We have to make do with conjectures about Kaspar’s previous life. The novel by Jakob Wassermann tells us that “no one knew where he hailed from,” and that he himself, being incapable of language, could give no information about his origins.2 However, his unheralded, defenceless presence signifies the living provocation of social resentment. We suspect that the speechless creature, as yet entirely untaught, is in possession of a secret of his own, if not actually in a state of paradisal bliss. And that, says Nietzsche, perspicacious in such matters, “is hard on a man. He may ask the animaclass="underline" ‘Why do you just look at me instead of telling me about your happiness?’ The animal wants to reply: ‘Because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say’—but then it forgets even this answer and says nothing.”3 It is rather like that with Kaspar and his prompters in the play. They envy him the blankness of the life he represents, his ability — to quote Nietzsche again — to be “totally unhistorical.”4 At the same time, this special quality is the reason for Kaspar’s strangeness. Hofmannsthal has linked similar conjectures with his concept of “pre-existence,” a state of painlessness beyond trauma in which a barely perceptible happiness, which is mere and simple existence, persists uninterrupted. Wassermann’s novel, too, tries to present this state as something very different from the deprivation of imprisonment. “He did not sense any changes in his own physical condition,” says Wassermann of Hauser, “or wish for anything to be different.”5 Kaspar’s placid existence is illustrated in the symbol of a “white wooden horse … that mirrored his own existence darkly.… He did not talk to it, not even in silent imagined exchanges, and although it stood on a board that had wheels it never occurred to him to push it to and fro.”6 From such a static existence, a life without a history in which one might acquire the art of hearing “wood rotting over long distances” and in which “Caspar could make out colours even in the dark,” he is released into the light of the stage, a shocking and painful transition to surroundings that are qualitatively entirely new, where the “originally prestabilized harmony” is lost and his inner resources prove inadequate.7 Anthropological theory assumes that exposure in a treeless situation where all escape upward was cut off led to the invention of myths. Kafka’s ape, dragged into human society, expresses very similar ideas in his “Report for an Academy.” It is the absence of any way of escape that has forced him to become human himself. “I had always had so many ways out, you see, and now I have none.”8 So the wild boy Kaspar has no choice but to develop, except that in his case, as in the ape Rotpeter’s, the myth does not have to be invented: it is provided for him by his professional prompters. Their disembodied voices have little to do with the optimistic educational theories of the eighteenth century and later, according to which it might be hoped that Caspar Hauser would educate himself to become a liberated, guiltless human being, a natural wonder. If such experiments showed naïve idealism, the general approach to Kaspar resulted only in an illusion of liberation, entirely adapted to existing circumstances. An ego is formed until finally, as Hofmannsthal described it, it slips into another identity, “like a dog, eerily silent and strange.”9
To Kaspar, the anonymous voices of the media to which he is constantly exposed mean “alienation in the sense of a passive submission to invasion by others.”10 Something in him cracks; he becomes vulnerable and begins to learn. At first Kaspar’s reactions to the refractory nature of the inanimate objects around him and his own incompetence as a human being are those of a clown. His hands get stuck down the side of the sofa, the table drawer falls out at his feet, he becomes entangled in a chair, a rocking chair tips over and Kaspar runs away, terrified, for every new lesson is a new horror to him. A clown merely performs an amusing act in the “tension between the serious mastery of objects that has been learned and his own deliberate clumsiness,” but to the uneducated Kaspar such acts cannot be foreseen and relate not so much to the mastery of inanimate objects as to his own training.11 Handke has written, of the circus, that the audience’s enthusiasm is never really free “because the imminence of shame or horror is always present”; something could easily go wrong with the act.12 “With a clown, however, the misfortune that is so embarrassing in all other circus numbers is planned as part of the act.… His accidents are not awkward but comic. Indeed, it is an embarrassing sight if he does for once, unintentionally, succeed in mastering inanimate objects. The sight of a clown who fails to fall over a stool or who can sit down easily in an armchair … is embarrassing.”13 Kaspar’s clumsiness, however, is far from intentional, and the accidents he suffers are only very superficially comic. He soon learns to avoid them. But he has still assimilated enough clownish behavior for us to be almost embarrassed by his correct reactions as the action continues. What looks like progress is really nothing but the gradual humiliation of a trained creature who, in approaching the human average, begins to resemble an animal gone mad. Kaspar’s éducation sentimentale is also his case history, and from it we finally gain insight into the pathological connection which inevitably exists between the possession of property and education. For do not things have names only to help us to grasp them better, as if the blank spaces in the atlas we have made for ourselves out of reality disappear only so that the colonial empire of the mind may grow? “As a child,” Henny Porten remembers during Ritt über den Bodensee (“The Ride Across Lake Constance”), “if I wanted something, I always had to say what it was called first.”14 Kaspar soon realizes that this is where the secret of mastering things lies; he becomes eager for information so that he will gain a little more power. Musil’s claim that knowledge is related to greed and represents a despicable urge to hoard, as “the fundamental and favorite expression of capitalism,” could be the critique of a development such as Kaspar’s once he understands the point of learning.15 It is not that he makes a conscious choice between naïveté and enlightenment, but the strange words that he uses in order to master strange things force themselves on him like commands and latent threats against which he cannot defend himself. Nor does he yet recognize the voices of society as something different, something outside him; instead, they echo within him as the part of himself that became strange to him when he was cast up in this new, overbright environment. Social maxims and reflections overwhelm him as compulsively as if they were his own individual delusion. Consequently, he obeys them.
