On Poetic Realism

　

Realism in imaginative literature depicts people and events in a way that most readers would agree comports with probability. We can agree that what the author displays in his or her narrative could occur. Often realism is demonstrated by introducing circumstances that are non sequitur to the story. An index of truth is that the text contains elements that don’t "fit" and are not relevant to the plot. Since real life is jammed with people, places, and things that don’t make sense with respect to narratives that we impose upon our existence, authors sometimes introduce irrelevant material into their stories as a demonstration that the "slice of life" depicted is embedded in a larger matrix of random or indifferent events that can’t accommodated to narrative meaning.

Strictly speaking, one may dispute that ‘realism’ even exists as a literary convention. All novels and stories mean something. By contrast, we must impose meaning on existence by arduous arrangement: meaningless details must be eliminated and sequences of cause and effect have to be regulated to the effect that the writer wishes to achieve. When editing shapes cause and effect relationships, we are probably beyond the zone of realism – and all literary works, I think, operate within schemes of causal relationship that on closer analysis are fictional. Accordingly, the deployment of seemingly random details purportedly unrelated to the narrative or theme of the narrative is a literary device that simulates the indifference of the real.

Some writers use seemingly random or fortuitous details not only to simulate the chaos of the real world, but, also, as a symbolic commentary on the events related in the narrative. When an apparently random event can be construed within the larger context of the work as meaningful – that is, when the reader is invited to supply a meaning inaccessible to the characters – then, the work has the dimension of poetic realism. Theodor Fontane is an example of a great writer who works within the perimeters of "poetic realism."

　

　

　

Theodor Fontane was a Prussian novelist, flourishing (as the cliche would have it) during the two decades before the turn of the century. Fontane was a profoundly civilized writer. His books are delicately limned comedies of manners involving adultery and marriage. Sometimes in his novels, tragic events occur – there is, for instance, a pointless and mortal duel in his masterpiece Effi Briest – but his prose is exquisitely tuned to a key of refined equanimity and gentle resignation. The duel is described in a sentence, or, perhaps, a dependent clause in a sentence, and is meaningless in itself: the event’s significance is the misery that it induces in those affected by the quarrel. Fontane’s theme is how arbitrary social conventions distort and ruin lives. He writes entirely without anger or satire and, although his ironies are profound, they are not shouted or, even, stated, but rather whispered to us. The ambiguity in his books relates to his stance toward the social norms that restrict and, sometimes, destroy his character – is Fontane writing as an objective anthropologist? Is he critical of the conventions that he describes? Or does he suggest that these conventions are, in fact, a necessary aspect of our social and political lives and that we might be lost without them? It is tribute to Fontanes’s subtlety that these questions can be raised about his work but, never, definitely answered.

My purpose in this essay is to consider certain aspects of Fontane’s realism, often described as "poetic" in nature. To this end, I analyze closely a passage in which the author injects apparently irrelevant and, even, distracting detail into his book Irrungen, Wirrungen (1888). The book has been translated into English under several titles – one of them is Trials and Tribulations. In fact, those words don’t effectively capture the tenor of the German title: Irrungen means to wander about "in error" – that is, to be lost in one’s passage through a landscape or place. Wirrungen means to be confused – although the timbre of the word is understated: not confused in a way that is necessarily bad or frightening: indeed, confused in a way that might be exhilarating. I might be tempted be tempted to go wrong in a way different from "trials and tribulations" by putting the title as "Digressions and Diversions" or, even, better "Whither, Thither." (All translating involves putting things a little wrong.) "Trials" is too strong for Irrungen and "tribulations" doesn’t capture the sense of mild, even pleasant, confusion in Wirrungen. Fundamentally, the meaning of the title relates to the book’s plot: the novel is about romantic love and the illusions and pleasant bewilderment that such an emotion stirs in us. The notion of "going wrong" in Irrungen also suggests one of the book’s themes – that is, our hearts can lead us to places that our mind would put off-limits.

