2 - Wandering and Words, Wandering in Words

Summary

THE AESTHETIC AND POETIC ROOTS of images such as “So rann ich aus dem Wort” (Thus I Ran out of The Word, 1959) or “Landschaft aus Schreien” (Landscape of Screams, 1957), which clearly conceive of the word and the poetic text as a “Raum” (space) and a “Weltall” (cosmos), are located in Sachs's earliest compositions. In order to conceive of the text as a landscape of screams or a space out of which one can run, one must first regard it as a space in which one can move, a landscape that one can traverse. Sachs's early texts show a consistent link between space and words, and ultimately an association of words with space, such that the text is a landscape, and the word itself a space that characters, the writer, and readers attempt to navigate.

Sachs's prose texts of the 1910s to the 1930s lay a clear foundation linking speech with landscape or space through a consistent pattern of wanderers adept in speech juxtaposed with static characters who either struggle with expression or are mute. “Eine Legende vom Fra Angelico” (A Legend of Fra Angelico, 1921) and “Die stumme Nachtigall oder Der Umweg zu Gott” (The Silent Nightingale Or The Detour to God, unpublished, 1930s), for example, feature interactions between wandering speakers and static figures who possess some ability of expression through means other than speech. The power dynamic that plays out between them reads as an allegory of aesthetic conflicts encompassing modes of expression, artistic agency, and the role of the audience in determining meaning. Static characters in Sachs's narratives succumb to the wanderer's power, represented most often in the static character's inability to distinguish literal from figurative language. Sachs makes the struggle with figurative language in the empirical world and the aesthetic world (that is, plays and stories) a main theme in the unpublished prose work “Chelion: Eine Kindheitsgeschichte” (Chelion: A Story of Childhood, 1930s). “Chelion” is the story of a child who is learning to navigate a landscape between the aesthetic world of plays and stories and the everyday world of her house and family, and is vexed by the conflict between literal versus figurative language. Ultimately, the child learns that even her own writing has consequences.