The nineteenth-century Bohemian author Adalbert Stifter is hardly read outside German studies. Though he is one of the great realists, his stature so pales in comparison to that of his contemporaries like Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert that Jürgen Osterhammel has deemed him and several other prominent German-language realists “Pflegefälle der Germanistik” (“kept on life support by German studies”; 30).Footnote 1 While none of the German realists have garnered much international acclaim—Theodor Fontane comprising the sole exception—Stifter is considered especially representative of the apolitical and provincial orientation that distinguishes German realism from its European counterparts (Auerbach 516).Footnote 2 For instance, in his monumental bildungsroman, the 1857 Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer), a love story filled with tips about gardening and furniture restoration, one of the high points of the action arrives—after several hundred pages—in the form of a blooming cactus. As gorgeous as his descriptive prose might be, as lovingly as he might depict rural Bohemia or his favorite cactus species, it is not altogether surprising that Stifter has failed to achieve global relevance.
Even the cultural references within Stifter's stories tend toward the local, or at least the Germanic. With his frequent use of self-reflexive literary allusions, Stifter positions himself as the legitimate heir to the German literary legacy at the transition between Romanticism and realism. One of his most important works in this vein is the 1844 story “Die Narrenburg” (“Castle of Fools”), whose central moment is torn from the pages of Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). The protagonist in Stifter's tale, also named Heinrich, strolls through the family portrait gallery in an uninhabited castle and is shocked to discover his own likeness in an image. He becomes in this moment confident that he is the long-sought heir to this estate and, after proving his ancestry, swears to uphold the bizarre family oath to write his complete life story and read those of all his ancestors. Novalis's Heinrich, on his journey to becoming a poet, recognizes his likeness in the illustrations of a book that depicts his past, present, and future life. Stifter's allusion to one of the most significant works of German Romanticism thus situates his own text in relation to a waning literary historical period, and it raises the question of the precise nature of the realist characteristics that distinguish this work from its predecessors.Footnote 3
Prominent though the Novalis allusion might be, it is only one of a whole series of intertexts within “Die Narrenburg,” which is scattered with references to Ludwig Tieck, the Brothers Grimm, and even the contemporaneous boom in female literacy (see Begemann 210–11; Müller-Tamm 566, 569; Hahn 293–310). However, the scholarly focus on the German Romantic undercurrents in the story has meant that an important influence on both Stifter and German realism more broadly has been overlooked. The epigraph to “Die Narrenburg,” the critical commentary notes, comes from Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), which appeared in German translation in the 1820s (Dittmann 209):Footnote 4 “Sieh nur, welch düstere Geschichten diese Trümmer reden. Altes Buch” (“Behold the gloomy stories that these ruins tell. An old book”; Stifter, “Narrenburg” 320).Footnote 5 Here, Stifter modifies a passage from “The Author's Account of Himself,” the opening piece of the allegedly “old book” (altes Buch) from the New World: “Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age. Her very ruins told the history of times gone by, and every mouldering stone was a chronicle” (Irving, Sketch Book 9).Footnote 6 Written onto decaying cultural artifacts, tradition persists, with even the most commonplace objects able to tell of the past.
Irving was widely read in the German-speaking lands, and his influence on nineteenth-century authors like Heinrich Heine and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff has been well documented (see Reichart; Guthrie). His anonymized appearance in “Die Narrenburg,” though, accounts more thoroughly for some of the peculiarities of German realism. Critics like Erich Auerbach, who dismiss the period as too disengaged from political-historical reality to have merit beyond the aesthetic realm, typically work from the nation-state model, which, for the German and Germanophone context, has obvious limitations. Is it any wonder that a unified, politically engaged literature would fail to emerge from the German principalities, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Switzerland? The veiled presence of an American author within Stifter's text not only indicates the need to look beyond the usual metropolitan centers of Paris and London for the study of realism, but also indicates German realism's intertwinement with global colonialism, and thus a political undercurrent to the ostensibly apolitical period.Footnote 7 For “Die Narrenburg” specifically—whose “colonial rhetoric,” to Joseph Metz, “is a means of conceptualizing the encounter with Austrian internal difference” in a multinational empire without external colonies (1483; emphasis added)—the American intertext offers a way of conceptualizing this same story's intertwinement within a global political context that has too long been seen as peripheral to the Germanophone (and German studies) setting. Thus, attending properly to the American intertext makes it possible to begin to resituate German realism within the global context that, at least on the surface, it so fervently disavows.
Even if the epigraph is the only direct—if concealed—reference Stifter makes to Irving, reading the two authors together opens up new ways of understanding German realism's peripherality. Instead of taking as self-evident the period's turn away from the political and toward the aesthetic realm, I contend that these very same characteristics that supposedly set German realism apart from its counterparts in fact result directly from contemporary media technologies that allowed authors to engage with the global and the foreign. Of particular relevance here is Petra McGillen's recent work on Fontane, whose realism, she argues, constitutes a “media-based effect” (Fontane Workshop 102). McGillen shows that Fontane skillfully remixed all manner of compiled source material, generating “reality effects” that, instead of resting on the reader's recognition of some external reality, relied on the reader's recognition of conventional representations of reality as promulgated by mass media like illustrated periodicals (Fontane Workshop, esp. 102–07). While Stifter's realism is likewise indebted to these same mass media, his borrowings from Irving reveal a transnational, transatlantic underpinning for such phenomena.
