Ego-Alter Ego COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES ImUNCI 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. Ego-Alter Ego Double and/as Other in the Age of German Poetic Realism john pizer UNC Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures Number 120 Copyright © 1998 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: Pizer, John. Ego-Alter Ego: Double and/as Other in the Age of German Poetic Realism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. doi: https://doi.org/ 10.5149/9781469656533_ Pizer Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Pizer, John. Title: Ego-alter ego : Double and/as other in the age of German poetic realism / by John Pizer. Other titles: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures ; no. 120. Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [1998] Series: University of North Carolina Studies in the Germanic Languages and Literatures. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: lccn 97030010 | isbn 978-0-8078-6582-8 (pbk: alk. paper) | isbn 978-1-4696-5653-3 (ebook) Subjects: German fiction — 19th century — History and criticism.| Realism in literature. | Doubles in literature. | Split self in literature. Classification: lcc pt763 .p65 1998 | dcc 833/ .70927 This book is dedicated to the memory of Ernst Behler, a true mentor. Contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Gender, Childhood, and Alterity in Annette von Droste- Hiilshoff's Doppelganger Thematic 20 2. The Double, the Alter Ego, and the Ideal of Aesthetic Comprehensiveness in "Der poetische Realismus": Otto Ludwig 40 3. The Oriental Alter Ego: C. F. Meyer's Der Heilige 60 4. Duplication, Fungibility, Dialectics, and the "Epic Naivete" of Gottfried Keller's Martin Sala11der 76 5. Guilt, Memory, and the Motif of the Double in Theodor Storm's Aquis submersus and Ein Doppelgiinger 95 6. The Alter Ego as Narration's Motive Force: Wilhelm Raabe 113 Conclusion 133 Notes 135 Works Cited 145 Index 153 Acknowledgments Three of the chapters of this book were previously published elsewhere, though all have been substantially revised. Chapter three originally appeared under the title "Double and Other: C. F. Meyer's Der Heilige" in Seminar 30 (1994): 347-59. Chapter four, "Duplication, Fungibility, Dialectics, and the 'Epic Naivete' of Gottfried Keller's Martin Salander" was first published in Colloquia Germanica 25 (1992): 1-18. Chapter five, "Guilt, Memory, and the Motif of the Double in Theodor Storm's Aquis submersus and Ein Doppelgiinger," can be found in its initial form in the German Quarterly 65 (1992): 177-91. I appreciate the permission of the editors of these three journals for their permission to republish. I would like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences at Louisiana State University for granting me a sabbatical research semester in the spring of 1995. This greatly facilitated my work on the project. My thanks are due as well to my friend and colleague at LSU, Irene Di Maio, for her suggestions for the final chapter. I am also indebted to Professor Clayton Koelb, the former editor of the series, to Paul Roberge, the cur­ rent editor of the series, and to Brian MacDonald, the book's copy­ editor. The readers of the initial manuscript provided many valuable suggestions. I also appreciate the assistance provided me by the staffs of the libraries of LSU, Tulane University, Portland State University, and the University of Texas. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my wife Patricia for her patience and understanding while I was com­ pleting the project. xi Ego-Alter Ego Introduction From early Hellenic drama to contemporary screenplays, the figure of the Double has been one of the most widely employed motifs in world literature. It can be used to create a comical confusion of identities, a de­ vice already popular in Greek and Roman comedies such as Amphit­ ryon. In narratives of the Far East, authors have employed the Double in order to illustrate the dialectic of mutability and unity that the phi­ losophy of this region sees imbuing all phenomena. In Wu Ch'eng-en's sixteenth-century tale Journey to the West, semidivine and magical sub­ terfuge allow enchanted figures to assume many shapes. More contem­ porary Western writers often use the Double in exploring what they re­ gard as the human individual's innately divided psyche, torn between the extremes of good and evil, avarice and selflessness, hatred and love, serenity and emotional chaos. These modern authors utilize nondivine but often fantastic stratagems to create two Beings from one. To cite two of the more popular examples in English language literature: Robert Louis Stevenson used a chemical compound to make, seemingly, two men out of one in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Oscar Wilde employed a painting in representing a dual persona in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). The Double is in many works a physically manifested projection of a tortured soul's imagination; the most cele­ brated instance of this variation on the Double motif is Feodor Dosto­ evski's The Double (1846). Countless detective novels and films create plots in which an innocent individual is implicated in a crime commit­ ted by a look-alike. These works need not rely on fantastic devices, since the guilty party is an actually existent, physically and spiritually dis­ crete individual, though many movies use the same actor or actress to play both criminal and innocent accused. Given the huge range of works that employ the Double motif in its many manifestations, the seemingly infinite variety of techniques and plots connected to its enactment, and the enormous amount of schol­ arly attention already devoted to this theme as a general feature in world literature,1 what legitimates a project purporting to shed further light on the Double as a literary device when the project restricts itself to a single period and to a body of work written in a single language? Albert J. Guerard has argued with regard to the word "Double" that "no term is more loosely used by casual critics of modern literature. As al­ most any character can become a Christ figure or Devil archetype, so 1 2 Introduction almost any can become a Double," though he concedes this figure is a "crucial literary and psychological phenomenon" (204). Paul Coates has argued with some cogency that all literature can be viewed as informed by the presence of the Double and the Other when the dynamics of both reading and writing are taken into account. An innate desire to identify with literary protagonists, "to discover in the apparent foreignness of another person the lineaments of one's own aspirations and hopes," in­ spires, to a great extent, the act of reading fiction. The reader thereby turns the fictive work's Other into his or her Double. Writing constitutes the mirror image of this dialectic, since figures in literature crystallize elements in the authorial ego. The various characters are fragments of the author's self. However, once another self attains discrete existence within the literary work, "the Double assumes independent life as the Other" (1). Coates's assertion that the Double and the Other are inherently im­ bricated manifestations of the authorial psyche evident in all fiction lends some weight to Guerard's claim that the Double has been mis­ appropriated and globalized in literary criticism. The same can be said of the term "alter ego," often used interchangeably with "Double" by Germanists and others who write on literature.2 Most dictionaries define "alter ego" as a "second" self, an intimate friend or associate, or as a unique facet in an individual's personality. However, the literal translation of the Latin expression is "the other I." If one adheres to the precise nuance inherent in the original Latin, the alter ego must be seen as governed by a relationship of radical alterity to the primary ego. Thus, when one juxtaposes the two figures in a dialectic synthesis, the entire spectrum, the broad range of human personality traits is re­ vealed. Opposing, indeed antithetical qualities are thereby fused and united like the colors in a rainbow. Such ego-alter ego relationships are only informed by the Doppel­ ganger motif when the two oppositional entities manifest a physical identity, or at least a close physical resemblance, as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Double. In German Romanticism, most ego-alter ego pairs were also Doppelganger. However, as Wilhelmine Krauss has in­ dicated in her book on the German Romantic Doppelganger, this figure is truly a physical "Abbild" of a primary ego, whether in the form of a mirror image, artistic representation, imaginative-poetic vision, or a discrete corporeal Double (6). This was often the case in the age of Ger­ man Poetic Realism as well, but even when it was not, the writers of the period discussed in the body of my text, with the singular exception of Gottfried Keller, employed ego-alter ego pairings to evoke in their texts the psychic totality, the broad range of human emotions and attributes Introduction 3 brought forth through the sort of character dialectics evident in the pre­ viously mentioned works of Stevenson and Dostoevski.