[T]he novelist does not set out to take the place of his master, the epic poet, but to set him free from restricting coercions of his single-minded, monological vision.
Paul de Man “Dialogue and Dialogism,” 1985.
Die kl. Kritik über Quitt ist ganz gut. . . Das einzige Anzügliche in der Kritik ist der Hohn – und Schreckens – Ausruf: Dostojewski und Fontane! Ich schrieb an Brahm, es klänge etwa wie: Egmont und Jetter! Natürlich lache ich darüber, ich göne den Berühmtheiten ihre dickere Berühmtheit und freue mich der Gesundheit und Natürlichkeit meiner Anschauungen. Das habe ich vor der ganzen Blase voraus und bedeutet mir die Hauptsache.
Fontane to his daughter Mete, February 17, 1891.
Denn Niemeyer ist doch eigentlich eine Null, weil er alles in Zweifel läßt. Und dann, Briest, so leid es mir tut…deine beständigen Zweideutigkeiten…
Luise von Briest to her husband in Effi Briest
Even though in modernity the novel remains the principle vehicle of realism (realist representation), it is often considered as an end genre (notably, both Auerbach and later Lukács were exponents of such view) rather than merely representing another instance of it. Conversely, Bakhtin saw the novel not as an end, but rather as a new genre still in the process of becoming, not yet been formed. As a theorist of the genre of the novel, Bakhtin contrasted it with poetry (as in music, polyphonic compositions differ from monophonic ones). While Lukács considered the novel to be a form of bourgeois epic, in which the “problematic individual” must emerge as a self in a society forced apart by capitalism, Bakhtin viewed the novel as separate from an epic past. He argued that unlike the old and stable genres such as the epic, rooted in the “monological” where all elements
because it accommodates different and competing systems of thought and does not presume to possess a monopoly on the truth and discourse. According to Bakhtin the novel exhibits an “indeterminacy” and “semantic open-endedness” and, unlike the epic, it is polyglot, polyphonic and flexible – it has the potential to continually grow and shape itself beyond the present by virtue of remaining in living contact with unfinished, still evolving contemporary reality (DI 11). It is through the communicative function of the novel, through the interchange of discourse that reality is produced and recognized. In other words, in dialogic prose, such as the novel, the world appropriately appears as an unfinalizable, open, creative space. Because the novel subjects other genres to the critical test of contact with what it claims to know as the real, in many respects it has anticipated, and continues to anticipate, the future development of literature as a whole.
I contend that Fontane’s narrative fiction including Effi Briest belongs to a specific paradigm of development of non-dominant literatures, which, by virtue of their socio-historical circumstances at the time of social novel canon-formation, as occupying a peripheral position in relation to the centrality of the metropolitan Western core cultures, differs from the Great Tradition of the European Realist novel. In this chapter, I will use Bakhtin’s approach to the novel, which represents a break with traditional ways of reading literature in general and Dostoyevsky in particular, to demonstrate other aspects of Fontane’s contribution to the paradigm shift, that is, the transformation from
monological to dialogical and polyphonic novelistic mode of writing in the field of literature that highlights cross-cultural encounters.
According to Bakhtin, all literary works belong to one genre or another or they combine the features of different genres, so that for him every new form of writing is an
extension of the possibilities of a known genre or a creative synthesis of the two or more already existing genres (DI 259-422). Bakhtin’s concept was based on the idea that in the novel, as in every work of fiction, the meaning, the ideas are encoded by all other genres, which present different forms and ways of expressing these meanings. But because the novel has the capacity to assimilate other forms of language and incorporate material from other genres, and reformulate, mutate or parody them, Bakhtin saw the novel as a consciously composed hybrid of languages, a composite and the most complicated genre.
This process of gathering up and transforming other genres into the novel as a composite genre is similarly described by Fredric Jameson as a “processing operation” through which fictional writers dialogically recycle pre-existing literary traditions:
Processing operation variously called narrative mimesis and realistic representation has as its historic function the systemic undermining and
demystification, the secular “decoding” of those preexisting inherited traditional or sacred narrative paradigms which are its initial givens (Political 152).
Bakhtin’s broader, more flexible, kinetic, open and self-reflexive concept of genre allows us to see Effi Briest as a narrative which embraces different writing possibilities in realist form, whereby a seemingly already exhausted genre of the novel of adultery with its domestic theme is transformed into a unique and intricate narrative that dynamically combines different discourses into a complex hybrid. Or to put this in terms of both form and content, Effi Briest as fictional prose demonstrates the break-down of the older realist tradition because, on the one hand, the traditional domestic plot and story arranged in near chronological order exhibiting an ostensible stylistic “harmony” rooted in the nineteenth century German realist tradition, is intertwined with diverse genres such as poetry, drama as well as elements of naturalism or imperial Gothic; on the other, the
referential style is unmistakably associated with emerging (post)modernism.
