Of Madness, Solitude, and the Paradox of Consciousness | Georg Büchner’s Lenz
“The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world.” - Georg Büchner
I. The 20th
“The 20th, Lenz walked through the mountains. Snow on the peaks and upper slopes, gray rock down into the valleys, swatches of green, boulders, and firs.” It’s 1839, and a 21-year-old Georg Büchner is writing a novella called Lenz. This scene, this image––a guy walking through the woods, looking for the sublime perhaps––typical, hackneyed even by this point in literary history. That is, until, as the 1988 English translator puts it, “without warning, comes a sentence almost like a blow” (Rappolt 49). A sentence that some critics claim ushered in the period of modern European prose. It is the same sentence that led me into a years-long, profound love affair with this novella. It states: “He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head” (Büchner 3).
Büchner’s Lenz is a masterpiece meditation on the nature, pitfalls, and boundaries of intersubjectivity ––the mutual understanding that exists between people, the shared psychological space between my inner thoughts, yours, and external reality. I want to introduce you to how it ingeniously uses its narrative structure to both replicate Lenz’s psychological disintegration and increasing alienation from the world around him and chip away the same alienation it depicts by creating an intersubjective experience in its very existence as a text.
II. The Low-Down on Lenz, Büchner, and Lenz
Behind the novella Lenz are three important historical figures, and I need to explain their relationship before I get into the argument. In addition to telling you the contextual backdrop, I will also share my personal story with Lenz: how I found it, why I love it, and why I chose to write my undergraduate literature thesis on it.
Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792) is a German writer of the 18th-century, a contemporary of Goethe. Lenz began theological studies at Königsberg, but he eventually dropped them to pursue writing plays and poems in the short-lived tradition of Sturm und Drang, which attempted to depict the emotional turmoil inherent to life (Harris 216). His most famous works are the dramas The Tutor and The Soldiers. In 1777, when Lenz was 26 and staying with his friend and fellow author Christoph Kaufmann, Lenz suffered a mental schism (216). Different critics like to diagnose Lenz as being afflicted with this or that, but my goal is not diagnosis. What’s most relevant about his condition to our understanding of Lenz is that he started hearing voices. In hopes of effecting Lenz’s recovery, Kaufmann sent him to spend time with Lutheran pastor Johann Friedrich Oberlin in the Steintal, the background, mountain village of Waldbach. Lenz stayed with Oberlin from 20 January to 8 February of 1777, but, unfortunately, his condition only worsened, resulting in his eventual departure from the vicarage (Harris 217). Oberlin wrote a report of Lenz’s stay with him, an account Kafkaesquely titled “Mr. L…,” which Büchner read and became fascinated by. Now we have 2 of our important figures: Lenz and Oberlin, so let’s talk about Georg Büchner.
About a century later, we get Georg Büchner (1813-1837), who was a 19th-century German playwright, essayist, scientist, and the writer of Lenz. He was a prolific writer and somewhat of a genius. Kind of like the John Keats of German writing, perhaps. So, Büchner had read some of Lenz’s works and had learned about him from Oberlin’s account, “Mr. L…”, from Lenz’s letters, and from anecdotes about him from some of Oberlin’s friends (Schonfield). He felt Lenz was a kindred spirit, and decided he was going to write something about him. Büchner’s intentions for Lenz varied between an informational essay, a novella, and perhaps even a drama, his most familiar medium; Buchner’s famous for his plays like “Woyzeck” (187-188). The edition of Lenz we have today is known to be a fragment. Büchner died at 23, unfortunately, before he got to finish Lenz. Even though it’s a short story length, it’s typically referred to as a novella, gesturing towards a work that is yet to be completed. But we have what we have; there’s no point in speculating about non-existent texts.
