Know each other? We’d have to break open our skulls and pull each other’s thoughts out of the brain fibers.
BÜCHNER, Danton’S Death 1.1 (24)1
WOYZECK AND THE BARBEL FISH
PERCY SHELLEY AND GEORG BÜCHNER: the two have rarely been considered together. And why should they be? One a poet and a neoplatonic idealist of sorts, who once asserted, in Mary Shelley’s recollection, “that he was too metaphysical and abstract, too fond of the theoretical and the ideal, to succeed as a tragedian” (156). The other a prose writer who, in a letter of July 28, 1835, lambasted “the so-called Idealist poets,” who “have created marionettes with sky-blue noses and affected emotions, but not human beings of flesh and blood.” Büchner was thinking primarily of Schiller when he wrote those words, but who is to say he might not have said the same of Shelley, had he read him, which he almost certainly did not.2
Two writers with little, apparently, in common—and yet. Even setting aside their shared commitment to political revolution—and a comparison between “The Masque of Anarchy” and “The Hessian Messenger” might well prove fruitful3—these writers inaugurated a profound transformation in theatrical meaning. The central works in that transformation are The Cenci and Woyzeck. It is no accident that the two plays were written during the period when the science of neurology was making enormous breakthroughs, of which both writers were well aware. And it is also no accident that these two plays were also orphans of time, harbingers of a change they did little to create. Woyzeck did not appear in print until 1879—more than forty years after its composition—and The Cenci did not receive its first performance, a private affair sponsored by the Shelley Society, until 1886—almost seventy years after Shelley penned it. Audiences would have to wait still longer for public performances, with Woyzeck at last premiering in 1913, and The Cenci shown to the public for the first time in 1922. In other words, Artaud’s avant-garde reworking of Shelley’s play followed its premiere by just thirteen years, as though, for a moment, Romantic and Modernist ages touched across a fold in time.
Artaud is in fact one of the very few who has understood Shelley and Büchner’s mutual sympathy. In the First Manifesto for “The Theater of Cruelty” (1931), Artaud compiles a list of works he intends to stage, and Woyzeck is the only playtext he names without qualification. An odd choice, perhaps, for the author of “No More Masterpieces,” since by that time Woyzeck had become one. In the century after its composition, the unfinished work had gone from an ignored collection of scribblings to a central exhibit in Büchner’s process of belated canonization. The obscure medical student and sometime revolutionary, whose writings were virtually unknown when he died of typhus at the age of twenty-four, had suddenly and very posthumously been dubbed a grosser Dichter who might have inherited Goethe’s mantle had he only lived. In 1923, his homeland of Hesse, which had driven him to exile during his life, inaugurated the Georg Büchner prize in his honor.
Artaud was aware that his selection could be viewed as self-contradictory. Parrying an imagined retort, he writes that he wants to stage the play precisely “in a spirit of reaction against our principles and as an example of what can be scenically drawn from an exact text (un texte précis)” (Oeuvres 4.119). Does he imagine Woyzeck as a vehicle of Cruelty against the principles of Cruelty, as a formal text against formal text, as a self-destructive masterpiece? It is hard to say; he writes no more about it.
One thing, at least, is clear: Artaud was mistaken to think of Woyzeck as “un texte précis.” Left unfinished at Büchner’s death, the text, or set of texts, has always rested on editorial fiat and performance convention. Even more than the plays of Shakespeare, Woyzeck is deeply imprecise. A haphazard set of four manuscript drafts, only one of which seems to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, the work languished in oblivion for decades.4 When Georg Büchner’s brother Ludwig published the first edition of his works in 1850, Woyzeck went missing and unmentioned, an omission that reflected Ludwig’s sense that the play was riddled with “cynicism” and “trivialities,” as well as being virtually illegible (Kühlmann 271).5 The play was not found again until the novelist Emil Franzos discovered, deciphered, and ultimately published it in the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse in 1875. Four years later, he included it in his complete edition of Büchner’s works. The title Franzos used, based on a misreading, was “Wozzeck,” and he introduced other confusions as well, including a free rendering of the text and, more seriously, the use of a chemical on the manuscript that had the effect of making the ink easier to read in the short run, and even more illegible forever after.
The result is a tragic, though perhaps fitting, mess. But if Artaud was wrong to regard this text as “précis,” he was right to view it as a work with a peculiar affinity with both The Cenci and the Theater of Cruelty.
In “No More Masterpieces,” Artaud lists three forces of his imagined stage: action, light, and sound. “The dynamism of action” drives the Theater of Cruelty, which, “far from copying life, puts itself whenever possible in communication with pure forces (forces pures)” (4.98). This “dynamism of action” is utterly different from dramatic action in anything like an Aristotelian sense, is practically the opposite of the sort of action that defines character and helps to determine plot; this action is a force, an impact, a stimulus: nonrepresentational and postdramatic.6 Light also is an actor on this stage; light as a force in its own right, a stimulus to the nerves of the spectator, “light which is not made merely for color, or for illumination, and which brings with it its power, its influence, its suggestions” (4.98). Light is a corporeal matter of vibrations and heat, a matter of sensation. So too the raw “sonorisation” of the stage, which will consist of “sounds, noises, cries … chosen first for their vibratory quality, then for what they represent” (4.98).
Artaud’s imagined theater could be a description of Büchner’s unfinished play. Woyzeck, too, is a play of sensation, and one that principally relies on the trinity of forces Artaud catalogues: action, light, and sound. The artistic revolution of Woyzeck consists not so much in its subject matter (the depiction of the proletarian protagonist, the depiction of clinical subjugation, etc.), nor in its genre (as proto-Naturalist, as proto-Expressionist, as absolute tragedy, etc.), or in its philosophy (as idealist, as anti-idealist, etc.), or in its politics (as leftist-revolutionary, as rightist-pessimistic, etc.), or in its style (the withered dialogue, the puppet-like characterizations, etc.), however innovative these characteristics undoubtedly are. The greater shock of Woyzeck is that it at once redirects the attention of the audience to sense stimuli and renders unstable any correspondence between these stimuli and the world. It replaces an autonomous model of the subject with one based on a fluid network of corporeal sensations—and simultaneously protests against precisely this condition. It is a text whose leapfrogging modernity emerges, ironically, from its rootedness in the neurological discourse of its time.
In 1821, a mercenary named Johann Christian Woyzeck killed his faithless lover by stabbing her seven times with a broken sword blade. While his guilt was never in question, his sanity was, and the court consulted a respected Leipzig professor, Dr. Johann Christian August Clarus, to examine Woyzeck and assess his mental state. Clarus ultimately issued two reports, both of which conceded that Woyzeck suffered from hallucinations as well as other mental disturbances, but which also concluded that Woyzeck was essentially sane and therefore accountable for his actions. Sentence quickly followed, and Woyzeck was beheaded in Leipzig on August 27, 1824. It was the city’s first execution in several decades and proved so popular that the rooftops of nearby buildings had to be altered to provide more viewing places for the crowd.
Clarus’s testimony reflects a conservative response to the complications raised by the case. Particularly important to Clarus was the assertion that the murderer possessed free will (e.g., 1.518, 1.524, 1.525),7 and that the strong evidence of his mental instability did not impair his agency.
Woyzeck’s alleged visions and other unusual experiences must be considered hallucinations, triggered by disorders of circulation and aggravated by his superstition and prejudices into notions of an objective and supernatural agency; and there is no reason to accept that he suffered at any time in his life, and more particularly before, during, and after committing the murder, from a condition of mental disturbance, or that he acted pursuant to a necessary, blind, and instinctual compulsion, or otherwise than according to ordinary passionate impulses. (1.534)
The somewhat tortured logic (and phrasing) of the passage is telling. After ascribing Woyzeck’s hallucinations to a range of physiological and psychological factors, Clarus concludes that Woyzeck was never mentally disturbed or otherwise compelled at any point. The two clauses—the first affirming Woyzeck’s hallucinations and speculating as to their physical and environmental causes, and the second unambiguously affirming Woyzeck’s autonomy—strain against each other. The tension suggests the difficulty of maintaining a strong sense of free agency in the face of an at least partial awareness of the physiological conditioning of psychology.
At stake for Clarus was far more than the fate of a single soldier; at stake was the perpetuation of a social order. If Woyzeck is allowed to avoid responsibility by reason of insanity, then where can we draw the line between freedom and compulsion? On what basis can we hold anyone accountable at all? Particularly toward the end of the second report, Clarus takes as his target a new sort of medical practice, one that connects the mind to bodily instinct.
