbis Litterarum ( W S ) , SO, 262-276

Idea, Reality and Play-Acting in Der Tor und der Tod Benjamin Bennett, University of Virginia

AIewyn recognized Iong ago that Death as he appears in Hof- mannsthal’s Der Tor und der Tod is not equivalent to death as a real event but rather has the character of an idea in Claudio’s consciousness, and this, taken together with the servant’s testimony to Death’s objective reality, forms the central paradox on which the play is constructed. This unbridgeable gap between death as idea and as reality has the effect of presenting us with death as a mystery, which is also the effect of the doctrine, derivable from Death’s explicit vision of a fundamentally chaotic universe, that the whole positive character of human existence is an arbitrary human creation, a kind of play-acting. But the mysteriousness of Death in this sense is presented with equal directness and in the same way to both Claudio and the audience, whence it follows that insofar as the play succeeds, the audience is meant to identify with Claudio, not regard him critically.

I

In an essay which remains as significant today as it was when it first appeared thirty years ago, Richard Alewyn says of the relation between Claudio and Death in Hofmannsthal’s Der Tor und der Tod:

Wenn die Erscheinung dcs Todes den Toren so erschreckte, dann war das nur die letzte seiner Tiiuschungen. Wenn er den Tod, der doch eigentlich das Leben ist, als Gestalt von auDen herantreten sah, dann war das uberhaupt nur moglich, weil er sich aaerhalb des Lebens gestellt hatte. Was ihn so herankommen sieht, ist nichts als Claudios Bewdtsein, das sich seinem Leben entfremdet hat. Und was in der Maske des Todes zu ihm hereintritt, ist nichts als sein eigenes ver- stdenes und vergessenes Leben. Und was sich vor dem Tode so entsetzt, ist sein Bed t se in , was sich gegen ihn wehrt, ist sein BewuOtsein, und was hier stirbt, - das einzige, was uberhaupt zu sterben vermag - ist sein BewuBtsein, die .In- dividuation*, mit Schopenhauer zu sprechen, dern Hofmannsthal hier so nahe kommt wie nirgends sonst.1

That is to say, not only the specific shape in which Death appears, but the very fact that he appears is conditioned by Claudio’s mental state, his hyper- conscious dienation from his own life. Death appears to Claudio because

Der Tor und der Tod 263

Claudio is the sort of person who not only lives his life and dies his death but also at the same time stands intellectually apart from these things, in the position of a spectator.

Alewyn’s perception may be verified and developed as follows: When Claudio hears Death’s music, it plunges him as it were into “ein jugendliches Meer,” enabling him to reexperience the lost feeling of being “Ein lebend Glied im groI3en Lebensringe.”z And Death, when he then steps forth, intro- duces himself in part with the words:

Wenn Oberschwellen der Gefuhle Mit warmer Hut die Seele zitternd fullte, Wenn sich im plotzlichen Durchzucken Das Ungeheure als vemandt enthiillte, Und du, hingebend dich im graBen Reigen, Die Welt empfingest als dein eigen: In jeder wahrhaft groI3en Stunde, Die schauern deine Erdenform gemacht, Hab ich dich angefihrt im Seelengrunde Mit heiliger, geheimnisvoller Macht. (209)

Death not as a person but as an event, or as a real force in experience, this “sea” or “flood” or “universal ring” or “shivering of one’s earthly form,” thus represents the transcendence of all individuality. With obvious reference to Nietzsche, Hofmannsthal notes in 1893 that “die in Individuen zerstiik- kelte Welt sehnt sich nach Einheit, Dionysos Zagreus will wiedergeboren werden” (A 106), and clearly it is death, in Der Tor und der Tod, which brings about this reunification of being.

But the articulated or individuated world which is transcended by death is also the whole of the phenomenal world, and it follows from this that death as such, which transcends thii world of appearances, cannot appear, any more than the Will as such, in Schopenhauer’s definition, can appear.3 What appears in the person of Death, therefore, as Alewyn says, is a particular and incomplete idea of death conditioned by Claudio’s mentality - or to express it in one word, a kind of hallucination - and it is of course significant in this connection that Claudio knows immediately who Death is without being told (6. 208). Death terrifies Claudio because Claudio both desires and needs to be suffused with uncontrollable emotion, “durchglutet h e n ” (210); Death reproaches Claudio because Claudio both desires and needs to reproach himself; Death calls up the most significant figures from Claudio’s past because Claudio both desires and needs to re-experience his life, which he has

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not yet really experienced emotionally at all. Not only Claudio’s last thoughts, therefore, but in fact the whole of the play from Death’s entrance on, may be regarded as “sterbendes Besinnen” on Claudio’s part, “Herauf- gespiilt vom todlich wachen Blut” (220). At the end of the play, when Clau- dio dies, the appearance of death finally merges with the reality; but up to that point Death is entirely conditioned by Claudio’s own thinking, essentially a hallucination.

