From Case to Causa mortalis: On the Explosive Potential of "Small Forms" (Ad causas Jiří Pištora, André Jolles and Eugen Gottlob Winkler)
Abstract
In connection with the problematic, but influential and still much-debated theory of "simple forms" expounded by the Dutch art historian and literary scholar André Jolles (1874-1946), the question is examined here of the extent to which "small forms" are formative or have a form-determining disposition which can develop an explosive potential under unfavourable social-political circumstances. This question involves the risk-prone, but sometimes unavoidable entanglement of literature/ poetry with politics, which came to be of fatal importance to Jolles himself, as he committed suicide in February 1946 in Leipzig.
Jolles postulates that at the heart of every "simple form" (myth, legend, joke, saying, case, memorabilia, riddle, fairy tale etc.) lies a "verbal gesture", i.e. a gestural basis for speech (and text). In line with the "explosion in culture" theory developed by Yuri M.
Lotman, an accompanying feature of this conception of explosiveness is unpredictability, which is naturally associated with a certain risk. Explosive processes within culture mean that the sphere of causal relations breaks through into the sphere of unpredictability, but they can also involve a transgressive breach of the boundary between stability and "primedreadiness".
For both poets - Jiří Pištora and Eugen Gottlob Winkler -, exposed to political persecution by "national communism" and "rational communism" (to use Helmuth Plessner's terms), their final radical gesture was an attempt to save and consummate their existence as free aesthetic-ethical beings.