The novel’s plot can be simply stated. A young seamstress, Lene, lives with an elderly woman whom she treats as her mother – family relations between the poor people are somewhat vague, suggesting irregularity in the way that these people have led their lives. Lene is a tenant of Frau Doerr and her curmudgeonly husband. The book begins in media res. Lene awaits a visit from Baron Botho, a young Prussian military man, with whom she has formed a romantic relationship. Botho, we discover, loves Lene and woos her sincerely – he is a better man than the dissolute officers with whom he lives. In general, Botho’s intentions seem honorable. But he comes from decayed Prussian nobility and his family has next to no resources – they own a swamp, a manor house, and a carp pond somewhere in the Eastern forests. Botho encounters his uncle who reminds him that the family’s fate requires that he marry well – that is, marry a wealthy heiress of his class. And, indeed, both Botho’s uncle and mother remind him that he has been promised as husband to Kaethe von Sellenthin, a young woman from a well-to-do and noble family. Botho may be criticized, perhaps, for what he does next. He takes Lene to a place in the Berlin suburbs, Hankels Ablage, a resort with a restaurant and inn on the Damm river – this is place where people go for romantic assignations: there is lake and sailboats and a dark woods brooding over the water. After spending the night with Lene at the Inn, Botho encounters his brother-officers and their mistresses, probably prostitutes, at the resort. They have taken the train to the Berlin outskirts to visit him. Lene and Botho recognize that the difference in their social rank makes their relationship impermanent and, even, problematic for both of them. Lene, who has had a previous love affair with a young officer, knows what will happen: Botho will face pressure to leave her and, after recriminations, he will succumb. She breaks off the love affair. Within two or three pages, Fontane accelerates the action: Botho marries Kaethe, a sweet but irritatingly shallow woman. Lene’s stepmother dies and she moves to another part of Berlin to avoid encountering the married Botho – with his new bride, he has moved into a flat near the Zoological Garden where Lene lived in the Doerr house. Lene is courted by a religious man, Gideon Franke. Franke has come from the "States" as Fontane describes the USA and he seems to be some sort of lay-preacher for an eccentric sect. Franke also owns a factory, is prosperous, and described by Fontane as a Spiessbuerger – that is,

Lene is not a virgin, something that troubles Franke. He looks up Botho and, essentially, asks him for a reference on the "damaged goods", that is, Lene. Botho still loves Lene and speaks highly of her. Ultimately, Gideon Franke marries Lene. Kaethe reads the marriage announcement in the paper and makes fun of Franke’s name "Gideon". The book ends with Botho pronouncing these words: "Gideon is better than Botho." Critics are divided as to what this final line means.

When the novel was first published, it was controversial. A newspaper, remarking on the book, called it a Hurengeschichte –that is "whore-story." Today, the uproar caused by the novel is explained in this way: Fontane doesn’t apologize for his heroine’s sexual encounters before her marriage to Gideon Franke, Franke accepts her without recriminations, and the novelist suggests that the most ethical and moral person in the book is the gentle and loving Lene. Berlin hypocrisy was alive and well in 1888 and Fontane was attacked for his realism – everything in the book seems plausible and, indeed, rooted in real life. You can draw a map of Berlin and environs from descriptions in the book and the novel names many real people in painting a portrait of the social milieu – the Prussian aristocracy, the common people, the libertine military, and administrators employed by Bismarck’s regime. It seems readily evident to the reader that Fontane is describing a situation that was probably familiar to the decrepit Prussian nobility and the bourgeois world that they inhabited. Mesalliance and, even, exploitation of working class girls was probably endemic.

In it’s 17^th chapter, about two-thirds of the way through Irrungen, Wirrungen, Fontane introduces Gideon Franke. After great sorrow, Lene has put aside her feelings for Botho and looks to the future. Fontane tells us that the only exterior sign of her inner struggle is a swath of white in her hair. With Frau Nimptsch, Lene has rented an apartment in a quarter of town remote from where she knows Botho and Kaethe to live. The next-door tenant in the apartment is Gideon Franke. Although he is a religious zealot, and, apparently, the founder of his own sect, Franke is a congenial fellow and relaxes his moral objections to gambling sufficiently to play cards with Lene’s stepmother. (He is drawn into a relationship with Frau Nimptsch because of his interest in Lene.) Frau Doerr, Lene’s previous landlady, remains close friends with the family and she visits Frau Nimptsch:


As one might think, all of this (Gideon Franke’s interest in Lene) aroused the greatest curiosity in Frau Doerr. She never tired of posing questions and making conjectures on the subject, although only when Lene was engaged at work or had business in the city. "Tell me, my dear Frau Nimptsch, what is he actually like? I paged through the directory and he’s not listed. My husband only has last year’s address book. His name is Franke?"

