READING HEINRICH HEINE

The biographical imperative: Helmut Heißenbüttel 35
hang on to fading modes of expression, while Baudelaire’s creative negativity
is a decisive measure of their disappearance, Heine can be correspondingly
seen as the writer at the break itself, as the great witness to it; in both senses,
therefore, as the writer of the break. Secondly, in a gesture that few writing
about him avoid, Heine becomes the hero of this moment, not subjected
to it, but mastering and manipulating it.
According to Heißenbüttel, the break occurs in the relationship between
metaphorical language and subjectivity. This, he claims, is the terrain which
Heine’s Buch der Lieder shares with the Romantic poets and with Baudelaire.
In fact, this relationship, between metaphor and subjectivity, is seen as the
site of the break in Heine’s work, from Buch der Lieder onwards; the failure
of that relation is itself the break:
The ability to express subjective things – feelings, moods, love, pain, despair,
disappointment etc. – in the form of linguistic images, in the form of metaphors
is thwarted again and again by the irony or even cynicism that earned Heine a
hundred years of censure. 2
Metaphor is understood here as an adequate and appropriate expression of
emotion through poetic imagery, which corresponds to or is anchored in
an accessible subjectivity. In Heine, however, according to Heißenbüttel,
the anchoring of metaphor in a stable relation of expressivity is upset by the
effects of irony and cynicism; that is to say, the ‘subject’ veers away from
the security of the metaphor, and perhaps means something else (irony), or,
in a more extreme way, exploits metaphorical discourse for other purposes
and abandons all claim to expressivity (cynicism). Heißenbüttel generalizes
these two indications by saying that the (expectations of) metaphorical
discourse are not fulfilled, and then goes on to paraphrase this process as an
‘emptying out’, an evacuation, of metaphor. To varying degrees the bond
between the subjective experience or ‘feeling’ of an historical personality
and its expression in imagery is attenuated or severed. In each case what
Heißenbüttel addresses is the recourse to biographical explanation, which
can be identified as an imperative in Kraus and in Adorno.
Michael Perraudin’s account of Heine’s use of Wilhelm Müller as a
source of such dead metaphors (and symbols) fleshes out historically what
Heißenbüttel identified phenomenologically. With reference to Lyrisches
Intermezzo LIX he remarks:
For this poet, his feeling is represented neither by the falling star, nor the falling
blossom, nor the swan-song but by their absence; in one sense he bemoans their loss,
in another he acknowledges their inadequacy for the expression of his condition
of mind. 3