The conceptual scaffolding for the elevation of the everyday derives for both Stifter and Irving from the British picturesque tradition, which developed from eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics. The importance of the picturesque in this context is not immediately obvious. Though Irving's indebtedness to the tradition is well established, the identification of Irving as “merely” picturesque overlooks the complexity of his ironic engagement with literary and aesthetic tradition (Giles 143). That is, Irving draws from the picturesque while simultaneously calling into question its tenets.Footnote 8 Stifter, for his part, has only recently been read in terms of the picturesque (see Martyn; Weitzman 34–48).Footnote 9 The point is not to posit either Irving or Stifter as unambiguous practitioners of the picturesque, for there are clear points of divergence, nor is it just to identify a new influence on a canonical author. Rather, by understanding German realism's indebtedness to the picturesque, it becomes possible to understand the period's provinciality less as a limitation and more as part of a sustained aesthetic program intent on obscuring its fraught ideologies. Both the colonial and media-historical dimensions of the picturesque indicate not only that German realism is less provincial than it might appear but also, and more significantly, that its alleged apolitical orientation is, in fact, a media effect.Footnote 10
[ I ]
Perhaps an even more hotly contested term than realism, the picturesque refers to a body of aesthetics that flourished in eighteenth-century Britain. In its initial sense, the term designated objects—chiefly landscapes and ruins—that were suitable for being captured as images. As David Martyn summarizes, “the picturesque was from the start defined not as a quality of nature but as a mode of observation. The phrase ‘alla pittoresca’—the origin of the term—meant seeing things with the eyes of a painter, looking at nature as a painter would” (430). Over the course of the eighteenth century, the term came to encompass a broader range of aesthetic experience, referring to an anti-utilitarian impulse, whereby one drew formal rather than moral enjoyment from nature (Andrews 48).Footnote 11
Even in its early iteration, the picturesque promoted a mediated understanding of the world vis-à-vis its relationship to painting. This was further encouraged by the practices of picturesque tourism. Illustrated guidebooks indicated where one could find picturesque scenes, and tourists would roam the countryside on the hunt for the best views.Footnote 12 With the aid of so-called Claude glasses—tinted, convex mirrors—observers could view and sketch idealized versions of landscapes, replete with the enhanced foreground and soft tones familiar from the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain.Footnote 13 William Gilpin, one of the earliest theorists of the picturesque, would describe one aspect of the creative process in terms of this idealizing tendency: “The imagination becomes a camera obscura, only with this difference, that the camera represents objects as they really are; while the imagination, impressed with the most beautiful scenes, and chastened by the rules of art, forms it's pictures, not only from the most admirable parts of nature; but in the best taste” (Three Essays 52). The picturesque thus not only encouraged one to view nature as image; it was also mimetically generative, in that images of nature promoted the study and production of yet more images.Footnote 14
German realism, too, was invested in the mediation of reality. As with the picturesque, the point was not to replicate nature, for this would become the purview of naturalism, or so-called rigorous (konsequenter) realism. Rather, the realists looked to aestheticize the world, selecting and arranging parts to form a more coherent whole. The name for this process was Verklärung, or transfiguration.Footnote 15 Because they foregrounded their elevation of reality and the self-conscious literariness of their works, German realists were also known as poetic realists. The overwhelming majority of poetic realist work was in prose, but the descriptor beautifully captures the irresolvable tension between poiesis and mimesis (Preisendanz 459). No matter how faithful to reality a work of art might be, it remains a work of art, brought into being as a mediation of the world.Footnote 16 Instead of disavowing this bind, poetic realists stressed the artificiality of their own representations. What emerged was a style that straddled the real and the ideal. Otto Ludwig, who popularized the period descriptor, would formulate the problem in a manner reminiscent of Gilpin: “Die Kunstwelt des künstlerischen Realisten ist ein erhöhtes Spiegelbild des Gegenstandes” (“The art world of the artistic realists is an elevated mirror image of the object”; 266; emphasis added).
The idealizing tendencies of the picturesque, to say nothing of its fetishization of objects like ruins, would seem to align the movement more firmly with Romanticism than with realism.Footnote 17 Indeed, the realists’ own emphasis on transfiguration seems at odds with the accentuation of the mundane commonly associated with the period. However, Irving's ironic treatment of the picturesque elevates the mundane at the same time as it pokes fun at it. This, in turn, buttresses Stifter's nascent realist aesthetics, which are nothing less than a paean to the everyday.
The first text in Irving's Sketch Book, entitled “The Author's Account of Himself,” serves as the source for the epigraph to Stifter's “Die Narrenburg” and foregrounds the key elements of a picturesque realism. To begin with, this opening text highlights the mediation of reality. The fictional narrator Geoffrey Crayon, whose name alludes to a drawing and writing implement, dryly remarks:
I have wandered through different countries and witnessed many of the shifting scenes of life. I cannot say that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher, but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print shop to another; caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature and sometimes by the loveliness of landscape.(9)
In good picturesque practice, Crayon wanders around and observes scenes, which he equates to the activity of the picturesque tourist viewing prints, rather than nature proper.