[W]hile on the one hand we may greatly esteem the zeal of various writers and medical bodies in discovering excuses for acts committed in the storm (Sturme) of emotions brought about by unusual events, or under the stress (Drange) of an instinctual will bound by the bonds of nature, on the other hand we must pay utmost attention to the confusion and detriment that would arise from the careless application of this doctrine if one were to continue, as one has already begun to do, to impute to every impulse to murder, to commit arson, to fight, to steal, and in the end to every single crime, a specific drive or instinctual compulsion, a necessity of action, thereby however destroying the effect of the law and robbing forensic medicine of its well-deserved reputation. (1.528)
Significantly, Clarus raises no objection to the veracity of the challenge to free will issued by “various writers and medical bodies”; rather, his objection is entirely to the social dangers posed by this challenge. Like many of his contemporaries, Clarus feared the consequences implicit in the emerging science of neuropsychology, consequences that threatened to make a mockery of agency and therefore of law.
Almost four decades after Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals argued that rational beings must regard themselves as free and therefore subject to moral law, the intertwining of free will, reason, and morality had become a centerpiece of German bourgeois thought.8 Büchner had learned these lessons himself as a schoolboy; three essays from the end of his schooldays in Darmstadt (he graduated from Gymnasium there in 1831) celebrated the righteousness of great men of history in their struggles for freedom. Büchner’s paean to Cato is typical: “The Roman knew only one freedom, which was the law to which he freely submitted out of necessity; Caesar had destroyed that freedom; Cato was a slave if he bowed before the law of power. And if Rome was not worthy of freedom, then freedom itself was worthy, that freedom for which Cato lived and died” (2.34).9 In another school essay from the same period entitled “On Suicide” (“Über den Selbstmord”), Büchner sounds oddly like Clarus by coupling a defense of free will with an attack on physiological explanations for psychology. He mocks somaticist theories of character, joking that “[i]t’s a short distance to the professor, in his holy zeal over the blind heathens, undertaking a dissection of Cato’s skeleton and proving that he was a few units short of a normal brain” (2.41).
But by 1835, Büchner was immersing himself in research on the nervous system. His subject was the barbel fish, about which he wrote his Dissertation on the Nervous System of the Barbel (Mémoire sur le système nerveux du barbeau) from 1835 to 1836, immediately after which he began writing Woyzeck. In September the University of Zurich awarded Büchner a doctorate on the basis of the dissertation, and on November 5 Büchner delivered a trial lecture (Probevorlesung) to the faculty of the University of Zurich in the hopes of securing a position as Privatdozent, or unsalaried lecturer. Having won the position, he taught his first course, on the comparative anatomy of fish and amphibians, while continuing to work on Woyzeck. His college, the Faculty of Philosophy, included the Department of Comparative Anatomy.
The fact that anatomy, including neurology, should be studied under the umbrella of philosophy was indicative of the intermingling of these two fields in the period, an intermingling with significant consequences for the development of neuropsychology. German idealism was generally unsympathetic to empirical psychology tout court, a suspicion that can be traced back to Kant. While Kant’s views on the scientific status of psychology were complex, he generally despaired of the possibility of establishing sure connections between mind and body and was particularly skeptical about the insights of neurology for understanding the mind. In a typical passage from his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798), Kant rejected any possibility of establishing a neurological basis for mind, arguing that “all theoretical speculation” about “the traces of impressions remaining in the brain” rests on an unavoidable ignorance of what “the cranial nerves and fibers” are actually doing, and therefore is a “pure waste of time” (3). Kant’s suspicion arose less from a lack of empirical evidence (though this possibility cannot be ignored) than from a theoretical concern that neuropsychological laws might dismantle free will and thereby undermine morality. The concern was heightened and institutionalized after his death, when German psychiatric practices tended to favor Kant’s emphasis on free will at the expense of his physiological anthropology, thus discounting his interest in corporeal constraints on autonomy (Doerner 184–186; O. Marx, “German Romantic” 351–361).
Generally speaking, the gulf between philosophy and empirical psychology in Germany only widened after Kant. Fichte, Novalis, and Friedrich Schlegel all amplified Kant’s banishment of psychology from philosophy, alternately employing epistemological, moral, and aesthetic arguments: that is, empirical psychology not only had nothing to say about the inner workings of the mind, but it also undermined morality (because of its challenge to free will) and maimed beauty (because of its reduction of noble acts to mere mechanical responses). F. W. J. Schelling went so far as to suggest that the empirical study of psychology be simply banned (M. Bell 163). For his part, Hegel worried that empirische Psychologie fragments Geist into individual and world, inner and outer spheres. In The Phenomenology of Spirit he directly attacked Gall’s phrenology and Johann Kaspar Lavater’s physiognomy (both of which held that individual psychologies could be detected through outer signs of the body) and in any case believed that the Phenomenology would displace all existing psychological explanations.10
Not that German philosophy was monolithic in this rejection. Friedrich Schleiermacher was a notable defender of empirical psychology, and in Athenaeum 2.2 (1799) sharply attacked Kant’s position as a disembodiment of anthropology. And when the philosopher and scientist Johann Friedrich Herbart succeeded Kant at Königsberg, he did so as Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, a title that contained an implicit rebuke to Kant.
In general, however, empirical psychological research was increasingly being conducted without explicit reference to philosophy. Elsewhere at Königsberg, for example, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel pioneered the field of empirical psychology by measuring and comparing reaction times of different observers; while the work was at least partly in answer to Kant’s objection to empirical psychology, it was done without reference to critical idealism. Similarly, we have already witnessed the influential contributions to neurophysiology in England by Matthew Baillie and Charles Bell, two empirical researchers whose exploration of interactions between nerves, sense organs, and the brain developed in concert with the research of François Magendie in France and Johannes Müller in Germany. And most influential of all, at least in the public imagination of the day, was Franz Joseph Gall, the theorist of “cranioscopy” or “phrenology,” a wildly popular method for determining personality through an examination of the external shape of the skull. While much of Gall’s work was subsequently disproven,11 the implications of Gall’s research—particularly the notion that mind may have its seat in brain matter, and that the brain may be multiple—were too revolutionary for the Roman Catholic Church, for the court of Franz Joseph II of Austria, and indeed for Napoleon, each of whom condemned his findings in succession.
In other words, though the mind-body problem was obviously antique, it returned with particular urgency in the 1830s, greatly exacerbated by the concurrent rise of the powerful and occasionally conflicting discourses of German idealism and neuropsychology. Never before in European history had each pole of the mind-body problem received such extreme and such sophisticated formulation. On one side we find various idealist versions of transcendental mind as epistemological ground, font of freedom, and source of morality. On the other side we find the cerebral nervous system studied by a growing range of empirical psychologists and neurologists, a physical structure increasingly difficult to distinguish from the mind, and casting doubt upon the soul. The debate was often expressed at the time as one between “psychist” and “somaticist” schools of psychology, the former of which stressed nonmaterial causes for subjective states, and the latter of which stressed corporeal causes—though in truth such distinctions were rarely so neat in practice.12
Büchner’s Dissertation stood at the center of this conflict, and attempted to reconcile it by examining the nervous system through a sharply idealist lens. That lens was provided by the movement of Naturphilosophie, an offshoot of German idealism that emphasized the search for primal laws and archetypes underlying the multiplicity of natural phenomena and insisted on a holistic understanding of the cosmos as a single, interconnected organism. The discovery of these primal forms, it was hoped, would expose the interconnectedness of nature as well as, for many Naturphilosophen, the identity of nature and God. As a medical researcher, Büchner was shaped by the movement, studying neurology with the Naturphilosoph J. B. Wilbrand at the University of Giessen, citing the Naturphilosoph Carl Gustav Carus frequently in his Dissertation, and attaching himself to Lorenz Oken, Professor of Medical Sciences at the University of Jena and perhaps the most eminent experimental Naturphilosoph of the age. Oken went so far as to attend Büchner’s Probevorlesung at the University of Zurich and subsequently had his own son enroll in Büchner’s anatomy class there. Moreover, in choosing the subject of his Dissertation and Trial Lecture, Büchner turned to a claim of particular importance to the Naturphilosophen. The claim, enthusiastically forwarded by both Goethe and Oken, was that the skull consists of fused vertebrae.13
The theory that the skull consists of fused vertebrae, with the implication that the brain might therefore be an extension of the spinal column, had special importance because many Naturphilosophen considered it an important building block in the archetypal conception of life. Goethe held that the vertebrae theory establishes the fundamental identity of all the members of a single skeletal type, however various these members may at first appear.14 For many Naturphilosophen, the vertebral theory of the skull was a significant example of the ability of anatomical science to penetrate into the archetypal forms of nature, and therefore to view, beneath shifting surfaces, the mind of God. In his 1807 inaugural lecture at the University of Jena, Oken famously concluded that “the entire human being is but a vertebra,” a statement that saddled him with the mocking epithet of “Herr Wirbelbein” (“Mr. Vertebra”). Oken’s conclusion may sound like a reductio ad absurdam of a certain kind of materialism, but for Oken, as for many Naturphilosophen, the existence of such physical archetypes provided evidence for a mystical worldview in which symmetrical microcosms and macrocosms nestled within one another. For Oken, as for Goethe, the vertebral theory of the skull supported the interpretation of natural phenomena as instantiations of archetypes, or, to put it another way, as a series of homologies repeating themselves according to a handful of elemental laws.