A commonplace of literary criticism, that theoreticians do not make good close readers and conversely textual critics are seldom long on theory, is also true of Fontane scholarship. In their approach to Effi Briest scholars have either focused their critical attention on the novel’s formal aspects by scrutinizing the literary conventions Fontane employed or challenged in his fictional narrative while largely ignoring the complex, material relations which constitute its historicity, or, conversely, those who stress the novel’s content in its socio-political context have tended to subordinate formal aspects of Fontane’s realist representation and his innovative strategies in style and structure.
Thus, for instance, critics who view Fontane’s fictional narratives as occupying a transitional position between nineteenth century realism and the modernism of the fin- de-siècle, do so mostly from an ethical position by observing that they embody the beginning of the disintegration of consciousness, along with breakdown of faith in both nineteenth-century literary realism and its humanist underpinnings. There is no attempt to connect this disintegration of totality in consciousness with the specific social and economic forms of capitalism as imperialism. They focus on the aesthetic, linguistic and stylistic intricacies of Fontane’s fiction without placing them into their proper material socio-political context, thus evoking a dematerialized, depoliticized and ahistorical concept of culture. However, viewing formal aspects of literature as separable from socio/historical/ideological contingencies preserves literature in its elevated and reified form and obscures the fact that in general terms of the debate on the production of theoretical knowledge in the context of Europe, ideological, national and socio-political differences between Western and Eastern Europe that have existed
at least since the fifteenth or sixteenth century, have produced different cultural trends and sensibilities and ultimately separate canons of literature and its interpretation. As recent literary studies in the context of post-unification Germany have shown there are strong signals that cultural divisions between the two former German states have increased rather than diminished (Bullivant; Jankowsky and Love).
The emerging modernism in Fontane’s fiction, therefore, has usually been ascribed to the turn inward and away from the social materials associated with classical realism, that is, as his increased subjectivization and introspective psychologization. Thus, for those critics who map the novel’s psychological and moral aspects, that is, in an approach that prevails in humanist liberal, feminist and psychoanalytic criticism that stresses the private and hermetic over the public and social, Effi Briest is primarily a psychological novel (e.g. White 59). For those who relate the psychology of Fontane’s characters to the spirit of their time, Effi Briest is taken as an illustration for breakdowns in communication and the inefficacy of language as an adequate medium of
communication.
In the essay “Discourse in the Novel” Bakhtin argues against the pure stylistic analysis of the novel, explaining that the context of the novel is important, even primary, in the understanding of its meaning. As he wrote, “Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon – social throughout its entire range and in each and every one of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning” (DI 259). For Bakhtin, dialogue is a natural condition of speech and it is precisely as verbal process that the dialogic force is most accurately sensed. Moreover, according to Bakhtin “the word in language is half someone else’s,”
and he explains: “every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the
profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates”(DI 280). Bakhtin considers the literary or artistic work as a form of utterance — a complex utterance based on the conventions of generic form. When applied to the novel, individual speech utterances are always in dialogue with each other. As Bakhtin writes,
Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another . . . Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances . . . Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account . . . Therefore, each kind of utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication. Every utterance necessarily elicits a response in one form or another . . . in the subsequent speech or behavior of the listener . . . Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another. (Speech 91)
Other voices and other texts can be heard in each discourse implicitly or explicitly. This dialogic imperative, determined by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of its current inhabitants, insures that there can be no actual monologue. As Bakhtin put it: “The word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder within it; the word is shaped in dialogic interaction with an alien word that is already in the object. A word forms a concept of its own object in a dialogic way . . . Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have escaped from start to finish this dialogic inter-orientation with the alien word that occurs in the object” (DI 279). In fact, it is Marx who wrote that “language is practical
consciousness” and posited language as the matter that burdens “spirit” from the very start, for consciousness is always and from the very first a social product. Bakhtin's social view of language, which places equal importance on the speaker as well as listener, is
Bakhtin’s first detailed references to the dialogic potential of the word and
polyphonic writing appeared in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. According to Bakhtin the novelistic form exemplified by Dostoyevsky is polyphonic because it contains a polyphony of voices presenting different consciousnesses or points of view. The novel develops into a sort of unmerged dialogue of voices presenting their own perspective on the world. This is a whole, albeit one that includes all various voices, which intersect and interact, mutually illuminating each other and their viewpoints, potentials, biases and limitations. No individual perspective is adequate to the whole in itself, for only the concrete totality of perspectives can present the whole. In other words Dostoyevsky’s novelistic language is heteroglossic and dialogic in the sense that it is incapable of rendering a single meaning.39
It should be recalled that in his early essay on the novel, The Theory of the Novel, Lukács similarly envisions the novel as a perpetual reinvention not of the epic but of itself. Unlike other genres the novel appears as “a form in the process of becoming” as departure, as a narrative, which thematizes its own reflexivity:
Thus, the novel, in contrast to other genres whose existence resides within the finished form, appears as something in process of becoming . . . As form, the novel establishes a fluctuating yet firm balance between becoming and being; as the idea of becoming, it becomes a state. Thus the novel, by transforming itself into a normative being of becoming, surmounts itself. “The voyage is completed:
the way begins.” (72-73)
Lukács’ early work represents a dialectics of pessimism and utopia, a philosophical pessimism in which there is no objective truth but only a subjective one. While it rejects optimism it does not exclude utopia, albeit a negative one which does not promise a
39 Heteroglossia is a broader concept than polyphony, a description of speech styles in a
possibility of reconciliation of contradictions, or an end of suffering. It offers constitution without optimism, which is basically tragic because it brings about the self-destruction of the one who strives for authenticity. According to Lukács it is not the hero of the novel but the author who is the true hero, because he gives form to life. In the midst of meaningless chaos he is the one who strives for the possibility of order by means of aesthetic possibilities still open to him.