Furthermore, Irving's ironic treatment of the picturesque exalts the commonplace in the same way German realism does. Crayon continues:
I fear I shall give equal disappointment with an unlucky landscape painter, who had traveled on the continent, but following the bent of his vagrant inclination, had sketched in nooks and corners and bye places. His sketch book was accordingly crowded with cottages, and landscapes, and obscure ruins; but he had neglected to paint St. Peter's or the Coliseum; the cascade of Terni or the bay of Naples; and had not a single Glacier or Volcano in his whole collection.(9–10)
Crayon's observations, he fears, are simply ordinary. Attending only to the commonplace, he neglects the extraordinary right in front of him, failing to sketch natural or architectural wonders. Crayon represents in this respect a travesty of the typical nineteenth-century tourist. Expecting to find the irreducibly foreign, tourists were inevitably disappointed when they found the same commonplace objects and practices they knew from home (Buzard 30–31). Crayon, then, embraces the tourist's dilemma. Acknowledging that he should be drawn to the characteristically foreign, he nonetheless embraces the familiar.Footnote 18
Crayon's disavowal of the great resonates throughout Stifter's most sustained programmatic text: the preface to his 1853 story collection Bunte Steine (Many-Colored Stones). Proclaiming the value of the “small” over the “great,” Stifter defends his mode of observation that is deliberately invested in the ordinary. Turning the standard conception of the sublime on its head, he writes:
Das Wehen der Luft das Rieseln des Wassers das Wachsen der Getreide das Wogen des Meeres das Grünen der Erde … halte ich für groß; das prächtig einherziehende Gewitter, … den feuerspeienden Berg, das Erdbeben … halte ich nicht für größer als obige Erscheinungen, ja ich halte sie für kleiner, weil sie nur Wirkungen viel höherer Geseze sind.(“Vorrede” 10)
The wafting air the rippling water the growing grains the undulating sea the earth becoming green … I consider great; the grandly approaching storm … , the fire-spewing mountain, the earthquake … I do not consider greater than the aforementioned phenomena, indeed, I consider them much smaller, because they are only the effects of much higher laws.
While Irving—in the guise of Crayon—is like the landscape painter who neglects to sketch the imposing volcano, Stifter deliberately avoids the erupting volcano in favor of gentler natural processes that reveal an underlying lawfulness. While the untrained eye is distracted by showy events, trained observers know to direct their attention to the mundane events that disclose something greater. One hears echoes here of Ludwig's “elevated mirror image.” Stifter's principles of selection highlight those mundane phenomena that make the lawfulness underpinning reality more apparent than do eye-catching occurrences.
While there are some basic similarities between (Stifter's) realism and (Irving's) picturesque in their privileging of the commonplace, a more decisive link between the periods is evident in an unexpected context: that of early statistical thought. A key through line in Stifter's preface pertains to the analogy he draws between the study of science and that of humanity. He describes the practices of the natural scientist (Naturforscher) who, à la Alexander von Humboldt, measures the earth's magnetic field at discrete points. Once brought together, these data points retrospectively reveal the presence of a magnetic storm. Stifter then suggests that the study of human morality conducted by the anthropologist (Menschenforscher) similarly proceeds from the discrete particulars to the common thread that unites them. Upon restoring just human relations in the face of a violation, humans feel themselves as part of a whole (“Vorrede” 12).Footnote 19 Paul Fleming shows that this same structure is at play in Adolphe Quetelet's Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés (A Treatise on Man and the Development of his Faculties [1835]), in which the Belgian statistician described the “average man” on the basis of compiled data. Quetelet presented information pertaining to birth and mortality rates, physical characteristics like height and weight, and intellectual or moral characteristics, such as the age at which authors produce great works, or factors that contribute to one's propensity toward crime. Not only, Fleming argues, do both Quetelet and Stifter use scientific tools to study humanity; importantly, “both rely on the law of large numbers to efface individual exceptions and to provide a model of ordered regularity” (150). Thus, the ubiquitous storms in Stifter's works, which stand in obvious tension with his programmatic assertations, can be understood as extremes that are “averaged out” by more mundane occurrences. Martyn goes a step further in linking this framework to the picturesque, which Quetelet saw as an artistic means of reconciling the average with the exceptional. “Instead of giving us the true but boringly smooth form of the statistical curve,” Martyn writes, “the picturesque gives us striking and interesting singularities—but singularities which, when combined, obey the law of the statistical mean. The result—in theory—is an art that is true precisely to the extent that it gives us an aesthetically affecting representation of the common” (435).Footnote 20
This intertwinement of the picturesque and realist epistemology also plays out at the media-historical level. Already the Claude glass captured both part and whole, leading to exactly the kind of transfiguration the poetic realists found so desirable. As Gilpin would put it, “in the minute exhibitions of the convex-mirror, composition, forms, and colours are brought closer together; and the eye examines the general effect, the forms of the objects, and the beauty of the tints, in one complex view” (qtd. in Andrews 69). The method of gleaning the whole from the parts demands a specific attentive mode that has an epiphanic quality. At stake is the brief moment where one discerns not just the parts but also the whole that they represent. Even though this rendering of the part-whole relationship had its roots in a very specific aesthetic context, it gradually assumed proto-realist qualities. By the nineteenth century, James Buzard shows, the picturesque had come to encompass a broader range of touristic experience than was originally present in the initial eighteenth-century context of landscape aesthetics. Nineteenth-century tourists, he contends, were in search of an “authenticity effect,” a term he adapts from Roland Barthes's “reality effect.” For Buzard, the authenticity effect serves as the ultimate goal of touristic experience, “[occurring] in the epiphanic moment when the unified aesthetic essence of the place shines forth” (33).Footnote 21 One feature of picturesque touristic experience was the way in which tourists sought to match the views in front of them with those familiar from illustrated guidebooks. Thus, part of the authenticity effect depends on the viewer's ability to match reality with its representation: The experience of “This is Rome!” is really “This is the Rome I am familiar with from my guidebooks!”Footnote 22
At first glance, the poetological program outlined in the preface to Bunte Steine appears difficult to reconcile with this representational mode. After all, Stifter posits that the whole—the lawfulness underpinning reality—is inaccessible to sensible experience. Moreover, the role of textual mediation seems to enter into the picture only as an afterthought, when, at the end of the preface, Stifter acknowledges that he is prefacing a collection of stories: “ich [bin bemüht gewesen,] in der Geschichte des menschlichen Geschlechtes manche Erfahrungen zu sammeln … , und … ich [habe] Einzelnes aus diesen Erfahrungen zu dichtenden Versuchen zusammengestellt” (“I have endeavored to collect many experiences in the history of the human race … , and … I have assembled individual components from these experiences into poetic experiments”; “Vorrede” 16).
