All a bloody fragment without meaning? Semantic oscillations in three poems by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Torsten Pettersson, All Is But Fragments Devoid of Meaning? Semantic Oscillations in Three Poems by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.This article studies three poems by Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), but it has two further objectives: to describe the workings of a poetic technique termed “semantic oscillations” and to exemplify a literary reaction to secularization.The first nineteen lines of “Ballade des äußeren Lebens” (1895) exhibit a tension or micro-oscillation between the desperate nihilism of a meaningless, fragmented world and the consolatory pleasure of the exquisite phrasing. The depressive world view then swings over to a will to live but a further swing back is introduced by the emptiness suggested by “hohl” in the last line.In “Ein Traum von großer Magie” (1895) there are multiple semantic oscillations: the Magician is described as God, as Goethe, as a Dionysian dreamer, and as a man endowed with the gift of fantasy; “unser Geist” is seen as a personal daimon and as a God common to all; the dream is presented as true and as a hallucinatory projection; and the speaker in the final section of the poem as both reliable and unreliable.The world of “Vor Tag” (1907) is fragmented and filled with anguish. The human mind forges links between phenomena and endows them with meaning, but this is revealed as gratuitous projection. The religious mini-narrative about the suffering of Christ is similarly presented as a projection – but equally as a true story determining the nature of the cosmos. Between these opposite perceptions the reader is left to oscillate.Faced with these oscillations in the three poems, scholars have often reduced the meaning of the poems to one of the opposite poles in an attempt to render a unitary meaning. However, all disparate elements of meaning and the oscillation between them are essential to a complex poetic vision which offers solace in a fragmented and meaningless world, while concomitantly suggesting that this solace is an illusory projection. As well as adumbrating the splintered forms of modernism, the technique of semantic oscillations thus adequately embodies fragmentation and lack of meaning as a problematic kernel of secularized modernity