Andr Fischer

Stanford University
Department of German Studies

5/10/16

[Work in Progress Please Do Not Circulate or Cite]

Epic and Epiphany Narrative form and myth creation

in Hans Henny Jahnns Flu ohne Ufer

Abstract: Despite refutations of myth as being irrational, regressive, or simply false, it has proven to be a
durable narrative form springing from fundamental questions inaccessible to conceptual knowledge. One
of the key functions of myth is to determine the numinous indetermination underlying human existence by
naming and narrating. In my dissertation, I explore the aesthetic potential of myth as a form of
perception, imagination, and narration in German postwar culture. I focus on artists working in different
media, the writer Hans Henny Jahnn, the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, and filmmaker Werner
Herzog and the way their non-rational truth claims are expressed through particular aesthetic
processes. In this paper, I would like to contribute my work on the reconfiguration of myth as an
epistemological resource by analyzing some narrative elements in Jahnns novel Flu ohne Ufer
(Shoreless River). Besides the rather traditional myth reception of the Gilgamesh epic, there is
mythopoetic dimension in the novel that unfolds in the protagonists confrontation with the numinous and
the aesthetic distancing in the narrative form. According to Hans Blumenberg, the function of myth is to
transform the original emotional tension of a savage terror into distance and to elaborate it as
something concretely perceptible. By highlighting this structure in Jahnns novel, I aim to
reconceptualize myth as a narrative form of non-conceptual knowledge offering new perspectives on myth
and narrative in the German postwar context.

1. Modern Epic: Fragments and Epiphanies

Among the many programmatic statements in the domain of modernist writing, Ezra Pounds
slogan make it new stands out for condensing the various processes of working through the
modern human condition with ideas of a lost totality. It refers to this totality as not to be
retrieved or rescued from the past, but as essentially gone. However, the farewell to the world as
a whole is the condition for its reinvention, and the very idea of making it new is an ancient one

that has been rejuvenated in various cultural rebirths.1 The core of the slogan is hence not a call
for mere novelty, but for creating totality anew. The literary form associated with this totality is
the epic, and Pound was involved in three of the most daring attempts to reinvent epic writing
under modern conditions: the Wasteland, Ulysses, and the Cantos. Arch-modernism of this kind
marked one trajectory of mediating totality, whereas Georg Lukcss anti-modernist realism
represents another. The question whether epic could be reinvented once more, or whether it is
essentially an obsolete form led Lukacs to his famous assertion that this could only happen in the
genre of the novel.2 Although the epic regularly returns throughout modernity, the evolution of
the novel seemed indeed more prepared for the all-encompassing task of mediating totality. The
central element of the novel, the modern subject, has however conditioned the genre to narrative
modes of subjectivity, reflexivity, and rationality, whereas the epic is typically defined as
organic, foundational, and situated in an absolute past.3
According to Adorno, epic narration offers the immediacy of material concreteness that
imitates the spell of myth in order to soften it.4 Myth, understood here as the eternally
invariant, and dialectically identified with the rationality that levels all experience, also bears an
element of resistance against this kind of rationality. In line with the understanding of myth in
the Dialectic of Enlightenment, according to which bourgeois rationality is already prefigured in
ancient myth while at the same time containing its critique, Adorno sees the epic navet that
1

Michael North describes Pounds slogan Make It New as a dense palimpsest of historical ideas about the new
probably originating his translation of the Confucian Ta Hio (D xu), but also influenced by Greek, Roman,
medieval French, and modern Italian notions of cultural rebirth. Cf.: NORTH, Michael: Novelty A History of the
New, Chicago 2013, p. 161-170.
2
LUKCS, Georg: The Theory of The Novel - A historico-philosophical essay on the forms of great epic literature,
London 1988, p. 56: The novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly
given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.
3
Cf.: BAKHTIN, Mikhail: Epic and Novel, in: The Dialogic Imagination, Austin 1981, p. 15: Whatever its origins,
the epic as it has come down to us is an absolutely completed and finished generic form, whose constitutive feature
is the transferral of the world it describes to an absolute past of national beginnings and peak times. [] The novel,
by contrast, is determined by experience, knowledge and practice (the future).
4
ADORNO, Theodor W.: On Epic Navet, in: Notes to Literature, New York 1991, p. 25.

imitates myth as a critique of bourgeois reason opposing the encompassing universality of

thought.5 Epic narration saves the singularity of experience from subsumption under general
concepts, but nevertheless brings them to light and distances them from the horror that surrounds
the myth. In that sense the epic occupies critical territory between myth and reason, preventing
the narration to tip over to either side. Although epic navet preserves singularity, its narration
remains meaningful in the sense of having wider implications, even typicality, without however
turning into the conceptual language of theory. Therefore, the images evoked by epic narration
are not consumed by what they stand for (like metaphors) but rather come to stand for
themselves, leading to a constant subversion of textual cohesion: the work seems to oscillate
between the aspiration to coherent totality and the focus on the specificity of detail. Adorno says
that it is precisely the material element in the epic poem, the element that is the extreme
opposite of all speculation and fantasy, that drives the narrative to the edge of madness through
its a priori impossibility.6
A narrative that resists rational meaning and borders on madness in its descriptions needs
justification. As for the traditional epic, in itself of an almost pre-literary status, telling the tale of
great past heroics sufficed as justification, as there were no competing narratives and the
importance of the event was reason enough to put it into words.7 But what about modern epics,
those that tried to make it new? Their case seems more complicated, as not only the mythic past
is far more distant, but also the rational expectations of narration and knowledge have increased
and the need for foundational narratives has diminished in modern times. The core functions of
the ancient epic have migrated into other forms of authorial writing leaving behind a formal
5

ADORNO (1991), p. 26.

ADORNO (1991), p. 27.
7
Hegel speaks of a transformation of things into words. Cf.: HEGEL, G.W.F.: Vorlesungen ber die sthetik III,
Frankfurt am Main 1970, p. 325: Das Epos, Wort, Sage, sagt berhaupt, was die Sache ist, die zum Worte
verwandelt wird, und erfordert einen in sich selbstndigen Inhalt, um auszusprechen, da er ist und wie er ist.
6

heritage that nevertheless keeps tempting modern literature. Franco Moretti defines the epic as an
inherited form, one that is upheld in modernity only to compete with antiquity and to not admit
the superiority of the ancient epic over the modern novel.8 And indeed, where the form of the
novel struggled to comprehend the totality of modern life around the turn of the (19th/20th)
century, the more open form of the epic allowed for experimentation, and the long ambitious
novels of high modernism, a distinct subgenre, were often ennobled with the title of the modern
epic. According to Moretti the modern epic is an almost super-canonical form, yet one that is
virtually unread,9 and it is driven by the desire to reunite what history has divided: knowledge,
ethics, religion, art; narrative, drama, lyric poetry; literature, music, [and] painting.10 This again
sounds like narrative on the edge of madness.
When adopting the term modern epic, it should be clear that the opposition between epic
and novel must always be historically contextualized in order to sustain a clear meaning.11 In
modernity, epic narrative as the inherited form becomes anachronistic, both as a source of
knowledge and as a literary genre. It does however aim to legitimize the modern age vis--vis the
ancient world and to rival its narrative achievements. The claim that the age of grand narratives
is over means first of all that in a modern or postmodern condition we are no longer able to
produce such narratives, that the epic transformation of things into words must fail due to the
complexity of modern civilization.
8

MORETTI, Franco: Modern Epic The World-System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez, New York 1996, p. 36:
A modern epic came into being because it was an inherited form. It was the form through which classical
antiquity, Christianity and the feudal world had represented the basis of civilizations, their overall meaning, their
destiny. In theory, modern literature could certainly have dispensed with that precedent, and contended itself with
the far narrower space-time of the novel. But that would have been to admit its own inferiority with respect to the
greatness of the past.
9
MORETTI (1996), p. 4.
10
MORETTI (1996), p. 108.
11
FUSILLO, Massimo: Epic, Novel, in: MORETTI, Franco (ed.): The Novel Vol. 2: Forms and Themes,
Princeton 2006, p. 40: Epic and novel should not be thought of as two fixed, immutable entities but rather as two
bundles of transcultural constants that can be more or less active from period to period and work to work, or even
transformed altogether.