I1

This, however, raises a very simple but very serious question: what is Clau- dio’s servant doing there? Attempts have been made to deal with this,* but to my knowledge the most obvious answer has never been suggested: that the servant, whose part in the action of the play could easily have been dis- pensed with, is introduced for the purpose of bearing witness to the objective existence of Death and the ghosts. This answer of course leaves us in some perplexity, since we have already argued that Death as he appears is really a function of Claudio’s own personal way of thinking. If there were no servant, it would be possible for an audience to regard Claudio and Death as ex- isting on different planes, Claudio in reality and Death in Claudio’s mind, as it is possible for an audience to do in the ghost-scene from JuZius Caesar (IV, iii). But Der Tor und der Tod is more like Hamlet in this respect (as in several others); there is another witness, and we are therefore constrained to regard Death and the revenants as more than mere mental figments. How does this relate to our argument above?

The answer is illuminating, provided we agree that the question really ex- ists. If Death as he appears on stage is basically a hallucination, produced by Claudio’s overintellectualized mode of existence, and if Death nevertheless appears with Claudio on that plane of appearance which by convention we accept as “reality” in the play, that is, if the hallucinatory vision of Death appears to us directly, then it follsws that Death is our hallucination as well, that the appearance of Death also reflects our way of thinking, and that our own mode of existence is therefore not essentially different from Claudio’s. Our understanding of the psychological aspect of Alewyn’s perception, that Death is a manifestation of Claudio’s consciousness, when taken together with the objective verification of Death’s presence by the servant, thus man- euvers us into an understanding of how foolish it would be to assume that


our own idea of death is any more accurate or complete than Claudio’s, and this in turn implies an understanding of our essential kinship with Claudio. Indeed, this kinship should be fairly obvious to us anyway, since in perceiv- ing the play we necessarily think about what Claudio is thinking about, and Claudio’s problem is precisely that he thinks too much about life (“Aber ich hab es hochstens verstanden” [201]) rather than simply live it; that his position with respect to life, in other words, is comparable to that of the spectator at a play, which is of course our position. Claudio is not merely held up as an example of decadent aestheticism, but rather is meant to embody an existential situation in which we, audience and readers, also participate, regardless of our particular philosophical orientation.

And if it strikes us, finally, that this dual perception of Death on the part of the audience, death as both a hallucination and an objective reality, is not something that could actually have been intended, we need only recall that in one of young Hofmannsthal’s favorite books the situation in the tragic theater at Athens is described in very similar terms:

Dionysus, der eigentliche Biihnenheld und Mittelpunkt der Vision, ist . . . zuerst, in der alleraltesten Periode der Tragodie, nicht wahrhaft vorhanden, sondern wird nur als vorhanden vorgestellt: d.h. urspriinglich ist die Tragodie nur Shorcc und nicht ,Drama<. Spater wird nun der Versuch gemacht, den Gott als einen realen zu zeigen und die Visionsgestalt sammt der verklarenden Um- rahmung als jedem Auge sichtbar darzustellen; damit beginnt das .Drama< im engeren Sinne. Jetzt bekommt der dithyrarnbische Chor die Aufgabe, die Stim- mung der Zuhorer bis zu dem Grade dionysisch anzuregen, dass sie, wenn der tragische Held auf der Biihne erscheint, nicht etwa den unformlich maskirten Menschen sehen, sondern eine gleichsam aus ihrer eignen Verziickung geborene Visionsgestalt.5

There are of course differences. Hofmannsthal does not use “Stimmung” to present us with a vision produced by our “Verziickung,’’ but rather uses our understanding of the relation between Death and Claudio to persuade us that Death is not only a person but also a vision produced by our consciousness. Der Tor und der Tod is not a tragedy, and even if it were, Death would not be the hero. But Death himself admits he is related to Dionysus.