As awkward as this coda might be, it raises generic questions essential for understanding the author's relationship to the picturesque. To begin with, the individual stories relate to the collection in the same way that the magnetic data points relate to the storm. The “dichtende Versuche” (“poetic experiments”) function much like the punctual measurements the Naturforscher makes: experimental data, they collectively make perceptible the moral lawfulness of human nature. Moreover, the simultaneously humanistic and scientific descriptor evokes Stifter's earlier story collection, Studien, where “Die Narrenburg” appeared. While “studies” are roughly equivalent to scientific “experiments,” the former term is situated within a broader semantic field. The “study,” which often serves as a preliminary rendering of a larger work, spans the realms of image and text, designating both visual and essayistic modes of representation. In these respects, the “study” has the same meaning as the “sketch,” which was fundamental for Irving. Both visual and verbal sketches featured prominently in nineteenth-century print media, especially in illustrated periodicals. As Martina Lauster argues, sketches formed a cornerstone of nineteenth-century “visual-cognitive culture,” since they straddled multiple, sometimes oppositional realms, including “observation and abstraction, entertainment and education, popular culture and science, journalism and high art, fragmentary and totalising views, [and] commercial interest and the dissemination of encyclopaedic knowledge” (1). In other words, the oppositional pairs central to Stifter's and Irving's respective works—the particular and the general, the scientific and the human, the mundane and the extraordinary—are further reinforced by the media in which those works appeared.
[ II ]
Many of the pieces gathered in Irving's Sketch Book and Stifter's Studien reflect explicitly on the composition of texts that ascribe to these principles. Irving's “The Art of Book Making,” for instance, satirizes the picturesque writing techniques of both its characters and its author and, with its emphasis on intergenerational literary production and the fraught relationship between life and art, resembles Stifter's “Narrenburg.” Irving's story depicts Crayon's visit to the reading room of the British Museum, where he watches modern-day authors pilfering from the greats. He soon falls asleep and dreams that the modern authors have donned portions of these old books as garments, stealing bits and pieces to use as sleeves, capes, or skirts. Suddenly, portraits of these venerable authors, which grace the walls of the room, come to life to retrieve their works. “I looked, and lo! the portraits about the walls became animated! The old authors thrust out first a head, then a shoulder from the canvass, looked down curiously for an instant upon the motley throng, and then descended, with fury in their eyes, to claim their rifled property” (Sketch Book 65). Crayon soon wakes himself up laughing and is asked to leave. The story concludes with a sarcastic comment about the “game laws” (65) that apply to the hunters in the library, which was a common metaphor to describe the activities of tourists prowling about for picturesque scenes (Andrews 67–68).
The story is exceedingly tongue-in-cheek. The Sketch Book bursts with references to literary giants, and “The Art of Book Making” is no exception. The story riffs on a passage from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy that also serves as its epigraph: “If that severe doom of Synesius be true, ‘It is a greater offence to steal dead men's labors, than their clothes,’ what shall become of most writers?” (Sketch Book 61). In a literalization of the commonplace trope of rhetoric as a garment, modern-day writers steal dead men's labors, which are one and the same with their clothes. For all its power of ridicule, the gesture that takes Burton (or rather takes Burton taking Synesius) at face value, indicates the seriousness with which the congruence between life and art is rendered. For the span of Crayon's dream, portraits are imbued with vitality, and literary tradition quite literally comes alive. The dilettantish authors of the present day are exposed as nothing more than plagiarists, and the story concludes by pointing out the parallels between such authors and those greedy picturesque tourists attempting to capture reality within their own media. Irving lays the irony on thickly, and it is impossible not to read the story in humorous, self-critical terms: one is, after all, reading a collection of picturesque observations. What is more, “The Art of Book Making”—and the Sketch Book more generally—are formed according to the same habits of cut and paste practiced by the thieving authors. In addition to keeping travel journals, Irving copied out passages from texts he read into commonplace books, and both types of notebooks furnished him with raw material he could later incorporate into his fiction.Footnote 23 This working process aligns with that of the picturesque, which involved the appropriation of visual and verbal prototypes in the construction of new works.Footnote 24
While it might seem troublesome to take this self-consciously unoriginal work as a kind of original source for Stifter, Irving's text makes room for this possibility. “Generation after generation, both in animal and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle is transmitted to posterity, and the species continue to flourish. Thus also do authors beget authors, and having produced a numerous progeny, in a good old age they sleep with their father; that is to say, with the authors who preceded them—and from whom they had stolen” (63). In a seeming anticipation of postmodernism, authorship appears as a kind of incestuous reproduction, with books being written from the ruins of other books. The image straightforwardly reflects the problem of American literature—namely, the conditions and possibilities of a national literature for a new nation. Even as Irving parodies modern authors stealing from tradition, rather than establishing their own, his works were subject to the same criticism. As a scathing British review of the Sketch Book reads: “They [American authors] have no foundation of their own to build on—nothing can come of nothing—and the consequence of their perverseness or blindness is, that all which they attempt of originality is an heterogeneous mass of unskilled plagiarism” (Ruland 184).Footnote 25