Reuniting what history has divided and including it in one poem;12 this can also mean
resisting the forced modernization of separating the spheres of human existence that Lukcs or
Max Weber have bemoaned.13 I hence interpret Pounds definition of the epic as a poem
including history in this sense that it contains what history has divided. The subversive navet
of the epic (Adorno) and the symbolic resistance of myth (Moretti) are interlinked in this
project of the modern epic that tries to bridge historic distinctions in order to question their telos.
The concept of myth developed in the previous chapter ascribes an existential function to
myth that accomplishes an epiphanic presentation of what is inexpressible within the limits of
rational discourse. I therefore do not see it as a form of secondary signification as most structural
myth theories have it (Levi-Strauss, Barthes), but rather as an authentic expression on the
margins of reason. Myth thus accomplishes a form of opaque meaning where rationality must
remain silent. At the center of mystic cults and religions, myth traditionally fulfilled the purpose
of making the gods present. The modern artwork inherited this cult value and continues to serve
this function in a secular context, in which this mythic expression converges with aesthetic
autonomy.14 The genre of the modern epic as an all-encompassing narrative structure is based on
a closed understanding of the world at the foundation of which the mythic revelation lies and
which the epic unfolds in the totality of its concrete descriptions.

12

BLANTON, C.D.: Epic Negation The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism, Oxford 2015, p. 6: The poetic
problem of a modernist epic in general requires that we explain how the history included in a poem comes to
mediate a totality that eludes its expression. What Lukcss grudging accession to the novels prose of life failed to
imagine was the possibility of a disjointed epic, a disarticulated epic, capable of mediating a totality conceptually.
13
In the specific case of Garcia-Marquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Franco Moretti ascribes myth the
potential of narrative resistance. C.f.: MORETTI (1996), p. 247: What is certain about myth (understood in its
broadest sense) is the sign and instrument of a symbolic resistance to Western penetration. Men of Maize, which in
so many ways is the prototype of magical realism, tells precisely the story of how mythical thought is reinvigorated
by forced modernization, which it seeks to oppose by every means.
14
In this sense, Karl Heinz Bohrer has recently carved out the specifically mythopoetic tradition of the Dionysian in
modern literature. Cf.: BOHRER, Karl Heinz: Das Erscheinen des Dionysos Antike Mythologie und moderne
Metapher, Berlin 2015.

But how are the mythic epiphany and the epic totality related? With regards to literary
modernism, Joyce provides the most notable example, because in his work the notion of
epiphany is developed the furthest and within an epic form. In the secular and literary context,
sudden epiphany of the poetic image is known from lyric poetry and characteristically employed
by authors like Hlderlin or Rilke. The sudden flash of mystic insight or divine revelation seems
to find its proper literary form in poetry, but as Joyce has shown can also be used effectively in
the epic form. In his early prose fragment Stephen Hero (1904-06/ 1944) his protagonist defines
epiphany as the moment of sudden recognition of an object:
First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an
organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is
exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that
thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance.
The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us
radiant. The object achieves its epiphany.15
Whenever such a mystical experience of profane, quotidian objects overcame Joyce, he recorded
and collected them, and built them later into his larger prose structures. The mystical experience
of the thing in itself, which reveals itself suddenly as the epiphany of a randomly given object is
developed as a literary form of myth-making. It is mythopoetic not in the sense of inventing a
myth as in inventing a story, but rather as making something (or really anything) mythical, as
seeing the revelation in the profane and bringing into a literary form. This form is developed by
Joyce and later becomes one of the constructive principles of Ulysses.16 The epiphany of the
profane object comes to constitute what can be called modern epic by achieving anew the epic
navet that Adorno framed with regard to the Odyssey as the substance appearing in naked
15

JOYCE, James: Stephen Hero, New York 1963, p. 213.

BEJA, Morris: Epiphany in the Modern Novel, Seattle 1972, p. 18: If I had to commit myself to a brief definition
of epiphany, then, I would call it a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or
memorable phase of the mind the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical
relevance of whatever produces it.

16

form.17 In this sense the making-mythical of given objects, which Joyce framed as epiphany
becomes the foundation and condition for epic narrative in modern literature.18
As Morris Beja has pointed out, Joyce neither invented the notion of epiphany, nor was
he the only modern writer to use it as a literary device.19 The involuntary memory of Prousts
protagonist that is triggered by a Madeleine cake, T.S. Eliots mythical method, Aragons project
of a modern mythology or Hofmannsthals poetic of the Chandos Letter are all distinct literary
strategies, but nevertheless closely related to Joyces epiphanies in their emphasis on what
Benjamin called profane illumination.20 This explicit trend in modernist literature must
however be differentiated by the specific form in which such illumination was realized, if the
terms in use are not to lose their meaning.21 Significant for both Joyce and Benjamin seems to be
the triviality of the object that suddenly reveals itself in a new light. This light is neither that of
divine revelation nor of rational enlightenment, but only the naked substance of the world
17

ADORNO (1991), p. 24: And as when the land appears welcome to men who are swimming, / after Poseidon
has smashed their strong-built ship on the open / water, pounding it with the weight of wind and the heavy / sea, . . .
. . .gladly they set foot on the shore, escaping the evil; / so welcome was her husband to her as she looked upon him,
/ and she could not let him go from the embrace of her white arms. If we gauged the Odyssey by these lines, this
simile for the happiness of reunited spouses, taking it not simply as a simile inserted into the narrative but as the
substance appearing in naked form as the story nears its end, then the Odyssey would be none other than an attempt
to attend to the endlessly renewed beating of the sea on the rocky coast, and to patiently reproduce the way the water
floods over the rocks and then streams back from them with a roar, leaving the solid ground glowing with deeper
color. This roaring is the sound of epic discourse, in which what is solid and unequivocal comes together with what
is ambiguous and flowing, only to immediately part from it again.
18
ADORNO, Theodor W.: The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel, in: Notes to Literature, New
York 1991, p. 35: A common feature of the great novelists of the age is that in their work the novelistic precept
this is how it is, thought through to its ultimate consequences, releases a series of historical archetypes; this occurs
in Proust's involuntary memory as in Kafka's parables and Joyce's epic cryptograms. [] Forty years ago, in his
Theory of the Novel, Lukacs posed the question whether Dostoevski's novels were the foundation for future epics, or
perhaps even themselves those epics. In fact, the contemporary novels that count, those in which an unleashed
subjectivity turns into its opposite through its own momentum, are negative epics. They are testimonials to a state of
affairs in which the individual liquidates himself, a state of affairs which converges with the pre-individual situation
that once seemed to guarantee a world replete with meaning. These epics, along with all contemporary art, are
ambiguous: it is not up to them to determine whether the goal of the historical tendency they register is a regression
to barbarism or the realization of humanity, and many are all too comfortable with the barbaric. There is no modern
work of art worth anything that does not delight in dissonance and release.
19
BEJA (1972), p. 13-23
20
BENJAMIN, Walter: Der Srrealismus Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europischen Intelligenz, in: Angelus
Novus, Frankfurt am Main 1974, p. 202.
21
ZIOLKOWSKI, Theodore: Tolle Legge: Epiphanies of the Book, in: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 109,
No. 1 (January 2014), pp. 1-14.

showing itself and glowing with deeper color.22 These entirely immanent epiphanies reenchant
the world without creating a spiritual presence, which means that the bliss or terror evoked by
myth does not necessarily constitute an authoritative order.
The crisis of the realist novel and the irrational demand for profane illumination
culminate in the experimental project of epic modernism. Alfred Dblin and Walter Benjamin,
agree that with the crisis of the novel genre, experimental forms open up new epic
possibilities.23 Besides Dblins Berlin Alexanderplatz, often labeled the German Ulysses, the
deep impact Joyces work has made on German writers is, as Robert Weninger argues, perhaps
best exemplified by Joyces German modernist contemporary Hans Henny Jahnn.24 Jahnn, who
had been working for years on his novel Perrudja (1929), significantly changed the structure of
his work after reading Ulysses.25 Apart from the interior monologue and montage, which soon
became popular devices after Joyce, Jahnn adapts in particular the short paratactic structures that
string together disparate momentary perceptions of concrete objects.
INELUCTABLE MODALITY OF THE
VISIBLE: AT LEAST THAT IF NO MORE,
thought through my eyes. Signatures of all
things I am here to read, seaspawn and
seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot.
Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust: coloured signs.
Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies.
Then he was aware of them bodies before of
them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce
against them, sure. Go easy. Bald he was and a
millionaire, maestro di color che sanno. Limit
of the diaphane in. Why in? Diaphane,