I11

In order to develop these perceptions we must understand more fully the complexities of the idea of consciousness, and we can begin by examining a note of Hofmannsthal’s written while the play was being composed:

Ben jamin Bennett

.Tor und T0d.a Beim Voriibergehen dieser lebendigen Toten hat er die Wal- lung von Schwindel, das 8aopacEiv wobei man plotzlich uber die ganze Exi- stem staunt. Das Leben kommt ihm einen Augenblick vor wie ein Traum, eine Fata Morgana, eine Sinnestauschung. Dann erkennt er diesen Phantasmen, an die ihn tiefe Gefiihle kniipfen, die hochste aller wirklichen Realitaten zu. (A 100)

The erstwhile friend, we recall, begins his speech with the implied accusation (“Liest immer noch Horaz” [216]) that Claudio subscribes to the doctrine of nil miruri, and 9aup&(stv (wonder, astonishment, admiration) is therefore just the medicine Claudio requires.

But how is it possible ever to be astonished by one’s existence if one does not begin by placing oneself, as Alewyn expresses it, somehow “auBerhalb des Lebens”? If one manages to live in perfect accord with existence, then obviously one’s existence will not have the capacity to astonish one, so that Claudio’s self-conscious alienation from existence seems to be a necessary precondition for the extraordinary surge of wonder by which he is now over- whelmed. And yet this statement of the situation is insufficient, because Claudio actually attempts twice to use his own self-consciousness as a means of generating for himself a sense of wonder at existence, or more particular- ly, at the emptiness of his existence, and fails both times.

From his opening words on, Claudio’s apparent anguish steadily inten- sifies until it reaches a climax in the lines:

Und auch das Leid! zerfasert und zerfressen Vom Denken, abgeblaBt und ausgelaugt! Wie wollte ich an meine Brust es pressen, Wie hatt ich Wonne aus dem Schmerz gesaugt: Sein Flugel streifte mich, ich wurde matt, Und Unbehagen kam an Schmenes Statt . . . (202)

What Claudio is doing here, very simply, is attempting to suffer anguish because of his inability to suffer anguish, which is of course hopeless; precisely to the extent that he succeeds in suffering he will also remove the remun for his suffering, and the last two lines above therefore describe what is actually happening in Claudio as he speaks them: er wird mutt. He realizes this with a start and now admits to himself that he has been engaged in mere “Griibe-

Then, however, after the servant brings the lamp, he begins the same process all over again, except that now - by artificial as opposed to natural light

lei77 (202p


- he uses not the idea of nature but that of art as his intellectual spring- board. All art is a product of feeling and therefore attracts Claudio, the seeker after feeling; but it also always disappoints him, for the feeling in art is neutralized by the form. Claudio addresses his collection:

Ihr wart doch all einmal gefiihlt, Gezeugt von zuckenden, lebendgen Launen, Vom groJ3en Meer emporgespiilt, Und wie den Fisch das Netz, hat euch die Form gefangen! (203)

But what Claudio now attempts to do is derive from these art-objects at least a feeling of revulsion, since the feeling of joyful affirmation is denied him: “Ihr hieltet mich, ein Flatterschwarm, umstellt,/Abweidend, unerbitt- liche Harpyen” (203). That is, he attempts to derive an intense feeling precisely from his inability to derive intense feeling from art, and since this is merely a repetition of the hopeless emotional-intellectual sophistry he had practiced upon himself earlier with regard to nature, the climax now comes more quickly - “Und Gluck ist alles, Stunde, Wind und Welle!” (204) - and fades with less of a shock. Claudio must now admit that he lives essentially “ohne IUagen” (204).

Self-consciousness in itself is therefore not sufficient. There is only one specific thought by virtue of which, when we think it as deeply and directly as possible, our self-consciousness becomes truly itself and produces in us that helpless “Schwindel” which Claudio not only needs, but as we have just seen, is deliberately striving for. This is the thought of death. In a passage there is good reason to believe Hofmannsthal was thinking of, Schopenhauer says,

die. . . philosophische Verwunderung [ist] im einzelnen durch hohere Entwicke lung der Intelligenz bedingt, iiberhaupt jedoch nicht durch diese allein; sondern ohne Zweifel ist es das Wissen um den Tod, und neben diesem die Betrachtung des Leidens und der Not des Lebens, was den starksten AustoD zum philosophischen Besinnen und zu metaphysischen Auslegungen der Welt gibt.7

Claudio has always desired to be somehow astonished by life.