The vertebral theory of the skull took a vision of life that could seem shockingly materialist—“the entire human being is but a vertebra”—and showed how this vision provided evidence for a holistic, even pantheistic, conception of nature. If one of the crucial questions of Büchner’s time and place was “is the human being an Absolute Mind, or a nervous system?”, then the vertebral theory allowed the cultured European to answer “yes—and yes.” By focusing his attention on the nervous system of the barbel fish, which supposedly represented a simpler and more essential form of the development of vertebrates, Büchner hoped to reinforce the vertebral theory of the skull and to expand it to include the brain. And, in his summary of the findings of his Dissertation, this is precisely what Büchner claims to have found. “As a result of my work I believe that I have proven that there are six pairs of elemental cerebral nerves, that these correspond to six vertebra of the skull and that the development of brain mass follows from the condition of its origin” (2.139; italics added).
The conclusion that the brain is nothing other than the “development” of the vertebrae implies a radical conflation of mind and body, a conflation that would seem to confirm Clarus’s fears of a loss of free will through an insufficient separation between psyche and physiology. For Büchner the medical student, however, this conflation meant not loss but reunion. His work is a clear extension of Goethe and Oken’s, and Büchner is never so much in harmony with the mystical tendencies of Naturphilosophie as when he celebrates the implications of the new research. By the light of this new science, he writes in the Trial Lecture, “a tangle of strange forms with the most exotic names resolved themselves into beautiful symmetry” (2.159). Mystical alongside natural riddles are at last being answered and their interconnections unearthed. Scientists are discovering the nature of “the metamorphosis, indeed the metempsychosis of the fetus during gestation” (2.160)—that is, not only the physical changes of the fetus but the moment when the soul enters the body. Science is also proving the validity of “Oken’s idea of representation in the classification of the animal kingdom” (2.160), a reference to Oken’s hypothesis that all zoology, culminating in humanity, is a manifestation of God, and that each of the levels of the Animal Kingdom mirrors the senses and attributes of the human being.
At the conclusion of this celebration of Naturphilosophie, Büchner turns to the observation that, as we have seen, may be considered the apex of the system. “Once Oken stated the skull is a spinal column, it necessarily followed that the brain is a metamorphosed spinal cord, and that the nerves of the brain are spinal nerves. But how this might actually be proven has remained until now a difficult riddle” (2.160). It is this puzzle that Büchner hoped to help solve by providing evidence, through his examination of the nervous system of the barbel, that all vertebrates are reducible to a single archetype. While Büchner did not draw out the implications of this work for psychology, they were hard to avoid; with the reduction of the human brain, along with the rest of the body, to mere vertebrae, the notion of an autonomous mind becomes difficult to maintain. While the Dissertation and the Probevorlesung repeatedly seek to demonstrate that the apparent division between speculative idealism and nerve science actually comprises a harmonious unity and points toward divinity, Büchner’s insistence can easily seem a case of protesting too much.
Working against Büchner’s sanguine conclusion are aspects of the Dissertation that cannot be so easily harmonized into naturphilosophisch categories of archetype and homology, moments when the Dissertation touches the cutting edge of physiological psychology. In general, the descriptive section of the Dissertation is a model of dispassionate, exacting observation, beginning with a description of the spinal cord and proceeding to a description of the cranial nerves from their points of origin to points of connection (to parts of the brain or to sensory organs).15 The work is almost entirely devoid of interpretive commentary or even concluding summaries, with the author’s role that of impersonal observer. There is, however—as Helmut Müller-Sievers observes in an incisive essay on Büchner’s anatomical writings—a brief passage, and one only, when Büchner breaks off from his distanced description of the appearance and location of the nerves. In this instance, Büchner interacts with the specimen, shining a light into the eye of the fish. By this means he discovers that the iris of the fish eye can be manipulated with light (2.85; Müller-Sievers 711).
Though Büchner does not mention the connection, his observation touches on two of the most important concurrent discoveries of neuropsychology: the analysis of reflex action and the law of specific nerve energies. Both discoveries were at least partly credited to Johannes Müller, Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the University of Berlin and the leading anatomist and physiologist of the day. Büchner was very familiar with his work, citing him nine times in his Dissertation. And Müller later became familiar with the scientific research of Büchner, writing a highly favorable review of the Dissertation in the 1837 Jahresbericht, an edition of an annual summary of recent anatomical and physiological research that sadly appeared some months after Büchner’s death.
While it has been noted since antiquity that a snake may continue to respond to stimuli long after decapitation, the modern theory of reflex action was established only in the 1830s.16 The theory, largely developed in 1832–1833 by Müller in Germany and Marshall Hall in England, marks a turning point in the development of physiological psychology. Müller and Hall argued that the spinal cord is the connecting link between the motor and sensory impulses, yielding a far more precise picture of the ways in which non-volitional actions are produced, and an awareness of the ways in which the spinal cord directs bodily actions independently of the brain. The result, too, was that pictures of the psyche that leaned heavily on notions of conscious volition, situated either in the brain or in some immaterial soul, began to seem increasingly dubious. The nervous system, so to speak, thinks and acts, often without knowledge, sensation, or volition.17
Müller also shared responsibility with Charles Bell for another major development in the establishment of neuropsychology, also roughly coincident with Büchner’s medical and artistic work. This development (of which Büchner almost certainly knew, given the field of his research, his familiarity with Bell and Müller’s work, and the importance of the discovery) was dubbed the “law of specific nerve energies.”18 First advanced in 1826, the law was a watershed in the study of physiological psychology in that it at once focused attention on sensation and rendered sensation radically unreliable. Briefly put, it stated that each sensory nerve produces a characteristic stimulation regardless of how it has been stimulated. Thus the optic nerves register luminosity when they perceive a light source, but also, say, when they are struck, when they are shocked by electricity, when they are altered through chemical agents such as hallucinogens, or when the surrounding blood becomes congested. Regardless of the means of stimulation, the optic nerve registers the same sensation: light. Conversely, the same cause generates utterly different sensations, depending on the nerves it stimulates. Electricity applied to the skin may produce a sensation of tickling, say, while when applied to the optic nerve it may produce a flash. In the second volume of his enormously influential Elements of Physiology (Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, 1840), Müller expressed the interrelationship of stimulus and receiver as follows: “[w]ithout the living ear there is no sound in the world, only vibrations; without the living eye there is no brightness, no color, no darkness in the world, only the oscillations of light’s unknowable matter and its absence” (2:261).
The law had important implications for epistemology, destabilizing the correspondence between external stimulus and internal sensation. Not only did it indicate the unreliability of the sensory apparatus, but it also showed that this unreliable apparatus participates in the production of experience. What we actually experience when we have a sensation is not the external stimulus, but rather our own nervous system as it reacts to a stimulus—and thus what remains inaccessible is the external stimulus in itself. In other words, Müller’s law parallels many of the conclusions of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, as both suggest that experience is never a direct reflection of subject and object, but always involves unavoidable mediation of a certain (critical and/or physiological) apparatus. This parallel between the findings of Müller and those of Kant was noticed by many at the time, including Hermann von Helmholtz, Müller’s most illustrious student, who argued for the essential compatibility of neurophysiology and critical idealism.19
As a result of Müller’s work on reflex action and sensation, pictures of the psyche that leaned heavily on notions of conscious volition, such as that advanced by Clarus against Woyzeck, became increasingly dubious. In the place of these pictures of mental autonomy arose a series of practices for separating and quantifying the physiological psyche. These practices constructed a psyche that was measurable and therefore subject to scientific investigation, and thus served as an ongoing retort to Kant’s disbarment of psychology from science. The irony of Müller’s “Kantian turn” in neuropsychology is that it in many ways challenged the Kantian subject, which came to seem less like an autonomous agent and more like a nexus of corporeal sensations of varying intensity.
At age twenty-three, then, Büchner had rapidly acquired a reputation as a promising medical researcher on the nervous system. While his research connected him to the nascent field of empirical psychology, he also attempted, through a rigorously naturphilosophisch methodology, to avoid the most destabilizing implications of the new science. The Dissertation and the Trial Lecture were in some sense oddly nostalgic enterprises, attempting to show how the close scientific observation of the nervous system supports rather than undermines Romantic idealism. But that center would not hold—and no one seems to have understood this better than Büchner himself. At the same time that he was fashioning himself as heir to the Naturphilosophen, he was writing a play that was to savage their delicate unities. The fish iris responding, reflexively, to a beam of light—in this detail from the Dissertation our attention is drawn to reflex action and to the interaction of stimulus and sensation, patterns that will reappear in Woyzeck.
