'Resisting, Therefore, Tyrannical Simplification'

On a whim I started reading Theodor Haecker’s Journal in the Night (1950) again and couldn’t stop. I remembered Geoffrey Hill’s Paris Review interview. Asked to address the “difficulty” of his poems, Hill replied: 

“I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called ‘inner exile’ in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations . . . resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.”

 

There’s a snobbish tendency to think those who champion “simple” poetry or prose – primary colors, nothing too obscure or allusive, just the facts, ma’am – are a little thick, not as cerebrally scintillating as the rest of us. Put that aside. Hill and Haecker suggest another explanation: keeping language one-dimensional makes it more persuasive, reducing poems to slogans or screeds. Certainly, much of today’s prize-winning poetry is intended as propaganda (and, incidentally, as virtue-signaling). Whereas, the best poetry, even when seemingly most explicit, suggests. Words well used carry an aura of implication. They buzz with significance. Propagandists want reducible, unambiguous “message” – which, incidentally, is how literature is customarily taught today. In a Journal entry from December 22, 1945, Haecker writes:

 

“It makes a difference whether a writer can suddenly surprise a reader  with an unexpected turn of phrase or whether one expects something unexpected to occur. It also makes a difference whether one can read the unexpected passage twice, or only once.”

 

This suggests that among the essential qualities of literature are enduring surprise and re-readability. It’s not disposable like Kleenex – read once and chucked. Language is a persistent theme in Haecker’s Journal. Recall that he is writing while under house arrest in Nazi Germany. At any moment the Gestapo could knock down his door and kill him for his words. In 1944, Haecker writes:

 

“The written language must continually be refreshed by the spoken language, that is by great writers, whose living soliloquies (monologues or dialogues) are spontaneous and lead directly from the heart of feeling to language, without going a roundabout way, avoiding the usual worn-out, conventional lines, avoiding the old pipe line, choked with old phrases, so furred-up that language loses all its élan, all its strength and all its purity.”