356 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
Thomas Mann had occasion to experience Adorno’s energy at first
hand when the latter wrote him a long letter in January 1954 on the
subject of Mann’s The Black Swan, which had been published shortly
before. He spoke with enthusiasm of the ‘scandalous parable’ about the
ageing Rosalie von Tümmler who lets herself be captivated by the young
American Ken Keaton. What impressed Adorno was precisely the meta-
phoric nature of the story, ‘the excess of idea over material... This
time even I could not help thinking of the musical technique of varia-
tion, so that I flatter myself with the notion that you had provided
variations on your insistent fundamental theme... : it is not, then, life
greedy for death that speaks here but death greedy for life.’^148 At the
suggestion of Walter Höllerer,^149 the co-editor of the literary journal
Akzente, this letter was published in full in a special Thomas Mann
issue in July 1955. Mann had given his agreement to the publication.^150
From the time Adorno started to write for Akzente he did not cease
to be in demand. The clearest evidence of this was the series of texts he
produced in 1958 with the title Notes to Literature. The programmatic
lecture ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’ contains a clear indication of
Adorno’s reasons for seeing in music and literature, and more generally
in the arts as such, an ultimate refuge of the anticipatory glimpse (Vor-
Schein) of the utopian as a possible state of otherness: ‘In industrial
society the lyric idea of a self-restoring immediacy becomes – where it
does not impotently evoke a romantic past – more and more something
that flashes out abruptly, something in which what is possible transcends
its own impossibility.’^151 Just as sentimentality seemed out of place in
the reified world, so too Adorno had an aversion towards the auratic
gesture, the lofty tone, for example, in the poetry of Rainer Maria
Rilke, whose secret gesture he thought betrayed ‘its blending of religion
with arts and crafts’.^152 He thought of art and poetry as refuges in which
the antagonism between individual and society can be expressed, ‘the
cleft between what human beings are meant to be and what the order of
the world has made of them.’^153
For this reason, the poetry of Eichendorff, Hölderlin, Heine and
Borchardt was not only ‘the subjective expression of a social antagonism’,
but also the aesthetic test of a core theme of dialectical philosophy,
namely that ‘subject and object are not rigid and isolated poles but can
be defined only in the process in which they distinguished themselves
from one another and change.’^154
Adorno’s fundamental conviction that literature is ‘a protest against
a social situation that every individual experiences as hostile, alien, cold,
oppressive’, and that these historical circumstances leave a negative
imprint on works of art,^155 led him, a philosopher and sociologist, to
champion the literary works of one of the most important avant-garde
writers of the twentieth century: the prose and drama of Samuel Beckett.
Adorno made efforts in 1958 to use the good offices of Peter Suhrkamp
to obtain an introduction to Beckett in Paris. At this time, a number of