The ghost of Dr. Clarus, whose examination helped condemn Woyzeck to the chopping block, returns in Woyzeck. There are traces of him in the character of the Doctor, the scientific sadist who at once examines and experiments upon Woyzeck. Keeping Woyzeck on a diet of nothing but peas, a diet that has who knows what effects on his psyche, the Doctor is also a fanatical believer in the triumphant power of the will, at one point insisting that Woyzeck exert his autonomous freedom against the body’s need to urinate. “Haven’t I proved that the musculus constrictor vesicae is subject to the will? Nature! Woyzeck, man is free; in man alone is individuality exalted to freedom. Couldn’t hold it in!” (4,8).20
And yet it would be a mistake to read the Doctor as simply a parody of the Leipzig physician. For he is something newer and stranger, a figure who combines the insistence on free will of the vulgar Kantian with the metaphysics of a Naturphilosoph with the clinical dispassion of homo calculus. The contrasting and in some ways contradictory strains of German idealism and German neurology are twisted together into grotesque satire.
If we take only one of the things in which the organic self-affirmation of the Divine manifests itself to a high degree, and examine its relationship to space, to the earth, to the planetary system—gentlemen, if I throw this cat out of the window, how will this organism relate to the centrum gravitationis and to its own instinct? (3,1)
The first part of the Doctor’s question could well be a parody of one of Büchner’s medical professors (most likely the Naturphilosoph J. B. Wilbrand at the University of Giessen).21 The second part suggests that this totalizing, hyper-organicist vision of the Naturphilosophen has come to coexist with dispassionate brutality. As a figure of this grotesque union, the Doctor presages the genocidal pseudoscience of the death camp.22 “I’m revolutionizing science,” he shouts to Woyzeck, “I’ll blow it sky high” (4,8).
The Doctor also personifies a period that, as Foucault argues in The Order of Things, marks a transition from the classical order to an order in which “the site of analysis is no longer representation but man in his finitude” (319). This new order is characterized by, among other things, the rise of a new field of scientific investigation: investigation into the neurophysiological conditions of knowledge. “[B]y studying perception, sensorial mechanisms, neuro-motor diagrams, and the articulation common to things and to the organism,” scientists during the period were
led to the discovery that knowledge has anatomo-physiological conditions, that it is formed gradually within the structures of the body, that it may have a privileged place within it, but that its forms cannot be dissociated from its peculiar functioning; in short, that there is a nature of human knowledge that determines its forms and that at the same time can be manifest to it in its own empirical contents. (319)
Epistemology, in other words, becomes inseparable from biology, such that to know the world one must know the (biological) self. Building on Foucault’s analysis, Jonathan Crary has argued that “[b]y the 1840s there had been both (1) the gradual transferal of the holistic study of subjective experience or mental life to an epistemological and quantitative plane; and (2) the division and fragmentation of the physical subject into increasingly specific organic and mechanical systems” (81). These two processes—roughly, the quantification and division of subjective states—are integral to the role of sensation in Woyzeck.
Significantly, it is impossible to tell whether Woyzeck’s “marvelous aberratio mentalis parialis, second species, beautifully developed” (4,8) as the Doctor calls it, is a mental or a physical condition, a spontaneous or a trained behavior, a matter of the brains or the digestion. Woyzeck’s physical-mental state is altered, observed, quantified; the Doctor checks and exhibits Woyzeck’s pulse to determine the psychological effects of his diet, and checks his own pulse to make sure that he is in a properly cool frame of mind (“I am calm, perfectly calm—my pulse is beating at its usual sixty” [4,8]). Pitched against this radically physiological practice, in which the outward signs of the body are exact representations of the inner life of the psyche, is an insistence on the freedom of the will so robust that bodily urges are entirely subordinated to the dictates of the trained mind.
The Doctor’s cult of autonomy would be ridiculous in any context, but is even more so in this play in which freedom has become a vulgar joke. Büchner so strips his haggard private of agency that he hardly seems to qualify as the main character of his own drama. Woyzeck is battered to and fro by the Doctor, by the Captain, by the Drum Major, by the demands of military discipline, by his economic need, by his forced diet of peas, by the demands of his body (sex and urination above all), by the voices in his head and the touch of the earth. He is not alone, of course; all are blasted onward here.
With volition rendered an absurdity, the movements of Woyzeck approach the status of reflex action. Despite their caricatured distinctions from one another, the characters all exhibit that horrifying sameness, that subjection to an inescapable force; they are puppets pulled by strings of their own bodies. The First Apprentice calls out that his “soul it stinks like booze” (4,11), while the Drum Major wants to “breed a race of drum majors” with Marie (4,6) and Woyzeck shouts that “everything” should “[d]o it in broad daylight, do it on our hands, like flies” (4,11). Marie, who can “stare through seven pairs of leather pants” (4,2), is drawn like an insect to shining things, whether it be the carnival (“The lights!” [2,5]) or the earrings she receives from the Drum Major (“These stones really sparkle!” [4,4]). “[M]an,” the Carnival Announcer exhorts, “be natural; you were created from dust, sand, dirt. Do you want to be more than dust, sand, dirt?” (1,2). To which the play answers with a question: do we even have a choice?
The network of drives within the play bewilders language. While one is tempted to use terms such as “oppression” or “compulsion” to describe relations of power between these characters, the play puts even such words into question, implying as they do one who compels and one who is compelled, at the very least a subject and an object. But does Woyzeck even show us subjects and objects? Perhaps, sometimes, yes; but at other times all positions of power appear possessed, at once forceful and forced; all appear as objects and conduits. The Captain is haunted by a terror of eternity, as well as of horses, canes, and fast movements, and is “so emotional” that he “always start[s] crying” when he sees his “coat hanging on the wall” (4,9). The Doctor obsessively categorizes all his encounters as medical conditions, a pattern marked by the “idées fixes” he diagnoses in others. The drivenness of the play, its ubiquitous “madness,” does not proceed from subjects or act upon objects; it is disembodied and impersonal rhythm. Büchner struggles to capture this condition by turning, time and again, to impersonal constructions. “Something’s moving behind me”; “It’s all quiet”; “It’s coming closer!” (4,1); “It followed me”; “It’s getting so dark… . I can’t stand it. I’m frightened” (4,2); “when I close my eyes, everything starts spinning … and then [it speaks] from the wall”; “it keeps saying: stab! stab!” (4,13). More than any character, this “Es” (“It”) is the agent of the play. Such constructions drive this play much as, in Chapter 1, we saw “things” drive The Cenci.
This is an Artaudian form of action, and Büchner (as John Reddick notes) relies heavily on modal verbs in Woyzeck, and in particular the verb müssen, to convey it (Reddick 360). The insistent repetition of this verb through all the drafts of Woyzeck helps to account for the sense of drivenness that dominates the play. Numerous commentators have emphasized the political nature of this force, and, while the play’s relentless drive is multifaceted—social and personal, physiological and psychological, conscious and unconscious—the early scenes of H2 and H4 emphasize the political. “The likes of us are wretched in this world and in the next,” reflects Woyzeck as he shaves the Captain; “I guess if we ever got to Heaven, we’d have to help with the thunder” (4,5). This theme is established from the very beginning of both H2 and H4, both of which open with a scene in which Woyzeck and his companion Andres are called to duty by an army drum. “They’re drumming. We’ve got to get back (Wir müssen fort)” (4,1). The following scene in H4 continues the theme by having Woyzeck once more called away to his military obligations. “Have to go to roll call (Muß zum Verles)” (4,2), he says to Marie after his brief visit, and again, “I’ve got to go (Ich muß fort)” (4,2). The last phrase is repeated in 4,4, as Woyzeck departs from Marie after discovering the earrings she was given by the Drum Major; “I have to go (Ich muß fort),” he says. The first draft adds the suggestion that the humiliation of Woyzeck’s compulsion may be one reason for his cuckoldry; in 1,3, Margret (“Marie” in the fourth draft) laughs at the fact that “[t]he other one gave him an order and he had to go (er hat gehn müsse). Ha! What a man!” (1,3).
Thus far in the play, the forces that drive and comprise Woyzeck are closely connected to class oppression, but after this point, as Reddick further notes, “Muß” becomes unmoored from any external source (361). It becomes, increasingly, a force of the mind. By 4,10, the powers that drive Woyzeck seem to billow forth from the “Ich”: “I can’t keep still… . I’ve got to get out of here… . I’ve got to go… . I’ve got to get out (ich hab kei Ruh; Ich muß hinaus; Ich muß fort; Ich muß hinaus).” In 1,11, this overpowering “Muß” leads him directly to the knife: “I’ve got to have it (Ich muß das Ding haben).” It is not that the political gives way to the personal (as though such a distinction could be drawn in this of all plays) but rather that political and personal become as indistinguishable as subject and object.