The colonial mindset also finds unexpected expression in Stifter. In picturesque fashion, “Die Narrenburg,” like the stories gathered in Irving's Sketch Book, is embedded within travel discourse. Heinrich, a visitor to “das romantische Waldthal der Fichtau an dem Flusse Pernitz” (“the romantic forest valley of the Fichtau on the river Pernitz”; 323), is a budding geologist who is interested in the local culture. Enthralled by the strange castle he comes upon, he is surprised to learn that this structure is, at least to the locals, utterly mundane. “[I]ch sage euch ja, ich habe heute das Schloß gerade erst so frisch gefunden, als hätte ich vor dritthalbhundert Jahren Amerika entdeckt. In eurem Lande unterstützt man Forschungen so wenig, daß sie den schönsten Marmor unbeachtet liegen lassen, oder höchstens Schweintröge daraus machen” (“I'm telling you, I just now found the castle so fresh, it was as though I had discovered America 150 years ago. In your land, research is supported so little that it disregards the most beautiful marble or, at most, makes pig troughs out of it”; 326–27). Heinrich's mockery of the locals’ indifference toward beauty is more broadly in line with Stifter's realism. At stake is not the merely mundane—that is, the base reality represented by a pig trough, but instead the transfigured mundane. A glance at works like Stifter's novel Der Nachsommer provides a wealth of examples for the cultivation of objects, such as the quarrying, polishing, and proper display of natural materials like marble. Stifter thus presents Heinrich uncritically as a Christopher Columbus figure who, with his apparently superior knowledge, only needs to “cultivate” the locals’ aesthetic principles. At the same time, the setting is not entirely “foreign” to Heinrich. Suspecting that he is the long-sought heir to the castle, he beholds the castle as something potentially familiar (and familial). In this way, the castle, in picturesque fashion, serves as the site of both the foreign and the domestic, the touristic object and the home.Footnote 26
The picturesque character of Stifter's story also finds expression in passages devoted more narrowly to media. Descriptions of local villagers, for instance, are laden with painterly vocabulary. Heinrich sits at the local inn discussing the castle ruins with the townspeople, when, as evening sets in, workers begin to return:
Er hatte noch das Wort im Munde, als eben Zwei jener malerischen Gestalten, wie wir sie so gerne als Staffage auf Gebirgslandschaften sehen, um die Ecke bogen, und fröhlich ihre Siebensachen, als da sind: Aexte, Sägen, Alpenstöcke, Steigeisen, Kochgeschirre u.s.w. auf die Gasse oder auf die lange Bank niederwarfen, und sich anschickten, Platz zu nehmen. Die abendliche Scene auf der Gasse vor der grünen Fichtau begann sich nun zu ändern, und jener Lebhaftigkeit zuzuschreiten, die unser Wanderer an jedem Samstage zu erleben gewohnt war, und die er so liebte. (335; emphasis added)
He had scarcely finished speaking when two of those painterly figures we love to see as staffage in mountain landscapes came around the corner and threw their odds and ends—axes, saws, alpenstocks, crampons, cookware, etc.—onto the street or the long bench and began to sit. The evening scene on the street in front of the Grüner Fichtau now began to change and approach the vivacity that our wanderer was accustomed to experience every Saturday and that he so loved.
Staffage figures were ubiquitous in picturesque paintings, though they were not rendered with any great detail. After all, the landscape was the primary focus, which the staffage figures simply enlivened (Andrews 25). Indeed, Stifter's description includes nothing about the figures themselves and instead zeroes in on their rustic accoutrements. The profound visuality of the description lends the scene an almost ekphrastic quality, though there is, of course, no actual landscape painting present. Instead, it is reality as such that assumes imagistic qualities. Moreover, the staffage reference, as Tove Holmes argues, assumes a base familiarity with the conventions of landscape painting (118). In this way, the narrative plays with the picturesque mediation of reality. The reader, like the picturesque tourist, does not recognize reality as such, but instead recognizes the conventional rendering and mediation thereof.
The specific import of Irving's “The Art of Book Making” becomes more apparent with Stifter's treatment of literature. “Die Narrenburg” opens with an overview of the strange traditions of the Scharnast family, whose foolishness inspires the castle's nickname (“castle of fools”). Centuries before, Hans von Scharnast had stipulated in his testament that each heir must, first, write his or her complete life story and, second, read and learn from the life stories of all his or her ancestors, which are preserved in the castle's archive. While the reading and writing requirement was intended to weaken the family's propensity for foolishness, it ends up having quite the opposite effect. The Scharnasts, instead of using reading and writing as an opportunity for measured self-reflection, mirror the behaviors recorded in their ancestors’ autobiographies. This is, to an extent, an amplified version of the authorial behavior on display in Irving's “The Art of Book Making.” The modern-day authors in Irving's texts, like the Scharnasts in Stifter's, are adopting the literature of their predecessors. The Scharnasts might not wear texts as clothes, but in modeling their lives so overtly upon those they read about, they realize these texts in a very literal sense.