While the events in Lenz generally parallel those in “Mr. L…,” Büchner changes the sequence and details of events that Oberlin records and adds new ones. I’m going to tell you what happens in Büchner’s version. Lenz has this experience in nature where it feels like it can almost be a sublime experience, “a powerful aesthetic moment of intense awe and transcendence that overwhelms ordinary human understanding and mental limits,” but it ultimately ends up alienating him from the world around him. He goes back to the vicarage after, and vascillates through extremes: when he arrives, he’s happy and comfortable then after dinner, when he’s alone, he feels totally lost, like everything is unreal. He jumps in the fountains at night in the vicarage and freaks the people around him out, he throws himself against walls and other objects to bring himself back to reality through physical sensation, namely pain. Then he has what seems like another sublime experience where he hears a Being (Wesen) speaking to him, which inspires him to ask Oberlin to give a sermon, which he allows. Lenz gives the sermon––which Büchner does not tell us about beyond Lenz’s feelings, which are of simultaneous sublime unity and pain and disconnect, and Oberlin only calls “a pretty sermon from the pulpit.” Again he vascillates through the extremes of feeling total unity with the others around him and then total alienation.
His friend Kaufmann, the guy who sent him to the backcountry, arrives, and Lenz gives the Kunstgespräch, the art talk, where he goes against all the movements of his time, basically––namely, idealism and romanticism. Everyone listens, but afterwards Kaufmann tells him maybe he should go home and Lenz is appalled and said he would go crazy if he goes home. To get away from Kaufmann, he goes out wandering again and stumbles upon a hut where a young girl is dying. He’s overwhelmed with the scene and is let in by the people taking care of her. He prays with them, and eventually tries to revive her by taking her hand and saying “arise and walk.” Which, of course, doesn’t work. Then he comes to the realization that either there is no god, or there is a god and that god doesn’t care for Lenz, and has his most intense mental rupture. He runs around the woods again, laughs at the meaninglessness and godlessness of the world, and feels atheism “creep over him and [hold] him fast in its firm and quiet grasp… Everything was empty and hollow to him… (55). He runs into Oberlin and asks him “Can’t you hear it, can’t you hear that hideous voice screaming across the entire horizon, it’s what’s usually called silence and ever since I’ve been in this quiet valley I can’t get it out of my ears…” His condition clearly deteriorates, and he tries to take his own life a couple times by throwing himself out of windows, and because those at the vicarage no longer feel like they can take care of him, they decide to send Lenz back to Strasbourg.
He becomes resigned to his fate, and the novella ends with these tragic lines describing him going back home: “he seemed quite rational, conversed with people; he acted like everybody else, but a terrible emptiness lay within him, he felt no more anxiety, no more desire; he saw his existence as a necessary burden.––And so he lived on.”
III. My Lenz Love Story
I first read Lenz when I did a summer program at Cornell in high school. It was called Madness and Genius in Literature, and we read Diderot, Balzac, Büchner, and Werther. The professor and the TAs were German, so I assume that’s why I got blessed enough to read Lenz. I still have the original copy of Lenz that I first read [show it]. As I mentioned, the line phrase that first got me hooked was: “He felt no fatigue except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head.” Its strange asymmetrical causation, nonchalant tone and placement made me gasp aloud. I remember the moment I read it in the silent, beautiful library and got dirty stares because of my gasp. The phrase immediately ruptures the novella’s realm of possibilities by literally and figuratively flipping it on its head. I wrote a paper about it called Lenz’s Intrinsic Motif-ation. My profound affinity for and constant making of puns isn’t something I’ve done much on this channel/substack, but it is quite ubiquitous—much to the comedic chagrin of my family and friends. Anyway, I was not only moved by Lenz and his story, but I was also deeply, deeply literarily intrigued. For years, when people asked me my favorite book, I would respond: “Fahrenheit 451 for reading and Lenz for analyzing.” This novella, despite only being 38 pages printed, felt so rich, like I could write essay after essay about each scene, each line.