Büchner shares with his contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer a radically physiological conception of the psyche, and it is worth noting that the period of Woyzeck’s composition falls precisely between the publications of the two volumes of The World as Will and Representation (Vol. 1: 1818–1819; Vol. 2: 1844). But Büchner far more explicitly connects physiology to the political than does Schopenhauer. Woyzeck in particular refuses to bury the political beneath a tragic metaphysics, or beneath an ideology that would assert the importance of embodiedness only in order to point away from systems of social power.23 Far from it; Woyzeck not only draws attention to corporeal sensation, but also draws attention to corporeal sensation as (at least partly) a political construction. Hence we see Andres leap to answer the call of the army drum; we see Woyzeck trained in how to walk, how and what to eat, how and when to urinate; and we see Woyzeck’s vision affected by his prescribed diet if not by his more general ill-treatment. The shift from a theater of representation to a theater of sensation does not, in Woyzeck, imply a turn toward some supposedly “pre-political” realm; rather, one of the play’s most significant insights is its presentation of political power as already active in the body even at its most “elemental.”
Like the debate over the work’s modernity, the question of Woyzeck’s political stance is perennial, with the play read as everything from nihilistic to revolutionary.24 But this question at once seizes and fails to seize the issue. If we take seriously the ordering of the senses in Woyzeck—not only those of the title character but also of all the characters, as well as of the audience—then we find a work that embodies, and offers up for reflection, a political life of sensation. The play directs attention not only to primary senses, but also their formation through both physiological and political apparatuses (and indeed, as with Woyzeck’s blindness, the inseparability of these two). Such attention to the constructedness and mutability of power is more suited to a politics of transformation than of fatalism.
And yet a bitter wind blows through Büchner’s work, which, for all its howls of protest, frequently flirts with despair. In a famous letter to his lover Wilhelmine (“Minna”) Jaeglé, he wrote that
I find in human nature a horrifying sameness, in the human condition an inescapable force, granted to all and to no one. The individual merely foam on the waves, greatness mere chance, the mastery of genius a puppet play, a ludicrous struggle against an iron law: to recognize it is our utmost achievement, to control it is impossible… . The word “must” is one of the curses with which man has been baptized. The dictum, “It must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh”—is terrifying. What is it within us that lies, murders, steals? (after March 10, 183425)
Parts of this letter return, almost verbatim, in Danton’s Death. Recalling his participation in the September massacre, Danton says,
The Man on the Cross made it easy for Himself: “It must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.”
It must—it was this “must.” Who would curse the hand on which the curse of “must” has fallen? Who has spoken this “must,” who? What is it in us that whores, lies, steals, and murders?
We are puppets, our strings are pulled by unknown forces, we ourselves are nothing, nothing! (2.5)
For Danton, the powerlessness of humanity is cause for lamentation, but also gives grounds for exculpation. The drivenness of Woyzeck the character as well as Woyzeck the play renders fundamental questions of the law—guilt or innocence, intent or accident, sanity or insanity—all but unanswerable. Clarus’s rearguard insistence on free will in the face of the real-life murderer increasingly appears a desperate gambit.
“Muß” is a proper name for the “Es” that drives Woyzeck, and the rhythm of that reflex also has a name: “immer zu.” The phrase, which may be rendered as “on and on,” “go on,” or “over and over,” appears nine times in the first draft and thirteen times in the fourth. Without subject or object, describing no particular origin or goal, it suggests motion qua motion, sheer movement. This vacuous motion haunts not only Woyzeck; it haunts the whole play. The Captain, for instance, views it with horror.
You’re going to finish early today—what am I supposed to do with the extra ten minutes? Woyzeck, just think, you’ve still got a good thirty years to live, thirty years! That’s 360 months, and days, hours, minutes! What are you going to do with that ungodly amount of time? Get organized, Woyzeck. (4,5)
The drivenness of the world can provoke a terror of unorganized, directionless time (and not enough of it!), or it can describe a dance. “Immer zu, immer zu,” Marie says, as she dances in the arms of the Drum Major. The phrase is immediately taken up and echoed by Woyzeck, who spies from the window.
WOYZECK: (Chokes.) Immer zu!—immer zu! (Jumps up violently and sinks back on the bench.) immer zu immer zu. (Beats his hands together.) Spin around, roll around. Why doesn’t God blow out the sun so that everything can roll around in lust man and woman, man and beast. Do it in broad daylight, do it on our hands, like flies.—Woman!—That woman is hot, hot! Immer zu, immer zu. (4,11)
The dance spins, rolls, enflames, and the dancer embodies the “immer zu.” In a sudden, violent gesture of displacement, Woyzeck turns from lustful horror of the “immer zu” to horrified lust for “Woman,” a gesture that might be a non sequitur if it weren’t for the ancient, familiar identity of Woman with Chaos. It is the gesture that allows Woyzeck to avoid recognizing a force neither wholly within nor wholly outside himself.
Woyzeck, then, directs us toward action as such, and particularly toward the basic polarity of motion and stillness. And as with action, so with sight and sound. Woyzeck also compels us to see and hear differently, to reorient our senses away from illumination and speech and toward light and sound as such. “How bright!” (Wie hell!) shouts Woyzeck at Andres in the first scene of the fourth draft, and the attention to light continues into the scene description for 4,3, which bluntly reads “Booths. Lights. People” (Buden. Lichter. Volk). The scene juxtaposes the lights of the Carnival, the black of Marie’s hair and eyes, and the fiery blackness of the night itself. The dialogue flickers between light and darkness.
SERGEANT: … [Y]ou’d think that black hair would pull her down like a weight, and those eyes, black
DRUM MAJOR: It’s like looking down a well or a chimney. Come on, after her.
MARIE: What lights.
The following scene transports this flickering vision to a domestic interior, and moves yet more forcefully from representation to sensation. We find Marie sitting with the Child on her lap, holding a piece of mirror. She is watching the light from her earrings flash in the mirror, enthusing that “[t]hese stones really sparkle!” Light in and of itself becomes a theatrical subject. “Shh, son, eyes shut—look, the little sleep angel! It’s running along the wall,” says Marie, and then, “(She flashes with the mirror.) Eyes shut, or it’ll look into them, and you’ll go blind.” This “sleep angel” (Schlafengelchen) is not illuminated by light; it is light, flickering with darkness. As Woyzeck enters in the following moment, the sleep angel disappears—and yet lives on, so to speak, in hidden places.
WOYZECK: What’s that you got there?
MARIE: Nothing.
WOYZECK: Something’s shining under your fingers.
As with the flashing mirror, our attention is drawn to the shine.
Woyzeck’s redirection of our attention to light qua light recalls the law of specific nerve energies; as with Müller’s law, our attention is directed to elementary sensations while, at the same time, those sensations are rendered radically unreliable. Far from providing some ultimate ground of knowledge, the turn to elementary sensations in Woyzeck actually dismembers stable correspondences. Innocent vision is not to be found here; sight is always mediated by physiology. This mediation makes a mockery of empiricism, as the sensations we receive—these apparently brute, unquestionable facts—are not in fact primal elements but complex products of our own neurophysiological faculties. And to make matters yet more complicated, these faculties themselves are subject to social manipulation, are therefore also sociopolitical faculties. The Doctor exhibits Woyzeck to his students in 3,1, directing their attention to the effects of his strict pea diet on his pulse and his eyes.
DOCTOR: Notice the result—feel how uneven his pulse is. There—and the eyes.
WOYZECK: Doctor, everything’s getting black. (He sits down.)
The importance of color symbolism to Woyzeck has frequently been noted, but attention to such visual motifs can occlude the importance of perception itself. While black, for instance, is often rendered as an object of perception (as with Marie’s black hair), it also appears as a constructed apparatus of perception (as with Woyzeck’s eyes). Senses deceive, and secrets escape representation; the deception is outrageous. After he learns of her affair, Woyzeck rages not just against Marie but against the lack of correspondence between sight and knowledge. “(Stares at her, shakes his head.) Hm! I don’t see anything, I don’t see anything. Oh, I should be able to see it, I should be able to grab it with my fists” (4,7). Marie’s response is equally telling: “You can see all sorts of things if you’ve got two eyes and aren’t blind, and the sun is shining.” Here the object of vision is unstressed, indeed irrelevant—“You can see all sorts of things”—and vision itself made the subject.
There are curious parallels between this inflamed and abstracted vision and the contemporaneous work of another artist with whom Büchner is rarely, if ever, compared: J. M. W. Turner. As Jonathan Crary has pointed out, a late Turner painting such as Light and Color (Goethe’s Theory)—the Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843) (Figure 2.1) not only directs our attention to abstracted light but also makes it a matter of the physiognomy of the perceiver’s eye rather than a passive object of perception.26 On one hand the luminescent ring is an impossible image, a blinding vision of the sun, and on the other it is a retinal afterimage, the lingering impression of the sun’s rays on the optical nerves of the artist.27 Such works recall Büchner’s manipulation of the eye of the barbel fish as well as the unstable relations between eye and object in Woyzeck. Would it go too far to suggest that this painting is to Turner’s earlier historical paintings what Woyzeckis to Dantons Tod? In any case, it is with Büchner and Turner that we first glimpse modern, embodied sight.
