German Life and Letters 37:4 July 1984 0016-8777 52.00

T H E RHETORICAL DISCOURSE O F SCHILLER’S BALLADS: AN ESSAY IN NEW CRITICAL PRACTICE

BY ELIZABETH WRIGHT

Schiller’s ballads have suffered from no lack of critical interest over the last three decades. ‘Schillers Balladen sind ausgesprochene Ideenballaden’, writes one critic. ’ ‘Unter dem Begriff ‘ ‘Ideenlyrik” sollte man diese Form der Ballade besser nicht subsumieren’, writes another. ’ ‘Dennoch ist die Ballade nicht tot’, maintains a third; ‘. . . Man sollte diese Gattung weniger nach dem bestimmen, was sie zu sein hat, als nach dem, was ihr moglich ist’.’ A fourth critic suggests: ‘Im Zeitalter der Weltraumfahrt und der Tiefenforschung, der alpinistischen Abenteuer und der sportlichen Rekorde aller Art wirken die Vorgange der Ballade fast “aktuell”. “Wer wagt es . . . ?” - eine solche Frage wird heute immer auf gespannte Horer rechnen konnen’. But yet another critic thinks: ‘Wer wagt es, Rittersmann oder Knapp, heute noch in die deutsche Tiefe zu tauchen . . . ?’. Considering that all the critics cited are endeavouring to take account of Schiller’s intentions there is here a surprising lack of consensus over the function of his ballads.

The critic cited last would wish to save Schiller’s ballads from moralists, ideologues and source-hunters alike. For Hinrich Seeba, the hero is not the deep-sea diver, the alpine hunter, the marathon-runner, the lion-tamer, the dragon-slayer, the faithful knight or servant, with or without their various exemplary deeds, but simply language. In an article promisingly entitled ‘Das wirkende Wort in Schillers Balladen’,6 Seeba goes through a large number of ballads and argues that the central happening in each is a verbal transaction, the dramatic dCnouement of which rests on the performative force of certain sorts of utterances, such as a promise, an order, a warning or a challenge. He thereby appears to be turning Schiller into a speech-act philosopher avant la lettre. J. L. Austin was the philosopher who first directed attention to the element of action in utterance, the acts we perform in speaking. For example, it is by means of speech that we perform the act of promising, and the judgment of whether one has promised or not is not adequately accounted for by an exclusive true-or-false characterization. This revelation, indeed, counted within analytical philosophy as showing that a positivist account of language as essentially descriptive was misleading. In his book H o w to do Things with Words,’ Austin made a first exploration of the field of speech acts, bringing out the importance to their success of conditions he called ‘felicitous’, a set of necessary contextual criteria. For instance, a promise to someone to do an act which one has already done and he already knows one has done would not count as a promise: the conditions would be ‘infelicitous’. It was the detail of such criterial conditions that was taken up by a pupil of Austin’s, John Searle, who was especially interested in the obliga- tions that are attached to the performance of particular speech acts. In his book entitled Speech Acts (Chapter 8 , ‘Deriving “ought” from “is” ’)* he argues that the obligation incurred by certain utterances, such as a promise, can be traced

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to an institutional fact, established via the constitutive rules of language. The obligation entered into through the utterance is in this view thus independent of the utterer: the word defines and constrains his act in the same way as one cannot win a game without keeping to the rules. This proposition can apply to Schiller’s venture, as expounded by Seeba: ‘Es ist nicht nur das gewechselte, sondern vor allem das wirkende Wort, das die dramatische Wirklichkeit der Balladen erst schafft’ . In the terms of my analogy the ballads might thus be called ‘speech-act poems’, for the problems of Speech Act theory are raised both in the poems and by the poems. This is in a similar spirit to Stanley Fish’s appropriation of Speech Act theory for Coriolunus, in his article entitled ‘How to do Things with Austin and Searle’, lo which has stimulated this essay. By examining in parallel the theory as it appears in the ballads and the theory itself I propose to bring out and question certain presuppositions common to both. This is unlike Seeba, who comes with his own ready-made theory which he applies to each ballad in turn, thereby hoping to master the discourse of the text with his new interpretation. I wish to make clear that I am not undertaking an application of Speech Act theory to the ballads, but by superimposing one upon the other I hope to make plain the ambivalences in both. Since I am not directly concerned with the place of the literary text in Speech Act theory itself, I shall not for the moment take up the distinction between speech acts in literature and speech acts in other forms of discourse.

Seeba freely avails himself of Schiller’s ironies in order to prove the execution or mis-execution of the various speech acts performed within the ballads. Such ironies, however, are what one might call stable ones, and their mode of dis- ambiguation will be obvious within the discourse. There is no necessary correspondence between the ambivalences that my analyses will show and these first-level ironies, though they will be taken into account.

In terms of Speech Act theory the title figure in Der Ring des Polykrates thinks that the speech act of confirmation is justified by the evidence before him:

~.

Er stand auf seines Daches Zinnen er schaute mit vergniigten Sinnen auf das beherrschte Samos hin. ‘Dies alles ist mir untertanig’, begann er zu Agyptens Konig, ‘gestehe, dass ich gliicklich bin.’