Sprache meiner nur wispernden Sinne. Ich kenne

meine Augen nicht. Auf eine menschenlose einsame
Insel verschlagen werden. Wie ein Verbannter leben.
Wenn ich nichts denke, male ich den Buchstaben D.
Schne Kurven. Das Gerusch in der Kche wollte kein
Ende nehmen. Oder schlichen die Sekunden nur klebrig
an ihm vorber? Verlor er das Bewusstsein der Zeit wie
alle anderen Fhigkeiten? Hatten seine unwirklichen
Gesichte die Brcken zu den Gesetzen der Wirklichkeit
schon ganz zertrmmert? Wurde ihm Stillstehen, was
anderen enteilte, die Zeit sogar? Wahnsinn also.
Dagegen bumte er sich. Riss Fenster auf. Auch

22

ADORNO (1991), p. 24
BENJAMIN, Walter: Krisis des Romans Zu Dblins Berlin Alexanderplatz, in: Gesammelte Schriften III,
Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 232: Die Montage sprengt den Roman, sprengt ihn im Aufbau wie auch stilistisch,
und erffnet neue, sehr epische Mglichkeiten. Im Formalen vor allem.
24
WENINGER, Robert K.: The German Joyce, Gainesville 2012, p. 38ff.
25
Weningers claims are mainly based on findings in: MITCHELL, Breon: James Joyce and the German Novel,
1922-1933, Athens, Ohio 1976. Such claims have been contested by Jan Brger in his Jahnn-Biography. Cf.:
BRGER, Jan: Schreiben und Verffentlichen Jahnn und Dblin lesen Joyce, in: Der gestrandete Wal Das
malose Leben des Hans Henny Jahnn Die Jahre 1894-1935, Berlin 2003, p. 197-202.
23

adiaphane. If you can put your five fingers steinerne und eiserne Falltore sollen den Eingang
through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your bewachen. Hinauf und hinabziehen. In die Flut.
Schleusentore.27
eyes and see.26

The typical crisis of the subject in the modernist novel that is struggling to synthesize its sense
perception shifts here from a negative experience to a positive one. The inability to conjoin
disparate elements produces a different perception allowing for an elevated total view. This
literary process of fragmenting sentences into short paratactic forms works as the process of a
fragmentation of reality with the goal of recombining the fragments in a new epic totality. Both
spatially and temporally, it seems to be rather closeness and immediacy than distance that
characterizes this epic modernism. The subject disintegrates, and with it its narrative form, as the
objective world comes too close to capture it in a coherent manner. To invert Bakhtins claim,
the modernist epic seems to take shape precisely at the point when the novel with its more
rigorous narrative structure was disintegrating.28
For all the differences (and there are plenty) between Joyces and Jahnns approaches to
the endeavor of reinventing the epic under the conditions of literary modernism, it is quite clear
that they are engaged in a similar project. Different from Jahnn and closer to Joyce here, Dblin
attempted this for the urban space of the Alexanderplatz, where jackhammers invade the mind of
Franz Biberkopf and a decidedly modern and industrial world is reconfigured in the form of
26

JOYCE, James: Ulysses, New York 1961, p. 43.

JAHNN, Hans Henny: Perrudja, in: Romane I, Werke und Tagebcher Bd.1, Hamburg 1974, p. 173: Language
of my merely whispering senses. I do not know my eyes. Being stranded on a devoid and lonely island. Living like
an outcast. When I do not think at all, I paint the letter D. Beautiful curves. The sounds in the kitchen would not end.
Or did the seconds only sneak tenaciously past him? Did he lose the consciousness of time and all other abilities?
Had his unreal sights already fully destroyed the bridges to the laws of reality? What was fleeting from others like
time, was it deadlock for him? Thus Madness. He reared against it. He opened the windows. Paddles of stone and
iron shall guard the entrance. Pulling up and down. In the flood. Floodgates.
28
BAKHTIN (1981), p. 37f.: The epic wholeness of an individual disintegrates in a novel in other ways as well. A
crucial tension develops between the external and the internal man, and as a result the subjectivity of the individual
becomes an object of experimentation and representation and first of all on the humorous familiarizing plane.
Coordination breaks down between the various aspects: man for himself alone and man in the eyes of others. This
disintegration of the integrity that an individual had possessed in epic (and in tragedy) combines in the novel with
the necessary preparatory steps toward a new, complex wholeness on a higher level of human development.
27

montage. In contrast, Jahnns thematic focus treats the rural experience and the creaturely
dimension of life, in which the delineations between genders and species are blurred. It is not
surprising that Walter Benjamin clearly preferred Dblins urban way of adapting Joyce, but his
scathing review of Jahnns novel, which he labeled as Heimatkunst der analen Zone29 probably
misjudges Jahnns literary achievement.30 Indeed, the partial failure of Jahnns modern epic is
that the reversal towards myth is not sufficiently contrasted with a modern social and political
condition, which may be one of the reasons for the lack of a wider reception and also for
Benjamins rejection of the work. As the epiphanic moments become obsessive and too limited
to an often disturbing imagery of pansexual morbidity, the ambitious project of overcoming the
crisis of the novel through a restitution of the epic eventually fails in the case of Jahnns
Perrudja.31 However, as failure the epic fragment remains important as Jahnn consequently
realizes the expectation of immanent narration and of making the concrete physicality of the
world mythical through his use of epiphanic imagery.32

29
BENJAMIN, Walter: Hans Henny Jahnn: Perrudja, in: Gesammelte Schriften VI, Frankfurt am Main 1985, p.
141.
30
GOEBEL, Eckart: Konstellation und Existenz Kritik der Geschichte um 1930: Studien zu Heidegger, Benjamin,
Jahnn und Musil, Tbingen 1996, p. 179f.
31
In contrast to Benjamins rejection stands Klaus Manns emphatic review underlining its character of modern epic
in the aftermath of Joyce. Cf.: MANN, Klaus: Ein fhrender Roman der Jungen: Perrudja von Hans Henny Jahnn,
in: Die neuen Elter Aufstze, Reden, Kritiken 1924-1933, p.285: Man hat Dblins epischen Stil mit einem
reienden Strom verglichen, der alles, was am Wege und noch weitab gedeiht, an sich und in sich hinein zieht. So
wie bei Dblin berstrzen sich bei Jahnn die Anekdoten und die Aufzhlungen, die Liederrefrains, medizinischen
Konstatierungen, alten Sprche, Kochrezepte, Obznitten, Legenden; die Namen von Edelsteinen, spanischen
Generalen, Fleisch-, Gemse-, Marmeladensorten, Sdseeinseln, Tierarten, Blumenformen, technische
Einrichtungen wirbeln, jagen sich durcheinander. Es ist die gleiche epische Urgewalt (Nieder der Roman, es lebe das
Epos!) Es ist die gleiche Schule: der groe Ire.
32
GOEBEL (1996), p. 133: Der Perrudja versenkt sich ganz in die Betrachtung der Immanenz, handelt an keiner
Stelle leuchtet so etwas wie Transzendenz, eine Hinterwelt, ein eschatologischer Horizont auf von der
Landschaft, von den Elementen, von den Wirkungen der Materie. Die Welt ist geschaffen, doch von einem
unbekannten Gott, der sie sich selbst berlie, ohne den Dekalog zu offenbaren [] Die Idee qualitiver
Vernderung in der Geschichte, der Vorstellung von einem teleologischen Gesamtverlauf des historischen
Geschehens mu widersprochen werden, soll die Erneuerung des Epos gelingen. Geschichte mu zurckgefhrt
werden auf Natur, unter Erneuerung astralmythischer Vorstellungen als die ewige Wiederkehr gleicher
Konstellationen bestimmt werden.

10

If the modern epic is an inherited form, which has however come to exceed the
limitations of a genre, one could characterize it as a literary form of totalizing ambition. As
Stefano Ercolino has pointed out, the epic and the novel are part of and continually interfere
within a narrative system of polyphonic and monologic tensions.33 In most cases, the modern
epic is of course nothing but a very long novel, and writers like Jahnn were indeed publishing
novels as books for the reading public instead of singing their epic verses to an archaic
community.34 Although the distinction remains fuzzy, the term modern epic fits the specifically
modernist cases of Jahnn to the extent that his narratives are structurally based on myth making
in his attempt to make the naked substance of the world appear.