So, then about 4 years later, I was choosing what text I was going to write my year-long honors undergraduate literature thesis about, I was kind of overwhelmed by choice. I mean you can basically choose any text at all. And I realized that I do my best analysis when I’m focusing on the relationship between form and content. And so I thought about Lenz alongside As I Lay Dying. What interested me about both of them was the use of multiple voices in the narrative structure. I also wrote a paper about that phenomenon in Faulkner in a US modernisms class I took as a sophomore. I actually wanted to compare the two but my professor convinced me not to, which in the end was a better call because I didn’t even exhaust everything I had to say about Lenz in my 70-page thesis so I can’t imagine comparing two such rich texts. So I re-read Lenz, and realized what I was fascinated by was its use of multivocality in its narrative structure and what that revealed about Lenz’s disintegration into madness. And I couched it in historical stakes that Lenz is anti-romantic/protomodernistic. My paper is titled “The Voices Awakened on the Rocks”: An Explication of Polyphony & Peculiar Consciousness in Georg Büchner’s Lenz.” I loved writing it; it’s my academic magnum opus.
We’re going to unpack the paradox of Lenz by investigating its narrative structure: how it is that Büchner presents a story of a man who cannot reach beyond the confines of his own consciousness while creating an intersubjective experience triangulated between the reader, the writer, and the protagonist. We need to get into a little philosophy beforehand, however.
IV. Hearing Voices: A Philosophy of Madness and the Voice
Whether or not the condition that the novella describes is a type of madness is an underlying question that the novella tries to both elucidate and complicate. In “Mr. L…,” Oberlin foregrounds Lenz’s madness as his subject of discussion and wishes to reveal his discoveries about Lenz’s errant consciousness after their time together. Although Oberlin’s text is not condemnatory of Lenz’s character, it does situate Lenz into what Michel Foucault denounces as “not a free realm of observation, diagnosis, and therapeutics” but “a juridical space where one is accused, judged and condemned” (Foucault 269) when, in its very last sentence, it labels him as “this unfortunate patient” (Oberlin 127, my emphasis). In Madness and Civilization, Foucault defines madness as a set of beliefs and behaviors that deviate from the standards constructed by historical social formations. He claims that the mad constitute a credible challenge to normality, and as a result, typically experience social alienation (Gutting 71-72). Büchner’s Lenz anticipates Foucault’s social criticism.
The novella’s fragmented, polyphonic narrative structure demonstrates that the categorization of the human experience into strict binary oppositions, such as mad/sane, creates a reductive and inaccurate view of human consciousness. In turn, it emphasizes multiplicity as the human mode of being. The novella forces readers to question whether Lenz is truly in a state of madness or whether it merely appears that way to the other characters in the text. Only appearing as madness demonstrates that the text uses the interplay of narrative voices to both recreate and represent the state of Lenz’s consciousness as it is seen by him and others while using that same textual phenomenon to illustrate the nature of conscious experience it is confined and constrained.
Descartes famously said cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am,” but Lenz complicates that by asking: how do I know whether it is “I” that is doing the thinking? How do I know it is “I” who am speaking? The voice is a force that both elucidates and obscures consciousness when it links the intangible internality of the human subject to the tangible externality of the world of other people and entities. In Voice and Phenomenon, Jacques Derrida argues that the “essence of language is its telos, and its telos is voluntary consciousness as wanting-to-say [vouloir-dire]” (Derrida Voice 30). Consciousness, he says, is a perception of our self-presence in the wanting-to-say and in the saying: in both the desire and the act, we assert and insert our selves as beings in the world (Derrida Diff. 291). The phenomenological voice—that is, the voice as an object of experience—is the carrier of linguistic meaning that materializes the wanting-to-say into an utterance. Derrida thus concludes that consciousness manifests itself as being within the voice because it allows for that acknowledgement of self-presence (Gordeeva 4).
