Adorno judged Helms’s philology-based associative text more avant-garde than Beckett.

Evidence

In Adorno’s view, Helms’s text was even more advanced than Beckett’s. Joyce had essentially counted on associative links provided by psychology or depth psychology. Helms was counting on associative links provided by philology. But this meant counting on erudition. Oddly, Adorno equated what he himself described as a kind of parody of the poeta doctus with a trend towards a predominance of associative connections that were created from the material of language itself. In contrast to Beckettand thus more radically, avant-gardistically than himHelms, according to Adorno, was trying in this way to break out of the interior monologue, which would therefore no longer represent the law of the literary work but instead become its material. By making chance itself a parameter, the fallibility of subjective consciousness was being openly admitted. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2245

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did Adorno rate Helms’s obscure, erudition-dependent text above Beckett’s? The grounds seem circular and oddly premised on obscurity itself — worth chasing into Adorno’s reception of the concrete/experimental poetry scene.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the distinction between interior monologue as law of a work vs. interior monologue as its material — a core Adornian formalist distinction.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno ranked Beckett and Helms as serial successors to Kafka and Joyce — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2238; Adorno saw Beckett and Helms as surpassing Kafka and Joyce. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2238; Richard Helms ordered the destruction of MKULTRA files in 1963. — Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Secrets in the…, 815

Broader Connections

• Richard Helms ordered the destruction of MKULTRA files in 1963. #complicates (0.80) — Nicholson Baker, Baseless- My Search for Secrets in the…, 815