2. Hans Henny Jahnns Flu ohne Ufer

Hans Henny Jahnns Perrudja was published in 1929, the same year as Dblins Alexanderplatz
and one year before the first volumes of Musils Mann ohne Eigenschaften and Brochs
Schlafwandler, all of which have been recognized as canonic modernist epics in wake of Joyce
and Proust. Jahnns often unbearable demands from his readership are certainly the main reason
for this lack of favorable reception, leaving to him the unfortunate role of the literary insider tip.
Due to the limited critical response to Perrudja upon its publication, the work neither
received a sustained reception until 1933 nor was it rediscovered after the war. Jahnns situation

33

ERCOLINO, Stefano: The Maximalist Novel From Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow to Roberto Bolaos
2666, New York 2014, p. 15.
34
ERCOLINO (2014), p. 16: Today, it is the novel, and perhaps only the novel, that is able to take up the legacy of
the epic and its universalizing dream. This is precisely what occurs in Mega-Novels, in system novels, and in the
maximalist novel. When the historical conditions which produced them disappear, and when the aesthetic
framework in which they originally developed changes, literary forms die, but not always. It often happens that
forms more resilient than others survive, accommodated in other forms. And so for the epic, which in novels such
as Don DeLillos Underworld or Roberto Bolaos 2666, has returned to speak to us directly, transformed, to be
sure, but preserving intact its utopian tension.

11

as a writer was always precarious and although he was quite established in the cultural scene of
Hamburg, by the time the Nazis came to power he only had a very small readership. There
would have been many reasons for the Nazis to ban his works, primarily the homoeroticism,
obscenity, and morbidity in his works, but his name was not to be found on their lists. After
several house searches however, his personal situation became unsustainable and he emigrated in
1933 first to Switzerland and then to Denmark, where he would stay until 1950 and where he
wrote the novel trilogy Flu ohne Ufer.35 Initially intended as a novella, the Holzschiff became a
novel, and after its rejection by his publisher Peter Suhrkamp (S.Fischer), Jahnn began to write a
final chapter, to clear up the inconsistencies of the text. The text grew boundlessly in all
directions and turned the initial Holzschiff into an overture to the larger work, which was
succeeded by the Epilog that was only published after Jahnns death in 1961.
Although Flu ohne Ufer is a project Jahnn was occupied with for more than 20 years,
the three-part novel remained a fragment. The programmatic title already hints at the
impossibility to finish the writing and the reading of this massive text corpus. Before even
reading it, the title and the mere length of the book already indicate the excessive character of the
text and mark the work as a challenging endeavor. The central event, an outrageous incident,36
of the sinking of the Lais, which is the wooden ship that gave the name to the trilogys first
part Das Holzschiff. In the very first sentence the ship suddenly appears as if it had come out of
the fog,37 and it soon sets on to begin its fateful course. In a manner that is reminiscent of
35

Regarding Jahnns status as an expatriate see BRGER (2003), p. 300-349.

ECKERMANN, Johann Peter: Gesprche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, Berlin 1982, p. 194f.:
Wissen Sie was, sagte Goethe, wir wollen es die Novelle nennen; denn was ist eine Novelle anders als eine sich
ereignete, unerhrte Begebenheit. Dies ist der eigentliche Begriff, und so vieles, was in Deutschland unter dem Titel
Novelle geht, ist gar keine Novelle, sondern blo Erzhlung oder was Sie sonst wollen. In jenem ursprnglichen
Sinne einer unerhrten Begebenheit kommt auch die Novelle in den Wahlverwandtschaften vor.
37
Cf: JAHNN, Hans Henny: Das Holzschiff. In: Romane II Flu ohne Ufer, ed. by Th. Freeman & Th.
Scheuffelen, Hamburg, 1974, p. 7: Wie wenn es aus dem Nebel gekommen wre, so wurde das schne Schiff
pltzlich sichtbar.
36

12

Kleists novellas or Kafkas tales (e.g. Der Heizer), a third person narrator provides the reader
with some details about the setting of the ship and the apparent characteristics of the crew
including the obligatory captain, his daughter Ellena, her fianc Gustav and the overly suspicious
freight supervisor. The essential information about the destination of the ship and the nature of
its freight is not revealed, even though we learn that many of the crew members wonder about
these issues. While showing the capacity of language to represent the factual reality as well as
the interiors of the characters in all detail, Jahnn begins to negatively shape the unspeakable,
which will be not only in the center of the first novel, but at the core of the whole trilogy. In Das
Holzschiff we witness the young and nave protagonist Gustav losing trust in the world of
appearances. While still occupied with reflections on the meaning of his young life, the notion of
progress and the triumph of reason he must acknowledge that the happenings around him do
not fit this narrative.38 The subversion of his belief that the world is governed by the rational
interrelation of freedom and necessity conjures up the possibility of a dark and destructive force
that drives the actions of the passengers and the course of the ship. Rather being a cryptic symbol
than an allegory for the hubris and vanity of human ambition against the forces of nature, the
ship is described in a detailed and concrete way. This makes the ship a space in which the
symbolic signification intertwines with realist depictions, which produce the ship as a
fundamentally uncanny place in the readers imagination.39 We soon get the impression that the
ship is doomed from the beginning and so is every person on it. The captains daughter and
fiance of the protagonist Gustav disappears and is not to be found until a series of events caused

38

JAHNN (1974, I), p. 144: Die Wahrnehmungen der Sinne waren in Einklang gebracht mit den bereinknften.
Die allgemeinen und augenfaelligen Gesetze waren an keinem Punkt umgebogen worden. Und das Prizip der
Ntzlichkeit war inmtten eines bedeutenden Aufwandes zur Herrlichkeit gefhrt.
39
According to Freuds famous definition, the uncanny is something that used to be familiar to the subjects mind,
but has undergone a process of repression, which generates the particular strangeness that is contained in the
paradoxical feeling of the uncanny as something that is alien and familiar at the same time. FREUD, Sigmund: The
Uncanny. In: LEITCH, Vincent B.: The Norton Anthology of Criticism, New York, 2001, p. 929-952.

13

by the crews munity lead to the eventual sinking of the ship. The story of the first part is very
close to a detective story, as we have a range of characters of whom we have very selected
information, a series of events that remain unclear (such as the causes for the mutiny), and finally
at least one major crime40. The isolated space of the ship does not allow for the typical detective
that would enter the scene from outside in order to investigate and to reconstruct the events on
the ship. The very categories of crime and justice, of right and wrong seem to be gradually
suspended as they fail to relate to the reality of the ship. The triumph of reason that the ship
represents for Gustav in his early reflections in the text, dissolves in front of his eyes and in his
mind.
The first part of Jahnns trilogy is concerned with the dissolution of fundamental values
of truth and morality that takes place in spacial-physical, rather than in temporal terms, which
will be the case in the second part of the trilogy (Die Niederschrift des Gustav Anias Horn
nachdem er neunundverzig Jahre alt geworden war). In Das Holzschiff we have several spacial
differences that structure the movement of the characters and the experience of the reader. The
primary difference is that between the land and the sea, the structured land and cityscape as
opposed to the amorphic ocean. The distinction we find between land and sea corresponds to
what Carl Schmitt has called a pre-modern understanding of this relation, in which the sea
signifies unmarked empty space.41 From a clearly modern point of departure at the port, the ship
reenters a mythic domain before Schmitts spacial revolution. Once we are on the ship the
spacial difference becomes crucial on another level, which is the above and the below of the

40

Cf.: VOGT, Jochen: Das vierdimensionale Labyrinth. In: Text + Kritik. Hans Henny Jahnn. Nr. 2/3. 1980.
Cf.: SCHMITT, Carl: Land und Meer Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung, Stuttgart 2011, p. 66: Die
Menschen knnen sich also jetzt einen leeren Raum vorstellen, was sie frher nicht konnten, mochten auch einige
Philosophen vom Leeren gesprochen haben. Frher hatten die Menschen Angst vor dem Leeren; sie hatten den
sogenannten horror vacui. Jetzt vergessen sie ihre Angst und finden schlielich nichts mehr dabei, da sie und ihre
Welt im Leeren existieren.