According to J. L. Austin, a speech act has three aspects, the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary. The locutionary act concerns the straight- forwardly linguistic characteristics of utterance, its phonetic, syntactic and lexical features. The last, the perlocutionary, concerns the consequences of utterance, such as the ‘effects upon the feelings, thoughts or actions of the audience’. The most important aspect is the illocutionary : what is conventionally performed with the word, such as promising, advising, confirming, assessing, estimating, even stating. Since each of these conforms to a conventional procedure, it is important that the persons and circumstances should be regarded as correct for the speech act concerned. But, says Austin, ‘we call the doctrine of the things that can be wrong

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and go wrong on the occasion of such utterances, the doctrine of the Infelicities. ’ ‘I

Now it is clear from the King of Egypt’s reply, ‘dich kann mein Mund nicht glucklich sprechen’, that he considers the conditions to be infelicitous (because various things can still go wrong) and hence feels unable to give Polykrates the confirmation he wants. But when Polykrates’s luck is repeatedly proved, the confirmation is withheld for another reason. According to the discourse of sixth- century Greece, having an excess of fortune cancels out the state of being fortunate: as soon as you are too lucky you are no longer lucky. Thus the King of Egypt can say: ‘Noch keinen sah ich frohlich enden,/ auf den mit immer vollen Handen/ die Gotter ihre Gaben streun’. Having got Polykrates to test his luck successfully, he can now turn what seem to be felicity conditions for the speech act of confir- mation into felicity conditions for a speech act of warning: ‘ “Doch warn ich dich, dem Gluck zu trauen”, / versetzt er mit besorgtem Blick’. According to Speech Act theory he is successful, for among the felicity conditions for a warning, the speaker, here the King of Egypt, wishes the hearer good, and the hearer, Polykrates, recognizes that the speaker wishes him good. That is, in this case, both believe that too much luck is bad luck. The story seems to bear this out, but to do so it leaves out of account the subjectivity of the King of Egypt. The obvious centre of the ballad is the tyrannous subjectivity of Polykrates, whose supreme authority is repeatedly put to the test. But what happens is that the triple repetition of his good fortune and the additional omen of the returned gift attest to his complete control of nature in the service of desire. The return of the ring signifies that there cannot even be a sacrifice by Polykrates, for, paradoxically, this would be an act against desire. The uncanny effect, on which the stable irony of the ballad depends, is the result of nature’s appearing to absolutize the authority of Polykrates in removing all limits to his desire.

Because the King of Egypt has the prevailing ideology on his side, ‘des Lebens ungemischte Freude/ ward keinem Irdischen zuteil’ , his own tyrannous subjec- tivity is taken for granted and ignored, whereas what he might be seen to be claiming is that he is the one who understands nature best. In successfully accomplishing the speech act of warning he is enabled to assert sovereignty over Polykrates: ‘ “SO kann ich hier nicht ferner hausen,/ mein Freund kannst du nicht ferner sein” ’ . The desire of Polykrates has been subverted and that of the King of Egypt has been satisfied. Now these effects, which constitute the basis of the interchange, are tidied away by Speech Act theory as ‘perlocutionary’, as conse- quences irrelevant to the vital convention. Nor will the disambiguation of the stable irony alone bring out the dynamic workings of the text. It is not the conventional use of the word which has brought about the new state of affairs, in Seeba’s terms ‘die handelnde Kraft des Wortes’,’’ but the appropriation of the word through the investment of desire. The text derives its rhetorical force from the workings of desire, even as it tells us that there are no felicity conditions to guarantee felicity.

Speech Act theory cannot and will not consider the subjectivities of agents. ‘Wherever the illocutionary force of an utterance is not explicit’, says Searle, ‘it can always be made explicit’.13 The speech acts of Schiller’s agents are under- mined precisely by what cannot be made explicit. An initial caveat is now necessary for what follows. It may be objected that in some of the analyses to come speech

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acts in the strict sense of being actual utterances (as is the case in Der Ring des Polykrates) are not performed. Speech-Act theorists themselves, however, would not find it contentious to claim that the understanding of and the successful performance of a speech act depend on communication as such and not on verbal utterance in particular. Take, for example, the ballad Ritter Togenburg. ‘Vom Ritter Togenburg und dem Abenjager, die schon immer ein (von der Forschung) verschwiegenes Randdasein fuhrten, kann auch unter dem Aspekt des wirkenden Wortes wieder nicht die Rede sein’, writes Seeba. “ He is correct in that this ballad has at its centre an (implied) speech act which is infelicitous, though it is not the speech act of the knight, for he accepts the lady’s conditions which imply a promise. For what is devotion if not a vow?

‘Ritter, treue Schwesterliebe Widmet euch dies Herz; Fordert keine andre Liebe, Denn es macht mir Schmerz.’

By the same token, the knight does not verbally accept her terms, but his hearing them ‘mit stummen Harme’ is tantamount to an acknowledgment. The poem is wholly centred upon the knight’s subjectivity, the heroic battles he fights, his faithful vigil at the convent, and this is also what occupies the critics. ‘Im Ritter erfullt sich das Wesen der Treue ganz, weil ihm die Zeitubenvindung ganz gelingt’, writes one. Is ‘Da sitzt denn jener unsagliche Ritter Toggenburg, eine Leiche, eines Morgens da als “Gleichnis einer Haltung” ’, writes another. l6 Neither of these comments does justice to the rhetorical discourse of the ballad. In the glorifica- tion of the knight’s pure renunciation, as he waits without hope, the subjectivity of the lady is forgotten. The crusading knight finds on his return that she has promised herself to Christ:

‘Die ihr suchet, tragt den Schleier, 1st des Himmels Braut, Gestern war des Tages Feier, Der sie Gott getraut.’

