Readers and Their Fictions in the Novels and Novellas of Gottfried Keller COLLEGE of ARTS and SCIENCES Muncl Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures

Readers and Their Fictions in the Novels and Novellas of Gottfried Keller COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES mUNcl Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures From 1949 to 2004, UNC Press and the UNC Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages and Literatures published the UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures series. Monographs, anthologies, and critical editions in the series covered an array of topics including medieval and modern literature, theater, linguistics, philology, onomastics, and the history of ideas. Through the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, books in the series have been reissued in new paperback and open access digital editions. For a complete list of books visit www.uncpress.org. Readers and Their Fictions in the Novels and Novellas of Gottfried Keller gail k. hart with a new foreword by the author UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Number 109 Copyright © 1989 New foreword copyright © 2020 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons cc by-nc-nd license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons. org/licenses. Suggested citation: Hart, Gail. Readers and Their Fictions in the Novels and Novellas of Gottfried Keller. Chapel Hill: University of North Caro- lina Press, 1989. doi: https://doi.org/10.5149/9781469656779_Hart Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hart, Gail K. Title: Readers and their fictions in the novels and novellas of Gottfried Keller / by Gail K. Hart. Other titles: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures ; no. 109. Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [1989] Series: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 88027918 | isbn 978-1-4696-5676-2 (pbk: alk. paper) | isbn 978-1-4696-5677-9 (ebook) Subjects: Keller, Gottfried, 1819-1890 — Criticism and interpretation. | Books and reading in literature. | Reader-response criticism. | Authorship in literature. Classification: lcc pt2374 .z5 h28 1989 | dcc 838/ .809 For my grandparents, Arthur and Margaret Melville, who remember the nineteenth century Contents Acknowledgments ix Foreword xiii Introduction 1 1. Fictions and Feuerbach: Keller's Progress toward Intellectual Independence 17 2. Pankraz, der Leser: Sulking and the Didactic Author 41 3. "Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe": The Romance of Realism? 60 4. Ziiricher Novellen: Didactic Literature and Unreceptive Life 85 5. Das Sinngedicht: Beyond the Futility of Utility 100 Notes 117 Bibliography 135 Index 139 Acknowledgments I am grateful to Sveta Dave, Thom Heine, Kaspar T. Locher, Jeffrey Sammons, and Walter Sokel for reading various parts and versions of my manuscript and making suggestions for improvement. I have also benefited from the comments of readers for the University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures and for The German Quarterly and Seminar, where some of this material has appeared. These two journals have kindly granted me permission to include that material in this book. Reed College provided a publica tion grant, for which I thank them. Also, Susie Schmitt did an excel lent job of proofreading the galleys. I am especially indebted to my husband, Thomas P. Saine, who gave generously of his time and expertise, reading and criticizing my work and helping me prepare the manuscript for publication. Even as I write this acknowledgment, he sits patiently at the computer, coding characters, reforming paragraphs, and compensating for my eccentric use of the space bar. ix Readers and Their Fictions in the Novels and Novellas of Gottfried Keller Foreword My original working title for this project was Gottfried Keller: The Futility of Utility, but, alas, the UNC series editorial board expressed its firm preference for a more clearly descriptive rubric, and the book became Readers and Their Fictions in the Novels and Novellas of Gottfried Keller. I still like the original title, however, because it asserts a significant ambivalence on Keller’s part toward the kinds of moral-didactic fictions for which he is unjustly famous. This book is about that ambivalence, an uncertainty that ultimately leads to the author’s despair at being able to use his stories as effective lessons in living. Indeed, he often pokes fun at the very idea of reader improvement. Whereas his fellow Swiss and near-contemporary Jeremias Gotthelf attempted to tackle social problems by writing novels and novellas that directly illustrated the folly of various behaviors (i.e., going to quack doctors, drinking to excess), Keller had, in my opinion, moved beyond a naive faith in the power of literature to change society in clearly predictable ways. Keller was not Gotthelf, and yet the scholarship at the time took it more or less for granted that Keller wrote with moral-didactic purpose, trying to sugar the pill with humor. Keller had indeed expressed clear didactic intentions in letters to contemporaries, but his fiction does not validate these pious and perhaps interested statements—many of them are addressed to well-placed correspondents who wanted to hear exactly that. In short, I believed I saw in his work as a whole a denial of direct social utility and an affirmation of a more complex aesthetic endeavor. Keller’s stock was not particularly high in US German graduate programs in the 1980s, and many colleagues were confused at my interest in what they considered a relatively easy-to-read, moralizing, and pedantic writer. Partly in response to discussions with fellow students, I moved more and more toward addressing this misperception through the phenomenon of readers within Keller’s fiction, figures who, to oversimplify, never got the message of what they were reading. I was also concerned with the position and perspectives of Keller’s (external) readers reading about his (internal) readers reading. Recent scholarship has not been specifically concerned with these themes and ideas but rather more involved in redefining and reimagining realism or poetic realism, taking a closer look at its components, its ancestry, its relatives, and the contradictions involved in real-ist fictions. I do see some relevance for my research in this current discourse, whether indirect or even mildly founda- xiii xiv Foreword tional. The realism of the fictional reader—and there are so many in Keller’s work—and the associated realism of Keller’s depictions of reading represent a writer’s reflection on the “real” terms of writing literature. I am grateful to the UNC Department of Germanic and Slavic Languag- es and Literatures and UNC Press for giving me an opportunity to revisit my first book for their digitalization of the North Carolina series. Paul Roberge was a wonderful and encouraging editor way back then and remains a trea- sured colleague. It is not easy to read your own work—especially your first book— after thirty years, and there are a lot of things I would add, eliminate, or amend. However, I do think the book has held up reasonably well, and I am very pleased to see it reappearing as a result of the Humanities Open Book Program grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the An- drew W. Mellon Foundation. Ultimately, I wish that I had not made so many annoying parenthetical asides in the manuscript you may be about to read (if that admission does not put you off). For this I apologize. Gail Hart, January 2020 Introduction The heroes and heroines of novels and novellas are notorious read ers. Indeed, many of the principals of prose fiction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would be inconceivable without their books. Maneuvering within their own stories, they grasp at other stories and practice a kind of "misreading" rarely encountered outside litera ture-namely, the uncritical reception of literary fictions as life-im peratives or as specific models for self-comprehension. They are liter ally enthralled by their reading and subsequently they engage in the most bizarre attempts to alter their "reality" and bring their lives into closer correspondence with the fictions that fascinate them. Such an effect-a fictional person's enslavement by another fiction-is but one manifestation of the complicated interplay between fiction and "re ality" that is characteristic of the epic genres, especially the novel. In such cases, authors, who seem to be telling us that fiction is not real (by allowing their characters to act upon the opposite assumption), do so within a fictional context whose reference to reality they have, perhaps unintentionally, relativized from within. The "book within the book" is a long-standing fixture of novelistic literature, and its history, functions, and implications cannot be sum marized in a few sentences. It is a literary figure that takes many forms, beginning with the book symbolism and related topoi exam ined by Ernst Robert Curtius1: the book of the world, the book of life, man's face as a book where his thoughts can be read. Here, the book as familiar object is used to illustrate the larger order of things, sug gesting that certain mysteries can be contained and deciphered by initiates. Another possibility is the reproduction of specific titles and specific passages, the kind of intertextuality explored by Hermann Meyer's Das Zitat in der Erziihlkunst. Meyer's contention that literature feeds upon itself is echoed in Klaus Jeziorkowski's study

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