The merciless education of Kaspar obeys the laws of language. The reason why the play could be described, says Handke, as “speech torture” is not just that other people talk to Kaspar until he loses what might be called his sound animal reason. More precisely, in this learning process, speech itself features as an arsenal containing a cruel set of instruments. Kaspar’s very first sentence helps him, as the prompters explain, “learn to divide time into time before and time after uttering of the sentence.”16 Tension arises, and with it a foretaste of the torture. Kaspar learns to hesitate as he speaks, and the voices show him how that hesitation can make painful incisions where they do not belong, separating the parts of a sentence: “The sentence doesn’t hurt you yet, not one word. Does hurt you. Every word does. Hurt, but you don’t know that that which hurts you is a sentence that. Sentence hurts you because you don’t know that it is a sentence.”17 What the prompters demonstrate through speech can be transferred, becomes an act of incision, the vivisection of reality and ultimately of a human being. Within it, the diffuse pain of being unaware becomes the keen torment of experience. In the obsessive attempt to find a reason for the animation of life, a world of images is divided into its anatomical components. This is the nature of speech operating successfully. Its grammar can be perceived as a mechanical system that gradually carves the crucial terms on the skin of the torture victim, and the torture arises from the combination of its apparatus with the organism. Kafka described the prerequisites for this process in his story “In the Penal Colony,” and Nietzsche, in discussing mnemonic techniques in the Genealogy of Morals, thought there was nothing more sinister in the prehistory of mankind than the combination of pain and recollection to construct a memory. But what is taken from the living substance of the individual in the long process of his training to become an articulate, moral human being adheres to the linguistic machine until in the end the parts become interchangeable in function. Lars Gustafsson, who designed an image of the grammatical machine, wonders whether the symbolical value of machinery does not perhaps lie in the fact “that it reminds us of the possibility that our own lives could be something simulated, in a sense resembling the life of machines themselves.”18 A human being, then, is a Stymphalian creature of metal screws and springs, stamping accepted patterns out of the metal of communication, and speech is an apparatus run out of control and beginning to lead a sinister life of its own. Model sentences such as those suggested to Kaspar are reflexes of the cruel treatment to which his sensory apparatus is submitted by its linguistic shaping. “The door springs open. The skin springs open. The match burns. The slap burns. The grass trembles. The fearful girl trembles. The slap in the face smacks. The body smacks. The tongue licks. The flame licks. The saw screeches. The torture victim screeches. The lark trills. The policeman trills. The blood stops. The breath stops.”19 The prompters know this too. At the beginning of the second part, when the injured Kaspar has split by simple division into two contented entities, the prompters utter an apologia for the process that initiates the candidate into a society where everything is regular. “Intermittent smashing / of a stick / on your jug / is no balm / nor a reason / to bewail the lack of law and order / this season / a sip of lye / in your mug / or a prick / in the guts / or a stick / in the nuts / being wriggled about / or something of that order /only pricklier / fearlessly / introduced in the ears / so as to / get someone hopping / and pop in order / by all means / at your command / but chiefly / without being / overly / fussy / over the means— / that / is no reason / to lose any words / over the lack of order.”20