Thus, the voice is not a mere means of communication but holds a deeper significance for understanding self-consciousness and self-presence. The Other, however, is also always-already present in the voice. Rousseau similarly claims that the voice possesses an immediate moral authority that calls both acting parties, speaker and listener, to each other’s attention (Dolar 86). Every time I say or write something I use historically inherited linguistic structures. Since the first utterance, it has been true that we speak in a tongue given to us from some collective Other whose entirety is never fully knowable. And while I assert my presence, I also am always speaking to another entity, a listener. So, as Mladen Dolar, a Slovenian philosopher, emphasizes, the moment the voice comes into being, it becomes autonomous, deferred, and part of the Other. Therefore, underlying every utterance is an ambiguous combination of self and Other, an unavoidable multiplicity and fragmentation that cannot be understated. Critic Vincent Pecora argues that “the very heart of our being [there is] a voice that speaks and cannot be located, that is and is not there” (Pecora 995). Because self-consciousness and self-understanding depend on both language and voice for articulation, they become doubly compounded with disunity and irreducible ambiguity. That is, self-consciousness and self-understanding depend on both language and voice for articulation, but language is unstable, and the voice some unknown mixture of self and unknown others, so the very act that brings us into being, that allows us to be relational beings, is precarious, and Büchner’s Lenz takes the deconstruction of those ontological premises to their extremes.
V. Broken Subjectivity: Where Does the Self End and the World Begin?
In “The Meridian,” poet Paul Celan claims that, as one who walks on his head, Lenz experiences the heavens as an abyss below him, revealing a world no longer whole, stable, or certain (Celan 46). After Lenz’s famous sentence, things start ramping up:
At first he felt a tightening in his chest when the rocks skittered away, the gray woods below him shook, and the fog now engulfed the shapes, now half-revealed their powerful limbs; things were building up inside him, he was searching for something, as if for lost dreams, but was finding nothing. Everything seemed so small, so near, so wet, he would have liked to set the earth down behind a stove, he could not grasp why it took so much time to clamber down a slope, to reach a distant point; he was convinced he could cover it all with a pair of strides.
That last line demonstrates Lenz’s confused notion of the relationship between his embodiment and the physical space in which he is embodied. Although intersubjectivity considers the relationship between subjects, namely conscious beings, we can add into our argument a phenomenological understanding: that is, how does consciousness experience a world external to it. Because we don’t merely interact with other minds (unless we’re in the matrix), we interact with other bodies within spaces, and the physical construction of spaces impacts how we can and do interact with others. Think of the fact that if you’re talking to someone while you’re in the same room and then you or they leave, then you may have to start speaking more loudly or stop your conversation. Or how if you go to a gym, there’s a certain way that’s accepted or not in how you use the shared space. And of course, your experience of your self always also happens within a particular space with particular boundaries. Lenz clearly does not understand those boundaries, and they grow increasingly obscure.
Then we get a 25-line sentence that starts “only sometimes when” moves through over thirty clauses until the adverbial phrase finds its predicate, Lenz, and,
he would feel something tearing at his chest, he would stand there, gasping, body bent forward, eyes and mouth open wide, he was convinced he should draw the storm into himself, contain everything within himself, he stretched out and lay over the earth, he burrowed into the universe, it was a pleasure that gave him pain; or he would remain still and lay his head upon the moss and half-close his eyes and then everything receded from him, the earth withdrew from him, it became as tiny as a wandering star and dipped into a rushing stream whose clear waters flowed beneath him (Büchner 5-7).
This long and jagged sentence illustrates Lenz’s first dissociative episode wherein he loses his sense of the boundaries of his self. The ambiguous word choice of “something” in “he would feel something tearing at his chest” shows that Lenz fails in identifying what tears at him. “Something” stands in for the undefined pronoun “es” in the original German text, which most closely relates to the English “it,” an equally vague description as “something” of what tears at him. The vague pronoun suggests that it could be his emotions figuratively tearing at his sense of self, it could be the force of the wind physically hurting him, or it could be that he simply cannot identify that he is, in fact, tearing at himself. Given these equally plausible possibilities, it is evident that Lenz cannot distinguish what belongs to him and what does not, an ontological confusion reflected also by his conviction that “he should draw the storm into himself, contain everything within himself” (7). This twenty-five line sentence violates grammatical boundaries by putting many full grammatical beings—sentences—into one run-on space and thus mirrors Lenz’s ontologically blurred sense of self.
