{"id":1325,"date":"2020-01-13T12:01:51","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T10:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/?p=1325"},"modified":"2025-03-03T12:58:36","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T10:58:36","slug":"sarah-pourciau-the-empty-canvas-daniel-kehlmanns-tyll-and-the-origins-of-modernity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2020\/01\/13\/sarah-pourciau-the-empty-canvas-daniel-kehlmanns-tyll-and-the-origins-of-modernity\/","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Pourciau: THE EMPTY CANVAS: Daniel Kehlmann\u2019s \u201cTyll\u201d and the Origins of Modernity"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the exact midpoint, to the page, of Daniel Kehlmann\u2019s 2017 novel Tyll<\/em>, there appears, for the first time, the figure of an empty canvas, which will come to govern the remainder of the work. The canvas is a gift bestowed by the eponymous fool-artist, Tyll Ulenspiegel\u2014whom Kehlmann has transplanted from the 14th<\/sup> to the 17th<\/sup> century, from Germany\u2019s medieval literary tradition to the baroque\u2014upon his recently-acquired patron, the exiled Elizabeth Stuart of England, \u201cWinter Queen\u201d of Bohemia, wife of the \u201cWinter King\u201d Friedrich V of the Palatinate. Friedrich\u2019s decision to proclaim himself King of Bohemia, a title he held for only a year (hence the derisive nickname \u201cWinter King\u201d), marked the beginning of the Thirty Years War that tore up much of Europe between 1618 and 1648; it is against this backdrop of historical chaos that Kehlmann narrates Tyll\u2019s trajectory, in a series of isolated, chronologically disordered episodes. <\/span><\/p>\n

Zum Einstand hatte er ihr ein Bild geschenkt. Nein, ein Bild war es nicht, es war eine wei\u00dfe Leinwand mit nichts darauf.
\n\u201cLass es rahmen, kleine Liz, h\u00e4ng es auf [\u2026]. Es ist magisch, kleine Liz. Wer unehelich geboren ist, kann es nicht sehen. Wer dumm ist, sieht es nicht. Wer Geld gestohlen hat, sieht es nicht. Wer \u00dcbles im Schild f\u00fchrt, wer ein Kerl ist, dem man nicht trauen kann, wer ein Galgenvogel ist oder ein Stehlvieh oder ein Arsch mit Ohren, der sieht es nicht, f\u00fcr den ist da kein Bild!\u201d (Daniel Kehlmann: \u201cTyll,\u201d Reinbek 2017, p. 237)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the surface, there is nothing strange at all about Kehlmann\u2019s decision to integrate this overdetermined image of imagelessness into his story of a fool surviving the Thirty Years War. In fact, it would almost be stranger if the figure didn\u2019t appear. For one thing, the empty canvas belongs to the arsenal of gags traditionally attributed to the character of Tyll Ulenspiegel, and not only to Tyll: the trope of the imaginary artwork is a fixture of trickster literature from the middle ages (the invisible portraits of kings in Der Pfaffe Amis <\/em>and Till Eulenspiegel<\/em>) to the baroque (the invisible puppet theater in Miguel de Cervantes\u2019 Retablo de las maravillas<\/em>) to the mid-19th<\/sup> century (the invisible royal robes in Hans Christian Andersen\u2019s The Emperor\u2019s New Clothes<\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\n

For another thing\u2014and in close proximity to this longstanding literary tradition of fools making fools of kings\u2014the figure belongs equally <\/em>firmly to the political-theological discourse of disenchantment, whose point of origin is invariably located, by theorists of secularization like Hegel, Marx, Weber, Schmitt, Kantorowicz, Marin, and Agamben, in the baroque era\u2019s twin crises of faith and sovereignty. Within the context of this discourse, the unpainted canvas, the unpopulated stage, and the undressed royal body gesture toward the \u201cunadorned reality\u201d of a proto-modern, proto-bourgeois worldview which emerges, in the wake of the Reformation, to lay bare the inherited mechanisms of divine and kingly power. The members of the court or the credulous citizenry, upon discovering that they have been duped, experience an epiphany of disillusionment, a revelation of nothingness that \u201cenlightens\u201d them to the \u201cemptiness\u201d of the feudal-monarchical spectacle, and in doing so paves the way for a new political imaginary.<\/span><\/p>\n

