On the curiously queer realism of Adalbert Stifter's Bunte Steine

Abstract

Is it curious to argue that Adalbert Stifter's story collection Bunte Steine is queer? Published in December 1852 (and dated to 1853) in the wake of Stifter's ultimately critical stance toward the 1848 revolution, and introduced by a Vorrede that famously speaks of the story collection's search for a “sanfte[s] Gesez” (Stifter 12), it would at first glance seem to resist such a reading. Of course, for decades now, Stifter scholarship has highlighted different facets of his œuvre’s radicality (see, for instance, Geulen; Schößler; Downing, esp. 24–90; Begemann; Bischoff, esp. 232–76 and 328–51; MacLeod, Fugitive Subjects, esp. 107–42; Vogel; Nagel, esp. 80–88; Strowick, esp. 59–157; Jürjens, esp. 160–295; and Weitzman, esp. 25–48). But what about queer readings? In 2015, Erik Grell published an extensive piece on homoeroticism in Stifter's Brigitta (1844-1847). But it was Robert Tobin who, building on earlier readings (Owen; MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity), first understood Brigitta as expressly queer in his seminal 2015 study Peripheral Desires (Tobin 127–33). A few years prior, two readings argued that one of the stories in Bunte Steine, namely Kalkstein, can be understood as a queer text, featuring as it does a poor minister with a fetishistic liking for exquisite linen undergarments gifted at the time of his death to his only male friend (Riley; Warmuth and Bugelnig). Is Kalkstein an outlier in Bunte Steine? And what of the story collection as a whole? Is it, too, curiously queer?

For all of Stifter's repeated mentions of “Gesez,” “Ordnung” (13), or “Gestalt” (13) in the Vorrede, and for all the efforts of the stories’ various narrators and characters to create order, to sort, to arrange, and to catalogue things, we soon get an inkling that in Bunte Steine “Ordnung,” such as it is, is a provisional state at turns threatened by forces of entropy and transgressed joyously. To wit, already in the Einleitung that follows the Vorrede, Stifter states that his story collection is “eine Sammlung von allerlei Spielereien und Kram für die Jugend” (18), whose eventual size is as yet undetermined (19). Thus, “das Kleine” (9), which can open a view toward the “sanfte Gesez,” may undermine this “Gesez” at least as much as it presumably testifies to its validity. We could therefore try to re-read what J. Halberstam enumerates as “the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant” as something that is best understood through the lens of the “low theory” Halberstam employs to grapple with queer failures and queer potentialities alike (Queer Art, 21).

And indeed, in Bunte Steine, a playful randomness, ein Allerlei, emerges repeatedly as the queer Other of Ordnung, instantiating cheeky infringements upon regimes of order. Already in the first narrative, Granit, we encounter a young boy who is disciplined by his mother for violating strict requirements of cleanliness and order. The boy's grandfather subsequently comforts him, takes off his dirty clothes, and washes and dries his feet, but then, in an instance of disorderly conduct that stands out for its remarkable casualness, states: “Die Sachen [the dirty clothes and the washing utensils] lassen wir da liegen, es wird sie schon jemand hinweg räumen” (Stifter 29). And lo and behold, the various “Sachen” that are scattered about the Bunte Steine collection seemingly get swept up by the force of narrative, are carried back and forth between stories, and create queer textual entanglements. Thus, children's clothing features in all of the narratives, but perhaps most queerly in Katzensilber, namely in the grandmother's enigmatic tale about the red jacket gifted to a queerly bodied creature, “ein Wichtelchen” (248).

Materials likewise travel between the stories, sometimes turning from Stoff into queer objects (see Brickell and Collard). In this context, we may think in particular of Kalkstein and the “Lederballen” and “Häute” (101) in the tannery of the father of the poor minister with the underwear fetish. This leather makes a reappearance not just in the shoemaker's shop in Bergkristall, but also in Turmalin, where it covers “ledergepolsterte Ruhebetten von verschiedener Höhe und mit Rollfüßen versehen” (136). These mobile leather beds belong to a “Rentherr” (142) who uses them to lie down on and to ogle, together with a close male friend and from all possible angles, the “Bildniße” “berühmter Männer” (136) with which he has plastered every inch of the walls of his room. This thoroughly homosocial idyll is disrupted when the male friend has an affair with the Rentherr’s wife. In emotional turmoil, the Rentherr abandons his apartment, taking his young daughter with him, and the dust, “der leichte schnell rieselnde Staub” (147), literally settles on the “Begebenheit,” which is soon “vergessen” (148). What remains unerhört about this “Begebenheit,” then, is not the run-of-the-mill violation of heterosexual bourgeois marriage vows, but rather the betrayal of a queer bond between two men. Consequently, the story breaks off here, but is picked up again, years later, only to end again in an erasure, a literal razing, this time of the locale where the Rentherr had taken up residence. The queerness of the fits and starts with which the text is presented is taken to the level of what Halberstam terms “the queer art of failure” in the representation of the Rentherr’s daughter, who, in Kaspar-Hauser-like fashion, is locked into a virtually empty basement and is asked by her father every day to “beschreibe[n] den Augenblik” (173) as he lies ready to be buried. Isolated as she is from the world, the daughter has signs at her disposal but cannot connect them to referents. Thus, her language cannot but be queer. Her Beschreibungen of necessity lack even the Barthesian “reality effect” that realism at most can hope to achieve, and yet, in a queer embrace of failure, the act of Beschreiben must be repeated again and again. This queer state of things is embedded within a queer temporality (Freeman): the fact of the father's actual death is reported prior to the narration of the daughter's narrations of his imagined death; the daughter never gets a glimpse, a real Augenblick of the actual “Augenblik, wenn [der Vater] todt auf der Bahre lieg[t]” (173); and the narrative fails to reconstruct with accuracy the precise circumstances of this actual death. Instead, we get a parable about the inherent queerness of any attempt at realism—it is always already doomed to fail, and yet the attempts must be repeated compulsively.

And but a brief word about Stifter's queer ecologies and the queerness of his representations of nature (on queer ecology see Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, and Morton; on queer natures see See). Where the white-out conditions in Bergkristall shroud nature in illegibility and produce a failure to find a “straight” path at all, the entanglement of organic and inorganic matter, the blurry boundaries between nature and artifice, the ambiguity of gendered matter, the queerness of nature itself are captured perhaps most expressly in the grandmother's tale about “das blutige Licht” (255) embedded in Katzensilber.

Last but not least, in Bergmilch, we encounter a queerly bodied protagonist with an odd mind who lives “in a queer time and place” (Halberstam, Queer Time), namely, in the early nineteenth century, in a castle surrounded by a moat—something that must strike an onlooker as though it were a “Fehler der Zeitrechnung” (Stifter 319). This queer protagonist fails to partake in the “reproductive futurity” (Edelman) that is the hallmark of heteronormative societies—in Sara Ahmed's terms, he fails to “convert,” to “return the gift of the line by extending that line” (Ahmed 17). He replaces the extinguished bloodline with an extended queer family of non-blood kinships that produce offspring through non-traditional heterosexual pairings framed by homosocial bonds. Unexpectedly yet fittingly, the text—and the entire “Sammlung von allerlei Spielereien und Kram”—ends with a reappearance of children's clothing, a queerly exuberant multiplication of “Sachen,” namely children's coats “entstanden” (Stifter 351) from the cloth of the coat of an enemy turned friend: queerly spawned from a Stoff that may yet be hinweg geräumt to unexpected places. Subtitled Ein Festgeschenk, these Bunte Steine are meant to be regifted, polyamorously passed from one queer place to the next.