This sentence also gives us a clear example of Büchner’s complex narrative structure and how it interweaves voices. It uses both free indirect discourse and indirect discourse as well as a third-person omniscient narrator, the distinctions of which easily become blurred and confusing. When the narrator describes how Lenz “feels” invisible forces tearing at his chest, he recounts Lenz’s thoughts without dialogue and uses the reporting verb of ‘feel,’ making that part of the sentence indirect discourse. Then, within the same sentence the narration states that “he burrowed into the universe, it was a pleasure that gave him pain,” arguably an instance of free indirect discourse, for it describes his imagination that he “burrowed into the universe” and his psychological sensations of fused pleasure and pain without reporting verbs (7). Lenz’s internal voice is thereby infused with the narrator’s, linking the extra-diegetic world of the narrator and the protagonist’s diegetic world. The narration uses these interthreaded narrative voices to discuss how phenomenal voices, those that awakened on the rocks, cause Lenz to lose his sense of the boundaries between what is internal and external to him (Genette 236). By enacting this metalepsis—wherein the world of the teller and the world of the told blur into each other—the sentence links form and content. The various tenses in the sentence also obfuscate who is speaking. In a sentence where the consistent use of past simple tense suggests a single continuous instance, the subjunctive use of “would” when he “would feel something tearing” (Büchner 5) and “would remain still and lay his head upon the moss and half-close his eyes” intimates repetition or cyclicality, temporally fracturing the scene (7). The resultant uncertainty in narrative perspective puts readers in the same position as the protagonist in not knowing which phenomena are part of the shared world and which belong to the subject’s interiority. Of course, the entire vocal chaos of the novella also necessarily occurs within readers’ minds when they give voice to the text by reading it, involving another voice and interiority in the already complex mix.
The scene demonstrates how Lenz’s consciousness collapses the distance between his subjectivity and the world around it. And because of the interwoven narrative structure, within the text, we find ourselves in a similar position to Lenz, not knowing what voices come from where, whether they are from us, from nature, from god, or from someone else. Yet, we are of course conscious that we are reading a text, and possess the knowledge that this is all in fact a fictionalized creation of another human being about another human being. Büchner’s genius lies in the perfect presentation of this paradox of consciousness in his form while discussing it in his content. And in his creation of this piece of art, he attends to the question of whether art allows a genuine intersubjective experience. Is art the only possible way to encounter another’s reality? To inhabit another’s consciousness? Or does an irreducible otherness remain?
In The World as Will and Representation, pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer claims that humans unavoidably create a violent clash between our desires and abilities precisely because of the individuation that we impose upon the entities around us (Wicks). We are always projecting our own categorizations of the world onto it, which not only does violence unto the external thing, but also unto the self which enacts this process of ontological categorization (Wicks). This reductive individuation of self transforms humans into “anguished products of our own epistemological making,” fated to conflict with others and with ourselves (Wicks). Schopenhauer argued that aesthetic meditation is the only thing that relieves us from the inevitable suffering inherent to life.
Building on Schopenhauer and French philosopher Simone Weil, Irish-British philosopher Iris Murdoch discusses how the great moral task of human existence is overcoming fantasy, to learn how to project less onto the world. According to Murdoch, moral improvement is mostly about learning to see reality more truthfully rather than making better decisions, which is what we tend to see morality as. She outlines how we’re constantly projecting our desires, prejudices, resentments, and simplifications onto the external world. Murdoch argues that art’s function is to interrupt this; encountering another’s depictions, another’s mind means coming face to face with another consciousness that resists our categories. Literature, as well as other forms of art, make this genuine encounter possible, even with a mind that possesses a nature that precludes it for that subject.
At the end of the novella, Lenz has an ultimate atheistic crisis when he fails to reawaken a dead child. His crisis leads him to hear silence as “that hideous voice screaming across the entire horizon.” For Lenz, silence is not the absence of sound which provides a space for new utterances, but an overwhelmingly infinite and oppressive presence. In its absence, it is fully, relentlessly present. The presence of silence emphasizes the lack of another. And if Lenz can hear nothing but silence screaming, he cannot escape the confines of his mind and come to hear anything but his own projects. He is stuck in a Schopenhauerean state of suffering without the possibility of escaping.