But whereas the promising act of the knight fulfils the felicity conditions of the promising game, in that he renounces all desire, that of the lady does not. Her vow, pure, unworldly, should have included a little codicil. In the small print it should have said: if I take the veil and become the bride of Christ, though I may love all my fellow men, 1 must renounce my sisterly affection for this par- ticular knight; to carry through a pure Kantian execution of this speech act I must forget that he is near the convent. Instead she is getting an advantage out of a speech act in which she has not fully played her part:

Und so sass er viele Tage, Sass vie1 Jahre lang Harrend ohne Schmerz und Klage, Bis das Fenster klang,

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Bis die Liebliche sich zeigte, Bis das teure Bild Sich ins Thal herunter neigte, Ruhig, engelmild.

The chivalric ethos gives her what she desires, but she gives nothing in return. The infelicity of her promising act thus stains the original purity of the knight’s speech act, because the conditions are now different. This also undermines speech act theory which insists that promises are promises regardless of the fact that two are intersubjectively involved: by idealizing the explicit singleness of the pact it ignores the implicit duality of the agreement.

Ritter Togenburg is in contrast to Der Handschuh, where the lady’s infringement of the chivalric code, her disregard of the felicity conditions of the challenging game, is at the centre of the ballad:

Da fallt von des Altans Rand Ein Handschuh von schoner Hand Zwischen den Tiger und den Leun Mitten hinein.

The knight’s selfless act in response to her frivolous one is somewhat ambivalent within the discourse, an irony undisclosed:

Und gelassen bringt er den Handschuh zuruck. Da schallt ihm sein Lob aus jedem Munde, Aber mit zartlichem Liebesblick- Er verheisst ihm sein nahes Gluck- Empfangt ihn Fraulein Kunigunde. Und er wirft ihr den Handschuh ins Gesicht: ‘Den Dank, Dame, begehr ich nicht!’ Und verlasst sie zur selben Stunde.

It might be said that the exemplary deed, the renouncing of desire, is here hand in glove with revenge, the satisfaction of desire.

In Der Taucher the king is in the place of the lady Kunigunde in making an empty speech act by trifling with the young squire, but the young squire is not in the place given to the knight, for his second and infelicitous response to the challenge to dive into the depths of the whirlpool is presented as ambiguous within the discourse, as part of its stable irony. For unlike Ritter Togenburg and Der Handschuh, the satisfaction of desire is here not de-centred:

Da ergreifts ihm die Seele mit Himmelsgewalt, Und es blitzt aus den Augen ihm kuhn, Und er siehet erroten die schone Gestalt Und sieht sie erbleichen und sinken hin- Da treibts ihn, den kostlichen Preis zu erwerben, Und sturzt hinunter auf Leben und Sterben.

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Goethe, who hailed Der Handrehuh as ‘die ganz reine Tat, ohne Zweck oder vielmehr im umgekehrten Zweck’, may not have been so sure in the case of Der Taucher, for he writes to Schiller: ‘Leben Sie recht wohl und lassen Ihren Taucher je eher je lieber ersaufen’ . ”

Where these ballads can be said to explore the felicity conditions of the utterances within courtly love, Der Alpenjager focusses on those implied by the pastoral con- vention. Here two agents who have authority are giving counsel to a third, the young ‘Alpenjager’, who has none and who wishes to hunt. The mother enjoins ‘be a shepherd’:

Willst du nicht das Lammlein huten? Lammlein ist so froh und sanft, Nahrt sich von des Grases Bluten, Spielend an des Baches Ranft.

The genius loci, the ‘Geist’, commands ‘leave the wild creatures alone’:

‘Musst du Tod und Jammer senden’, Ruft er, ‘bis herauf zu mir? Raum fur alle hat die Erde- Was verfolgst du meine Herde?’

It is here assumed that there is a consonance between culture (looking after sheep) and nature (the ‘Geist’ protecting the mountain deer). In this Arcadian vision, which presupposes that you eat lambs and that lambs eat flowers, the boy is seen as dangerously anarchic:

Und der Knabe ging zu jagen, Und es treibt und reisst ihn fort, Rastlos fort mit blindem Wagen An des Berges finstern Ort.

The boy is wrong both from the viewpoint of nature (in desiring to hunt) and from the viewpoint of culture (in refusing to herd). The boy is denied all subjec- tivity: charging about on mountains is plainly wrong. He cannot be a part of nature, which in his terms is the freedom of hunting, nor can he be a part of culture, which in his terms is a limitation of freedom. He is simply given orders and the orders are to accept the pastoral definition as the correct form of mastery (in the previous ballads it was the Greek and the courtly definition that were to be accepted). But the two authority figures are by no means at one over their speech act of ‘follow nature’: for the mother assumes that nature is dangerous and wishes to protect the boy from nature, whereas the ‘Geist’ thinks the boy is dangerous and wishes to protect nature from the boy, and this is a stable irony within the discourse. Nevertheless, the balance of this antinomy is disturbed, for the ‘Geist’s’ prohibition is only thought of in terms of protecting deer from arrows, not lambs from butchers’ knives (‘Raum fur alle hat die Erde/ Was verfolgst du

