The Forty-Nine Steps

Dr. Rönne kept going in and out of hospitals, morgues, and literature. He had been living this way for quite a while, proceeding further and further into his first internal emigration. He was an émigré in a doctor’s white coat, and later in a Wehrmacht uniform. Rönne’s initial gesture was to separate his fate from reality. It was unacceptable that what offered itself as reality should actually be so. A pile of debris, maybe. Material to connect with, even. But the more Rönne connected, the more his separation from all of it grew. A silent eruption was going on. Around his head was a slight whiff of epilepsy.

Dr. Rönne had already appeared in Ithaka, a play imbued with medical filthiness that Gottfried Benn published in 1914. But Rönne’s identity card shows Brussels, in the early months of 1916, as the place and date of his birth. Benn at the time was a doctor in a hospital for prostitutes and was billeted with his orderly in a requisitioned eleven-room house. He was allowed to go out in civilian clothes, his hours on duty were few, he ignored the inhabitants of the place, and with the war as a pretext he secretly embarked on a mental flight that was never to be interrupted. Very probably, he already knew that “the category in which the cosmos manifests itself is hallucination.” Now “life was wavering in a sphere of silence and dismay,”¹ a hallucinatory stasis with fluctuations. Rönne experiences in himself what Benn will later formulate: “The ego is a late state of mind in nature, and fleeting besides.”² Like Pameelen, another double dating from the months in Brussels, Rönne annotates his own clinical chart: “In this brain something is decomposing that for four centuries has been considered as ego and rightly so; during that period it has sustained the human cosmos in forms transmitted from generation to generation.”³ The process is accompanied by a slight, sinister euphoria. What matters is to render the “basic schizoidness of the human essence”⁴ productive and provocative. “Schizoidness” is not a textbook word, freshly coined by Eugen Bleuler, but the seal on every hidden, fading moment. Rönne feels its stamp on his skin in the café or while eating lunch with men who talk about tropical fruits or in the corridors of a hospital. What exists? Those levers, handles, tables, waistcoats, those convinced words, those necks planted like tree trunks—or his invisible delirium, his cold, then burning trance?

I have devoted various studies in my essays to this theme of absolute prose. I found the first signs of it in Pascal, who speaks of creating beauty through distance, rhythm, and intonation, “through the recurrence of vowels and consonants”—“the oscillating number of beauty,” he says once, and “perfection through the order of words.”

—Gottfried Benn, Doppelleben

To what literary genre does Gehirne (Brains) belong? To absolute prose. But what is meant by “absolute prose”? Obviously, something that had burst forth in Lautréamont, in Arthur Rimbaud (Illuminations, but also Une saison en enfer), in Stéphane Mallarmé (Divagations), but they are all still too lyrical; the mocking tone stands out only in Lautréamont and the Rimbaud of Une saison. Among his contemporaries, Benn cited Carl Einstein (Bebuquin) and André Gide (Paludes and nothing else) as producers of absolute prose. As for the surrealists, they were incapable of it. André Breton declared his contempt for art and had too many alexandrines in his ear. For the best examples, look to Saint Petersburg: to Osip Mandelstam (The Egyptian Stamp and his prose in general) or Andrey Bely (in his grandiose intentions); or else to a lone woman, Marina Tsvetayeva, when she speaks of her mother and the piano or also of Aleksandr Pushkin. Such is the lineage. It has nothing to do with avant-garde or literary manifestos. Indeed, it has no patience with either. There is only one criterion, and Benn stated it succinctly: “For anyone striving to give expression to his inner self, art is not something relevant to the social sciences but something physical like fingerprints.”⁵

Gehirne is a record of drugged writing. An endocrine drug is acting here, secreted by the physiology of a doctor through whose hands many corpses have passed. This drug loosens the connections that make reality feasible. It isolates other connections, which exhibit themselves with mocking clarity to the drugged mind and which to other minds are indecipherable. This nourishes the shifting soil of absolute prose: A space where words are given over to the force of inertia and friction is reduced to a minimum. Images wink at each other, nouns interbreed, and no one knows what they are talking about. Perhaps, a few moments later, even Rönne does not know. He stacks up fragmented figures on the shelves of a café; he puts himself in the shoes of a repulsive gentleman seated at another table. His perceptions are accompanied by overwhelming sarcasm; he rides the crest of a primordial wave. Meanwhile, Rönne tries to respond faultlessly to anyone who speaks to him, and he is pleased that the decomposition going on in his head cannot be noticed from outside.