While this kind of imitation would seem to align the story with a naive realism, the practice represents the lingering influence of Romanticism. Heinrich is in love with Anna, the daughter of the local innkeeper, who devours fairy tales. The nurse of her best friend, Thrine, told them fantastic tales when they were young, and the women maintain their interest in stories. During a midnight rendezvous in which Heinrich and Anna profess their love for each other, Anna makes repeated reference to Heinrich's resemblance to familiar literary figures. “‘[W]enn mein Vater auf die Bücher Thrinens schmälte, und sagte, es sei lauter Narrheit in ihnen, und wenn ich es auch schon selber zu glauben anhob, so war mir doch dazumal – – – aber das ist zu lächerlich. – – ’ / ‘Nun, Anna, nun?’ / ‘Es war mir öfters, als seid ihr in einem solchen Buche gestanden, und daraus in unsern Garten getreten’” (“‘Whenever my father disparaged Thrine's books and said they were full of foolishness, and even if I also began to believe it, it nevertheless was as though – – – but that's too ridiculous. – – ’ / ‘Well, Anna, well?’ / ‘It was often as though you stood in such a book and stepped out of it into our garden’”; “Narrenburg” 347). Anna's beloved fairy tales contain, in her father's judgment, utter nonsense. Like the foolish family from the castle, Anna is apt to understand life through texts and thus describes Heinrich as a literary figure who, in a moment of Romantic metalepsis, has stepped out of the pages of a book and into her life.Footnote 27 Anna, however, despite being an exemplary reader of Romantic texts, frames her literariness with a degree of skepticism (“but that's too ridiculous”). Heinrich likewise calls the Romantic model into question. Though he suspects he is indeed the long-sought heir to the Scharnast estate, he is wary of revealing his hunch to Anna: “nein es ist zu fabelhaft; ich getraue mir es selber nicht zu glauben” (“no, it's too fable-like; I don't even trust myself to believe it”; 351). The possibility that he might indeed be descended from the Scharnasts is so improbable—so fabelhaft—that it could fit in one of Anna's beloved tales.
Like Irving, Stifter both adopts and plays with literary conventions. Even as he makes extensive references to Romanticism, the narrative does not fully ascribe to the tradition. The characters are skeptical of their own Romantic inclinations, and even core Romantic topoi, like the castle ruins, seem to have little in common with the literary models they evoke. The strangeness of these Romantic appropriations grows over the course of the narrative, culminating finally in the aforementioned scene in which Heinrich (à la Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen) recognizes his own likeness in a portrait. The significance of the scene is hard to overstate. It is here that the oppositional pairings structuring the narrative—the poetic and the realist, local and global, part and whole, ordinary and extraordinary—are temporarily short-circuited in such a way that the experience of reality becomes epiphanic.
The lead-up to the scene features several references to Romanticism. Heinrich arranges to tour the castle together with his friend Robert, the city clerk in charge of the Scharnast estate. Heinrich remarks on the Romantic qualities of the castle: “Mir ist es, wie in einem uralten Märchen” (“It's like I'm in an ancient fairy-tale”; 368). Ruprecht, the senile castellan who shows the two men around and takes Heinrich to be the long-deceased Sixtus II, is described in similar terms: “de[r] märchenhaft alte, blödsinnige Mann” (“the senile man, so old as to be fit for a fairy tale”; 377). Ruprecht's misrecognition will turn out to be more accurate than the visitors realize. He leads Heinrich and Robert into the family portrait gallery, which contains paintings of every member of the Scharnast family. The massive portraits have an imposing presence, and, in a manner reminiscent of Irving, the objects depicted alongside the people seem almost to burst from the canvas: “Da funkelte die Sonne in wundervollem Schmelze auf jener Rüstung, jenem Goldgehänge, jenen Vasen und Geschirren schwer und massenhaft, als müßte ihre Wucht von dem Bilde niederbrechen,—auf dem weichen Goldhaare der Frauen, auf jenem Antlitze, in dem lieblichen Auge, auf dem Munde, der eben nur gesprochen haben muß” (“The sun glistened with a wondrous glaze upon that armor, that gold pendant, those vases and dishes, heavy and massive, as though their weight were about to break out of the image,—upon the soft, golden hair of the women, upon that countenance, in the lovely eye, upon the mouth that must have just spoken”; 382).Footnote 28 The portraits are so lifelike that the subjects appear to have just been speaking. The subjunctive, though, indicates a degree of skepticism. In contrast to the earlier fairy-tale descriptors that had suggested the fusion of life and literature, this passage indicates a firmer distinction between the two realms.