41

14

water surface.42 This difference becomes existential for the crew, the ship and its mission,
whenever the threat of sinking is present. On board of the ship we can distinguish the deck, being
the open space that is illuminated by sunlight or darkened by fog and clouds, and from which the
masts rise up to the infinite.43 The lower decks seem to be staggered like Dantes circles of hell,
and up until the end, it is never quite clear where the bottom of the ship really is. Gustavs
growing doubt about the purpose of the course of the Lais drives him to explore more and more
levels of the ship climbing and crawling through narrow corridors, ladders, hatches and bottom
flaps. Behind every wall and every door there seems to be another layer of the ships body. In
spacial terms, the crew, of which Gustav eventually becomes the paranoid leader, is lost in the
sea and lost in the ship, up to the degree that the only way to locate the ship is to sink it.44
In the logic of the text, the search for meaning is not a search in time, which Gustav will
engage in, in the Niederschrift, but an exploration of space. Das Holzschiff works as an overture
to the trilogy. With about 250 pages it is fairly short compared to the over 2000 pages of the
whole novel, but all thematic elements of the epic Niederschrift & the Epilog are already
anticipated. Besides the suggestive spacial phenomenology of the ship and the sea, the main
motives of the trilogy, death, love, and nature, are introduced in the first part in several ways.
The problem of love and death gets a particular shape in Jahnns worldview, which sees a
devastating hopelessness of the creaturely existence and its natural determination through
creation and decomposition. In this fatalistic view love becomes an objective natural force that
42

JAHNN (1974, I), p. 72: Das Schiff fuhr mit dunkles bauchigen Segeln ueber den Abgrnden, die mit Wasser
ausgefllt waren.
43
Ibid., p. 72: Das Gebilde aus Menschenhand schwebte einsam im Nebelmeer, war von der Erde abgestrzt. Die
Spitzen der Masten verschwanden schon im Unendlichen. Blutschwarze Segel umbrandet von weilich jagendem
Qualm.
44
Ibid., 167: Gustavs Augen glommen auf. Neben dem Gedrhn gab es pltzlich einen klingenden Scherbenlaut,
wie wenn ein groer Spiegel herabfllt und zerbricht. Die Mnner horchten auf. In der gleichen Sekunde, Gustav
glaubte seinen Augen misstrauen zu mssen, strzte blank, vergleichbar dem frischen Kamm einer anspringenden
Welle, hinter der aufgeschlitzten Holzwand Wasser hervor.

15

takes possession of the human bodies and forces them to reproduce themselves, only for the sake
of new suffering, death and decay. This dark vision is not only reformulated in poetic language
as critics of Jahnn have argued,45 but gets its particular form only through the authors
sophisticated play with suggestive metaphors and symbols. The almost trivial acknowledgement
that human existence is cruel and meaningless, becomes aesthetically striking, and even
overwhelming at times, in Jahnns work by his ability conjure up the beauty and the horror of
nature in his poetic imagery.
Despite the often excessive poetic language, Jahnn presents with the Holzschiff a rather
conventional narrative structure in which the Joycean fragmentary writing sets the tone less than
the stylization of the mysterious and the uncanny.46 This is also due to a change in Jahnns use of
myth, which becomes closer connected to the evocation of horror and death and an increasingly
tragic view of creation altogether.47 It is a more mature writing that develops some of the motifs
of Perrudja, not necessarily in a less disturbing manner, but with more narrative precision and
rhythm, focusing on the mystery of nature and mortality and creating various mythic figures
around it. Recalling Adornos notion of the epic narrative that imitates the spell of myth in
order to soften it, Jahnns overall shift from Perrudja to Flu ohne Ufer can be described as one
towards nave narration and memory, while insisting on the immediate experience of mythic
epiphany. Significant for this shift in the macro-structure of the trilogy is the failed novella of

45
FREEMAN, Thomas: The Case of Hans Henny Jahnn Criticism and the Literary Outsider, Rochester 2001, p. 114.
46
Breon Mitchell identifies this with a stylistic orientation on Kafka. Cf.: MITCHELL, Breon: Hans Henny Jahnn
and James Joyce The Birth of the Inner Monologue in the German Novel, in: Arcadia, Jan 1, 1971, 6.1, p. 70f.
47
Foundational is Hans Wolffheims study on the tragic myth in Jahnn, cf.: WOLFFHEIM, Hans: Hans Henny Jahnn
Der Tragiker der Schpfung, Frankfurt am Main 1966.

16

the Holzschiff in which the unheard-of event takes the form of a mystery that unfolds in the
second part of the trilogy and continues in the epilogue.48
Despite notable exceptions, one common feature of the epic is length. The many pages of
Flu ohne Ufer are a quantitative feature, but even more is the title that names the boundlessness
of Jahnns writing and suggests an endless narrative flow. Emerging from an epiphanic
appearance the shoreless river remains inconclusive and yet always flows in the same direction,
being pulled towards an end out of sight, a determining and fatal telos for all its elements. The
leading metaphor of the work hints at the double character of this modern epic, a closed world in
which there is no outside, no solid shore, but which is nevertheless in steady flux.49 In this way
the metaphor of the shoreless river exceeds that of the oceanic in an unsettling way, suggesting a
totality of movement that is fundamentally inconclusive. The boundless narrative of the novel
does however have a definite beginning, which is the sudden appearance of a ship as if it had
come out of the fog and throughout the novel doubts will remain about the status of this
appearance. The hypothetical clause invokes the fog as the image for a veil abruptly pulled away,
clearing the vision for a very concrete thing. In the following passage, the wooden ship is
described in a rhetoric of descriptive precision that solidifies the ephemeral beginning. The
Lais, is introduced as a masterpiece of construction, conceived by an English shipbuilding
genius from another century, which also locates the narrative in the 20th century when wooden
ships were no longer common. Despite such temporal indicators throughout the text, Jahnns
48

Hans Mayer suggests that the central and longest part, the Niederschrift, represents the actual independent work,
while the Holzschiff and the Epilog only give pretense to the structure of a cohesive novel trilogy.: Cf.: MAYER,
Hans: Versuch ber Hans Henny Jahnn, Freiburg 1994, p. 70.
49
In order to sustain his reading of Jahnns work as essentially transgressive, Reiner Niehoff insists however on the
presence of the shore in this metaphor. Cf.: NIEHOFF, Reiner: Hans Henny Jahnn Die Kunst der berschreitung,
Berlin 2001, p. 400: Denn was wre Flu ohne Ufer anderes als der Titel fr ein ber-die-Ufer-Treten, der Titel
einer berschreitung, die exakt so die Grenzen der Ntzlichkeit, der Normalitt und Nchternheit hinter sich lt
wie der Flu, der ber seine Ufer tritt. Ihm sind die ursprnglichen Ufergrenzen noch anzusehen, aber doch schon
nur noch als berschrittene.

17

narration seems strikingly removed from historical time as it seeks to establish a zone in which to
present a condition unaffected by history. It is this element in his writing that has often been
identified as archaic as it seems to reduce human existence to mere corporality that beneath all
culture and civilization is driven by primal instincts.50 At the outset of the story however, the
forces that govern history knowledge, property, power are present in form of the
sachverstndigen

Herren,

Zollbeamten,

Reeder,

hhere

Stellen,

Banken,

Wachmannschaften, Offiziere, Landheer, Staat, Volk, Polizeikrfte, Spitzel, and

Arbeitskolonnen.51 The authorities present at the quay mark the solid shore of power structures
from which the ship is about to break away and can readily be identified with the totalitarian
state,52 here characterized by the instrumentalization and subordination of all accessible
resources under one goal. This goal remains undetermined however and all we know is that
under the supervision of state authorities an unknown freight is loaded up to be shipped to an
unknown destination. Instrumental rationality coincides with impenetrable mystery and it seems
as if the mysterious reality of the ship is produced by reason (triumph der vernunft), but
remains opaque.
As an alternative to the powers of the state at the harbor, the ship locates the exception to
the ordinary way of the world, but its labyrinthine and incomprehensible engineering stages the
hopelessness of any human endeavor. Already the invocation of the ship opens up a metaphorical
register that allows for a dynamic perspective on the solid shores of human existence, as well as

50
Interestingly Jahnn seemed never interested in Freud, nor have there been any notable readings of his work
informed by psychoanalysis. Cf.: FREEMAN, Thomas P.: The Case of Hans Henny Jahnn Criticism and the
Literary Outsider, Rochester, 2001, p. 107-125.
51
JAHNN (1994), p. 7-15: experts, customs officers, shipowners, higher authorities, banks, security
forces, officers, army, state, nation, police forces, snitches, work crews.
52
Cf.: NIEHOFF (2001), p. 404f.