T H E RHETORICAL DISCOURSE OF SCHILLEK’S BAILADS - ______. 286

meine Herde?’), whereas the mother’s prohibition is only thought of in terms of protecting her son from nature’s savagery, not of protecting the herd from his herdsman’s horn (‘Willst du nicht die Herde locken/ Mit des Hornes munterm Klang?’). This undermines the set of rules constituting the pastoral code, which presupposes that ifyou go deeply enough into nature, you will end up with culture, and culture and nature will thus become reconciled. O r as Schiller writes: ‘Wir waren Natur wie sie, und unsere Kultur sol1 uns, auf dem Wege der Vernunft und der Freiheit, zur Natur zuruckfuhren’. ’*

The discourse of the ballad shows that in order to make nature confirm culture there must be a repression of nature. Similarly, on a lower level of generality, speech acts try to make nature conform to cultural agreements. In Die Kruniche des Ibykus the poet-hero is assigned full subjectivity. He is given a proper name, Ibykus, which is frequently and reverently cited in the text (‘ “Ibykus!” - Der teure Name’), and given god-like words:

_____~

Ihm schenkte des Gesanges Gabe, Der Lieder sussen Mund Apoll; So wandert er, am leichten Stabe, Aus Rhegium, des Gottes voll.

The villains, on the other hand, are mainly referred to by a string of common nouns and metonymic coinages, such as ‘Morder’ , ‘bose Buben’, ‘Morderhand’ , ‘Bosewichter’, only one proper name, Timotheus, being bestowed on one villain by another in the involuntary act of confession. There is thus a presupposition that maximum motivation for guilt (the spontaneous confession) can go hand in hand with minimum motive for crime (the identity denied to the murderers except in the act of confessing). The perfect murder is presented as the motiveless crime of pure evil: ‘Ein guter Mord, ein echter Mord, ein schoner Mord. So schon als man ihn nur verlangen kann’, writes Buchner in Woyzeck.

The motiveless crime is finally matched with a confession of absolute guilt, which fulfils all the conditions of a successful speech act:

Man reisst und schleppt sie vor den Richter, die Szene wird zum Tribunal, und es gestehn die Bosewichter, getroffen von der Rache Strahl.

How does this come about? Name and nature are denied to the murderers, have been cancelled out by the full assignment of them to Ibykus. From the beginning he is assigned a place in the order by virtue of his unique identity, his pure good will. His first attempt at a speech act is to address a flock of cranes, who are ‘accompanying’ him:

Seid mir gegrusst, befreundte Scharen, Die mir zur See Begleiter waren! Zum guten Zeichen nehm ich euch, Mein Los, es est dem euren gleich.

~ ____ - - -_______

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‘The sentence “Hello” ’, writes Searle, ‘. . . provides a conventional means of greeting people . . . The intentions will be achieved in general if the hearer understands the sentence “Hello”, i.e., understands its meaning, i.e., understands that under certain conditions its utterance counts as a greeting’. Now Ibykus, as a poet, takes his fiction for reality, but he is making a mistake within the stable irony of the discourse, which depends on ‘ein Kranichheer’, that is, any flock of cranes, fatefully arriving as the Furies appear in the amphitheatre. Although the poets Goethe and Schiller were in lively correspondence over this subject, whether the cranes were to be ‘Naturphanomen’ or ‘Schicksalshelden’, 2o the co- incidence of cranes and furies does not exceed the bounds of the natural. Hence we may say that the felicity conditions for Ibykus’s greeting are not fulfilled, for he is pressing the birds into the service of his fiction. It is an important presumption on the part of Ibykus that he is entitled to claim nature’s assistance. It presupposes that there is an identity between him and nature, which is a moral presupposition in the fictional world of the text. Not content with having a privileged place in culture by virtue of his proper name, he desires to appropriate nature via a series of infelicitous speech acts. The second one is his request to the cranes before he dies:

‘Von euch, ihr Kraniche dort oben, Wenn keine andre Stimme spricht, Sei meines Mordes Klag erhoben!’ Er ruft es, und sein Auge bricht.

This is crucial for the watching ‘criminals’, for the desire of Ibykus going into the cranes, as perfect justice, will take over the desire of the murderers, as full confession. ‘ “Sieh da! Sieh da, Timotheus,/ Die Kraniche des Ibykus” ’.

The appropriation of the murderers’ subjectivity, the denial of their nature, is de-centred within the discourse of the ballad, where ‘natural’ justice is made to coincide with culture: the patterned flock of birds, the ‘Kranichheer’ , coincides with the patterned ritual of the Furies solemnly encircling all present in a shared experience of guilt:

Und schauerlich gedreht im Kreise Beginnen sie des Hymnus Weise, Der durch das Herz zerreissend dringt Die Bande um den Sunder schlingt.

This shared experience is concentrated on the criminals alone by dint of fortuitous circumstances. Shakespeare writes in Hamlet:

I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul, that presently They have proclaimed their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ.