Rönne’s obscurity of mind comes from a compulsion. We believe Benn absolutely when he tells us that “The Birthday” just “happened,”⁶ that the “writing totally obeyed a compulsion.”⁷ We are not dealing with automatic writing as clumsily theorized and practiced by the surrealists. It was the irruption of a twilight state as the average condition (in the statistical sense) of consciousness. He, Rönne, had no need to train, stretch, or goad himself to reach that state. On the contrary, he needed to hold himself back, in order to go on shaking hands with his colleagues, soberly greeting the nurses, and ordering a beer. The drug was flowing in a lethargic and unfathomable sensory apparatus, like water from a faucet left open during the night.

Weary of all avant-gardes and formalisms, we take a dim view of these words, since we have heard so many others like them. “Writing that refers to nothing but itself”—how many times have we heard that? But what looks similar can also be immensely distant. That “phosphoresce,” which for Benn was the result of long sojourns on the other side of the river Acheron, can never become a pedantic prescription. The literature that celebrates itself and only itself and has cut all its moorings is precisely the one that derives in minute detail from that psychical darkness, that silent cavern where at intervals the style phosphoresces like an ignis fatuus. Many have brandished this literary thyrsus, but there have been very few bacchants. And today almost all of them are dead. Benn takes leave of Wellershoff: “But I would be happy if I’ve succeeded in showing you that it’s not just a question of style and language, but of problems of substance.”⁸

The azure sky is in Benn from the start. But it is the azure of someone who traveled very little, whose knowledge of other languages was poor, whose idea of delight was to read a detective story in English. Even Nietzsche, after all, took a few walks around Santa Margherita. Benn’s biographical landscape instead is dirty snow, with a few wooden hulks sticking up in it. It is Berlin around the end of the war, the scene that greets Benn’s final representative, the Ptolemean who emerges from his beauty parlor. This is no Club Med divined by the poet. “Azure” is a vision of devastation that invades any bystander, an intensity that relates to nothing, a cutting mental irruption. This azure is sacrilegious, a gash, an enamel scar.

When Rönne was a doctor in a bordello and had reached the age of thirty, he began to reap the stylistic consequences of the earth tremors being produced in him, glacial and carboniferous, the friction of continental plates. Metaphor lay always to hand, like a jimmy for a burglar, if the only possibility for relief was offered by a chronic “attempt to escape.” And the “lack of fidelity” sounded like a rousing virtue for someone who, like Rönne, felt oppressed by sincere and truthful citizens, purveyors of public opinion. “The Conquest” and “The Journey” are variations of an archetype that is the polestar for the modern: the strolling of the schizophrenic, introduced by Georg Büchner in Lenz, doused with metropolitan poison by Baudelaire, unraveled with amiable despair in Robert Walser. To stroll in an unknown city, among hostile Belgians armored in their language, to sit for hours in a café, to end up for no particular reason in sordid neighborhoods, and finally to walk around in a greenhouse—this is all it takes to be sucked back into metamorphosis, the ceaseless billowing of figures, which can also be terrifying. “By now the formless was spreading, and the monstrous lay in wait.”⁹ Strolling and escaping now coincided.

One of Benn’s peculiarities was a supreme sense of exhaustion. “I suddenly felt a profound exhaustion and a poison in my limbs.”¹⁰ My father always suffered from fatigue, his daughter Nele was to say. It is an exhaustion that comes from above and crushes like a giant hand. The frequency of such verbs as “waver,” “fluctuate,” and so on also pays homage to expressionist conventions. But what conveys Benn’s tone is the backwash in the blood, the crouching vampirism in the breath, a cosmic gasping.

The Rönne stories are not always beautiful. They are sometimes dull, sometimes overloaded; at times images are not set free or are set too free, while bits and pieces of poetry remain trapped by the harsh laws of prose. But what does it matter? There is, after all, a throb in every line, a hammering at the temples, a fever that dries up the throat, and one cannot say why. There will be time for beauty later, maybe the next line, maybe some forty years later, amid venereal disease and Wehrmacht uniforms, in multiple internal emigrations, and always with a poker face. But it had all been made possible by that “unprecedented” year when “Rönne, the physician, the flagellant of individual things”¹¹ was born in Brussels, a year governed by a feeling of landslide, of forever wandering about while losing one’s footing. Catastrophe first, then strophes.