18

the absent banks of the title.53 The voyage, whatever its actual purpose may be, is also an
existential passage that leaves the confined and structured life onshore behind and enters a new
condition. In his exploration of the shipwreck metaphor, Hans Blumenberg places embarking in
the theological context of Pascals bet and Nietzsches existentialism and it is in particular
Nietzsches 124th aphorism of the Gay Science that emphatically expresses the existential
dimension that is also present in Jahnns work.
Im Horizont des Unendlichen. Wir haben das Land verlassen und sind zu Schiff
gegangen! Wir haben die Brcke hinter uns, mehr noch, wir haben das Land hinter
uns abgebrochen! Nun, Schifflein! sieh dich vor! Neben dir liegt der Ocean, es ist wahr,
er brllt nicht immer, und mitunter liegt er da, wie Seide und Gold und Trumerei der
Gte. Aber es kommen Stunden, wo du erkennen wirst, dass er unendlich ist und dass es
nichts Furchtbareres giebt, als Unendlichkeit. Oh des armen Vogels, der sich frei gefhlt
hat und nun an die Wnde dieses Kfigs stsst! Wehe, wenn das Land-Heimweh dich
befllt, als ob dort mehr Freiheit gewesen wre, und es giebt kein Land mehr!54
[In the horizon of the infinite. - We have forsaken the land and gone to sea! We have
destroyed the bridge behind us - more so, we have demolished the land behind us! Now,
little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean; it is true, it does not always roar, and at
times it lies there like silk and gold and dreams of goodness. But there will be hours when
you realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the
poor bird that has felt free and now strikes against the walls of this cage! Woe, when
homesickness for the land overcomes you, as if there had been more freedom there - and
there is no more 'land'!]
The metaphorical voyage that leaves all certainties behind leads into the infinity of a fully
immanent world, without any higher sphere or possible redemption. Against the horizon of the
infinite, the finitude of human existence takes on a clear shape, and it is this existential contrast
53

BLUMENBERG, Hans: Shipwreck with Spectator Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, Cambridge 1997, p.
7: Humans live their lives and build their institutions on dryland. Nevertheless, they seek to grasp the movement of
their existence above all through a metaphorics of the perilous sea voyage. The repertory of this nautical
metaphorics of existence is very rich. It includes coasts and islands, harbors and the high seas, reefs and storms,
shallows and calms, sail and rudder, helmsmen and anchorages, compass and astronomical navigation, lighthouses
and pilots. Often the representation of danger on the high seas serves only to underline the comfort and peace, the
safety and serenity of the harbor in which a sea voyage reaches its end. Only where there can be no achievement of a
goal, as in the cases of Skeptics and Epicureans, can calm on the high seas itself stand for a vision of pure good
fortune.
54
NIETZSCHE, Friedrich: Die Frhliche Wissenschaft, in: Smtliche Werke, KSA 3, ed. by Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari, Mnchen 1999, p. 480. Cf.: BLUMENBERG (1979), p. 20ff.

19

that Jahnn sets up with the wooden ship on the shoreless river. Jahnn is close to Nietzsches
vitalism, although his aesthetic pessimism resembles that of the early Nietzsche, rather than the
later concept of the bermensch. In fact, Jahnns perspective on life emphasizes weakness over
strength, rather ennobling animals to a higher species instead of promoting mans selfovercoming. Affirmation of life is central to Jahnns thought, but his pessimistic view of creation
emphasizes the fatum of mortality.55
Eines Tages geschah dann die Vernderung. So wird eine Strae ins Land hinausgebaut.
Oder ein altes Haus niedergelegt. Ein junges Ehepaar zieht in die verlassene Wohnung
eines Verstorbenen. Ein grner Acker verwandelt sich in ein Grberfeld. Etwas
Schmerzliches, das vorgibt, die Freude und den Fortschritt als Ziel zu haben. Aber es
werden die Gedanken bewegt, die das Vergngliche als das Unabnderlichen umkreisen.
Die Stille ist ein besserer Trost als die Bewegung. Und nur jugendliche Tatkraft findet
Genge am Gebrll der lauten Tage. Sie denkt gering von allmhlichen Wachsen, und die
Geheimnisse des Frhlings sind ihr verschlossen, weil es ihre Jahreszeit ist. Sie sieht nur
das Aufbrechen, die Lust und ihre Oberflchen, nicht die sickernden Feuerstrme eines
von der Qual des Schaffens zerschrundenen Gottes.56
[One day then, the change occurred. Like a road being built out into the country. Or an
old house being torn down. A young couple moves into the abandoned apartment of a
deceased. A green field turns into a graveyard. Something painful pretending to serve
progress and joy. But thoughts are being moved that encircle the ephemeral and
irrevocable. Silence is the better consolation than this movement. And only youthful
energy finds satisfaction in the roaring of noisy days. They hardly appreciate the gradual
growth and the secrets of springtime inaccessible to them as they live through this season.
They only see the bursting, the lust and its surfaces, and not the oozing firestorms of god
that is exhausted from the agony of creation.]
Jahnns tragic view of creation is not harking back to a primal and complete state of being, but
hinting at the neglected domain of the physical and the corporeal. His critique is directed at any
moral or rational restriction of physical life, while at the same time insisting on the meaningless
55

BRGER (2003), p. 225f.: hnlich wie Nietzsche verwirft Jahnn die traditionell-christliche Abwertung der
gelebten Gegenwart zugunsten des Jenseits. Jede Konstituierung des Subjekts, die auf Abstraktion beruht, scheint
ihm vor diesem Hintergrund verfehlt. Der naturwissenschaftliche Rationalismus sei obsolet, weil das irrationale
Moment, das ihm innewohnt, nicht ausgeklammert werden knne. Der Impuls, dem diese berzeugung entspringt,
ist religiser Natur: Wenn ber Gott berhaupt eine Erkenntnis gewonnen werden knne, dann nur, indem man ihn
im absolut anderen zu entdecken versucht, im grten denkbaren Gegensatz, im Unendlichen, im Nichts, in der
Null.
56
JAHNN (1994), p. 12.

20

suffering of all creation that can only be slightly alleviated through the expressive function of art.
The passage of the ship is also one of realization and insight into this fate and Jahnns laconic
third person narration sustains this existential dimension throughout the text. Following his
passions, the mindless youthful protagonist Gustav, enters the ship as a stowaway to join his
fiance and captains daughter Ellena, who is the only female on board. Their presence on the
ship indicates the violation of seafaring laws and superstition, which only increases the mystery
of the whole endeavor. Already the unknown freight and destination of the ship has been the
source of rumors and tensions among the crew. The ship-owner and his representative (the
Superkargo) appear to know more, but any new bit of information that comes up only
amplifies the uncertainty and confusion. Soon after the wooden ship has left the harbor, it seems
completely closed off from any outside reality, and different begin to rules apply. Gustavs
discovery of hidden passageways in the body of the ship raises fundamental doubts about the
meaning of the overall endeavor. The unexpected opening of a locked door seems to unleash a
wholly other reality:
Irgendeine Welle uralter Erinnerung durchsplte sie. Der Anfang des Denkens. Der
magische Ablauf, der aus dem Dunkel des Raumes kam. Gesetze, die erst undeutlich
waren und darum aufgehoben schienen. Metalle, die wie Wachs knetbar, im Feuer
geschmolzen und nicht erstarrt. Holz biegsam wie Schilf. Krper, die keine Schwere
haben und kein Gesicht. Schwimmende Steine. Magnetberge. Himmel, der ber sich Erde
wlbt. Die Umkehrungen der Sinne. Das groe Reich des Unzuverlssigen.57
[A wave of ancient memory washed over them. The beginning of thought. The magic
course, coming from the darkness of space. Laws that were unclear at first and therefore
abrogated. Metals, to be kneaded like wax, fused in the fire and not solidified. Wood
flexible reed. Bodies that have no weight and no face. Floating stones. Magnetic
mountains. Sky, over which the earth is arching. The reversal of the senses. The great
realm of the unreliable.]

57

JAHNN (1994), p. 22.

