READING HEINRICH HEINE

24 Reading Heinrich Heine
The shadow of Kraus’s critique falls across Adorno’s judgement here once
more. Kraus had complained that impressionistic journalism deems every
possible minor event worthy of a ‘treatment’ in which experience, stripped
of any genuine particularity, takes on the contours of the commodity; and
Adorno detects exactly the same process in Heine’s earlier poems:
For them as for the feuilletonist, the experiences they [the poems] processed secretly
became raw materials that one could write about. The nuances and tonal values
which they discovered, they made interchangeable, delivered them into the power
of a prepared, ready made language. 12
This description of a kind of industrial mechanization of the lyric process
is very closely derived from Kraus’s argument that in journalism the real
sensuous particular is displaced by mere impressionism. Similarly in Heine,
the apparent immediacy of the verse is itself mediated as a commodity; not
for the first time the poet emerges as a middleman leaping in to bridge the
gap between art and ‘an everyday world bereft of meaning’. What seems
‘pure and autonomous’, the immediacy of experience expressed in Heine’s
poetry, is the very thing that it reproduces for the market: in the terms of
Benjamin’s Kraus essay, the signs of intimacy and individuality in this verse
are those clichés (‘Floskel’) which ‘as ornaments give it a certain collectors’
value [Liebhaberwert]’, and individuality is no more than a brand-name; 13
or to speak with Adorno again, the vitality of the poems is simply saleable,
their spontaneity at one with their reification.
By a perceptive turn of the argument, Adorno defines this structure
as specific to the lyric. He observes that, in this poetry, sound itself falls
prey to the power of commodity exchange when it had previously been
the essential negation of that circulation. By this Adorno means that the
tradition which had always identified poetry with sound (vocal rhythm
or even song), and hence with the intimacy and interiority of the human
voice, is contested in Buch der Lieder: far from being the guarantors of
some realm of subjective experience, by making such authenticity generally
accessible – by marketing it – the poems sell out to the forces of commodity
exchange.
However, the dialectical pair of spontaneity and reification conjured up
by Adorno was perfectly capable of being read as straightforward ambiguity,
or even as unsuccessful irony. The forces of the market may well have set out
to occupy the territory of ‘sound’, but in the first round at least the outcome
was not a foregone conclusion. It has been suggested that Heine’s success
with the poems of Buch der Lieder was achieved relatively slowly in the early
part of the publishing history, between 1822 and 1829.Inlarge measure this