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The assumption is that murder will out. In Die Kraniche des Ibykus the villains are condemned by those who control the

institution of justice, by those who have agreed to uphold it, the ‘Volk’, and by themselves. There is no ambiguity about the way the law should be interpreted. All the conditions for the successful performance of the act of judging have been fulfilled. In Der Kampf mit den Drachen the law itself is challenged and leads to an appraisal of the constitutive rules: ‘ “denn des Gesetzes Sinn und Willen/ vermeint ich treulich zu erfullen” ’, says the young dragon-slayer to justify his disobedience, but this is not acceptable. For though the knight has killed the dragon, which the edict of authority has failed to bring about, the agent who is defining the situation says it is pointless: the speech act of confirmation cannot be carried through because it is not acknowledged by the code of rules. Says the master: “‘den Kampf, den das Gesetz versaget,/ hast du mit frevlem Mut gewaget!” ’. Hence the speech act of praise which the ‘Volk’ wishes to accord the hero is made null and void:

Und tausend Stimmen werden laut: ‘Das ist der Lindwurm, kommt und schaut, der Hirt und Herden uns verschlungen! Das ist der Held, der ihn bezwungen!’

Both Speech Act theory and Schiller are pledged to ignore that authority comes from the satisfaction of desire: Speech Act theory, because it wants to idealize the univocity of the constitutional agreement, an ‘idealization of reciprocity’ in Alfred Schutz’s terms,22 and Schiller, because he wants to idealize the word as ethical commitment to a transcendental reality. The critical debate in Der Kampf mit dem Drachen is about who shall have the right to have authority, to wear the crown of triumph:

laut fordern selbst des Ordens Sohne, dass man die Heldenstirne krone, und dankbar im Triumphgesprang will ihn das Volk dem Volke zeigen- da faltet seine Stirne streng der Meister und gebietet Schweigen.

This makes salient the master’s relation to desire. The master has failed and his failure is in the air, ‘ “zerissen fand man jungst die Hirten,/ die nach dem Sumpfe sich verirrten” ’, and it is the result of a wrong order:

Funf unsers Ordens waren schon, die Zierden der Religion, des kuhnen Mutes Opfer worden- da wehrtest du den Kampf dem Orden.

The knight, in disobeying authority, has satisfied desire, for the killing of the

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dragon represents satisfaction, ‘ “Der Drache, der das Land verodet,l er liegt von meiner Hand getotet” ’, and the ‘Volk‘ and his fellow-members of the order want to invest him with authority because he can kill dragons. What is more, he has shown better foresight than the master in knowing that he must plan. He has set up a mock dragon and trained his hounds, till the hounds know what to do:

-~ ~

Die hetz ich auf den Lindwurm an, erhitze sie zu wildem Grimme, zu fassen ihn mit scharfen Zahn, und lenke sie mit meiner Stimme.

The unconditional obedience that the knight exacts from the dogs, which are only capable of a blind will of need, the master expects of the knight with the good will of pure self-abnegation:

doch schweigend blickt der Jungling nieder, still legt er von sich das Gewand und kiisst des Meisters strenge Hand und geht.

But what is a will without desire? What gave the knight, like the ‘Taucher’, the courage to risk his life, if not his own subjectivity?

Doch an dem Herzen nagte mir der Unmut und die Streitbegier, ja selbst im Traum der stillen Nachte fand ich mich keuchend im Gefechte.

Yet the master has wrested from the knight an admission that orders are to be obeyed for orders’ sake, quite unrelated to desire, and it is this admission, and not the service the knight has rendered, which constitutes the felicity condition for the ensuing speech act of praise. Instead of the crown of triumph he receives the cross as a seal of approval and confirmation of his re-admission to the order. The seal of approval is for the promise, implied by the knight’s meek surrender of his rights, never to re-interpret an order, and justifies the master’s original order not to fight the dragon. Within the lines Qf the text at story-level, and within Speech Act theory, it looks to all the world as if there has been a selfless acceptance by the knight of the duty of loyal obedience. What is not seen is that the cheers from the crowd that the master has managed to elicit apparently in his own favour represent approval for the killing of the dragon, now subverted and defined as approval of the knight’s final abnegation and hence of the master. This is a sleight of hand, for one is not supposed to ask what would have happened to the crowd’s loyalty if the knight had been left to travel into exile. The tenor of the text has been that either a subject must accept constitutive rules or give them up: yet the very defence of that position at the close of the ballad rests upon a covert ambiguity, one which hides the true source of confirming desire.

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Just as the murder in Die Kraniche des Zbykus is upheld as a purely abstract crime, so the edict in Der Kampf mit dem Drachen is upheld as a purely abstract order. In each case authority manifests itself as absolute, constituted by pre-existing cultural agreements, which the members of the community have to follow to the letter, irrespective of outcome, if they wish to remain members. Der Kampf maintains that orders must not be subverted, neither on account of external dragons in nature, nor, aforfiori , by internal dragons of will.