FIGURE 2.1 Embodied sight: J. M. W. Turner’s Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—the Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843).
Available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported) license. www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-light-and-colour-goethes-theory-the-morning-after-the-deluge-moses-writing-the-book-n00532
As with light, so with sound. The reorientation of the audience’s attention begins with the first scene of the play, as Woyzeck draws Andres’s attention to primary sensations: “[S]hh!”; “Shh! Something’s moving!”; “—[Y]ou hear that?” (Still!; Still! Es geht was!; horst du?). The threat of these mysterious sensations compels Woyzeck to beg for a return to the discursive: “Say something!” he says to Andres. Instead we are given a malevolent, mysterious “pause.” As no other playwright before him, and only Beckett and Pinter after him, Büchner makes us hear silence as an active force.
WOYZECK: It’s so strangely quiet. You feel like holding your breath. Andres!
ANDRES: What?
WOYECK: Say something! … … … … .
ANDRES: (After a pause.) Woyzeck! Do you still hear it?
WOYZECK: Quiet, it’s all quiet, like the world was dead.
ANDRES: Do you hear? They’re drumming. We’ve got to get back.
From the very outset of the play, our ears are attuned to a different kind of sound—sound not principally as language, but as noise and silence. The scene ends with the call of the army drum, and the repeated query “Do you hear?” Presumably we in the audience hear the drum too, and we are quite likely listening differently now from how we were at the beginning; we are beginning to listen not only to meaning but to sound and silence.
Scene 2 develops this new way of listening. The drumming that ends Scene 1 carries over into the opening of Scene 2, as a military patrol goes by with the Drum Major at the head, and Büchner focuses our attention on non-discursive sound:
MARIE: (Rocking the CHILD in her arms.) Hey, boy! Sa-ra-ra-ra! You hear it?
Once again, Büchner introduces an elemental sensation of noise (“Sa-ra-ra-ra!”) and juxtaposes this noise with its opposite, silence. The silence here comes from the Child, who says nothing here or indeed anywhere in the play.
MARIE: Why are you so quiet (still), son? Are you scared?
Especially when reading Woyzeck, it is easy to forget this boy who never speaks, but his frequent presence on stage is another way in which Büchner draws our attention to sound and silence. As Marie’s line indicates, the Child’s silence, like the “pause” in the previous scene, is not a mere absence but rather a fearful force in its own right—a force that unnerves the characters as it may well the spectators.
A scene from the third draft—a concatenation of babble, screams, cheers, and empty stares—deepens this relationship between sound and silence. The short scene, between Woyzeck, the Child, and the “Idiot” Karl, is worth examining in its entirety.
KARL: (Holds the CHILD on his lap.) He fell in the water, he fell in the water, he fell in the water.
WOYZECK: Son—Christian!
KARL: (Stares at him.) He fell in the water.
WOYZECK: (Wants to caress the CHILD, who turns away and screams.) My God!
KARL: He fell in the water.
WOYZECK: Christian, you’ll get a hobbyhorse. Da-da! (The CHILD resists. To KARL.) Here, go buy the boy a hobbyhorse.
KARL: (Stares at him.)
WOYZECK: Hop! Hop! Horsey!
KARL: (Cheers.) Hop! Hop! Horsey! Horsey! (Runs off with the CHILD.)
“Der is ins Wasser gefallen, der is ins Wasser gefalle, der is in’s Wasser gefalle [sic],” Karl says at the outset of this passage, and once more the stripping of sense forces us to listen for pure sound, captured here by incessant “z” and “s” vocalizations. Like the furious chorus of “C’est pas par lá, c’est par ici” that ends Ionesco’s Bald Soprano, words have come to signify nothing. The next moment is crucial: for the only time in the play, the Child breaks his silence. The Child now moves the play to another register of sound: the scream. Dialogue now is no more, dialogue has melted into utterance, to a hiss, a scream, and a cry of “Hop! hop. Roß! Roß.”
The late scenes of the first draft, almost always incorporated into reconstructions of the play as a whole, continue this attention to nonrepresentational sound. In the scene that immediately follows Woyzeck’s murder of Marie (or Louis’s murder of Margaret, as they are named in that draft), Büchner shows us “Two people.” The brief scene (1,16) focuses on “ein Ton,” a sound.
FIRST PERSON: Wait!
SECOND PERSON: You hear it?
FIRST PERSON: Uu! There! What a sound (Was ein Ton).
SECOND PERSON: That’s the water, it’s calling. Nobody has drowned for a long time. Let’s go—it’s bad to hear things like that.
FIRST PERSON: Uu! There it is again. Like someone dying.
SECOND PERSON: It’s weird, so damp, everywhere fog, gray, and the beetles humming like broken bells. Let’s get out of here!
FIRST PERSON: No—it’s too clear, too loud. Up this way. Come on.
The central actor of this scene is neither the First nor the Second Person, two virtual nonentities who appear only for this scene; the central actor is sound. But what a sound! Like calling water, like someone dying, too clear, too loud, a ghostly wisp and a physical force. “Es ist unheimlich, so dunstig” (“it’s weird, so damp [hazy, vaporous]”), says one of the People (they are ultimately indistinguishable) and that thingly “Es” returns again.
The mise en scène of Woyzeck is as central as it is mysterious. Two of the chief questions raised by any staging of Woyzeck are “what is the lighting design?” and “what is the soundscape?” Does the audience, for example, hear the “Ton” of 1,16? If so, then what does it sound like? The vital elusiveness of this sound is another indicator that we are not in the sort of world where distinctions between “objective” and “subjective,” “realist” and “expressionist” hold, that we are not in the sort of world where representation is reliable enough to draw such distinctions, that we are moving toward a playworld where sensations are cunning agents endowed with character and material force.
Whether or not the uncanny “Ton” is actually heard in 1,16, another sound certainly is: the exclamation “uu.” We hear it twice: “Uu! Da! Was ein Ton” and “Uu jetzt wieder.” “Uu” contrasts with other nonverbal utterances in the play, such as Marie’s “Sa ra ra ra!” echoing the marching band, or the “Hey! Hopsa!” of the Carnival, or the Captain’s “Ha! ha! ha!” in Woyzeck’s face. At the same time, “uu” is not entirely unfamiliar at this point in the play; we have heard it before in the final sound of “immer zu.” “Uu” marks the final transformation of “immer zu” into pure sound; after “uu” ’s first appearance, in 1,16, “immer zu” disappears from the dialogue.
“Immer zu” dwindles into mere “uu,” which becomes the dominant tone thereafter. After emerging in 1.16, “uu” appears again in the next scene, in which Woyzeck (“Louis” in the First Draft) has fled to an inn. Katey and an Innkeeper spot blood on his hands, producing the following exchange—which will be rendered here in both English and German for reasons that will become clear.
KATEY: Red, blood! (People gather around.)
LOUIS [WOYZECK]: Blood? Blood.
INNKEEPER: Uu blood.
KATHE: Roth, Blut! Es stellen sich Leute um sie.
LOUIS [WOYZECK]: Blut? Blut.
WIRTH: Uu Blut.
One might say that dialogue has degenerated to a null point, as we hear “Blut” over and again, and little more. Yet if we leave aside representation and listen instead for mere sound, the interchange expands rather than contracts. Here is that eerie “uu” again, with “Blut” recalling the “uu” exclamation from 1.16, and echoing, once more, the trailing syllable of “immer zu.” The distance between language and guttural utterance has been all but eliminated, simultaneously impoverishing and enriching the performed work.
Woyzeck teaches us to see and listen differently, to sense more materially. There is a moment, in the opening scene of the second draft, when Woyzeck exhibits clear signs of insanity. The disturbance is one of both motion and sound. “You hear it, Andres?” he says.
Do you hear it, it’s moving! Next to us, under us. Let’s go—the ground’s swaying under our feet. The Freemasons! How they’re burrowing underground!
In H4, Büchner further strips the lines.
Something’s moving behind me, under me. (Stamps on the ground.) Hollow—you hear that? It’s all hollow down there. The Freemasons!
The revision is typical of Büchner’s increasingly windswept style. But the style is not the only thing that has changed; the content, too, is altered. When, in H4, Woyzeck “stamps on the ground,” his stamping may well produce a sound. It is one of the most elemental sounds of the theater, a sound we do not hear any more than we see the frame of the proscenium: the sound of the stage itself, as the actor treads above a hollow space.
Action, light, sound: Büchner brings Artaud’s trinity of forces together in a rapacious shard of a monologue toward the end of his last draft. It is the moment when Woyzeck decides to murder Marie (4,12).28 Again, the original is reproduced here to give a sense of the soundscape.