Given the pedigree of this aesthetic, political, and theological nexus, and assuming that Kehlmann makes substantive use of it, which he does (more on this below), one might expect the most common criticisms of the novel to involve accusations of ideological heavy-handedness or at least motivic tendentiousness. A novel about the relationship between desacralization and art, which is set in the epoch credited with originating both the modern novel and the secular worldview, cannot help but run the risk of sacrificing narrative to \u201cmessage,\u201d historical specificity to contemporary \u201crelevance.\u201d The vast majority of reviews, however, take precisely the opposite tack:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWorauf will der Autor mit dieser pittoresken Geschichtsfiktion denn nun eigentlich hinaus? M\u00fcsste sich nicht irgendwo ein T\u00fcrchen auftun in Problematiken der Gegenwart?\u201d (S\u00fcddeutsche Zeitung<\/a>).<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDoch scheint es manchmal, als sei Kehlmann der zitatistische Erz\u00e4hlspa\u00df, das literarische Spiel wichtiger als ernsthaft \u2018eine aus den Fugen geratene Welt\u2019 zu portr\u00e4tieren\u201d (Tagesspiegel<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTyll<\/em> ist Historien- und Fantasieroman in einem, der es seinem Helden gleichtut: [\u2026] Ein Schwebe-Roman, der geschickt mit seinen Einf\u00e4llen jongliert und \u00fcber die historischen Abgr\u00fcnde balanciert\u201d (Berliner Zeitung<\/a>).<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTyll <\/em>w\u00e4re dann nur mehr eine Empfehlung f\u00fcr diejenigen, die sich dem Grauen einer grauenhaften Zeit nicht v\u00f6llig aussetzen wollen, sondern es ein bisserl leichter nehmen wollen\u201d (Die Zeit<\/a>).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The implicit claim, here, is that Kehlmann does not treat his material seriously enough. And since his material is the quasi-sacred \u201cstuff\u201d of the desacralization theorem, the implicit conclusion is that he does not treat his own, desacularized moment\u2014which is also our moment\u2014seriously enough either. The underlying worry, in other words, is that Kehlmann is laughing at us and our crises, turning our hard-won Bildung, <\/em>our enlightenment, our disillusion into the pretext for a frivolous, and perhaps even mean-spirited, display of artistic dexterity: \u201eManchmal vermeint man Kehlmann wie ein vergn\u00fcgtes Rumpelstilzchen kichern zu h\u00f6ren \u00fcber eine neu gelegte R\u00e4tselspur\u201d (Die Zeit<\/em>). The fact that these kinds of objections fall into a centuries-old pattern of criticisms leveled at Austrians by Germans (Kehlmann, the son of a prominent Viennese theater director, was born in Munich but raised in Austria) does not necessarily mean that they are entirely unfounded. For while it is true that Kehlmann\u2019s style elicits from German reviewers (in marked contrast to Austrian and Swiss ones[1]<\/a>) nearly the entire pantheon of quintessentially \u201cAustrian\u201d adjectives, including but not limited to \u201cpolished,\u201d \u201celegant,\u201d \u201cwitty,\u201d \u201cagile,\u201d \u201ccivilized,\u201d \u201ccosmopolitan,\u201d \u201cdistanced,\u201d \u201cironic,\u201d \u201csmug,\u201d and, by implication, \u201csuperficial\u201d (\u201cein bisserl leichter\u201d), it is also true that Kehlmann, or at least his Tyll, is<\/em> laughing at us.<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems unlikely, however, that we will be able to get to the bottom of why he is laughing\u2014and in what tonal register, and for what purpose\u2014so long as we remain within the stereotypical paradigm of \u201cAustrian frivolity.\u201d Lightness is everything, for Tyll, who dreams from childhood onward of flying, and compensates with tightrope-walking. Lightness is everything, also, for Kehlmann\u2019s novel, which tells the story of this childhood under the section title \u201cHerr der Luft,\u201d and concludes by allowing his hero to vanish into thin air. What does this lightness, which is less that of \u201clight fiction\u201d than it is of transcendence\u2014\u201cHerr der Luft\u201d is a traditional epitaph for both God and Satan\u2014have to do with the weight <\/em>of the Thirty Years War and its aftermath, around which the novel simultaneously revolves? Is there a way of responding to this disjunction that makes the irritation it generates more productive?<\/span><\/p>\n

In his contribution to this blog, entitled \u201cZur Aktualit\u00e4t des Drei\u00dfigj\u00e4hrigen Krieges (II): \u2018Denn es ist alles nicht lang her\u2019? Daniel Kehlmanns Roman Tyll<\/em><\/a>,\u201d Claude Haas traces his own quite considerable annoyance with Kehlmann\u2019s novel to the existence of two disparate \u201cTextschichten,\u201d which cannot be synthesized into a unity. This structural intuition seems to me exactly right, and profoundly significant, though I would be inclined to characterize the relevant levels differently than he does. Where Haas sees the narrative dividing into \u201cStreberwitz\u201d and \u201cKriegsdarstellung\u201d\u2014his examples from the former category include the empty canvas motif, along with Kehlmann\u2019s treatment of the Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, whose monumental optical treatise gives its title to one of the novel\u2019s eight sections (\u201cDie gro\u00dfe Kunst von Licht und Schatten\u201c)\u2014I see something more like a division between Witz<\/em> and Krieg <\/em>per se. The point and the provocation of the novel, in my view, is that Kehlmann declines to bring these two strata together, or rather: that he first insists<\/em> on bringing them together, by forcing Tyll and the Thirty Years War to inhabit the same work, and then refuses<\/em> to synthesize them into anything like a higher unity. The irony of the fool, in Tyll<\/em>, does not acquire gravity or depth by virtue of its relationship to a reality whose hidden truths it emphatically does not reveal; and the reality of war does not find redemption or sublimation in art.<\/span><\/p>\n