It should be noted that Rönne is not a “born artist,” even if at the end he “perceives art.”¹² What happens in him is not a literary apprenticeship but a slippage of geological strata. He witnesses something, or rather, undergoes it, and there he sinks. And as he sinks, for a moment he would still like to be one of those steely and obtuse gentlemen who toss down a glass at the officers’ club and accompany it with a quip. That way it would be easier to survive. The solution will come later, in a perennial “double life.” One day Rönne, or Benn, will open a medical practice, treating venereal and skin diseases. And he will write a few perfect poems, six or eight by his own count. This is how poets are: “petit bourgeois, born with a particular impulse, half for volcanic action and half for apathy.”¹³

A breath of criminality blows throughout Gehirne, striking the stagnant air of the cemetery behind the pastor’s house, the house where Benn was born; it blows as well through Nietzsche and “as statistics prove, more than 50 percent of Germany’s great men.”¹⁴ There is the cruel Lutheran dictate of Benn’s father, forbidding the son to administer morphine to his mother in her tortured death throes, since suffering comes from the Lord and we must accept it as such; there is the nest of mice embedded in the diaphragm of a girl drowned among the reeds. The doctor’s hand grazes them. Without having to move a step, Benn falls into extremes, and his words are tinged with that magic that Nietzsche had evoked: the magic of the extreme, the eye of Venus.

Benn’s daughter Nele had written from Denmark to ask him a question like a good Nordic girl: God? Benn got up his nerve, and remembered having written, “God is a bad stylistic principle.”¹⁵ But then he added, “To believe already puts me outside of God, that is to say the universe, and affirms that in general I would be something. But I’m really nothing, it’s just that something runs through me whose provenance and direction have always seemed veiled to me and every day more veiled.”¹⁶ No one, not even Nietzsche, knew so well as Benn how to mock the Germans. But reading these overly simple words to a daughter who wants answers from her daddy, we cannot help thinking of a few other great Germans—Eckhart, Hölderlin, Nietzsche.

Benn was forever overturning categories in the minds of many of his readers. How can one be regressive and classical at the same time? How can one be algae or a jellyfish and at the same time the capital of a column? How can one obey the fluctuations of a primordial lymph and at the same time establish the rigid rule of form? Fearful as it may be, one can manage to follow Benn on one of the two paths, but how to do so on both? And yet, unless one follows him on both paths, one loses him. Benn escapes: He becomes a brute nostalgic for the primordial or else a wan defender of form. To read Benn, one must see the algae on the capital and the capital in the algae.

Benn read everything and collected names in his notebooks. Later he rediscovered them, isolated and radiant. “Phaeacians,” “megaliths,” “Lerna,” “Astarte,” “Geta,” even “olive” (as in “The Birthday”) or “theogonies”—for a Romance-language reader, it is hard to grasp the force with which these sounds collide with the knots of Germanic consonants. But for Benn, and for the antennae with which he constantly probed words, they were almost the whole vital tension. Had that been taken away from him, he could even imagine having spent his life selling cigarettes behind a counter.

Whoever reads Benn’s prose, from the Rönne stories to Novel of the Phenotype, is struck by a volley of verbal splinters, mostly nouns, and often composite nouns, hybrids invented on the spur of the moment. They are not readable in linear sequence, but arrange themselves in constellations. And then the prose appears, a prose like the segments of an orange. Aware that Novel of the Phenotype was “markedly incomprehensible,”¹⁷ Benn once politely mentioned the circumstances in which those words arose. It was during the war, in the Landsberg barracks, and he had happened on an art book, The Beauty of the Female Body, reproductions of famous paintings from all periods. Benn leafed through it, and from that perusal his prose was born: “Always new details, which otherwise would have had to be assembled with effort and annotated and might never have been found.”¹⁸ And now instead: “Venuses, Ariadnes, Galateas rise from their cushions under arches, gather fruits, veil their mourning, drop violets, convey a dream.”¹⁹ There are doves, dogs, boats, conches, swans, hares, shrubs. Then begins “the process, which may last half an hour.”²⁰ And it is deposited on a page. But here is the secret: Keep turning the pages, do not even let your eyes stop.

There is the motto of an old French family, the Beaumanoires, which is basically the motto of all artists: “Bois ton sang, Beaumanoire”—drink your blood, Beaumanoire: which is to say, for the artist, if you suffer, do as best you can, you are your sole redemption and your god; if you’re thirsty, you must drink your blood, drink your blood, Beaumanoire!

—Gottfried Benn, Totenrede für Klabund