2.2 Bases Teóricas 1 LA PERSONALIDAD
2.2.3 RECOMENDACIONES PARA FORMAR EL CARÁCTER
This introduction to the subject of space in Fontane has sought to demonstrate that the analysis of spatial representation is an appropriate methodological approach to the study of Fontane‘s texts, in order to gain a clearer sense of Fontane‘s own spatial sensibility and of the Realist awareness of space as a carrier of poetic meaning, and also because space has proved a productive analytical tool in previous studies and continues to be a fruitful focus of scholarly debate.
86
Hubertus Fischer, ‗Märkische Bilder. Ein Versuch über Fontanes Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, ihre Bilder und ihre Bildlichkeit‘, FBl, 60 (1995), 117-142.
87 Stefan Neuhaus, ‗Und nichts als die Wahrheit? Wie der Journalist Fontane Erlebtes wiedergab‘,
FBl, 65-66 (1998), 188-213.
88‘Geschichte und Geschichten aus Mark Brandenburg’ Fontanes ‘Wanderungen durch die Mark
Brandenburg’ im Kontext der europäischen Reiseliteratur. Internationales Symposium des Theodor-Fontane-Archivs in Zusammenarbeit mit der Theodor Fontane Gesellschaft 18.-22. September 2002 in Potsdam, ed. by Hanna Delf von Wolzogen, (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003).
It has been shown that there are two main approaches to analysing the function of space in literary texts, one focussing on topography, the other on figural focalisation. This study draws on both methodologies, adopting a flexible methodological approach which responds to the individual text. In addition to general theories of literary space, it also draws on Fontane‘s own aesthetics, as documented in his writings and scholarly research.
The thesis seeks both to build on existing scholarship and, more importantly, to break fresh ground by dealing with a wider range of texts, incorporating more primary material than many of the more recent works on space in Fontane have done. In line with current research, the project incorporates the Wanderungen together with a range of novels. The novels have been selected to provide a balanced picture of Fontane‘s narrative output: early and less well- known works have been analysed alongside later, more canonical novels. This study thus addresses a more diverse selection of texts from the oeuvre than scholarship on space hitherto. While tracing correspondences, it provides a series of coherent interpretations based on spatial insights which can stand independently in their own right.
In addition, most spatial interpretations focus entirely on spatial representation in the text as an aspect of the literary text‘s formal composition. As Lotman argues, however, the view that a literary text is defined primarily by its formal qualities is erroneous: it is the semantic aspect of literature, the layers of meaning which create the difference between an aesthetically functioning text and
other text forms.89 Viewed in this light, space in the text is not only form but also content. This study uncovers the extent to which space and spatial experience can at times become the object of literary exploration in Fontane‘s works, and argues that through this Fontane creates a complex, reflexive discourse on his art and its place in our lives.
89 Yury M. [sic] Lotman, ‗The Content and the Structure of Literature‘, in Twentieth-Century
Literary Theory, A Reader, ed. by K. M. Newton, (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 176-177. Cf. footnote no. 9.
2. Spatial Representation and the Boundaries of the Literary
Text: Die Grafschaft Ruppin
Abhandlungen haben ihr Gesetz, und die Dichtung auch. Letter to Emilie, 24th June 1881.1
2.1 Introduction
To modern readers, Fontane is above all known as the author of social novels, such as Frau Jenny Treibel (1892), or Effi Briest (1895). For his contemporary readership however, Fontane‘s identity as a novelist was a later addition to Fontane‘s already established reputation as the writer of a series of travel feuilletons about the local area and its history, the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, which the author began in 1859 following his return from Britain, wrote over a period of twenty years, and edited until into the 1890‘s.2 Twentieth- century Fontane scholarship has consisted, in part at least, in revising the perception of Fontane as wanderer, Prussian conservative and balladeer in favour of a novelist of a subtle, but highly refined art with a critical, liberal disposition. Accordingly, the Wanderungen have been viewed by modern scholars as subordinate to Fontane‘s novelistic output, either as incomplete,3
or as a training ground and collection of motifs and settings to be employed in the fiction of his later years.4
1 HA IV, 3, 148. 2 HA II, 3, 812f. 3
Cf. Conrad Wandrey, Theodor Fontane, (Munich: Beck, 1919), p. 92.
4 Among others: Anselm Hahn, Theodor Fontanes ‘Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg’
und ihre Bedeutung für das Romanwerk des Dichters, (Breslau: Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, 1935).
