(Email, The University of Southern Mississippi)
“A Silence is Living”: Georg Trakl’s Quiet Apocalypse and the Barthesian Ideal
In his short essay “The Rustle of Language,” Roland Barthes suggests that the “rustle,” the singular, whispering sound, “is the noise of what is working well” (76). Barthes contends that the “rustle” of language “is the very sound of plural delectation,” an indication of overlapping silences which denature meaning to the point of forming “a vast auditory fabric,” which, however dissonant, refuses to dismiss meaning altogether, forming a new language that emanates in the distance “like a mirage” and creates a “double landscape” (78). Barthes applies this notion to modern man, the language of unassimilable (yet perceivable) intelligences, and yet his idea of an indefatigable rustle calls back the Hegelian shudder of nature, the design of intelligence in rustle of branches, creeks, animals, ghosts.
Last year, I analyzed how the silence motif in Georg Trakl’s work doubles as a prophetic voice. Presently, I am concerned about how this motif creates identifiably ordered, i.e. narrative, meaning in the poems. In Trakl’s poetry, which in this essay is viewed and analyzed through English translation, the Barthesian “rustle” permeates nearly every poem, though in Trakl’s iteration it signifies the apocalyptic, the afterlives of narrators having to interact in landscapes of silences and silencing to reach their distant mirage. Though Trakl’s poetry is always viewed as discordant, full of imagistic, subjective leaps that revivify the reader with unexpected ends, I argue in this essay that, through an employment of the Barthesian “rustle,” Trakl’s poems work as detectable, though idiosyncratic, narratives that function as what Barthes calls “meaning[s] which reveal an exemption of meaning[s]” (78).
