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

IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS GERMAN QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-05-03 DOI:10.1111/gequ.12440
Imke Meyer
{"title":"On the curiously queer realism of Adalbert Stifter's Bunte Steine","authors":"Imke Meyer","doi":"10.1111/gequ.12440","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Is it curious to argue that Adalbert Stifter's story collection <i>Bunte Steine</i> 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 <i>Vorrede</i> 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 <i>œuvre</i>’s radicality (see, for instance, Geulen; Schößler; Downing, esp. 24–90; Begemann; Bischoff, esp. 232–76 and 328–51; MacLeod, <i>Fugitive Subjects</i>, 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 <i>Brigitta</i> (1844-1847). But it was Robert Tobin who, building on earlier readings (Owen; MacLeod, <i>Embodying Ambiguity</i>), first understood <i>Brigitta</i> as expressly queer in his seminal 2015 study <i>Peripheral Desires</i> (Tobin 127–33). A few years prior, two readings argued that one of the stories in <i>Bunte Steine</i>, namely <i>Kalkstein</i>, 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 <i>Kalkstein</i> an outlier in <i>Bunte Steine</i>? And what of the story collection as a whole? Is it, too, curiously queer?</p><p>For all of Stifter's repeated mentions of “Gesez,” “Ordnung” (13), or “Gestalt” (13) in the <i>Vorrede</i>, 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 <i>Bunte Steine</i> “Ordnung,” such as it is, is a provisional state at turns threatened by forces of entropy and transgressed joyously. To wit, already in the <i>Einleitung</i> that follows the <i>Vorrede</i>, 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 (<i>Queer Art</i>, 21).</p><p>And indeed, in <i>Bunte Steine</i>, a playful randomness, <i>ein Allerlei</i>, emerges repeatedly as the queer Other of <i>Ordnung</i>, instantiating cheeky infringements upon regimes of order. Already in the first narrative, <i>Granit</i>, 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 <i>Bunte Steine</i> 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 <i>Katzensilber</i>, namely in the grandmother's enigmatic tale about the red jacket gifted to a queerly bodied creature, “ein Wichtelchen” (248).</p><p>Materials likewise travel between the stories, sometimes turning from <i>Stoff</i> into queer objects (see Brickell and Collard). In this context, we may think in particular of <i>Kalkstein</i> 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 <i>Bergkristall</i>, but also in <i>Turmalin</i>, 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 <i>Rentherr</i>’s wife. In emotional turmoil, the <i>Rentherr</i> 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 <i>unerhört</i> 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 <i>Rentherr</i> 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 <i>Rentherr</i>’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 <i>Beschreibungen</i> 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 <i>Beschreiben</i> must be repeated again and again. This queer state of things is embedded within a queer temporality (Freeman): the fact of the father's <i>actual</i> death is reported prior to the narration of the daughter's narrations of his <i>imagined</i> death; the daughter never gets a glimpse, a real <i>Augenblick</i> of the <i>actual</i> “Augenblik, wenn [der Vater] todt auf der Bahre lieg[t]” (173); and the narrative fails to reconstruct with accuracy the precise circumstances of this <i>actual</i> 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.</p><p>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 <i>Bergkristall</i> 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 <i>Katzensilber</i>.</p><p>Last but not least, in <i>Bergmilch</i>, we encounter a queerly bodied protagonist with an odd mind who lives “in a queer time and place” (Halberstam, <i>Queer Time</i>), 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 <i>Stoff</i> that may yet be <i>hinweg geräumt</i> to unexpected places. Subtitled <i>Ein Festgeschenk</i>, these <i>Bunte Steine</i> are meant to be regifted, polyamorously passed from one queer place to the next.</p>","PeriodicalId":54057,"journal":{"name":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","volume":"97 2","pages":"210-213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2024-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gequ.12440","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"GERMAN QUARTERLY","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gequ.12440","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

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.