Der Gang nach den Eisenhammer is about what happens when a speech act goes wrong, when an order fails to go through because of a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding takes place as follows: a good servant, Fridolin, is slandered by a bad servant, Robert, who suggests to the master, the count, that Fridolin, the special servant of the countess, has written love letters to her. The count rides post-haste to his foundry and gives an order to two workers (‘Knechte’): they are to throw into the furnace the first one who turns up with the question ‘Habt ihr befolgt des Herren Wort’. Fridolin is summoned to the count, who orders him to go to the foundry and put this question. O n his way Fridolin asks the countess, since he is her special servant, if she has any orders for him. The countess says ‘go and say a prayer for me’. Her wishes involve him in a detour to the church and in taking part in the sacrament of communion. When he finally arrives at the foundry and asks the question, ‘Habt ihr befolgt des Herren Wort’, the two iervants point to the furnace with a grin and words of confirmation. He tells the count, who is thunderstruck to see him and immediately asks him whether he has seen Robert. The answer is no. ‘ “Nun,” ruft der Graf und steht vernichtet,/ “Gott selbst im Himmel hat gerichtet!” ’. That is to say, the bad servant is the one who was thrown into the furnace through a misunderstanding, a misfire. ‘We shall call in general’, writes Austin, ‘those infelicities . . . which are such that the act for the performing of which, and in the performance of which, the verbal formula in question is designed, is not achieved, by the name MISFIRES [author’s capitals] . . . When the utterance is a misfire, the procedure which we purport to invoke is disallowed or is botched’.’’

Are all the crucial speech acts in this narrative accounted for by Austin’s categories ‘misfire’ or ‘abuse’? An abuse occurs when the professed act is hollow or insincere. ’‘ When the count orders Fridolin to go and ask the foundry servants ‘ “Ob sie getan nach meinen Worten” ’, he does not wish to have an answer to this question, he wants Fridolin thrown into the furnace; hence he is insincere and the speech act is infelicitous. Yet he does want the question asked by Fridolin, who in turn understands it, so to that degree the count is sincere and the speech act is felicitous. Nowhere in speech act theory is such a rivalry between sincerity and insincerity accounted for. The other crucial speech act occurs when the count asks Fridolin: ‘ “Und welche Antwort wurde d i d am Eisenhammer? sprich!” ’. As a speech act it is completely felicitous: the speaker asks the hearer a question to which he wishes to know the answer, and the hearer understands the question and gives the answer required. But what the count wishes to learn is something quite other than what the question and answer are concerned with. This speech act, then, being felicitous, without misfire, contains a meaning, that Robert is dead, the most important meaning of the whole narrative, which is not accounted

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for in any way by the constitutive rules of discourse. Hence the notion of ‘misfire’ and ‘abuse’ cannot account for all ambiguities. This is equivalent to saying that the word cannot validate all meanings. Yet this is precisely what the ballad purports to refute by bringing in the judgment of God, by allowing that God, in looking after the pious Fridolin, is also looking after the established order, which includes him, the count, who has just been responsible for murdering a servant:

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Und gutig, wie er nie gepflegt, Nimmt er des Dieners Hand, Bringt ihn der Gattin, tiefbewegt, Die nichts davon verstand. ‘Dies Kind, kein Engel ist so rein, Lasst’s eurer Huld empfohlen sein! Wie schlimm wir auch beraten waren, Mit dem ist Gott und seine Scharen’.

This assumption rests on the earlier presupposition that the two servants in the foundry were more evil in obeying the order than the count was in giving it:

Des freut sich das entmenschte Paar Mit roher Henkerslust, Denn fuhllos, wie das Eisen, war Das Herz in ihrer Brust. Und frischer mit der Balge auch, Erhitzen sie des Ofens Bauch, Und schicken sich mit Mordverlangen, Das Todesopfer zu empfangen.

What was mandatory in Der Kampf mit dem Drachen, unquestioning obedience, is here condemned. Indeed, they should be praised for obeying unquestioningly (in contrast to the dragon-slayer), and, further, their pleasure should be morally irrelevant to any judgment of their deed if the Kantian argument were to be followed through. Instead they are having to function as co-agents of evil in a possible miscarriage of justice. The analysis of the various speech acts, on the other hand, has revealed the source of evil in the count’s dissimulation, his ambiguous manipulation of a speech act, which results in the successful subversion of the conventional system. This subversion is not allowed in the story because the intervention of providence restores and saves the moral order, in providing a delay: Fridolin dallies on his errand because he goes to say prayers for the countess: ‘ “Dem lieben Gotte weich nicht aus/ Find’st du ihn auf dem Weg” ’. God’s intervention, then, depends partly on Fridolin’s disobedience: unquestioning obedience on his part would have been his death. God’s intervention is also dependent on the pun created by the count’s own trick. The count’s subsequent order to Robert to put the question in its usual sense is another triply-ambiguous blending of sincerity, misfire and abuse: (1) Robert’s sincerity, (2) the misfire in the response of the workmen, and (3) the count’s original abuse of agreed

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meanings, are all co-present in the deed. Thus the attempt in the story to make the order justify itself depends on a series of meanings that have been turned. This kind of troping interferes with the very constitution of the rules of giving an order, whether seen in terms of Speech Act theory or in terms of Schiller’s view of the word as guarantee of a pure deed. Die Burgschafi makes a similar attempt in idealizing the pure deed of a promise.

The hero, under sentence of death for making an attempt on the life of a tyrant king, is given three days’ grace to dispatch his affairs. The understanding is that he leaves his willing friend as hostage. When the hero returns he will be executed, but should he not return, his friend will be killed in his stead, whereas he will go free. The last clause is added by the king, who sees more advantage in discrediting his enemy than in killing him.

According to Speech Act theory the act concerned in the promise must be one that it is not obvious to both speaker and hearer that the speaker will do in the normal course of events. ’’ This felicity condition is fulfilled in the present case because it is not obvious in the normal course of events that a man would freely turn up to his own execution.