Dann .. . stand ich an den Lebensgittern, Der Wunder bang, von Sehnsucht sii0 bedrangt, Dal3 sie in majestatischen Gewittern Auffliegen sollten, wundervoll gesprengt. (210)

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But only by confronting himself with the idea of death can he succeed in this, only through his recognition, “Beim Voriibergehen dieser lebendigen To- ten,” that he too is nothing but a living corpse; that there is no magic gate way into life but rather that life, as Death says specifically, is never anything but the temporary and arbitrary creation of apparent order or “Beziehung” in what always remains fundamentally a “Chaos toter Sachen” (210). This is the sense in which Claudio must acknowledge the ghosts’ “reality”; he recognizes that he himself is in essence one of their number, that all ordered reality, even the reality of ourselves, is never anything but a fleeting appari- tion, the impermanent organization and animation by “Geist” (210) of dead elements which tend normally toward chaos.

It is clear, therefore, that Claudio more or less deliberatezy calls forth the idea of death, in order to accomplish what he has failed to accomplish by re- flecting on nature and art, to maneuver himself intellectually into a state of overwhelming astonishment at his existence. And it follows from this, moreover, that the servant’s testimony to Death’s and the ghosts’ objective presence, to the fact that the vision is ours as directly as it is Claudio’s, has the effect of reminding us that we, its audience or readers, are doing exactly what Claudio is doing. In accepting the conventions of literary art, namely, we are deliberately attempting to think about human existence in such a way as to be astonished by it; or at the very least, we are consciously and ex- pectantly open to this possibility. We are, as every audience is, that all-too- literate gathering of whom Goethe’s “Direktor” says:

Sie sitzen schon, mit hohen Augenbraunen, Gelassen da und mochten gem erstaunen. (Faust, 41-2)

It is for this reason that we allow ourselves to be confronted here with the otherwise uncomfortable idea of death. Thus, once again, our kinship with Claudio is insisted upon very strongly: Claudio’s function as our representative on the stage.

Iv We are now in a position to make use of our observations on structure as an approach to the play’s meaning, and we can begin by recalling that Hof- mannsthal, while working on Der Tor und der Tod, was also planning an adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae (cf. A 100). There are several specific re- miniscences of that Bacchic-dance tragedy in Hofmannsthal‘s “Kleine To-


tentanzkomodie” (GLD 106).8 Death’s association of Dionysus with Venus recalls the same association made scornfully by Pentheus (B 225). Cadmus’ curious remark that even if Dionysus were not a god, Pentheus would still be well-advised to consider him one (B 333-6), is echoed by Claudio’s admis- sion in his final speech that it does not really matter to him whether what he says is true:

Kann sein, dies ist nw sterbendes Besinnen, Heraufgespiilt vom todlich wachp Blut, Doch hab ich nie mit allen Lebenssinnen So vie1 ergriffen, und so nenn ichs gut! (220)

And of come the idea of foolishness is central in the Bacchae (e.g. B 344, 369); Cadmus and Teiresias, greybeards decked out as Bacchantes, appear foolish but are wise, whereas with Pentheus the reverse is the case.

More important, however, is the basic structural similarity between the two plays. Claudio, like Pentheus, is “spottisch-klug” (6. 216), and his cle- verness is refuted by Death and the ghosts as Pentheus’ is by Bacchus and the Bacchantes. Pentheus is of course simply destroyed in the end whereas Clau- dio somehow learns to participate in the dance of Death, but this does not affect the inner parallel. Both men are confronted with the absolute necessity of participating in something their reason recognizes as totally absurd, this being in Claudio’s case the dance of Death which, as Alewyn suggests, is also the dance of life: “Man bindet und man wird gebunden” (211), one dances the dance even though one’s reason has the tendency to make relative all Bindungen by raising one up into an aesthetic detachment from which the particular business of life appears merely tedious or trivial. The ghosts, moreover, are by no means exempt from these self-conscious diffi- culties.9 Indeed, each of their speeches includes a specific desperate attempt to rescue some sort of meaning from what is clearly perceived as the general absurdity of existence. Their situation is not essentially different from Clau- dio’s except insofar as they, like Cadmus and Teirmias, not only recognize the absurdity of existence but also fulfil their obligation to participate in it, to dance the absurd dance, to act as though this “Chaos toter Sachen” were an ordered cosmos, to undertake the hopeless but inescapable task of “Wege noch im Ewig-Dunkeln finden” (220).

