In Tatters. On Büchner’s “Woyzeck”

Abstract

The paper aims at analysing Büchner’s Woyzeck from a genetic perspective, highlighting the progressive emergence of political and social issues starting from the passionate chronicle that inspired the drama, as well as the evident and manifold Shakespeare’s influence. The themes of jealousy and madness are intertwined in an extremely functional way with the staging of individual humiliation; the result is a drama about the defeat and the violent overwhelming (physical, hierarchical, political) of man over man. Büchner’s cold look at this disposition of the world, as we know it from other works, from his letters and biography itself, is by no means a resigned one; however, in Woyzeck’s case the reaction to injustice manifests itself above all on an individual level, and not as a violent rebellion, but as a derailment from the cognitive patterns shared with the community, as an escape into madness that is above all an escape from a universe made intolerable by defeat and injustice, as well as lacking any – even symbolic – form of redemption. From a formal point of view, the fragmentary nature of the drama is studied, which is due not only to its state of unfinished work, but also to the author’s deliberate choice to produce a play where the individual scenes acquire meaning in isolation rather than in their mutual relations. This, on the one hand, reflects the crumbling of the protagonist’s mind; on the other hand, it makes a normative interpretation problematic, as in pretending to be systematic and coherent it lets the human substance of Büchner’s drama pass unnoticed.