As in Irving, the portraits are linked with derivative imitation: “Vorzügliche Gemälde waren alle, obwohl sie augenscheinlich viel später gemalt wurden, als die Urbilder lebten, aber wahrscheinlich nach vorhandenen, wenn auch schlechten Originalen” (“All the paintings were exquisite, although they were evidently made long after the prototypes had lived, probably from extant, if inferior originals”; 383). The portraits are painted from other portraits, and even the individuals are inscribed within this mimetic discourse, existing not as people but rather as “Urbilder.” (One is reminded of picturesque painting practices, whereby images generate other images.) Heinrich finally encounters his own Urbild when, at the end of the gallery, Ruprecht reveals a hidden portrait. “Es war ein Männerbild, und im Serpentine unten stand: ‘Sixtus II.’ / Allein das Bild war das Heinrichs Zug für Zug, nur in fremden Kleidern” (“It was a portrait of a man, and the plate underneath read, ‘Sixtus II.’ / But the portrait was of Heinrich, trait for trait, only in strange clothes”; 391). Shocked into speechlessness, Heinrich stands in front of the portrait, overcome by his uncanny resemblance to someone he never knew existed. The moment is overburdened by tradition in several ways. Stifter's Heinrich is a copy of Novalis's Heinrich, and within the story, he is the spitting image of a portrait that is a copy of an Urbild. Like the authors in Irving's “The Art of Book Making,” Stifter's Heinrich in a way dons the garments of authors past: both the “strange clothes” in the portrait and the motivic garb of German Romanticism. As the living manifestation of his ancestor's image—as the Urbild that was his ancestor—Heinrich goes on to write the life story that is required of him as a member of the Scharnast family. In other words, this image-heavy moment keeps alive the textually generative Scharnast line. Each descendant is only a copy, an Urbild destined to be copied in turn. In Irving's parlance, one has here author-copies begetting yet more author-copies.
The apparent congruence between life and art is met with the same type of wariness with which Anna had framed her fairy-tale-like view of life. Hesitant to explain to Heinrich her impression of him as a fairy-tale figure, she had described the notion as silly (“but that's too ridiculous”). In this scene, Robert beholds Heinrich and the portrait and grapples with a similar impression: “zwar ein Gedanke, blitzschnell und abenteuerlich genug, schoß durch sein Gehirn, aber er war zu lächerlich, als daß er ihn nicht sogleich hätte verwerfen sollen” (“while a thought, lightning quick and fantastic, shot through his head, it was too ridiculous for him not to discard immediately”; 391). Robert is resistant to the fantastical idea that his friend has, in a way, stepped out of a portrait. Heinrich, for his part, is speechless. “Dieser aber, der ebenfalls die Sache zu fassen begann, war Anfangs todtenblaß, dann allmählich flammend roth geworden; – der stummen Frage des Andern aber konnte er eben so wenig eine Antwort geben” (“He, though, who also began to grasp the situation, was first deathly pale, then gradually turned a flaming red; – he, too, was unable to answer the other's silent question”; 391). What was framed in the beginning of the story as a fantastical idea is revealed here as not so extraordinary at all. That is, the fantastical overlap between life and literature—exemplified by Ruprecht's misrecognition of Heinrich as Sixtus II—has become reality. In other words, the Romantic structure is taken at face value, as the misrecognition of reality transmutes into the recognition of the overlap between art and reality. Removing the “what if” of fantasy, Stifter forces his characters to confront literature as reality. This is not the Romantic union of life and art, but rather the grounding of literature in the real world, a move that Stifter's characters rightly view with suspicion. In this instant, art and reality become one, while the characters simultaneously become cognizant of the poetic structure that the moment replicates. It is, then, a poetic reality effect.Footnote 29
This represents an intensification of the central moment in Irving's “The Art of Book Making.” The strange events in that story are part of a dream, and it is quite obvious to the reader that the story world is one in which portraits do not regularly come alive. At the same time, Irving invites the reader to consider the what if of these events. What if, just for a moment, readers suspended their disbelief and took Burton literally? What if, in this dream world, portraits really did come alive, with life and literature no longer so distinct? In Stifter's “Die Narrenburg,” the dream quality disappears, the “what if” factor no longer necessary to stage the overlap between the fantastic and the real. This, of course, harkens back not just to the Novalis intertext, but to Romantic aesthetics more broadly. At the same time, the Romantic undercurrents in the story are repeatedly met, if not with outright disbelief, then at least with sustained skepticism. Though in proclaiming the fairy-tale-like qualities of the castle, the narrative draws out its similarities to its literary forebears, this is not enough to make the castle Romantic. It is clearly removed from the Romantic context, and the constant announcement of its quasi-Romantic status only emphasizes its difference from these models. The point, in other words, is that “Die Narrenburg,” to borrow a term from Russian formalism, defamiliarizes its Romantic predecessors. More importantly, beyond the obvious modification of the Romantic setting, Stifter alters the status of the basic premise of Romanticism—namely, that reality and imagination can seamlessly flow into each other. In this transitional period in literary history, what was ordinary for Romanticism has become extraordinary for realism. In this way, the picturesque—specifically Irving's version thereof—not only furnishes central themes and motifs for Stifter's realism but also becomes a way of reframing the provinciality of his realism.
Irving's influence reverberates throughout this scene in several additional ways. First, both authors are concerned with processes of generation and preservation within multigenerational familial groupings. At stake is the transmission of cultural tradition, whose vitality is ensured through its continual reception. While Irving presents this process ironically, depicting authors as part of an incestuous legacy, Stifter does so with earnestness. Where Stifter goes further than Irving is in his foregrounding of the anthropological gaze. If the castle had, in Heinrich's assessment, originally served as a site of geographic exploration (like the uncolonized Americas), it becomes, in the portrait gallery, a site of quasi-ethnographic self-study. In a clear anticipation of the anthropological shift in the preface to Bunte Steine, Heinrich, the budding geologist who had come across the castle while collecting rocks, has now become the object of his own study as he experiences himself as part of the Scharnast family.