And in his last speech, in that desperately and unashamedly sophistical juggling with the concepts of life and death by which he attempts to make at


least some verbal sense out of his hopeless situation, Claudio finally joins the ghosts. This speech is his Bacchic conversion, his affirmation of absurdity, his dancing of the dance of life, and it opens, significantly, with the rueful words:

Wie auf der Biihn ein schlechter Komodiant - Aufs Stichwort kommt er, redt sein Teil und geht, Gleichgiiltig gegen alles andre, stumpf, Vom Klang der eignen Stimme ungeriihrt Und hohlen Tones andre riihrend nicht: So uber diese Lebensbiihne hin Bin ich gegangen ohne Kraft und Wert. (219)

In order to understand this we must keep in mind that the opposite of ‘‘ein schlechter Komodiant” is “ein guter Komodiant.” Claudio is not suggesting that we should become genuine or natural or sincere human beings; in fact it is questionable whether these ideas are even meaningful in this context. What Claudio now understands is that man, so to speak, is naturally unnat- ural, that there is an essential tendency in man toward the consciousness of death and that consequent self-estrangement which makes possible a sense of wonder at things, a recognition of how absurd and futile it is that anything should exist in the first place. Life is nothing but a “Lebensbiihne” upon which we arbitrarily contrive a game for ourselves in the face of our own knowledge of its absurdity, and what Claudio regrets is that unlike the ghosts, or unlike Cadmus and Teiresias, he has resisted playing the game. Our job in life is not to achieve some sort of harmonious union with nature by which our self-consciousness will then somehow be neutralized. Claudio’s mistake is precisely that he believes in this sort of “nature,” filled with “Sinn und Segen” (200); that he conceives of life as a kind of paradise to be entered through magically opening “Lebensgitter,” that he refuses to live except on the basis of what Hofmannsthal later calls an “Urgrund des Erleb- nisses” (A 241)lO which unfortunately does not exist. Our job in life, rather, is to play the game, to be good actors in the sense of Diderot’s Paradoxe sur Ze combdien, good both in spite of and by virtue of our self-conscious detachment from our rales.

This does not mean that self-consciousness is not a problem. In and for itself - as “Geistige Souverkitat; sieht die Welt von oben” (A 213) - self- consciousness is a quasi-divine capability to which Hofmannsthal later gives the name “Prae-existenz”; it raises us above mere animal helplessness, and


in the form of memory it renders past and present mysteriously simultane- ous, thus overcoming time.11 But by the same token, self-consciousness, es- pecially in the form of memory, also involves an awareness of precisely the temporality it overcomes, an awareness of our changeableness - “Mein Ich von gestern geht mich so wenig an wie das Ich Napoleons oder Goethes” (A 93) - hence eventually the idea of death. ( l k s logical development of self-consciousness toward the idea of death represents another aspect of Claudio’s dramatic thought-process.) Our existence, that is, no sooner begins to make sense to us, as a “Glorreicher . . . Zustand” (A 213), a taste of eternity, than it turns out to be senseless; the divine capability of self-awareness only serves to confront us with our helpless human mortality. Self-conscious existence, which means all human existence, thus includes its own re- ductio ad absurdum, and this implies that whatever coherent and positive character our existence nevertheless possesses must be the result of what we ourselves arbitrarily make it; our job relative to this chaos of dead things is “[unseren] Garten dram zu machen/Fiir Wirksamkeit, Begluckung und Ver- drul3” (211), to create the whole of our life, not only its pleasant side, as an actor creates the whole of his character and his character’s fate on the stage.