WOYZECK: On and on! On and on! Quiet—music! (Stretches out on the ground.) Ha—what, what are you saying? Louder, louder—stab, stab the bitch to death? Should I? Must I? Do I hear it over there too, is the wind saying it too? I hear it on and on—stab dead, dead.
WOYZECK: Immer zu! immer zu! Still Musik! Reckt sich gegen den Boden. Ha was, was sagt ihr? Lauter, lauter,—stich, stich die Zickwolfin todt? stich, stich die Zickwolfin todt. Soll ich? Muß ich? Hör ich’s da auch, sagt’s der Wind auch? Hör ich’s immer, immer zu, stich todt, todt.
Immer zu, Muß (“Muß ich?”), and Es (“Hör ich’s da auch, sagt’s der Wind auch?”) all combine here, as the “uu” spills from “immer zu” to “Musik.” Has Musik become a visceral drive, too ? And how to read the unpunctuated “Still Musik!”? Most straightforwardly, an imperative followed by a noun: “Quiet—music!” But there is the suggestion as well of “stille Musik”—silent music, motionless music—a form that would be paradoxical only if silence and stasis were not so essential to the rhythm of the play. The utterance seems to compel Woyzeck to “stretch out on the ground,” the better perhaps to feel sound’s vibrations, or to grasp a spinning globe. And then, suddenly, this seasick on-and-on-ness spasms into another abyss.
The name of this other abyss is die Zickwolfin. The word is translated here as “the bitch,” but its meaning is unclear. Dr. Clarus’s psychological evaluation, which Büchner drew upon for some of Woyzeck’s lines, reads “Stich die Frau Woostin tot!” (1.527). At first Büchner seems to have changed Clarus’s “Frau Woostin” to “Woyzecke” (a feminization of “Woyzeck”), but then changed it again to “die Zickwolfin.” As “Zickwolf” does not appear to have been a word in Büchner’s time, “Zickwolfin” may denote a proper name.29 More likely, though, Woyzeck uses “Zickwolfin” as a term of abuse. “Zicke,” a variation of “Ziege,” meaning “goat,” was already employed in Middle High German as an insulting term for a woman, implying falsity and sinfulness. Added to this is “Wolfin”—“she-wolf”—producing a monstrous, self-consuming hybrid of goat, wolf, and woman. This denigration of Marie expands on other identifications of her with the bestial. In 4,6 the Drum Major calls her “wild beast,” a description that returns after the murder, as Woyzeck queries her dead body: “Why does your black hair hang so wild?” (1,19). In both cases, Marie’s wildness is a mark of her devilry. Immediately after calling her a wild beast, the Drum Major asks, “Is the devil in your eyes?” and Woyzeck’s apostrophe is similarly accompanied by an accusation of the “sins” that have made Marie “black, black,” like her hair.
Büchner heightens Marie’s sensuality in the final draft of the play. In the first draft she is named Magreth and in the second Louise, but in the fourth Büchner changes her name to Marie; the change may, as Holger Hamann argues, reflect a desire to connect her to Marie Magdalene (259–260). Maurice Benn points to other indications as well, such as the sharpening of her lust for the Drum Major (comparing 2,2 and 4,6), and the lengthening of her dance scene with the Major in 4,11 (249–250). At the same time, Marie’s penitence is also stressed to a greater degree in the final draft. She calls herself a whore but wants to kill herself for it (in 4,4), and, in 4,16, reads of the woman taken in adultery as she longs for the strength to imitate the Magdalene. “ ‘And stood at his feet weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with ointment.’ (Beats her breast.) It’s all dead! Savior, Savior, I wish I could anoint your feet.”
The sudden turn in Woyzeck’s monologue from the compulsion of sensations to the commandment to kill this sinning “Zickwolfin” is suggestive of a deeper connection. It is no coincidence that the neuropsychological challenge to agency corresponds, historically, to the rise of the cult of the femme fatale, and Woyzeck’s murder of Marie is both a harbinger of this rise and a warning against it. As the nineteenth century advances, the monstrous mongrel that Strindberg will eventually dub the “man-hating half-woman” increasingly becomes a site of displacement for fears of an uncontrollable influx, an influx that does not simply batter man but comprises him. She will play a central role in theaters of sensation.
Woyzeck marks one of the first artistic embodiments of a new picture of the psyche. The picture is a diptych. One side is anthropological, offering a psyche composed, at its “deepest,” of moving material forces, variously theorized in such ways as animal magnetism, nerve energy, and reflex arc. The other side is aesthetic, offering an artwork conceived as an influx of sensations. The spectator of such an artwork is neither a passive recipient nor a removed, critical observer; rather, the artistic spectator receives that of which he or she is already composed—the spectator becomes a body of variable waves at which the art-stream is directed. The figure of Woyzeck embodies both sides of this diptych, figuring both subject and spectator. In his peculiar receptivity to corporeal forces at once abstract, concrete, and uncanny, he is the protagonist and the audience of a new mode of theatrical performance.
SECOND GENTLEMAN: Have you seen the new play? A tower of Babylon! A maze of arches, stairways, halls—and it’s all blown up with the greatest of ease. You get dizzy at every step.
DANTON’S DEATH 2.2 (48)
Early in his play Danton’s Death, as the Jacobins’ execution machine begins to consume its own creators, Büchner has two unnamed Gentlemen stride across the stage discussing theater. They exchange a few words, jump a puddle, and are off, never to appear again. A random slice of life? A comic interlude? To made things odder, the drama they discuss is an anachronism. In a play otherwise so attentive to historical accuracy, including lengthy verbatim quotations from the principal historical characters, we hear about a sort of play that would not have been seen in 1794, but would have been quite familiar to Parisian audiences in 1835. What the Second Gentleman is describing is the sort of spectacular melodrama that was all the rage in Paris, London, and other major European cities throughout the nineteenth century. These popular theatricals were often organized around those grand disaster sensations that were their primary “draw”; the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was a perennial favorite, but the collapse of the Tower of Babel certainly fit the bill. Indeed, as Herbert Wender points out, Büchner may even have had a specific contemporary work in mind, as a Parisian production entitled Le tour de Babel (a pastiche by no fewer than thirty authors) premiered in 1834, the year before Büchner wrote Danton’s Death and two years before he began work on Woyzeck.
The irruption of this anachronistic disaster spectacle into the world of the Revolution points to another revolution occurring during the moment of the play’s composition. This transformation—actually the result of fissures that had built up over decades and even centuries, and therefore as much evolutionary as revolutionary—involved a shift from holistic conceptions of subjectivity (exemplified above all, for Büchner, by Naturphilosophie) to attempts to isolate and quantify the neurophysiological preconditions of consciousness. This shift was partly driven by the artform most centrally reliant upon bodily representation and bodily perception: the theater. And if Woyzeck represents an obscure and proleptic origin point of the theater of sensation, then the “tower of Babylon” play referred to in Danton’s Death points toward a far more popular point of origin in the increasingly sensational melodramas of the nineteenth century.
For the dialogue between neuroscience and art was hardly limited to the avant-garde. From Mesmeric spectacles to popular demonstrations of galvanic operations on frogs to Gothic depictions of reanimated corpses, the neuro-electrical nature of the human being was a subject of popular fascination at least since the late eighteenth century, and was to become ever more central over the course of the nineteenth. This popularity became especially explicit in the “cult of sensation” that swept from Britain through North America and much of Western Europe in the 1860s. It is in this decade, as John Jervis writes, that
the word “sensationalism” comes to be recorded. It refers both to a philosophical programme that emphasizes “sensation” either as the epistemological core of our knowledge of the world (John Stuart Mill) or as the basic constituent of its ontology (Ernst Mach, writing a decade or two later), and also to the better-known sense, glossed by the dictionary as “addiction to what is sensational in literature.” (Sensational 21)
Sensation novels, sensation journalism, sensation art, and sensation drama began to electrify a public aware of itself, as never before, as a dynamic yet fragile network of stimulations, thrills, and breakdowns. And while he may be more readily associated today with the cult of sentimentality, no one understood this cult of sensation better than that quintessential Victorian, Charles Dickens.
1 Except where indicated, Büchner citations refer to the Poschmann edition of his work. I draw my translations of Büchner’s plays, letters, and medical writings from the Smith edition, though where these translations are not my own I have occasionally modified them.
2 It is possible but highly unlikely that Büchner read Shelley. An English-language edition of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge was published in 1829 by Galignani in Paris, and one or possibly two pirated English-language editions of Shelley’s poetry were produced in Germany in the 1830s. The first German-language edition, however, did not appear until 1844, seven years after Büchner’s death. Shelley’s ascent thereafter was rapid, and by 1845 (the year of the first American edition) it was possible for Margaret Fuller to write, “In Europe the fame of Shelley has risen superior to the clouds.” For more on the German reception of Shelley, see Schmid. For the Fuller comment, see Barcus 414.
