| The starting point of this close reading of Gottfried Benn's novella-cycle, Gehirne (1914-1916), is his correspondence with Max Niedermayer and F. W. Oelze. These letters show Benn's aversion to the conventional autobiographical form; he insists on an experimental form of fictional representation. The core of my investigation consists of tracing Benn's process of fictional coding, of converting authentic autobiographical experiences into texts that ultimately defy any determination by genre. For Benn, this process is fraught with the fact that autobiographical experiences cannot be expressed in the successive order of words. Implicit in this discreditation of the conceptual is the more general criticism of the progressive cerebralization of man, through which the human psyche's affective-volitional aspects are suppressed and isolated.;I view the protagonist, Ronne, as Benn's "test-figure" who examines the cognitive interplay of thought, language, and writing in different situations and displaces it into the realm of "hallucinatory-constructive" expression. Benn thus examines the aporia of "authentic," autobiographical representation and achieves progressively a critique of the communication aspects of the novella as genre, and of mimetic language itself.;My reading of Benn's text has been influenced by L. S. Wygotski's work on the psychology of language as Benn's early prose by Semi Meyer's philosophical analysis of the human mind. Both authors maintain that linguistic processes in the human mind cannot be reduced to cognitive dimensions. Instead, a different component of linguistic consciousness needs to be accounted for which is pre-verbal, not predictable, but impulsive and emotional: "motivation." This problem of an approximation of the emotional sphere in language forms the basis for Benn's texts as experimental presentations, as "Ausdruckswelt," and my reading them as such: The first novella deals with the complex interaction between thinking and the aporia of its linguistic transcription. In the following novellas another focus is added, that of the protagonist's unfulfilled wish for socialization, caused by his insufficient "motivation." Finally, the aporia of inner and outer speech is not merely the theme anymore, but causes the breaking down of representational language. |