Or to look at it somewhat differently, the ecstatic self-consciousness of preexistence, by its nature, “sieht nur Totalitaten” (A 213); if we grasp something consciously, we necessarily grasp it as an ordered totality. But this, as Hofmannsthal says specifically, is the “Nachteil” (A 213) of preexistence, for it implies that such a state can be maintained only “durch Suppition des quasi-Gestorbenseins” (A 213). Our own existence, in order to be view- ed as a totality, must somehow already have been terminated, which means that in pre-existence we, as it were, deny ourselves the opportunity of being what we are, of standing in the midst of our own life. Hence the ambivalent “Bangen und Sehnsucht diesen Zustand zu verlassen” (A 214): trepidation because we stand to lose our “Geistige Souveriinitat” in that “Das Tun setzt den ubergang aus dem BewuSten zum U n b e d t e n voraus” (A 226); but also yearning, for otherwise we find, like Claudio, that our own existence has passed us by. In spite of our trepidation we must therefore somehow re- nounce our vision of totalities and take upon ourselves what Hofmannsthal, to go back to a much earlier diary-note, calls the “Pflicht . . . mit dem Frag- mentarischen sich zu begnugen” (A 89). We must do what the actor does, the “guter KomOdiant,” when after having thought about his r6le as a totality, he takes a firm grip and somehow actually places himself in the midst


of it, no longer outside as knower and creator but now inside, as the character himself, and this, again, is what Claudio does in his last, outrageously illogical speech. It is significant in this Connection that the concept of “Ver- wandlung,” which is used frequently in “Ad me ipsum” to describe a basic mode of actual participation in life, as opposed to intellectual detachment (6. A 217-18,221-2), also occurs later as a description of what “Der groae Schauspieler” (PIV 233) achieves.

This, finally, enables us to make an incidental point concerning the basic theatricality of Der Tor und der Tod, as opposed to what is usually con- sidered this play’s predominantly lyrical quality. If, as we have argued, the play’s meaning includes the idea that the proper conduct of human l i e is not something that somehow comes from the heart but rather is comparable to skillful dramatic acting, then it follows that when the play is actually per- formed, the very medium by which we perceive it (i.e. play-acting) becomes a symbol of the truth it expresses, so that this truth is expressed much more fully for the spectator in a theater than it is for the lyrically aroused sensi- bility of a reader. The relation between the spectator and the actors may even be said to parallel that between Claudio and the ghosts. Precisely his awareness that the figures before him on the stage are merely play-acting, must eventually move the understanding spectator to ascribe to these figures, in a sense, “die hochste aller wirklichen ReaWten,” since what he learns from the play is that life itself, in its deepest essence, is not different from such play-acting.

V But this brings us to an important question which we have not yet dealt with: why does CIaudio die? If the dance of Death is really a dance of life, why does Claudio, when he learns to participate, not go forth into the world like the young man in “Der Jiingling und die Spinne” (GLD 37-9),12 or for that matter like the audience when the play is over? The answer to this question is at once very simple and very significant. Given the implied emphasis in the play upon Death as a mere idea, a kind of deliberate hallucination, there must clearly be a corresponding emphasis upon death as an actuality, upon “Die Wirklichkeit des Sterbenmiissens.”l3 If death is merely an idea by which we create a sense of existential wonder for ourselves, and if, moreover, we know that this is the case, then obviously the idea of death, thus


drained of its actual force, its terror, will no longer cause us any wonder after all. Death must really happen, we must really be mortal, or at least believe that we are, in order for the idea of death to have its effect on us.

That is to say, if we and Claudio really desire the idea of death, as a spur to that astonishment at existence by which we are enabled to live, then it follows that we and Claudio also in a sense actually desire to die - or at least desire somehow to experience death as an immediate reality14 - and this sheds some light upon a rather curiow feature of Claudio’s death: that Death himself, though he is actually standing there on the stage, takes no part in it. Claudio’s death occurs as the intellectual climax of his own final speech; the paradoxical relation of death and life, and of sleep and waking, is developed to an unsurpassable pointedness, whereupon Claudio simply falls over. Thus Claudio dies essentially of his own accord, and his death thus il- lustrates that line of Yeats, “Man has created death.” Death, once again, must be a reality if the idea of death is to fulfil its function in human existence, and in this sense the reality of death is our own desire.