21

For an instant Gustav and his fiance Ellena experience a different state, causally unrelated to
any event preceding or following it. The ancient memory from the beginning of thought
seems to hint at some primordial truth, but the distorted perception of the physical world
prohibits any judgment. The sudden appearance of the inconceivable suggests an epiphanic
experience, but the magic course remains concealed and provides no answers. It is particular to
Jahnns epiphanies that they take place in very secular and quotidian encounters such as a
suddenly opening door, an architectural description of the ship, the taste of certain foods, or,
most prominently, from human bodies stripped to their mere physical concreteness. The narrative
dynamic oscillates between the factual telling of what is really there and the epiphanic
moments in which this factuality dissolves into in a fundamental uncertainty.
In the world of the shoreless river there is no transcendence and so every epiphanic
experience is one of immanence, in which an objective world seems to reveal itself. The spiritual
world, in which Gustav initially still believes as being meaningful and reasonable, is translated
into physical terms. Through various uncanny incidents on the ship, the vessel becomes charged
with spiritual significance, making it appear like an ark carrying the last examples of a species
towards the horizon. Jahnn devotes particular attention to the description of the human body and
assigns spiritual attributes to the physical structure that constitute a body. As if to find the
spirituality, whose existence in higher spheres is doubtful, in the human flesh, the body images
Jahnn constructs seem to invert the relation of the material and the spiritual and present the
human body as a spiritual appearance.
Wir haben das Grssliche oft mit unseren Augen gesehen. Die unerwartete Verwandlung.
Ein heiler Leib wird unter einem Gefhrt zermalmt. Das Blut, das vorher im verborgenen
die feinen Schwemmstoffe, die chemisch geladenen Harmonien des Aufbaus und der
geheimnisvollen Arbeit verzweigte, im Geflecht der dnnen Bahnen pulste, und so, fast
spirituell, als roter, in den Menschen eingewachsener Baum, seine Gestalt abtastete das
22

Blut gerinnt formlos in breiten Lachen. Und niemand begreift noch, dass es im Gerank
der Adern eine Form hatte.58
[We have often seen the gruesome with our own eyes. The unexpected metamorphosis.
An unharmed body being crushed under a vehicle. The blood, that before ramified in
secrecy the fine silt, the chemically charged harmonic structures in mysterious labor,
pulsing through the meshes of thin channels and thus, almost spiritually, as a red tree
growing inside the human body, sensing its own Gestalt blood clotts formless in wide
puddles. And nobody still comprehends that it had a form in the tendrils of the veins.]
The narrative is constantly interspersed with such digressions, uttered by a distant and laconic
voice. Jahnns roots in expressionism become apparent in such passages and are reminiscent of
Gottfried Benns early poetry, with the crucial difference that the shock of the physical serves the
expression of a spiritual tremor. Although it appears that Jahnn takes a morbid pleasure in the
description of physical decay, his project differs from other extremist poetics insofar as he uses
these effects to sense a spiritual substance in the physical.59 The transition from life to death, as
the central theme in this text, remains mysterious and the narration increasingly expands on this
as the plot fails to deliver actual deaths.

3. [Kebad Kenya story]

One central passage of the Holzschiff contains the story of Kebad Kenya. It is placed in the
chapter called Mann, zweihundert Jahre begraben (Man, buried for two hundred years) and
follows the event of a storm in which the crew and the ship were facing extinction by the natural
forces of the ocean. As a result, the mood among the crew is rather dark and confused, when they
are hiding in the sailors lodge telling stories that intermingle with the narration of the third
person narrator of the novel. This way, Jahnn leads us through the dreamlike stories of the
58

JAHNN (1986), p. 39.

SCHTTE, Uwe: Die Poetik des Extremen Auschreitungen einer Sprache des Radikalen, Gttingen 2006, p.
14f.: Wie also ist es zu fassen, das Extreme? Vielleicht al seine Intensivierung des Radikalen, gleichsam als
energetische Aufladung, die zu einem explosive Hervorbrechen des Angestaunten fhrt. Ein Funke springt ber.

59

23

characters and it remains unclear whether the described images are within the narration of one
character, or in the minds of his listeners or only in the narration of the third person narrator. The
story of Kebad Kenya emerges from this obscurity, but is clearly distinguished through an
introduction and the drastic beginning paragraph:
Kebad Kenya dachte daran, das Fleisch seiner eigenen Schenkel zu verspeisen. Roh, wie
es herabhing, noch warm und vom Blut seines Herzens durchpulst; aber doch schon
losgelst von dem Mann, dem es gehrt hatte, bereit, anderswo hineinzuwachsen. Oder
eitrig zu vergehen.60
[Kebad Kenya thought of eating the flesh of his thighs. Raw, as it was hanging down, still
warm from the blood of his heart; but already detached from the man to whom it had
belonged and ready to grow into something else. Or to ulcerate and decay.]
The reader is at this point already more than 100 pages into the narrative and had many
occasions to familiarize himself with the demands of Jahnns writing style and particularly his
themes. The story depicts the eponymous hero as a wealthy lord who is tired of his life and
decides to die. After aimlessly riding his horse all night long, he lays himself to bed and waits for
death to arrive. He declares his last will and describes meticulously to his inferiors how he wants
to be buried. As nothing happens he decides to close his eyes and to stop breathing, which
indicated to his serfs that he passed on and that it is time to bury him. The master, still alive, is
put into a very narrow wooden coffin and is buried in the exact grave that we wanted. Under
ground, he is still living and witnesses the decay of his body. His perception becomes extremely
slow, as there is little indication that time is passing at all. After hundreds of years the grave is
destroyed by vandals and he is released from his grave, witnessing the desecration of his own
grave and his mortal remains from above. Taking revenge, Kebad Kenya regains his identity and
turns into a ghost, who terrorizes the farmers and torments their horses.

60

JAHNN (1974), p. 95.

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This story invokes several classical literary motives, but also philosophical themes and
elements from Jahnns early expressionist writing. The horror element clearly stands out and so
does the motive of the ghost-story. While on the ship the spacial-temporal structure of a
claustrophobic ship sailing without a goal in the roaring ocean is established, the Kebad Kenya
story contrasts this emphasizing its telluric setting. The supernatural spirit of the protagonist is
physically present in the land, and exercises his power through the dimensions of territorial
property, soil (as a living substance) and space of the fields. Almost inverted to the blood and
soil poetic of the Nazi-literature, in this text we can see how the ever growing resources of life
are the fundamental cause of creatural suffering. In a language that oscillates between romantic
horror narration, archaic expressionism and surrealistic dream-prose, Jahnn conceives an antivitalism that rejects the possibility of redemption. Instead, every transformation or
metamorphosis of living elements leads to new creation, which is again doomed to live and
suffer again and again. The narration is infused with Christian imagery, which emphasizes the
violation of Christian principles starting with the protagonists refusal to pray, to his will to kill
the divine life that is given to him, or his sodomitical relation to horses. The eventual goal of
Kebad Kenya is to overcome the dichotomy of death and life. As mentioned, these fundamental
categories of existence are at stake not only in this short story, but in the whole project of Flu
ohne Ufer. While many critics have argued that Jahnns prose is merely a vehicle to distribute
this crude worldview, it is clear beyond the idea of authorial intention that Jahnns prose is an
aesthetic exploration of a philosophical theme that goes back to Silenus wisdom that it is best
not to be born at all. In the novel, after the crew members were facing death in the oceanic storm,
they are confronted with the perspective of Kebad Kenya that death is not the negation but the

25

affirmation of life. In contrast, the transformative and regenerative qualities of death even
contain an emphatic conception of life.
The crew members are debating the status of the narration, and come to an agreement that
it is hard to believe, but also difficult to prove it wrong. It becomes apparent that the sailor
Klemens Fitte did not tell the story for the mere entertainment, but that he intended to point
towards the fact that no one knew what the freight was the ship was carrying through the ocean.
The boxes on board of the ship were reported to be in the shape of coffins. While the cook Paul
Raffzahn had earlier stated that he had heard female voices singing in the lower decks, the
confusion among the crew takes on another quality. As survivors of the storm they were relieved
that death was only threatening the ship, not actually visiting it. With the indications by the cook
and the sailors Fitte and Tutein, death seems to be present on the ship. How can we read the
image of a ship that is loaded with coffins and that is sailing nowhere, or whose destination is at
least unknown? Typically, there is either an allegorical or a symbolic reading of these Jahnnian
images. The allegorical interpretation is tempting, given also Jahnns predilection for baroque
aesthetics, because the historically unspecific setting of the ship implies that the ship is a
metaphor for the human condition.61 Even on a closer look, it would still hold to hermeneutically
unfold the image of the ship as a double-layered semiotic structure, in which every element of
the image is the significant of a deeper meaning. Although the obscurity of many of Jahnns

61

BENJAMIN, Walter: Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. In: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.1. Frankfurt am
Main, 1972, p. 342: Whrend im Symbol mit der Verklrung des Unterganges das transfigurierte Antlitz der Natur
im Lichte der Erlsung flchtig sich offenbart, liegt in der Allegorie die facies hippocratica der Geschichte als
erstarrte Urlandschaft dem Betrachter vor Augen. Die Geschichte in allem was sie Unzeitiges, Leidvolles, Verfehltes
von Beginn an hat, prgt sich in einem Antlitz nein in einem Totenkopfe aus. Und so wahr alle symbolische
Freiheit des Ausdrucks, alle klassische Harmonie der Gestalt, alles Menschliche einem solchen fehlt es spricht
nicht nur die Natur des Menschendaseins schlechthin, sondern die biographische Geschichtlichkeit eines einzelnen
in dieser seiner naturverfallensten Figur bedeutungsvoll als Rtselfrage sich aus. Das ist der Kern der allegorischen
Betrachtung, der barocken, weltlichen Exposition der Geschichte als Leidensgeschichte der Welt; bedeutend ist sie
nur in den Stationen ihres Verfalls. Soviel Bedeutung, soviel Todverfallenheit, weil am tiefsten der Tod die zackige
Demarkationslinie zwischen Physis und Bedeutung eingrbt.