When he returns to Oberlin’s parsonage after roaming the mountains for hours, he can only speak in “broken words” (57). Much to the other inhabitant’s discomfort, he resumes his nightly bathing in the fountain, creating a tense mood in the house, and one night, “[t]he maids who slept in the children’s room beneath him said they had often, and especially that very night, heard a deep humming noise that they could only compare to the sound of a shepherd’s pipe” (61). The maids hearing Lenz’s moans occurs in both Büchner’s and Oberlin’s narratives. However, instead of a shepherd’s pipe, Oberlin says that the maids “heard a deep humming noise that they could only compare to a demon” (Oberlin 101, my emphasis). In both instances, the comparison is between Lenz’s voice and something non-human, but Büchner is less condemning. He represents Lenz’s non-humanity as a pastoral instrument rather than a hellish creature. Following the description in both texts is the same decree: “Perhaps it was him moaning in his hollow, ghastly, desperate voice” (Büchner 61, Oberlin 101). This phrase is fascinating to me. The “perhaps” means that Oberlin isn’t really sure whether it’s Lenz or some demon, which possibly means he sees Lenz as having some kind of demonic force within him or that there is a possibility it wasn’t Lenz making this noise but some other thing, separate, and from the spiritual world.
In Büchner’s text, this speculative utterance is also peculiar because, unlike in Oberlin’s text, it has no clear character attribution. I believe that this sentence encapsulates the paradox of consciousness. The paradox of consciousness is a result of the fact that in order to know that I am conscious, I must also be aware of the other; there is no self without other. If everything is self, then nothing is self. The boundaries of a certain thing are defined by that which it is not. However, while self is not-other, at the same time, on the level of language, the other is already present in the self, part of the self. The paradox explodes the binary of self/other by asserting both sides as true simultaneously. Lenz is a dramatization of this paradox. Because he hears voices whose origins seem indeterminable to him, he can’t find the boundaries that define his self from that of others. Things are always melting into indecipherable puddles. This realization leads him towards a spiritual and mental state that doesn’t feel comfortable existing within the confines of the typical social and metaphysical construction of the world as humans have conceived of it. This state is what is considered ‘madness’ by some.
But the reality is that none of us can ever truly tell where we end and where someone else begins. The western world and the modern cultural frameworks that have thereafter developed promote a prominent notion of individualism, of the individual as an independent agent with private thoughts, personal values, and distinct desires. An isolated ego. Carl Jung posited a deep layer of the psyche beneath the personal unconscious shared by all humanity, the collective unconscious, which generates symbols, instincts, and structural patterns that shape human existence beyond the immediate ego. And in the east, however, Buddhism has long rejected this individualistic nation. It teaches us that the human self does not exist independently but emerges dynamically through a shared, interdependent web of relationships. And literature acts as a space of active interaction between minds where we can stage intersubjectivity. In Lenz, it allows the reader to build an empathetic bridge to the very consciousness whose bridges to the world are collapsing.
VI. Conclusion: “A Human Being is Such an Abyss”
St. Augustine writes “a human being is such an abyss.” Everything we make, then, if inherently human, is a reflection of some facet of that abyss. Lenz is a particularly poignant one, and if I haven’t made this clear by this point, it is a text you should read and tell everyone else to, too.
A text is an abyss, too. Büchner’s employment of a polyphonic narrative structure to recount a speculative biography of Lenz can perhaps be read as a return to the origins of the idea that a ‘text,’ stems from texĕre, to weave, braid or fabricate. While in “Mr. L…” Oberlin tells his story of Lenz, Büchner uses the interwoven narrative voices—including Lenz’s own—to tell Lenz’s story in a way that both recreates his state of consciousness and reveals deeper aspects of our reality by way of that re-creation. As such, to study text is to strive to understand the origins, patterns, and interstices of the threads. And the voice, in its written and oral mediums, provides the avenue of this study in Lenz and in life because of the similarly ambiguous nature of its construction. In turn, readers can realize the multiplicity of text, tradition, as well as individual and collective consciousness, and find that, instead of turning the world upside down, a walk on one’s head may reveal its true nature.