The brutal prologue \u201cSchuhe,\u201d which opens the novel, condenses this structure of co-existing without co-mingling into an emblem. Tyll and his small travelling theater troupe visit a village that has remained thus far untouched by the war. They perform, and Tyll collects money from the villagers with the promise to show them something even better if they are generous. The \u201csomething better\u201d is explicitly framed as a \u201ctest\u201d of whether the villagers are in fact \u201cgood people,\u201d who help and understand each other. It turns out to involve nothing more than Tyll on a tightrope, commanding his rapt audience to throw their shoes into the crowd and then, under insults, to collect them again. This exercise in mass frustration incites them to turn on each other in a violent frenzy, as Tyll, now turned spectator, or perhaps better, director of spectacle, looks on laughing from above. Unlike its forbears in the genre of tricksters pretending to make art, Kehlmann\u2019s theater of disillusion does not culminate in a moment of insight. It is, however, preceded by one, an epiphany about the unbridgeable gap that separates the villagers from Tyll:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cUnd wir alle, die wir hochsahen, begriffen mit einem Mal, was Leichtigkeit war. Wir begriffen, wie das Leben sein kann f\u00fcr einen, der wirklich tut, was er will, und nichts glaubt und keinem gehorcht; wie es w\u00e4re, so ein Mensch zu sein, begriffen wir, und wir begriffen, dass wir nie solche Menschen sein w\u00fcrden\u201d (20).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Gravity vs. lightness, obedience vs. freedom, law vs. grace, Pr\u00fcgeln<\/em> vs. Schweben,<\/em> the lowing of the villagers\u2019 unmilked cows vs. the dance of the swallow who shares Tyll\u2019s tightrope: these oppositions will not get sublated, either in the prologue or the rest of the novel. There will be no cathartic purification of the viewers, no dramatic turning point of self-recognition, no art-propelled transformation toward higher things. The villagers, no matter how many more plays they see, will never rise to Tyll\u2019s level. They will simply continue to live, now in the new consciousness of their own baseness and the emptiness of their heaven (\u201cals w\u00e4re der Himmel, seitdem das Seil in ihm gehangen hatte, nicht mehr derselbe\u201d, p. 27), until the war arrives to erase them from memory.<\/span><\/p>\n

A blog entry is not the place to try to unpack all the layers of reference that Kehlmann manages to integrate here, each of which is tied to a different intertext. But even if we confine ourselves only to the most obvious parallels\u2014the way that Tyll\u2019s \u201ctest\u201d rewrites an earlier episode in his life, which we read about later in the novel, when the witchcraft trial staged by Athanasius Kircher incites the villagers of Tyll\u2019s childhood to turn on his father; the way that this earlier episode of \u201cJesuit theater\u201d operates, in the context of Kehlmann\u2019s Frankfurt poetics lectures Kommt, Geister<\/em>, as a cipher for the fascist theater that incites 20th<\/sup> century German villagers to turn on their Jewish neighbors; the way that the prologue also <\/em>rewrites the baroque brutality of Cervantes\u2019 Retablo de las maravillas, <\/em>which links the punishing violence of disillusion to the villagers\u2019 attitudes toward the Jewish conversos<\/em>\u2014it becomes clear that Kehlmann\u2019s dexterity, virtuosic as it is, could not be less frivolous or genteel. Tyll, and by extension Tyll, <\/em>takes our modern, secular expectations for the role of art in a disillusioned world extremely seriously. He also thwarts them brilliantly, with more than a trace of angry pleasure. The effect is irritating, to be sure. But if we don\u2019t do the work to figure out what alternative is here on offer, the joke really will be on us.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> A notable exception within the German context is Tilman Spreckelsen\u2019s review for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sarah Pourciau is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Until the end of 2019, she worked as a research associate at the ZfL.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Sarah Pourciau: The empty Canvas: Daniel Kehlmann\u2019s \u201cTyll\u201d and the Origins of Modernity, in: ZfL BLOG, 13.1.2020, [https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2020\/01\/13\/sarah-pourciau-the-empty-canvas-daniel-kehlmanns-tyll-and-the-origins-of-modernity\/<\/a><\/span>].<\/span>
\n<\/span>DOI: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.13151\/zfl-blog\/20200113-01<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n