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阿达尔贝特-斯蒂夫特的《Bunte Steine》中奇特的现实主义风格
因此,这部 "Begebenheit "的不完美之处并不在于对异性恋资产阶级婚姻誓言的普通践踏,而在于对两个男人之间同性恋纽带的背叛。因此,故事在这里中断了,但多年后又被重新拾起,只是又一次以抹杀和夷为平地而结束,这一次是伦特尔夫妇曾经居住的地方。在表现伦特赫尔的女儿时,文本所呈现的起伏不定的奇特性被提升到了哈尔伯斯塔姆所说的 "失败的奇特艺术 "的高度,她以卡斯帕-豪泽尔(Kaspar-Hauser)式的方式被锁在一个几乎空无一人的地下室里,在他准备下葬时,她的父亲每天都要求她 "beschreibe[n] den Augenblik"(173)。由于与世隔绝,女儿可以使用各种符号,却无法将它们与所指联系起来。因此,她的语言只能是怪异的。她的 Beschreibungen 必然缺乏巴特斯式的 "现实效果",而现实主义最多只能达到这种效果,然而,在对失败的畸形拥抱中,Beschreiben 的行为必须一次又一次地重复。这种畸形的事物状态蕴含在一种畸形的时间性之中(弗里曼):在叙述女儿对父亲想象中死亡的叙述之前,先报道了父亲实际死亡的事实;女儿从未瞥见过真实的 "Augenblik, wenn [der Vater] todt auf der Bahre lieg[t]"(173);叙述也未能准确地再现实际死亡的确切情形。相反,我们得到的是一个关于任何现实主义尝试固有的怪异性的寓言--它总是已经注定要失败,但这种尝试又必须被强迫性地重复进行。在《伯格克里斯托尔》中,白茫茫的环境使自然变得难以辨认,根本无法找到一条 "笔直 "的道路;在《卡岑希尔伯》中,祖母关于 "das blutige Licht"(255)的故事或许最能体现有机物与无机物的纠缠、自然与人工的模糊界限、有性别区分的物质的模糊性以及自然本身的 "同性恋 "性。最后但并非最不重要的一点是,在《伯格米尔希》中,我们遇到了一个身体古怪、思想古怪的主人公,他 "生活在一个古怪的时间和地点"(哈尔伯斯塔姆,《古怪的时间》),即 19 世纪初,生活在一座被护城河环绕的城堡中--旁观者一定会觉得这是一个 "时代技术的缺陷"(斯蒂夫特,319)。用萨拉-艾哈迈德(Sara Ahmed)的话说,他没有 "皈依",没有 "通过延长血脉来回报血脉的恩赐"(艾哈迈德,17 岁)。他用一个非血缘关系的同性恋大家庭取代了濒临灭绝的血缘关系,通过同性社会纽带框架下的非传统异性配对产生了后代。出乎意料却又恰到好处的是,这篇文字--以及整个 "Sammlung von allerlei Spielereien und Kram"--以童装的再次出现而结束,"Sachen"(即从敌人变为朋友的外衣布料上 "entstanden"(斯蒂夫特 351)的童装)的 "Sachen"(即从敌人变为朋友的外衣布料上 "entstanden"(斯蒂夫特 351)的童装)的 "Sachen "奇异地繁衍:从斯托夫(Stoff)奇异地衍生,可能会在意想不到的地方出现。这些 "Bunte Steine "被称为 "Ein Festgeschenk",意在重新赠送,从一个同性恋的地方传递到另一个同性恋的地方。
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GERMAN QUARTERLY
GERMAN QUARTERLY Multiple-
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期刊介绍: The German Quarterly serves as a forum for all sorts of scholarly debates - topical, ideological, methodological, theoretical, of both the established and the experimental variety, as well as debates on recent developments in the profession. We particularly encourage essays employing new theoretical or methodological approaches, essays on recent developments in the field, and essays on subjects that have recently been underrepresented in The German Quarterly, such as studies on pre-modern subjects.
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