The important point here, however, is that there must be a difference between death as reality and as idea. Death is a reality for us only insofar as it is also a mystery, “The undiscover’d country from whose boum/No traveller returns,” something we simply cannot grasp adequately in an idea, and this difference between idea and reality is expressed on stage by the radical disconnectedness between Claudio’s falling down and that figure standing there whose name happens to be “Death” but who neither does nor says anything until afterwards. This disconnectedness between Death and death - which also reflects what we may regard as the outrageously incomprehensible injustice of death, for even the learning of Death’s lesson does not exempt one from dying - this discoMectedness on the stage thus serves to remind us of the utter inadequacy of our own idea of death and faces us thereby with death as an impenetrable mystery. If Claudio, having learned his lesson, were to go on living, this would simply illustrate that the idea of death acts as a spur to life, and from our point of view such a comfortably positive conclusion would destroy the play’s meaning, since death would not have the character of a reality for us and so would not serve us as the source of a metaphysical astonishment at existence. Claudio dies, therefore, in order that the idea of death presented by the play be an idea which includes the knowledge of its own utter inadequacy, that is, a mystery.

This idea of the mystery (M injustice of death, moreover, also enables us to


bring to bear our arguments above concerning the meaning of the play, for there is simply no way in logic of reconciling the truth that all life is essentially play- acting, its character determined by what we arbitrady make of it, with the fact that we are utterly helpless before the necessity of dying. Taken in com- bination with the specific lesson Claudio learns from Death, therefore, Clau- dio’s actual dying has the effect, once again, of presenting us with death as an impenetrable mystery; and paradoxically, it is in turn only by virtue of the sense of astonishment and radical self-estrangement which this mystery awakens in us, that we are enabled to appreciate and actualize the truth of Death’s lesson, that life is really a kind of play-acting. Despite the great dis- tance in time and spirit between the two works, Claudio’s death fulfils the same function as the death of the human characters in Das Sulzburger grope Welttheater; it brings into focus the truth that ‘‘Amchaffen und gehorchen, sich aufrecken und sich ducken, prassen und entbehren, das alles geschieht von denen, die im Spiel stehen: gleichnisweise aber geschieht es und nicht fur wirklich, und gut oder schlecht wird nicht die Rolle heBen, sondern das Spiel dam, wenn die Dinge an ihr Ende kommen sind” (DIII 262-3).

But if the play actually succeeds in presenting us with death as a mystery, then it follows, finally, that what we experience here is the reality of death, not only an idea; death’s mysteriousness, after all, is precisely the discre- pancy between idea and reality. And this, our experience of death as both idea and reality, once again has the effect of placing us in the same p i t i o n as Claudio, who meets Death und undergoes death. Indeed, the whole idea of our kinship with Claudio, which, as we have shown above, is central to the play’s intellectual structure, depends for its poetic validity upon our experience of death as a reality, for only on the basis of such an experience can it be said that Claudio dies as our representative, that he enacts our own secret but essentially human desire to confront the reality of death, or that we, in a sense, thus die in Claudio.15 It is of course impossible to say exactly what the experience of any particular reader or spectator is, but on the basis of our present argument I think we can be fairly certain of our ground when we say that not a detached critical judgment of Claudio, but rather a complete participation in Claudio’s experience, the experience of death, on our part, as both a more or less deliberately conceived idea and a reality before which we are utterly helpless, represents the play’s deepest intention.


NOTES

1. Richard Alewyn, sDer Tod des Astheten,< in bber Hugo von Hofmannsthal, 3. A d . (Gottingen, 1963 - the essay alone orig. 1944, rev. 1949), p. 76. See also Mi- chael Howard Porter, *The Theme of Consciousness in the Poetry and Early Plays of Hugo von Hofmannsthal,a Diss. Cornell (1970), esp. p. 95.

2. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gedichte und lyrische Dramen, ed. Herbert Steiner, Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben (FrankfudMain: S . Fischer, 1952), p. 207. Further references to Der Tor und der Tod are located in the text by page-number alone. Quotations from elsewhere in this volume are located by pagenumber p r e ceded by the abbreviation *GLD.a Other references to Steiner’s edition are located by page-number in the various volumes according to the following abbreviations: PI = Prosa Z (1950), PI1 = Prosa ZZ (1959), PIV = Prom ZV (1955), DII = Dra- men ZZ (1954), DIII = Dramen ZZZ (1957, A = Aufzeichnungen (1959).

3. Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, as the advocate of sheer nothingness, of course also thus contradicts himself by appearing in a particular form, and this contradic- tion, which Faust challenges in the line .Du nennst dich einen Teil, und stehst doch ganz vor mir?a (Faust, 1345), is probably what Hofmannsthal actually had in mind when he fashioned the relationship between Claudio and Death.

