The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s early text The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy (1916), offered to the reader, reveals the complexity of reasoning and uniqueness of style at the intersection of philosophy and literature, which are characteristic of the author’s later works. Thus, asking about the role of language in trauerspiel and tragedy, Benjamin does not limit himself to an analysis of these genres, but draws a metaphysical picture of nature that is striving to be expressed and therefore entering the “purgatory of language.” It is the vicissitudes of this movement that form the context for a new definition of the phenomena that are of interest to Benjamin: dramatic art in general, tragedy and trauerspiel in particular, feelings of grief and lamentation as its expression, meaning, and history. Seeing the principle of trauerspiel as a drama of grief in the very disparity between word and meaning, Benjamin poses the question of overcoming this opposition in art. The solution to this problem leads the author to music as a “saving mystery” of trauerspiel: in a dramatic game, heard in the fullness of its sound, a word can be filled with meaning in a new way granting nature the deliverance of expression beyond the category of meaning. Therefore, if tragedy establishes the regularity and unbreakable order of speech, then trauerspiel sets it in motion, freeing the grief of nature and dissolving it in music as the “language of pure feeling.” The essay “The Meaning of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy” not only makes it possible to better represent the range of problems and cognitive processes in the philosopher’s early works (especially in the context of the work “On Language in General and on the Language of Man,” written in the same year), but it can also be considered as one of the first sketches of Benjamin’s book The Origins of the German Baroque Drama (1925).