The Displaced Self: the Interplay of the Fictional and the Autobiographical in the Prose of Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and Peter Weiss
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Displaced Self: The interplay of the fictional and the autobiographical in the prose of Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and Peter Weiss Michael Jopling A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University College, London 1996 ProQuest Number: 10046060 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10046060 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the issue of self-representation in recent German language literature. In order to trace the ways in which the cultural and linguistic displacement that are inescapable features of twentieth century European history are reflected and paralleled in literary constructions of identity, it focuses on the interplay between the autobiographical and the fictional, examining a range of texts within each writer’s oeuvre. Thus a writer’s autobiographical texts are read in the context of their fiction in an attempt to identify the problems of translating lived experience into literary discourse. The introduction offers a brief survey of the theory of autobiography in order to suggest the problems involved in classifying this notoriously hybrid genre, particularly in its modem literary forms. Then the writing of Elias Canetti, whose "Lebensgeschichte" appears to be so traditional at first sight, is examined and his emblematic "Verwandlung" metaphor is related to his plural notion of identity and his experience of displacement and exile. In the second chapter, Thomas Bernhard’s central autobiographical narratives are examined in the tight of his more fictional countertexts. In addition, the suggestion is made that the dialectic of assertion and withdrawal, represented by his recurrent notion of ’’Gleichgültigkeit", occupies a central place in his highly idiosyncratic prose. Then the recurrent theme of "Leere" is followed through the prose of Peter Weiss. This is related to his autobiographical narratives’ quest for "Selbstfindung", which dominates even the ideologically-motivated revisions of DieAsthetik des Widerstands. Finally, the conclusion uses Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster and Was bleibt as paradigmatic autobiographical fictions with which to illuminate the other texts and compares the overlapping metaphors the writers examined have created to represent the displacement of the subject. CONTENTS Abstract 2 Acknowledgements and a note on primary sources 4 Introduction 5 Chapter 1 Elias Canetti: Verwandlung and Self-Sufficiency 13 1 Die Blendmg: Self against world 16 2 Die Stimmen von Marrakesch'. Self in world 32 3 Lebensgeschichte: Self as world 36 Governing metaphors 37 Leerstellen 49 Sonne 53 Vertreibung and rebirth 57 4 Verwandlung and Identity 61 Chapter 2 Thomas Bernhard’s "Gleichgültigkeit'' 67 1 KalkwerkfKmstwerk 69 2 Autobiographisches 79 3 AusloschunglKorrektur 98 Artificiality: Praparieren and Papierrosen 99 Wolfsegg as Austria 106 Paradigm and Parody 115 4 Holzfiillen : Scandalising a life 120 Chapter 3 Peter Weiss: Leere and "verdammtes FOr-sich-sein" 128 1 Laokoon 1 128 2 Abschied to Fluchtpunkt 136 3 Early Prose 154 4 Resisting Die Asthetik des Widerstands 163 Art and ideology 168 The threat of exile 174 Gegen-Archiv 180 Self-resisting self 187 Conclusion Christa Wolf: autobiographical paradigm 190 1 Kindheitsmuster. Autobiographical narrative as theory 190 2 Was bleibt: The remains of the self 205 3 "Die Niederschrift von Traumen" 213 Notes 218 Bibliography 237 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND A NOTE ON PRIMARY SOURCES I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Martin Swales, from whose encouragement, advice and perceptive criticism I have benefitted immeasurably. I am also grateful to other members of the German Department at University College, London for their advice and interest. I would also like to thank the British Academy for awarding me a three year full time studentship and for funding what proved to be a vital research trip to Vienna. I am indebted to my parents for their support and for lending me the printer which has made this thesis more readable and to my sister, Louise, for being able to retrieve the Canetti chapter from the cyberspace oblivion into which it had fled. Finally, my greatest debt is to Paula Jones, who proof-read the entire manuscript and made innumerable invaluable suggestions. She also succeeded in the much more difficult task of putting up with me while the thesis was being written and revised. Primary sources and any abbreviations that I have used are listed at the beginning of the notes for each chapter. All sources are listed in the bibliography which is divided into chapter sections for ease of reference. INTRODUCTION Joseph Brodsky once commented that "Displacement and misplacement are this century’s commonplace"/ This statement, with its suggestions of dislocation, accident and loss, goes to the heart of the problems of modem literature. The writers whom I wish to examine in this thesis all experienced in different ways the cultural and linguistic displacement which has been an inescapable feature of Central European history in this century. I wish to trace the ways in which a common sense of disorientation is reflected in their constructions and literary representations of identity. It is in relation to the displaced self that Wolfgang Paulsen has written of the closeness of "Identitatssuche" and "Identitatskrise"^ in modem German literature. In addition, the notion of the displacement of the subject, first posited in the writings of Nietzsche and Freud, has been regarded as an emblematic condition of modernity by many subsequent critics. In his introduction to a collection of essays on the subject, Mark Kmpnick distinguishes a post- stmcturalist notion of displacement from an earlier, more restorative conception: "Instead, displacement now refers to a violent intervention intended to shake and demoralize that old order"\ One of the prime sites in which such displacement is effected and reflected is the autobiographical narrative, where self-representation results from an interplay of the fictional and the autobiographical, the past and the present. As Frederic Jameson has noted: "If narrative theory today has accomplished anything substantial, it is to have powerfully displaced the old category of the fictive".^ This is nowhere more apparent than in recent autobiographical fiction. Numerous commentators have recognised the afBnities between psychoanalysis and autobiography. Both processes are concemed with the investigation of identity and experience; Paul Jay’s recognition that they both "treat" the past? captures this succinctly. The impact of psychoanalysis on autobiographical literature is undeniable, most notably perhaps in the writing of Michel Leiris, which is explicitly represented as a form of self- analysis. Lionel Trilling’s tracing of the shift from sincerity to authenticity® demonstrates that autobiography represents a secularisation of its roots in the confessional. This is also reflected in the legitimating rhetoric of autobiography. When Odo Marquand speaks of "Rechtfertigung" and "Prozefi" in this context,^ his choice of toms recalls both analysis and Kafka’s transformation of experience into nightmare, while also looking back to autobiography’s origins in legal, as well as ecclesiastical, self-defence.* However, it is only really in the Romantic period,’ as Christianity begins to lose its hold, that the self becomes a subject worthy of examination, in what has come to be seen as the classical period of autobiography. Indeed many of the early taxonomies of autobiography depict its history as that of a decline from the highpoint of the early nineteenth c e n tu ry .A s the self’s cohesiveness has come increasingly to be questioned, so too has the possibility of self-representation. Few would subscribe today to the grandiose claims of Wilhelm Dilthey, one of autobiography’s earliest theorists: "Die Selbstbiographie ist die hochste und am meisten instinktive Form, in welcher uns das Verstehen des Lebens entgegentritt"". This fundamentally nineteenth century attitude echoes that period’s utopian faith in totality and unity. The development away from such assumptions is the movement from Rousseau’s Confessions to HeiBenbüttel’s "Literatur der SelbstentblôBer" However, even in its classical form, autobiographical narrative is a hybrid genre, dependent on an interplay of past and present, introspection and retrospection, memory and imagination. Roy Pascal’s observation, in one of the earliest studies to include (if not entirely approve) modem autobiography, that "Remembering is itself a creative act, and the recording and ordering of memories even more so"*’ is much closer to the ideas of later theorists than they might admit. As both Nietzsche and Kundera have shown so forcefully, history and autobiography are as dependent on omission as inclusion, recollection is re-creation: "To remember is also to dismember".** Philippe Lejeune, one of the most systematic of autobiography theorists, has demonstrated that autobiographical