O n his way back to keep his pledge the hero encounters every variety of obstacle, elemental and human, which results in delay. As he approaches the town he is met with the news that he is too late: the execution is in progress. He insists on keeping his word nevertheless:

‘Und ist es zu spat, und kann ich ihm nicht, Ein Retter, willkommen erscheinen, So sol1 mich der Tod ihm vereinen. Des riihme der blutge Tyrann sich nicht, Dass der Freund dem Freunde gebrochen die Pflicht, Er schlachte der Opfer zweie Und glaube an Liebe und Treue!’

When he gets there in time after all, saving his friend from death, his keeping of the promise produces a perlocutionary effect: the king is so overcome by his keeping the promise that he decides not to have him executed. But this infringes the very felicity condition on which the success of the original speech act depended. The purity of the speech act of promising is therefore radically undermined: he promised to let himself be executed and his reward for keeping the promise is not to be executed. What the logic of the text says is that if you keep your promise you don’t have to keep your promise., Thus two opposed elements cancel each other out, creating a paradox in the text. The objection might be made that the promise was fulfilled, because the hero did in fact return, but this leaves out of account that the promise must be properly defined: it was not merely a promise to return as such, but a promise to return and be hanged. Without this addendum the promise is worthless.

The idealization of the word in this series of ballads has led from ambiguity to paradox. Might not paradox in its most acute form be found in the very place where there is an attempt to present the word at its purest? Let there be a perfect

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authority figure. Let the circumstances be the speech act of investing this figure with that authority. What would happen then? The Count of Habsburg, in the ballad of that name, is at his coronation feast at a moment when history calls for a just ruler. Enter a ballad singer who sings of an act of renunciation: the doer of the deed was a count, the beneficiary a priest. The count, in the course of a hunt, gave away his horse, in order that the priest could be there in time to give a poor man the last rites. A corollary of this deed is the count’s bestowal of the horse as an act of dedication, a gesture of humility. Thus the singer relates:

Nicht wolle das Gott, rief mit Demutsinn der Graf, dass zum Streiten und Jagen das Ross ich beschritte furderhin, das meinen Schopfer getragen! Und magst du’s nicht haben zu eignem Gewinst, so bleib es gewidmet dem gottlichen Dienst; denn ich habe es dem ja gegeben, von dem ich Ehre und irdisches Gut zu Lehen trage und Leib und Blut und Seele und Atem und Leben.

The ballad-singer turns out to be the priest; the count turns out to be the Kaiser- elect. Authority has been caught out in an act of pure renunciation at a critical moment. For the revelatory song is a validation of the coronation, since it shows that the highest authority is being given to the right man, the one who can give up desire. Power must be given to him who can renounce it:

Und alles blickte den Kaiser an und erkannte den Grafen, der das getan, und verehrte das gottliche Walten.

In Der Graf von Habsburg the ballad within the ballad, the reality of fiction within the fiction of reality, is the self-reflexive image of the poet, an image which maintains that his fiction can turn out to be ideal reality. But this idealisation is dismantled by the logic of the text. For if the final purport of the story be that the act that absolutely valorizes authority and power is the renunciation of that authority and power, then the Kaiser should perform the speech act of abdication at the moment of performing the speech act of taking his coronation vows. Such a meta-renunciation, being of greater moral value than the first, would on this next level justify the successive choice of him as Kaiser who can perform such a sacrifice. Again, his abdication would be performed at the moment of his coronation vow, and so on, ad infiniturn. Here, then, a speech act results in the acutest form of paradox, the infinite regress. The felicity conditions for a perfect coronation are that in order to be crowned you must give away the crown. The moral implication of this logic is that renunciation is the best form of acceptance, that if you renounce all desire you end up with full satisfaction. But this, of course, is contrary to the ballad-stories which tell you to renounce desire and forget all

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about satisfaction. Far from the univocal word constituting a bond, as Seeba would have it in his article, ‘das wirkende Wort’ turns out to be a double-bind, or rather a double-bond, a coronationlabdication.

One might try to deny the regress by claiming that all the story is out to do is to present the Kaiser at his most renouncing, that no absolute is implied. This is to ignore, as was argued in the case of Der Kampf mit dem Drachen, that praise cannot be accorded without a motive. If the Kaiser is to be admired for his capacity for self-sacrifice in one situation, it cannot be considered appropriate at that of the coronation, unless a comparable demonstration is seen to be relevant. The paradox is precisely that of all freedom and authority, and can only be handled by an ironic understanding: we want to legitimate authority, and we can only do this if all agree that their desires be satisfied by that authority; if all desire is satisfied, then all should be free and not require an authority.

The infinite regress is inescapable: perfect authority, the categorical imperative, is self-cancelling. The effect of this regress is a reductio ad absurdum of the ballads’ rhetoric of intention, that we must take for granted that the word, whether as ethical commitment or as constituted by rules, has a stable meaning. The reductzo shows that, while performing that taking for granted which underlies all our doings with words, we cannot take our taking-for-granted for granted. The very terms of Speech Act theory cannot avoid making an appeal to ‘felicity’, here becoming ‘parasitic’, to use Austin’s own designation of fiction,26 his text being a parasite on his own figure, the figure of desire, thus rhetorically subverting his own discourse. The literary text, which only differs from other texts in that it will proclaim its ineluctable and abundant figurality, is all the more at risk from its own subversion.