From the nineties onwards however, primarily in the wake of new interest in travel literature,5 but also as a result of shifting attitudes to Fontane‘s journalism,6 and indeed journalism more generally, a new consensus seems to be emerging that the Wanderungen should be treated as a work of poetic literature.7 The recent publication ‘Geschichte und Geschichten aus Mark Brandenburg.’ Fontanes ‘Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg’ im Kontext der europäischen Reiseliteratur, is dominated by articles which argue for such a reading.8
Considering the Wanderungen as literature in the narrow sense raises major issues. The first problem concerns the text‘s apparent lack of unity, arising from its extended genesis and overall length. Many commentators have highlighted the evolution in Fontane‘s political views during the Wanderungen years, from conservatism to liberalism and a more critical stance towards the establishment.9 Fontane‘s aims and ambitions for his text also evolved. The earliest diary entries which refer to a Wanderungen style project suggest a reference work, written for the purposes of collecting material, or Stoff, for future
5 Fischer. 6
Cf. Neuhaus, ‗Und nichts als die Wahrheit?‘. John Osborne‘s research into the Kriegsbücher is a good example of Fontane‘s journalism being re-examined. Cf. Fontane-Handbuch, ed. by Christian Grawe and Helmuth Nürnberger, (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000), pp. 850-868, especially p. 850.
7
The schema given is of course somewhat simplified. In the 1960‘s Ernst Howald described the
Wanderungen as ‗dem Romanwerk Ebenbürtiges‘ (Ernst Howald, ‗Fontanes Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg‘, in Ernst Howald, Deutsch-Französisches Mosaik, (Zurich and Stuttgart: Artemis, 1962), pp. 269-289, p. 289), while in the relatively recent Fontane-Handbuch, the
Wanderungen continue to be listed under ‗Das journalistische Werk‘ (Grawe, Fontane-Handbuch, p. 818.)
8 Stefan Neuhaus describes the Wanderungen as a ‗Novellenzyklus‘, Stefan Neuhaus, ‗Archäologie
der Poesie. Überlegungen zum Kompositionsprinzip von Fontanes Wanderungen‘, pp 398-415;
Gabriele Radecke‘s excellent chapter makes a text-genetic argument for a literary reading, Gabriele Radecke, ‗Von Reisen zum Schreiben. Eine textgenetische Betrachtung der Wanderungen am Beispiel des ―Pfaueninsel‖-Kapitels‘, pp. 231-252.
poets.10 The first written chapters however are impressionistic travelogues, closer to the style of travel writing Fontane praised in related, contemporary works.11 Furthermore, once the Wanderungen were being produced, Fontane acknowledged changes in style. Writing to Wilhelm Hertz in 1861, he comments:
Dennoch denk‘ ich es ist richtig, daß ich diesen Touristen-, diesen gemüthlichen Wandrer-Ton […] aufgegeben und statt dessen mehr eine Erzählungsweise angenommen habe, die von dem Erzähler selbst möglichst abstrahirt und den Stoff giebt wie er sich findet, sei er nun historisch oder landschaftlich.12
The outcome of these shifting aims and methods of writing is further complicated by the author‘s editorial practices. It is not simply the case that the earliest chapters are located at the beginning of the text, and the later ones at the end. Fontane was constantly adding to and changing the text, as it grew into its four volumes, and the final collection Spreewald (1882) contains in fact many of the oldest compositions. The product is thus a complex and multifaceted text. Is it a collection of semi-independent works, or should it be treated as one text? Are the Wanderungen a poetic text? As can be seen, even at a superficial level of analysis, the text challenges ‗quite possibly the fundamental [...] aesthetic criterion‘, unity.13 Nevertheless, despite these difficulties, scholars have been able to deal with the issue by acknowledging the variety of the text, and admitting a looser sense of
10
Helmuth Nürnberger, ‗Nachwort‘, in Theodor Fontane, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, ed. by Helmuth Nürnberger, 3 vols, (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006), III, pp. 1329-1360, p. 1331. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to detail the complex genesis of the Wanderungen. Information is available in all of the standard editions, as well as in Jutta Fürstenau, Fontane und die märkische Heimat, Germanische Studien CCXXXII, (Berlin: Ebering, 1941).