4. E.g. Hinrich C. Seeba, Kritik des usthetischen Menschen: Hermeneutik und Moral in Hofmannsthals sDer Tor und der Toda (Bad Homburg v.d.H., 1970), who ar- gues that the scene with the servant is focused upon Claudio’s lack of sympathy and is intended to show that ~[Claudios] ichbezogene Gleichgiiltigkeit setzt ihn ins Unrechte (p. 81). But this idea has no relation whatever to the scene’s actual effect; though he does eventually become impatient (,la0 mich in Ruha [2051), Clau- dio is not really unpleasant to the servant, hears him out all the way, and in fact, having ascertained at one glance that he is frightened (,Was erschreckt dicha [204]), initiates the conversation himself.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragodie, ch. 8, in Nietzsche: Werke, ed. Gior- gio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, III. Abt., 1. Bd. (Berlin, 1972), p. 59.

6. Hofmannsthal achieves this effect by excising, after san Schmenes Statt,a eleven lines which appeared only in the play’s first printing and which develop the thought logically enough, but without dramatic necessity, to the idea of BAnblick des medusengleichen Nichtsa (GLD 534).

7. NUeber das metaphysische Bediirfnis des Menschen,a Die welt als Wille und Vor- stellung 11, ed. Max Frischeisen-Kohler, in Schopenhauers samtliche Werke (Ber- lin, 1928), 111-IV, 165f. What makes it at least reasonably likely that Hofmannsthal was thinking of this essay, apart from the obvious applicability of the idea of death, is the quotation in it of two Greek passages, Plato, Theaetetus, 155D, and Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b (alpha major), in which euup&~Etv (BVerwunderunga) is specifically characterized as the beginning of philosophy. That Hofmannsthal read at least some Schopenhauer very early is shown, for example, by the letter of 8. VII. 91, Hofmannsthal/Richard Beer-Hofmann, Briefwechsel (FrankfurtlMain, 1972), p. 3, and by a footnote to the essay on .Maurice Barrkscc (PI 57).

8. References to Euripides’ Bacchae are located by sBa plus the linenumber. Inter- estingly, Hofmannsthal’s later plan for a tragedy Pentheus still shows affinities with Der Tor und der Tod; the theme of aestheticism was to be struck by costumes sim


9.

10.

11.

Geist Aubrey Bwdsleys,a and Pentheus was to have a dialogue with his mother in which he was to mistake her for a DTraumbilda (DII 523). For a more detailed argument on the basic similarity between Claudio and the ghosts, see my article .Death and the Fools,a forthcoming in GLdiL. The note reads, seine solche StelIe wie: ‘Ich fiig mich so, dal3 Gut und Bose iiber mich Gewalt . . .’ [211] heat: Gut und Bose hat keine Gewalt: ich glaube sie nicht, weil ich sit nicht vom vitalen Urgrund des Erlebnisses her empfangen habe.< We must be careful to understand that Hofmannsthal is here putting the idea of .Ur- grund des Erlebnissesa in Claudio’s mouth, thus relativizing it. In the same series of notes Hofmannsthal defines aversiindigunga as sdas Nicht-sich-Halten am engen Gegebenena (A 241), which suggests that any BUrgrunda of experience must be at- tained by a conscious act of self-limitation, and speaks of .Ringen um das Not- wendigea (A 241), that is, of necessity itself as something that must be struggled for. For a more detailed argument on preexistence and consciousness, see my article DChandos and his Neighbors,< forthcoming in DVjs. Cf. also Erwin Kobel, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (Berlin, 1970), pp. 36Of., on pre-existence as memory, and Man- fred Hoppe, Literatentum, Magie und Mystik im Friihwerk Hugo von Hofmanns- thals (Berlin, 1968), esp. p. 113, on magic and memory.

12. On the relation, as Hofmannsthal saw it, between this poem and Der Tor und der Tod, see A 214, 220.

13. William H. Rey, .Die Drohung der Zeit in Hofmannsthals Friihwerk,a Euphorion, 48 (1954), 297.

14. On the desire to die and the joy of experiencing death, compare Gabriel’s specula. tion on the origins of animal sacrifice in ~Das Gespriich uber Gedichtea (PI1 88-9).

15. See note 14.

idea, reality and play - acting in der tor und der tod

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