READING HEINRICH HEINE

The real Heine: Atta Troll and allegory 147
The extent to which, in these instances, the authority of a ‘point of view’ has
been withdrawn is parallel in its force to the concentration, elsewhere in the
poem, on the tight focus of relatively unmotivated parody. The astonishing
admission in the preface to the French translation of Atta Troll that it has
no apparent subject – ‘un poème qui n’a pas de sujet bien palpable’ 31 –
leaves only, as Heine goes on to say, ‘the arabesques and allusions of
which the fable is merely the pretext’ (‘les arabesques, les allusions dont
cette fable n’est que le prétexte’). The fable (with the moral and satirical
expectations it arouses) is merely a pretext for this play of reference but it
does not provide the resulting work with anything resembling a unitary
logic.
It would be possible to read Heine’s French phrase ‘qui n’a pas de sujet
bien palpable’ in the stronger sense that Atta Troll lacked any authorizing
subjectivity. But such a ‘death of the author’ would be too extreme a reading.
Certainly, the I-persona of the poem drifts from the amused sophisticate
who is reminded by Mumma’s dancing of la Grand’ Chaumière in Mont
Parnasse to the Hunter who accompanies Laskaro as fellow Argonaut. Nevertheless
Heine himself offers aesthetic programmes in Canto III; and he is
securely present as ‘ich’ from the end of Canto II (49–56), where Juliette’s
Parisian nostalgie de la boue marks the distance of an urban sensibility in
the face of Romantic sublimity. 32 That altered taste dominates the opening
stanzas of Canto I, and particularly the dramatization of a wild landscape
in which is found ‘das elegante / Cauterets’: what the enjambement has not
said, in addition to the precise register of the loan-word, is filled out by the
careful observation of beautiful women on the balconies of the small town.
This urban and urbane presence is only rarely identifiable in the course of
the poem.
Heine’s wryness in fragments of parody is constantly dissipated by the
pursuit of relevance, that is by the effort to locate the fleeting focus of ironic
digressions in the stability of an allegorical framework. (Hoffmann’s Der
goldene Topf, for instance, has to stand in for Heine’s critique of Romantic
excess.) Nevertheless, a sphere of personal accountability apparently
emerges exactly after the hesitancy of the central cantos (on the Lac de
Gobe, with the Giroflino children, among the Cagots, and in the snow
canto). The Hunter speaking in the first person gives his account of the
Wild Hunt. This narrative maintains the level of arcane scholarship which
underlies the parodies elsewhere in poem. Yet, even in the procession of the
Wild Hunt, fixed categories of interpretation cannot hold their ground.
While Goethe and Shakespeare stand as great creative personalities, the
first group of women following them are part mythical-medieval and part
urban Parisian. The grisettes come dressed up like actresses: 33 ‘Parodistisch