11 HA II, 3, 813.
12 To Wilhelm Hertz, 26th February 1861, HA IV, 2, 25.
unity,14 or by ascribing significance to discord. Pierre Bange for example sees it as a formal representation of relativism and scepticism.15 Perhaps however Peter Wruck‘s view is the most persuasive. He argues that the Wanderungen is composed of individual chapters within an open, cumulative macrostructure, and that consequently, it is a work which it is difficult to approach with traditional aesthetic models.16
Yet it is not primarily the matter of unity which occupies scholars most when arguing that the Wanderungen ought to be considered as a literary text. Commentators stress rather the subjectivity and self-sufficiency of the Wanderungen text. Stefan Neuhaus puts the argument clearly. He states that ‗die Geschlossenheit, Stimmigkeit, und Ausrichtigkeit des Textes auf eine Aussage hin war Fontane wichtiger als die Authentizität‘, and that accordingly the Wanderungen deserve literary interpretation.17 Neuhaus is arguing here that the Wanderungen texts are independent, that they work as an integrated, organic whole, and that their relationship to reality is of secondary importance. These are standard descriptions of a literary text‘s qualities. Gero von Wilpert‘s Sachwörterbuch der Literatur, for example, describes ‗Dichtung‘ thus: ‗Dichtung schafft eine in sich geschlossene Eigenwelt von größter Höhe, Reinheit und
14
Cf. Stefan Neuhaus, who describes the Wanderungen as a ‗Novellenzyklus‘, in ‗Archäologie der
Poesie‘, p. 398.
15 Pierre Bange, ‗Zwischen Mythos und Kritik. Eine Skizze über Fontanes Entwicklung bis zu den
Romanen.‘, in Fontane aus heutiger Sicht, ed. by Hugo Aust, (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1980), pp. 17-55, p. 44.
16 Peter Wruck, ‗Fontane als Erfolgsautor. Zur Schlüsselstellung der Makrostruktur in der
ungewöhnlichen Produktions- und Rezeptionsgeschichte der Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg‘, in Delf von Wolzogen, Geschichte und Geschichten, pp. 373-396.
17
Neuhaus, ‗Und nichts als die Wahrheit‘, p. 198. Neuhaus is careful to deny that the
Wanderungen present a fiction, ibid. p. 197, although the question of fictionality might arguably be considered a secondary concern in a Realist text in any case. Yet Neuhaus does see the Küstrin chapter of Das Oderland as ‗ein kleines erzählerisches Meisterwerk‘, p. 207.
Einstimmigkeit mit eigenen Gesetzen.‘18 To use a term more appropriate to a spatial investigation of literature, the poetic text is another world, it is a heterocosm.19
These types of arguments about the other-worldliness of literature rest essentially on the direction of reference that the signifiers in an aesthetically functioning text make. As Paul de Man puts it, the literary text is free from ‗referential constraints‘.20
A text which refers primarily to external reality (and is thus tied to it) is deemed non-poetic or non-literary, whereas referring to itself to construct meaning is typical of a poetic text. It is through its self-reference that the text, as a web of meaning, constitutes an organic whole, and it is unified through its symbolism, the layers of meaning that each textual element acquires, when considered alongside the other parts.
The argument of textual autonomy is also historically defensible here. The Realist poetics Fontane advocated are based on the widespread concept of Verklärung, the process of selecting, organising and representing reality in a way appropriate to art, which should be beautiful. The criterion of textual autarky, or the independent organicism which Neuhaus and others appear to argue the Wanderungen text creates, accords thus not only with generally accepted models of literary theory, but with Fontane‘s own.
The purpose of reiterating and explaining some of these, perhaps well- known, arguments is to show that the Wanderungen are being accepted as a poetic
18 Gero von Wilpert, Sachwörterbuch der Literatur, entry ‗Dichtung‘.
19 The term is taken from Kenneth Knowles Ruthven‘s Critical Assumptions, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 1. The term originates from Baumgarten. Cf. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Reflections on Poetry, trans. by Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), § 51.
text not because of a revised view of literature per se, but because qualities are being recognised in the text itself which fit already accepted criteria. The question this chapter will address is, is this new consensus right? Is the Wanderungen text a heterocosm?