3 Shelley’s poem “The Masque of Anarchy” (1819) was written in outrage over the Peterloo Massacre, and Büchner’s cowritten manifesto The Hessian Messenger (1834) was an exhortation to revolution in response to the Upper Hesse peasant uprising of 1830. They are two of the most radical and penetrating revolutionary statements of the nineteenth century, though never, to my knowledge, considered together.
4 The First and Second Drafts (abbreviated H1 and H2, respectively) consist of five double pages in folio, the Third Draft (H3) consists of one page in quarto, and the Fourth Draft (H4) of six double pages in quarto. H4 is largely a revision of earlier drafts, especially H1, and scholars generally give it precedence in their (necessarily imaginative) “reconstruction” of the work. The effort is complicated by the fact that H4 ends at what seems to be midpoint (scene 4,17), so that, in order to complete the play, scholars generally revert to the last scenes of H1.
5 Before Ludwig Büchner’s edition, the editor Karl Gutzkow had published, in Telegraph für Deutschland, bowdlerized scenes from Leonce and Lena (in 1838) and a version of Lenz (in 1839).
6 For more on the “postdramatic” qualities of this sort of action, and of Artaud generally, see Lehmann, esp. 38.
7 For examples of Clarus’s insistence on Woyzeck’s freedom of will, see 1.518, 1.524, and 1.525. All quotations from the Clarus reports are taken from the Lehmann edition, as the Poschmann edition includes only excerpts.
8 Notable in this respect is the similarity of Clarus’s judgment on Woyzeck to Kant’s judgment on a case of infanticide. In that case, the murderer was spared the sentence of death on grounds of insanity, a verdict Kant rejected. “On the basis of this argument,” he writes in the Anthropology, “it might easily be possible that all criminals be declared insane persons whom we should pity and cure, but never punish” (quoted in Doerner 184).
9 At the time of their writing, such sentiments would not have been uncontroversial, in that they affirmed suicide as a potentially heroic act, and—more problematically—almost certainly drew from Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1807–1808), a manifesto that had been banned by the state since 1824. The controversial side of Büchner’s school essays is largely attributable to the still precarious position of bourgeois power in Hesse, and further indicates how the insistence on autonomous subjectivity had become a leitmotif of German bourgeois ideology by the 1820s. For the connection of Büchner’s essay to Fichte’s address, see Lehmann.
10 For more on the German Idealist rejection of psychology, see M. Bell 143–166. Accounts of Hegel’s rejection of empirical psychology may be found in Drüe 1–12; Kain 78–80.
11 While phrenology has long since been debunked, Gall’s broader reputation has actually undergone something of a revival in recent decades, as he is now widely regarded as a pioneer in the understanding of the modularity of the mind. The philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor, for example, concludes that Gall “appears to have had an unfairly rotten press,” and particularly credits him with founding the “ ‘vertical’ tradition in faculty psychology”—that is, with inaugurating the notion that there is “no such thing as judgment, no such thing as attention, no such thing as volition, no such thing as memory”—but rather that “there is a bundle of what Gall variously describes as propensities, dispositions, qualities, aptitudes, and fundamental powers” (14). For further evidence of Gall’s rehabilitation, see e.g. Young, chap. 1; Crick 85–86.
12 The division was, even at the time, a crude shorthand for a complex set of disagreements in German psychology between roughly 1805 and 1845. As with the vitalist-materialist division discussed in Chapter 1, many scientists of the time are difficult to classify neatly into one of the two camps; Johannes Müller, for example, is often categorized as a groundbreaking somaticist, and yet never fully separated himself from certain “psychist” conceptions of Naturphilosophie. For more on the psychist-somaticist conflict, see Doerner 245–291. An account of Müller’s break with, and ongoing debt to, Naturphilosophie may be found in Gregory.
13 The theory was ultimately refuted by T. H. Huxley in 1858, though it proved influential to Darwin’s development of the theory of evolution. See Thorogood; Northcutt.
14 See, e.g., Wells 23. The relationship between Goethe and Naturphilosophie—and indeed the relationship between any one self-described Naturphilosoph and another—is a complex matter, as Naturphilosophie, like most sprawling intellectual movements, meant different things to different people. For Schelling, say, it implied a strong preference for a speculative, “philosophical” approach to science over an empirical one, while for Carus and Oken it did not. For Carus, to take another example, Naturphilosophie supported a theistic vision, while for Schelling and Oken it supported a pantheistic one. And so on. But the movement, while variegated, was not hopelessly incoherent. At the least, it entailed a search for fundamental laws and/or archetypes of nature, a strong preference for organic over mechanical explanations, a philosophical and scientific holism, an affinity for post-Kantian idealism, and a belief that the essential elements of nature are an expression of the divine.
15 The Dissertation is divided into two parts, the first descriptive and the second philosophical, a division that reflects the split between empirical science and speculative philosophy in the period.
16 In his classic study of the history of theories of reflex action, Franklin Fearing divides the history into four periods, and the work of Marshall Hall and Johannes Müller in the 1830s is the hinge between the third period (of nascent experimentation [1750–1831]) and the fourth period (of increased knowledge of the structural components of the reflex arc [1832–1906]). The work of Charles Bell and François Magendie between 1811 and 1822 revealed that the motor and sensory spinal nerves were separate, a distinction confirmed by Müller in 1831. This distinction between motor and sensory spinal nerves, dubbed the Bell-Magendie Law, was crucial to Hall’s subsequent work on the reflex arc and reflex functions.
17 The implications of reflex theories for agency began to be drawn with particular acuity about five years after Büchner’s death, with the publication of Wilhelm Griesinger’s work on the relations between the spinal cord and the brain. Griesinger postulated a “mental reflex” (psychische Reflexaktion) in the brain, and argued that psychological disorders arose from disturbances in these mental reflexes. While having much in common with the somaticist school, Griesinger in fact broke with Somatiker such as Maxmilian Jacobi and Friedrich Nasse by viewing insanity as a disease of the brain in particular rather than a disease of the body as a whole. See Doerner 278–290; Engstrom 58–59; Clarke and Jacyna, 133–134.
18 In the Dissertation, Büchner references Bell’s Exposition of the Natural System of the Nerves of the Human Body (in Jean-Louis Genest’s French translation of 1825) alongside several anatomical works of Müller’s.
19 In his Treatise on Physiological Optics (Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, 1867), for instance, Helmholtz compares the law’s importance in his own field to that of the law of gravitation in physics, and writes that the law of specific nerve energies “is in a certain sense the empirical realization of Kant’s theoretical representation of the nature of the human faculty of knowledge” (208).
20 The notation “4,8” indicates the draft from which this scene is taken, followed by the scene of that draft. This scene is therefore the eighth scene of the fourth draft. Since the scenes of this play are so short, I have followed convention and given all citations from the play in terms of scene number rather than page number.
21 A number of scholars have drawn this connection; see, e.g., Lindenberger 106; Schmidt 45.
22 The idea that the Doctor of Woyzeck presages totalitarianism has been briefly explored by Richard Gilman and was also an element of Richard Foreman’s 1990 production of the play in Hartford. See Gilman 36; Gussow 141.
23 Contrary to my position, some critics have found in Büchner a Schopenhauerian fatalism; see, e.g., Benn 61–62; Müller-Seidel passim.
24 The locus classicus of this controversy may be found in Viëtor’s “Die Tragödie des heldischen Pessimismus” (1934) and Lukács’s response, “Der faschistisch verfälschte und der wirkliche Georg Büchner” (1937). The latter reading of Büchner as a proto-Communist returned with the publication of Enzensberger’s edited edition of Der hessische Landbote in 1966 and continued in the 1970s through the work of the Forschungsstelle Georg Büchner at Philipps-Universität Marburg and with the 1979 publication of Arnold, ed., Georg Büchner I/II.
25 Poschmann dates this letter, somewhat peculiarly, to the middle or end of January 1834; I follow Schmidt’s more established dating here.
26 See Crary 139. I have developed this comparison between Büchner and Turner at greater length in “Georg Büchner, J. M. W. Turner, and the Materiality of Perception.”
27 The phenomenon of afterimages, or “ocular spectra,” was also of interest to Erasmus Darwin, who discusses it at several points in The Temple of Nature. Erasmus’s son Robert (father of Charles) subsequently conducted a series of important experiments on afterimages. A brief overview of the science of afterimages from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century may be found in Wade 130–133; see also Richardson, British 12–13.
28 Woyzeck’s murder of Marie has been the subject of a number of recent feminist readings that partly inform my discussion here; see, e.g., Dunne; Martin.
29 According to Margaret Jacobs, “Zickwolf” was still in use as a surname in Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, and Frankfurt am Main in the early twentieth century; “Zickwolfin” is a feminization of the name, which could be used for female family members. See Jacobs’s notes in her edition of Büchner, Dantons Tod and Woyzeck 165.