Like Bakhtin, Lukács too championed “proto-modernist” Dostoyevsky, whose social commentary could be seen as foreshadowing that representative twentieth-century
condition — social crisis. At the end of The Theory of the Novel, Lukács looks for signs for a new beginning by referring to Dostoyevsky: “It will then be the task of historico-philosophical interpretation to decide whether we are really about to leave the age of absolute sinfulness or whether the new has no other herald but our hopes: those hopes which are signs of a world to come, still so weak that it can easily be crushed by the sterile power of the merely existent.”
Lukács later upheld the idea that works of art can provide unity, coherence, and meaning, which have been lost in most of modern life; European realism was able to create totality, that is, the all-round determining domination of the whole over the parts, that other human institutions failed to do. The category of totality was the essence of the dialectical method, which considered the process of becoming more important than what is actually changing. However, in viewing the world as structured totality Lukács’
dialectics offers a unified paradigm by which to approach a work of fiction, but at the same time imposes constraints on practitioners because structures impose their form on human beings, restricting their creative ability to transcend form.
Bakhtin did not accept these constraints of a dialectic, or structured view of reality.
As a critical theorist Bakhtin was consistently mistrustful of “theoreticism” (i. e. the belief that everything can be explained through wide-ranging systems, such as Marxism or formalism), and attached importance to small, “prosaic” facts of life, favored
heterologic or centrifugal forces rather than unitary, monologic and authoritarian
language, thus inherently contesting homogenizing and totalitarian ideologies. The novel, for Bakhtin, uncovers the formative principle of discourse, its relationality, dialogism, neither presenting some final absolute language of truth in terms of Kantian
transcendence nor merging of voices into a final authoritative voice such as that which constitutes Hegelian conceptualism. In other words Bakhtin stands at the threshold between modernism and postmodernism. Unlike modernists of his own time, but much like contemporary postmodernists, Bakhtin, rather than lamenting fragmentation, paradoxes, contradictions, provisionality, performance, instability, liminality, unpredictability or incoherence, celebrates them. He rejects rigid genre distinctions, mistrusts centrism of various kinds, closure, hierarchy of values, or undermines from within any absolutes, but rather emphasizes polyphony, hybridity, parody, bricolage, irony, and subversive playfulness.
Long before postcolonial theorists placed the writers from the margins at the center of what is now considered the “canon of world literature,” Mikhail Bakhtin, long-time internally exiled to Soviet Kazakhstan, had made claims about the distinctive and innovative qualities of novelistic discourse and appreciated in the novel giving voice to the fringes of society and mainstream culture, including the inherent multiculturalism and populist tenor of genuine creativity (DI 11-12). Bakhtin believed that novelistic discourse
thrived in the bilingual or trilingual periphery of Western (i.e. Hellenic and Helleno-Roman) culture and continued to thrive in the zones called peripheral where secular and religious cultures confront one another, and where economic asymmetries become more pronounced and strained at the marginal reaches of societies where different cultures interact and breed new forms (DI 61-63). In the Bakhtinian sense border areas — zones, countries, and cities — are not marginal to the constitution of a public sphere but rather are at the center.40 They are certainly at the center of those at the peripheries.
Polyphonic narrative became the key articulation of modernity characterized by an increased fragmentation of individual consciousness in the West so much so that it became assumed that polyphonic novelistic discourse was created in large cosmopolitan centers of Western core cultures, while the eastern part of Europe was discarded as belated, underdeveloped and rural, so that Eastern European ethnic, regional, religious identities were assumed to have been so entrenched in their locality and tradition, their languages insufficient, that they could not have facilitated the creation of modernity either in civic society, political nations of citizenships or in culture and literature. This particularly anachronistic argument about Eastern Europe, however, overlooks the a priori situation and condition of diversity, the fact that what also existed in the area
40 Marina Warner’s dynamic principle of creation that she calls metamorphosis evokes Bakhtin in that she also asserts that art flourishes at crossroads and on borders. In Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self she argues that
“metamorphic writing” flourishes “in transitional places and at the confluence of
traditions and civilizations,” (18) in periods of cross-cultural fertilization and migration.
The self-told in such metamorphic writing is typically fluid, hybrid and unfinalized. For Warner, this idea of metamorphic identity is preferable to that which superseded it in Western culture: the Judeo-Christian, and Freudian, concept of a unified, integral self (203). According to Warner, it is a more productive model for the relation between colonized and colonizing nations, because it emphasizes the attraction, fascination and
before the development and imposition of nation states, were not exclusive parochial and
before the development and imposition of nation states, were not exclusive parochial and