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ATMOSPHERE, MOOD, STIMMUNG

Stanford University Press

Contents

Reading for Stimmung: How to Think About the Reality of Literature Today.....................1Fleeting Joys in the Songs of Walther von der Vogelweide.....................................23The Precarious Existence of the Picaro.......................................................29Multiple Layers of the World in Shakespeare's Sonnets........................................38Amorous Melancholy in the Novellas of Maria de Zayas.........................................50Bad Weather and a Loud Voice: Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau...................................56Harmony and Rupture in the Light of Caspar David Friedrich...................................62The Weight of Thomas Mann's Venice...........................................................72Beautiful Sadness in Joaquim Machado de Assis's Last Novel...................................82The Freedom of Janis Joplin's Voice..........................................................94The Iconoclastic Energy of Surrealism........................................................103"Tragic Sense of Life".......................................................................115Deconstruction, Asceticism, and Self-Pity....................................................128Acknowledgments..............................................................................135Bibliographical References...................................................................137

Chapter One

The middle ages, as they have been imagined ever since they were rediscovered by Romanticism—valorous knights jousting, fair ladies in high towers surrounded by deep forests—these Middle Ages never existed. The picture is the product of a few hundred songs that bards performed at courts—first in the south of France, then in the north and in German-speaking lands. Since then, this fantasy has set the tone—in a specific, but also in a historically varied way—for our understanding of luck, good and bad, in love; in some cases, it may even have determined the success or failure of individual lives.

With endless variation on a finite repertoire of situations and motifs, these texts encouraged self-confident joy among nobles who must have been obsessed by the defiant eccentricity of their gestures. "Friends, I will sing a song after our taste"—begins a poem ascribed to William IX of Aquitaine (one of the most powerful princes of his day)—"Its love, joy, and youthfulness are more mad than sensible. May he who fails to understand its words be deemed a peasant." Scholars will never agree about the precise circumstances favoring the development of this tone—the medium of a haughty, elite sense of self. However, there can be no doubt that it emerged in opposition to harsh conditions of medieval life (in these songs, nothing is celebrated more than the end of the gray and lonesome winter) and to counter religious commandments of austerity (in the Middles Ages, marriage and the passions of love were thought incompatible, and William IX, as the "first troubadour," spent his life feuding with the church). Decades ago, Hugo Kuhn—a medievalist unsurpassed for his power of imagination—speculated that pride in the male and female roles one finds in Minnesang may have brought forth early conceptions of happiness and sorrow that were experienced as social reality only half a millennium later by the bourgeoisie under the distinct influence of Romantic ideas.

What concerned Kuhn in his philological interpretations was the question whether, in the comparatively reserved tones of German love lyric, it was possible to receive an unmediated impression of the high spirits at medieval courts. Kuhn's own responses often expressed doubt, and sometimes they even seemed trapped in Romantic melancholy. His ablest successors have long since agreed that literary forms and formulas will forever obscure the true nature of the atmosphere at court. We will never be able to reconstruct, even partially, the music and melodies of songs on the basis of the notation and verse forms that remain. The few sources we do have for courtly festivals—for example, the Whitsuntide knighting of Barbarossa's sons at Mainz in 1184—contain little information about social rituals and attendant circumstances. The hints of individuality one encounters in lyrical works, which offer roles that are matters of convention, have been revealed, once and for all, as illusory.

Even though we should know better, it remains as difficult for us as for "naive" readers ever since the thirteenth century to avoid the temptation of yielding to emotion when, for example, we read the words of Walther von der Vogelweide:

    Can you see the power of wonder given to May?
    Now, soon, all will be well for us.
    We will be joyful,
    And dance and laugh and sing,
    Free of dull and boorish pleasure.

Although Walther's verses recall those of William IX, composed one hundred years earlier, their distinguishing mood comes from the fact that—almost obsessively—the scenes of springtime joy are paired with the colors and sounds of winter:

    The world shone yellow, red and blue,
    Green in the woods and elsewhere.
    Little birds sang there.
    But now, the hooded crow croaks.
    Does the world now have another color, too?
    Yes, it has become all pale and gray,
    And thus, furrows have appeared on many brows.

It would be entirely in keeping with what we know about the formulaic fashion in which medieval poetry was composed if we could simply distinguish between springtime and winter poems. In Walther's works, however, the harsh cold of winter always threatens the bliss of May. Hardly a pleasure in his text is not laden with the destructive intuition of its own end. To convey this state of emotion, the songs take up, again and again, an image that stands apart from the changing seasons—an image incompatible with the tastes and colors that belong to them. This image also occurs in the so-called "Elegy"—a text that commentators have, with some plausibility, interpreted as the poet's embittered look back on life:

    Woe, how the sweet things of this world have led us astray!
    I see bile floating in honey:
    On the outside, the world beautiful—white, green, and red—
    But inside black, as dark as death.

Here, the combination of beautiful sweetness and black bitterness—the German employs the verb sweben to represent how honey and bile flow into one another—reaches a point of religious asceticism according to which all the pleasures of this world are revealed as deception. A decade earlier, in an invective he composed against Pope Innocent III (who had made an alliance with the Guelphs and the king of France against the Staufen dynasty), Walther had employed the image of bile as a metaphor for what interrupts the order and joys of the world in passing:

    Suddenly the angel exclaims:
    Woe, woe, a third time...