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images invites to interpret them allegorically, their disparate arrangement is hard to be reconciled
in a symmetrical structure of signification. The simple reason for that is that the truth behind the
images is not to be expressed in rational language, such as: The human condition is hopeless,
or: The human condition seems hopeless, but there is the possibility of redemption. Even for
the embedded narrative of Kebad Kenya this is hardly possible, despite the fable-like structure of
the story, as the significance of life and death is shifting constantly. The decision of the
protagonist to die is not executed, because he simulates death in order to be buried alive. Once he
is buried there is a separation of body and soul going on, but the spirit remains captured in the
coffin until the grave is opened by vandals. After being released the spirit does not seek
redemption, but regains its bodily presence in which he haunts the people (and horses) that
inhabit his former land. When Kebad Kenya recognizes himself in the images of his ancestors
that he finds in the houses of his neighbors, his identity becomes even more uncertain. Instead of
constructing an allegory that the thoughtful reader can decipher, the narrator lays several false
trails that lead to a hermeneutic aberration. The attraction and the repulsion of the narrative, as a
miniature example of the whole trilogy of novels, lie in the overload of signifiers. The reader of
the Holzschiff gets all the indications that he is reading a crime fiction, until it seems clear that if
there even was a crime, no one is investigating it.62 Instead, Jahnn adds more and more layers
(horror, adventure, love story, mythology, dream-prose) to the narrative that contradict each
other and make a stringent reading impossible. The images of the ship, the coffin, or the chest of
the sailor Tutein are symbols; which means they are signs whose sensual particularity (and
materiality) is inseparable from their meaning. The surplus of signification (a symbol can mean
multiple things at a time) sabotages the allegorical reading. While critics have argued whether
62

Jochen Vogt classified Das Holzschiff as a detective novel unleashed from the narrow restrictions of the genre.
C.f.: VOGT, Jochen: Struktur und Kontinuum ber Zeit, Erinnerung und Identitt in Hans Henny Jahnns
Romantrilogie Fluss ohe Ufer, Mnchen, 1970, p. 42-49.

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this is a specific quality of Jahnns texts or simply a lack of stylistic ability, it needs to be
emphasized that his writing is clearly leaning towards a symbolist aesthetics and not to an
allegorical one.
The symbolism that can be found in the Kebad Kenya story is the main formal principle
in Jahnns prose. The often cryptic images are developed in very few sentences; patterns similar
to the exclamatory expressionist diction of very short elliptical phrases alternate with meandering
passages of streams of consciousness. A frequent effect of Jahnns images is disturbance.
Kebad Kenya wurde gehoben, veraschte sich, zerstob, sammelte sich wieder. Wie aus
groer Hhe sah er unter sich. Irgendwo hatte man ein Grab geschndet. Steine waren zu
Trmmern aufgeschottert. Gebeine lagen umher. Zersplitterte Eichenbohlen. Menschen
standen und schauten neugierig in ein kraterartiges Loch. Das war ein verzehrender Blick
von hoch herab. Gleichzeitig war aber Kebad Kenya auch unten. Lag da. Seine Glieder
waren auseinandergezerrt. Nicht nur gevierteilt. Seine Baucheingeweide hingen um das
Haupt eine jungen Mannes. Und dieser frass sie, so schnell, wie man Luft einatmet.63
[Kebad Kenya was lifted, turned to ashes, dispersed and recomposed himself. As if from
very high up he looked below. Somewhere a grave had been desecrated. Stones were
piled up as gravel. Remains lay around. Shattered planks of oak. People were standing by
and watching curiously into a craterlike hole. It was a consumptive view from above. At
the same time Kebad Kenya was also below. Lying there. His limbs tugged apart. Not
merely in four parts. His bowels were hanging around the neck of a young man. And he
ate them, as fast as one inhales air.]
The sequence seems fragmented, but coherent enough to imagine the narrated setting. The tone
of the narration is calm, almost in a standstill, but it is also hasting forward up until the weirdness
of the scene is surpassed by the disturbance of the man devouring the guts of the protagonist.
Such images appear like flashes of horror that are always on the edge of being either deeply
disturbing or laughable. Jahnn is challenging the limits of the aesthetic perception of horror,
which can only affect us as horrific if it remains in the realm of the real (that which is possible).
Only if the violence displayed is exercised on a human or an animal, and not on some fantastic

63

JAHNN (1974), p. 102.

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creature, its effect remains on the disturbing side. One is reminded of the surrealist aesthetic of
choc as Andr Breton demanded it and as Walter Benjamin has incorporated it in his media
theory. But similar to Peter Weiss or Ernst Jngers poetics of violence the emphasis is on the
physical concreteness of pain and the destruction of the body, and less so on the effect on the
reader. Symbols of violence in Jahnn, like symbols of sexuality or nature, are autarchic and
merely evoke the physical reality of these existential dimensions. Whereas Breton hoped to
eventually reconcile the conscious reality with the unconscious in a surreality, the existential gap
Jahnn is describing is that between life/death and non-existence.
In the structure of the trilogy, the Kebad Kenya story also has an important function to
introduce the motive of burial. The fatal relationship between the protagonist of the trilogy
Gustav Anias Horn and the sailor Alfred Tutein is characterized by permanent sacrifice.
Although Jahnns main inspiration for the structure of the trilogy is the Sumerian Gilgameshepic, the Egyptian funeral cult is an important background, especially when Gustav buries his
friend and lover Tutein following the rites of mummification. Compared to this long stretching
narrative, the Kebad Kenya story is like a prelude, to which Gustav and Alfred (they are both
present in the sailors lodge when the story is being told) listen, not knowing that it foreshadows
their fate.
Often compared to Thomas Manns Dr. Faustus, Flu ohne Ufer is also a Knstlerroman
(artists novel) that depicts the protagonists struggle of aesthetic production and artistic identity.
Similar to Mann, Jahnn projected his artistic ego as a writer onto a composer, which is not only
thematically relevant, but also shaped the form of the novel. Terms like harmony, dissonance,
repetition, theme, score, fugue and many other principles of composition structure the novel in
various ways, and the ambitious and unfinished project of the composer Horn, the symphony
29

Das Unausweichliche (the inescapable), becomes congruent with the novel Flu ohne Ufer,
which also remained a fragment. The theme of the inescapable fact of mortality is strikingly
introduced by the Kebad Kenya story and sets the tone for the fatalist composition of the trilogy.

[]

In this chapter as it stands so far, I have tried to engage with the question whether modernist
approaches to the genre of the novel generated a new potential for epic writing. I have tried to
define this modern epic writing as objective and immanent in its character, while emphasizing
the role of mythic epiphany for this mode of writing. I insist on myth here in order to demarcate
this narrative form from realism on the one side and the imaginative or fantastic on the other.
According to my working definition of myth, as a liminal expressive form that makes the
incommensurable aesthetically available, it renders epic possible by presenting the immanent
world from its margins. Without referring to metaphysical concepts or transcendent entities,
myth presents the limits of the immanent world aesthetically. I have tried to show through the
example of Jahnns Fluss ohne Ufer such myth-making as it appears in the form of epiphany.
Going further it will be crucial to ask whether there is any necessary relation between myth and
epic and how this relation would be different from that between myth and novel. A preliminary
answer would be to say that the epic ambition of narrating totality is only to be realized from an
absolute perspective, which in the subjective form of the novel is unavailable. If only for the
ephemeral instant of an epiphany, myth promises that ambition to be fulfilled.

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[Following the discussion of the first part of the trilogy (Das Holzschiff), I intend to focus on
the second volume and the erotic relation of Gustav and Tutein in the theoretical context of
Bachofens theory of myth and matriarchate. Furthermore, I will contrast the modern epic with
its ancient model of the Gilgamesh epic, after which Jahnn has modeled the second volume
(Niederschrift). Finally, I hope to extract Jahnns fatalist view of creation and contextualize it
in the (German) intellectual environment around 1945.]

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