This scene also picks up on the colonial discourse that infiltrates these areas of knowledge. Heinrich's physical response—his face turns from ashen to flushed in a matter of seconds—belongs to a broader thematic and motivic repertoire. While the story's pronounced red and white imagery can be read as a reference to the Grimm fairy tale “Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot” (“Snow-White and Rose-Red”), Metz shows that the prominent colors also reflect inner colonial discourse within the multinational Habsburg Empire, which had a red-and-white flag. One of the most significant appearances of the motif occurs in an embedded narrative consisting of the life story of Jodokus, the brother of Heinrich's Doppelgänger Sixtus. Jodokus travels to India and returns to Austria with a bride, Chelion, who struggles to adapt to her new surroundings. The Greek marble building where they reside—“ein edles Geschlecht weißer schlanker Säulen” (“an elegant family/race of thin white columns”)—is generally representative of the “cultivating” influence Jodokus tries to exert on his wife. Such descriptors, Metz aptly notes, “[wed] cultural-racial and patriarchal-phallic domination into one seamless whole” (1482). After Sixtus and Chelion share a kiss, Jodokus nearly poisons her in a fit of rage. In this moment, Chelion imagines dying, as her skin bleaches from red to white. Metz shows that this is only one example where her assimilation is depicted as deracialized death, the exotic bride becoming as white as the classical building she has been forced to call home (1483). While Heinrich physically resembles the transgressive figure of Sixtus, his bride, Anna, takes on a number of Chelion's features. Similarly exoticized, she, too, is subjected to the deadening effects of her husband's “cultivating” authority (1484). Heinrich constructs a museum to house his ever-growing collection of natural artifacts, and by the end of the narrative, Metz contends, Anna has become “figuratively dead, preserved in Heinrich's museum along with his (other) exotic plants, stones, and herds of stuffed animals” (1484).
That such practices of cultivation and collection, ubiquitous in Stifter's works, have violent colonial underpinnings is to be expected when one traces them back to the picturesque tradition. Landscape, according to W. J. T. Mitchell,
is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is (or frequently represents itself as) independent of human intentions. Landscape as a cultural medium thus has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site.(1–2)
While picturesque representational practices upheld and “naturalized” various repugnant ideologies, the tradition also straddled a number of ambiguities in diverse contexts. For instance, even as picturesque depictions of Jamaican slave plantations worked to introduce distance from the horrific realities of slavery, they inevitably drew attention to the artificiality of such attempts (Bohls). And the feminine picturesque on the Indian subcontinent highlighted the blurring of supposedly rigid distinctions between male colonizer and feminine (or effeminate) colonized: “on one level, it [the feminine picturesque] is obedient, and follows the strictures of sentimentality in complete acceptance of its own minority status. On a more subversive level, it manipulates the terminology of the picturesque to lend a new violence to fragility, implicitly questioning the symbolic relevance of women to a colonial discourse” (Suleri 78). Even within the domestic context, picturesque images, which nostalgically depicted outmoded agricultural settings, simultaneously endorsed and obscured industrialism and the rise of wage labor (Bermingham 75).
In the final analysis, Stifter's naturalization of the exotic is part of a nefarious—and at times ambivalent—undercurrent within poetic realism that operates within the strictures of picturesque representational practices. In other words, the allegedly apolitical and provincial qualities of the period are more reflective of a process of ideological camouflage. To understand how Stifter masks this dimension of his picturesque realism, one need only turn to the end of “Die Narrenburg.” Like most of the endings to Stifter's stories, the end of this narrative is lackluster, the loose ends tied up a little too neatly. Before Heinrich and Anna are married, he turns his cultivating attention to the decrepit castle grounds, embarking on an extensive renovation project. Even though such endeavors feature prominently in Stifter's works, the conclusion of such efforts works against the picturesque thrust of the story. To quote Gilpin once more, this aesthetic insists on the very ruins that Heinrich repairs. “A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant in the last degree. … But if we introduce it in a picture, it immediately becomes a formal object, and ceases to please. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps. In short, from a smooth building we must turn it into a rough ruin” (7–8). “Die Narrenburg” begins in a picturesque mode, only to disavow this mode by its end. The exotic women, along with the landscape, have been cultivated and killed, and there is no longer anything extraordinary to counterbalance the mundane. Readers are left not with the rough ruins that capture their interest, but instead with the smooth, restored, and whole buildings.Footnote 30 If the tools of the picturesque—the mallet, Claude glass, pencil, and sketchbook—inform Stifter's depiction of present reality as bearing traces of the past, he discards them at the end of the story, thereby flattening this temporality and thus the potential for the simultaneous experience of both present and past, reality and its mediation. The end of the narrative is jarring precisely because Stifter concedes the totality that he has thus far insisted he cannot access. That is, the ends of his texts all too often deaden the potential of the epiphanic, and thus their picturesque realist appeal. With no potential intrusion or disruption, readers are left outside the sense-making apparatus they have relied on to understand the narrative thus far. The violent narrative intrusions, like the anonymized Irving epigraph, become obscured, paradoxically, under the transfigured ruins of the everyday.
