Die Niederschrift des Gustav Anias Horn II

River without Banks #2.2

by Hans Henny Jahnn, Ulrich Bitz (Editor), Uwe Schweikert (Editor)

Dans cette deuxime partie des cahiers, Gustav Anias Horn dcrit la lente, l'inexorable approche de " l'adversaire " aux masques multiples : la maladie, la vieillesse, l'homme qui l'a pouss se remettre en question, l'armateur du navire de bois, un valet intrigant, dmoniaque : autant de messagers de la mort, de la dcomposition finale. Ce chant mlancolique poignant, a pour toile de fond une nature d'une grandeur saisissante, surtout lorsqu'elle dploie ses splendeurs automnales, et une sympathie viscrale pour les cratures, qui portent toutes, dans leur beaut mystrieuse, la blessure de la vie et sont elles aussi condamnes souffrir et sombrer dans l'hiver et dans la mort. " Souvent, dans ces cahiers, lorsque j'abordais la musique, j'ai employ le terme d'" harmonie ", en quelque sorte comme sceau ou comme symbole de plusieurs aspects compositionnels. Il y a l une inexactitude involontaire, une contrevrit, voire un mensonge : car mon esprit non seulement est tranger l'harmonie telle qu'on l'entend communment ; il en est totalement dpourvu. J'ai expliqu, un jour, que j'appartenais une strate plus ancienne, plus dure, de l'expression musicale. C'est une brve constatation, qui comporte peut-tre bien des choses justes. Voil pourquoi - mais aussi sans ce " pourquoi " - je ne comprends l'harmonie tout au plus que par convention, mais pas fondamentalement. Une chose est certaine : le mobile de mes uvres expansives et (peut-tre puis-je me permettre de le dire) profondes est mon existence personnelle. Mon angoisse, ma tristesse, ma solitude, ma sant, les perturbations de mon me et les priodes d'quilibre, ma manire de sentir, d'aimer, l'obsession que j'y investis, ont aussi faonn mes motions et mes penses musicales. L'art clt dans le champ d'ros ; c'est pour cette raison, uniquement, que la beaut lui est inhrente. "

708 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Hans Henny Jahnn (17 December 1894, Stellingen – 29 November 1959, Hamburg) was a German playwright, novelist, and organ-builder.
As a playwright, he wrote: Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1917), which The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes as a nihilistic, Expressionist play "stuffed with perversities and sado-masochistic motifs"; Coronation of Richard III (1922; "equally lurid"); and a version of Medea (1926). Later works include the novel Perrudja, an unfinished trilogy of novels River without Banks (Fluss ohne Ufer), the drama Thomas Chatterton (1955; staged by Gustaf Gründgens in 1956),[1] and the novella The Night of Lead. Erwin Piscator staged Jahnn's The Dusty Rainbow (Der staubige Regenbogen) in 1961.
Jahnn was also a music publisher, focusing on 17th-century organ music. He was a contemporary of organ-builder Rudolf von Beckerath.

Reviews

[Tom Ghostly · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you‘re longing for a comfort read, „die niederschrift des gustav anias horn …“ is not the way to go – nevertheless it still is one of the greatest accomplishments in german literature (as is part 1 of the trilogy, „das holzschiff“; for a review on part 3, see my review on the volume called „epilog“).
in any case, part 2 is quite different from part 1: it's not that frantic & certainly no raging river; it's multilayered like a composition, it’s more spacious, free flowing, meandering, sometimes even the equivalent of what one would consider open sea. all in all, in terms of poetics, it does something fundamentally different than part 1. there's no omniscient narrator, so this time everything that happens is portrayed & remembered by gustav, decades after what has happened on the sinking ship, the „lais“. however, what has happened in the past is steadily pushing into the present & gustav's mind.
„die niederschrift …“ spans across roughly 1500 pages, & i'm not 100% sure it couldn't have been edited down slightly on some parts, but still, this is one of the biggest monuments of (modern) german literature.

the prose is nothing but gorgeous, kinda baroque & honestly not quite what you would expect from a modern day novel. the text itself is always shifting, fluctuating – as is its meaning –, always playing with your expectations. it's deep & dark, sometimes darker than i wished for. this is not a novel of hopeful prospects. it's about death, decay, the unfathomable nature of the world.
throughout its 1500 pages, many themes are recurrent:

– living outside of social norms (polygamy, homosexual- & bisexual relationships, etc.) & living on the periphery of civilization (freely chosen solitude vs. dreadful loneliness, etc.)

– nietzsche's concept of eternal recurrence, meaning history repeating itself with slight variations (finite mass – infinite time)

– the concept of time (including philosophical thoughts about it, whether to think of it as a linear stream or maybe more accurately of a vast, open sea)

– human's ability to remember events & people from the past; fading memory

– death & decay in opposition to biblical resurrection

– the impossibility of a christian god & a world as the bible is propagating it

– the supremacy of animals over humans

– music, composition & art in general (drawing, architecture, etc.)

if you are able to read german, you can get a lot of details from wikipedia, otherwise, maybe machine-translate the article. but you‘d still do yourself a big favor if you‘d someday read this masterfully composed german piece of art, preferably on beautiful spring or summer days, as the darkness & portrayed bleakness of the novel can weigh quite heavy on one's shoulders – i know what i'm speaking of.
sadly, after 70+ years, there's still no english translation of this & the conclusory part of the trilogy („epilog“) in sight. part 1, however, is translated fully into english, so maybe take it from there.