Here again there are immediately visible problems, perhaps most obviously the presence of non-literary elements in the Wanderungen such as lists or diagrams. Fontane often adds pages of third-party diary entries or historical documents. How are these texts to be integrated into a literary reading? How can a catalogue of paintings be said to constitute ‗eine in sich geschlossene Eigenwelt‘? Further, faced with such problems, how is it that scholars have managed to produce persuasive arguments and analyses in favour of a poetic reading? There must be evidence: there are indeed poetic elements in the Wanderungen, even fictional, or quasi-fictional episodes. The image of the wanderer is in many cases quite clearly metaphorical, rather than real.21 Another, this time methodological, aspect to be considered, however, is that, because the Wanderungen is such a large work, most scholars engaging in detailed analysis do so only with a limited number of extracts. Each of the chapters in the volume ‗Geschichte und Geschichten aus Mark Brandenburg’ can necessarily cover only one small part of the Wanderungen, and yet from that, many of the authors draw conclusions about the whole four-volume work and its essence. It will be the purpose of this chapter to produce a more precise, nuanced reading, incorporating the range of different text types in the Wanderungen.
This analysis will draw only on the first volume of the Wanderungen, Die Grafschaft Ruppin. This is a more manageable amount of text, permitting a thorough analysis, and yet is representative of the major problems the Wanderungen pose. Die Grafschaft Ruppin contains texts from the early and late phases of writing, unlike DasOderland, for example,which is more uniform, and Die Grafschaft Ruppin has passages which range from verse and poetic prose to lists. Using the function of spatial representation in the text as a focus and methodological approach in order to produce a textual interpretation, the discussion will pose the following types of questions: does the text refer inwardly as a heterocosmic text, or is it dependent on its real-world context? Is the function of space symbolic in these texts as would be expected in a poetic text? Do objects and places in the represented world carry significance beyond themselves within ‗the work itself as a structure of meaning?‘22
If not, how may spatial representation in the text be best described? What alternatives might there be to describing the text as poetic?
Three different functions of space will be distinguished. In the first of these, the text is closest to journalistic or essayistic writing. That is not to say that these texts are objective or simple. The narrator may be observed to organise reality, creating a clarified schema or view; this may serve a purely textual or stylistic need, to orientate the reader for example, or it may serve to support a particular bias or message that the author wishes to convey. This type of spatial representation will be termed rhetorical. At the second level it will be
22 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, Studies in the Structure of Poetry, (London: Methuen,
demonstrated that the narrator discusses or reacts to the empirical world as if it were an artwork, by attributing symbolic potential to real objects, or by seeing poetic significance in exterior reality. The key characteristic of this kind of spatial representation is the distance between the narrator‘s comments and the reality to which he refers. This kind of spatial representation will be termed interpretative. In the final group of texts a type of spatial representation may be observed which will be described as poetic. Spatial representation in these texts assumes a symbolic function. This is not the result of an ironic comment issuing forth from the narrator, but rather reveals itself within the context of the text. Whereas in the other text types, it is primarily the external reality described which is of interest and importance, in the last group of texts, the textual world achieves independence and creates its own internal web of meaning.
It goes without saying that the boundaries between the various types of texts described above are fluid and overlap and within a single chapter more than one approach may be employed. Nor should these identified forms and functions of representation be seen as any kind of hierarchy: ‗Classification […] should be distinguished from evaluation‘.23
What this study hopes to achieve, is to highlight an experimental element in these texts perhaps not feasible in the later novels; how Fontane, in a reflective way, explores the boundaries and potentialities of his writing.
2.2 Rhetorical Representation
Die Grafschaft Ruppin begins with a description of the land around the Ruppiner See, at the beginning of the ‗Wustrau‘ chapter. The lake is the central point around which the following chapters are to be organised, coming under the general heading ‗Am Ruppiner See‘. The description is as follows:
Der Ruppiner See, der fast die Form eines halben Mondes hat, scheidet sich seinen Ufern nach in zwei sehr verschiedene Hälften. Die nördliche Hälfte ist sandig und unfruchtbar, und die freundlich gelegenen Städte Alt- und Neu-Ruppin abgerechnet ohne allen malerischen Reiz, die Südhälfte aber ist teils angebaut, teils bewaldet und seit alten Zeiten her von vier hübschen Dörfern eingefaßt. (18) The landscape represented here has been divided in a systematic way by the narrator. He gives the lake an easily recognisable form, a half moon. This shape which gives a vertical axis is then divided across a horizontal axis into two zones, whose difference is stressed: the north is aesthetically unappealing, as well as