Schiller’s ballads show the subversion of the taking-for-granted in operation at its most dramatic. They enact the text’s disagreement with itself: what the text ‘ “knows” but cannot say’. 27 O n the one hand there are the statements at story- level, which seductively speak for themselves; on the other hand there is the logic of the text’s own performance. The statements at story-level are, of course, themselves shot through with irony, but it is irony mastered by consciousness, forced into the service of reason. What the difference within the text suggests is that the Schillerian ‘Spieltrieb’, playing at the level of a higher form of consciousness, is not proof against the play of textuality, what Jacques Derrida calls diferance. 28 What I have tried to show in the analyses above is that Schiller’s dramatic ambiguities are not immune to those ambivalences which the text inadvertently displays, arising from that diferance which is the result of the shiftings of desire in language.

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Ohne eine kleine Dosis von Liebe [writes Korner to Schiller in 17971 behalt die Ballade leicht etwas Trockenes, das durch alles poetische Talent sich nicht iiberwinden lasst. Nur muss die Liebe, daucht mich, im Hintergrunde bleiben, und mehr aus ihren Wirkungen geahnet werden’. 29

Take ‘Liebe’ here as a metonym for desire (instead of as the ballads’ subject matter), and Korner’s remark becomes appropriate in a way he could not have

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guessed. The ‘etwas Trockenes’ is that of the constitutive rule, the Speech Act theory, the ideal which attempts to convert that partial coincidence of separate desires which is intersubjectivity, into a motiveless perfection. It is not, as Seeba thought, that in these ballads the bodiless Word (or, as Kant would say, the Word divorced from all heteronomous inclination) here receives a substantial proof, but that on the contrary, the ballads betray the inconsistency of the attempt to prove the Word bodiless.

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NOTES

’ Steffen Steffensen, ’Schiller und die Ballade’, Festschrift Borcherdf, ed. Albert Fuchs and Helmut

Benno von Wiese, Friedrich Schiller, Stuttgart 1959, p.612

Walter Hink. Die deufsche Rallade von Burger bis Brecht, Gottingen 1968, p.7 Wilhelm Loock, ‘Friedrich Schiller: Der 7hucher’. Wese rum Gedichf, 11, ed. Rupert Hirschenauer

Hinrich Seeba, ‘Das wirkende Wort in Schillers Balladen’, JDSC, 14 (1970), 281

Motekat, Munich 1962, p.257. ’ ’

and Albrecht Weber, Munich/Ziirich 1963, p.229. ’ ‘ Ibid.

’ J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words, ed. J . 0. Urmson, Oxford 1962 John R . Searle, Speech Acts, Cambridge 1969, pp.175-177

Seeba, op.cit . , 287

Stanley E. Fish, ‘How to do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary

Austin, op .c i t . , pp.101 and 14.

l o

Criticism’, MLN, 91 (1976), 983-1025. I’

I’ Seeba, op.cit., 286.

I’ Searle, op .c z f . , p.68. Seeba, op .c r f . , 287.

I’ Hink, o p . c i f . , p.28 j 6 Norbert Mecklenburg, ‘Balladen der Klassik’, Deufsche Literafur zur Zeif der Klassik, ed. Karl Otto Conrady, Stuttgart 1977, p. 158. I’ Der Briefwechsel rwischen Schiller und Goefhe, ed. Ernil Staiger, 11, Frankfurt 1977, letters to Schiller, 21 June 1797 and 10 June 1797, pp.402 and 309. la Friedrich Schiller, Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, ed. William F. Mainland, Oxford 1957, p.2.

I9 Searle, op.cit., p.49. ’’ Bridwechsel, ed.cif . , letter to Schiller, 22 August 1797, p.446: ‘der Kraniche sollten, als Zugvogel, ein ganzer Schwarrn sein, die sowohl uber den Ibykus als iiber das Theater wegfliegen, sie kommen a l s Naturphanomen und stellen sich so neben die Sonne und andere regelmassige Erscheinungen’; and letter to Goethe, 30 August 1797, p.452: ‘Mir sind die Kraniche nur aus wenigen Gleichnissen, zu denen sie Gelegenheit gaben, bekannt, und dieser Mangel einer lebendigen Anschauung rnachte mich hier den schonen Gebrauch ubersehen, der sich von diesern Naturphanornen machen Iasst. Ich werde suchen, diesen Kranichen, die doch einrnal die Schicksalshelden sind, eine grossere Breite und Wichtigkeit zu geben’.

” Harnkef, 11. ii. 599-605. ’* Alfred Schutz, ‘Common Sense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action’, Collecfed Papers Vol. I : The Problem ofSocial Reality, The Hague 1962, pp. 32-33. * I Austin, op.cit., p.16.

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” Ibid. ” Searle, op.ci t . , p.59. 26 Austin, op.c i f . , p.22. ”

1980, p.12. Barbara Johnson, The Critical Dzffermce: Essays in the Con~emporaty Rhetoric of Reading, Baltimore/London

** Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, Speech and Phennomenn, Evanston 1973, pp. 140-141. 29

1840, letter to Schiller, 30 July 1797, p.34. Brigwechsel rwirchen &hiller und Korner, with an introduction by ,Julius Geiger, IV, Stuttgart/Berlin