"Yes, Franke."

"Franke. There was one on Ohm Street, a cooper – he had only one eye. That is, the other was still there, but completely white and, actually, looked something like a fish-bladder. What was this about? A hoop that he was trying to bend, sprang back at him and, with its point, took out his eye. That’s what happened to it. So is he from around here?"

"No, Frau Doerr, he is not from here at all. He comes from Bremen."

"Oh, I see. Then, naturally, it’s another."

Frau Nimptsch nodded in agreement, there being nothing to add to Frau Doerr’s assurance that the man was "naturally" another, and, on her part, continued: "And from Bremen to America, that’s 14 days. He went there. And he was something like a plumber or locksmith or a machinist, but he saw that this didn’t suit him so he became a doctor and went around with nothing but little bottles and he’s supposed to have preached also. And because he was such a good preacher, he was installed as a pastor with...Well, I’ve forgotten it again. But they are certainly very pious people and also very moral."

"Good lord, my friend," Frau Doerr said: "he isn’t one of those... Ach, what are they called, those ones that have so many wives, always about six or seven, and many even more...I don’t know what they do with so many."
In the paragraph preceding this passage, Fontane has used his omniscient narration to tell us that Franke is a Konventikler – a word that I translate as "Covenanter". The "Covenanters" were Scottish Presbyterians whose religion was prohibited by the Crown. (The word appears in some short stories and novels by Robert Louis Stevenson). The German term seems to be more broadly construed: it means a member of a non-orthodox religious sect. Fontane tells us: ...he was first a Mennonite and then later played a role with the Irvingists more recently founding his own sect. The "Irvingists" were followers of Edward Irving, a Scottish preacher who founded the Catholic Apostolic Church. Irving denied the divinity of Christ and asserted that all believers were "prophets" ordained to preach the second coming of Christ. Unfortunately, so far as we can ascertain, Christ didn’t come. The Church decreed that its teachings were true only to the extent that they were confirmed by utterances of Irving and performed as part of an extremely elaborate liturgy. Irving died in 1834 and his last living apostle passed from this earth in 1901. These deaths imposed upon the Church a period called "the time of silence" which has lasted more than a century – the Church now has no members although some of its majestic worship places are maintained, vacant and unused to await Christ’s coming. As we have seen, Frau Nimptsch believes Gideon Franke to have worked in various capacities in "the States" as Fontane describes it and, perhaps, peddled patent medicine (the meaning I presume of her comment about little flasks or bottles. Frau Doerr wonders if the man isn’t a polygamist Mormon. Somewhat later in the book, Fontane uses the word "monogamy" in a chapter in which Botho counsels his raffish cousin, Rexin, about an imprudent love affair between the young man and working class girl of questionable repute.. Rexin says that he believes in "monogamy" and loves the working class woman with whom he is having an affair – indeed, loves her to the extent that he wishes that he were free to elope with her to Sacramento and the gold mines. Apparently, late 19^th century Germans thought of California as a place where people could live freely in accord with their desires, thereby escaping the tyranny of society and family. Within the structure of the book, Gideon Franke seems to represent two completely opposing values: the antinomian freedom of the United States where a man can found his own religious sect but, also, the repressive values of the German Spiessbuerger – that is, the narrow-minded, philistine petite-bourgeois. (Spiessbuerger is the term that Fontane applies to Franke.)

The tension between petite bourgeois factory owner, who quizzes Botho on Lene’s sexual history, and his status as religious zealot and cult leader, is so fraught that if the book’s structures were to spring apart one might lose an eye. Gideon Franke, Lene’s wooer, is pointedly said to be of uncertain Titulator" – that is, Botho’s servants are unclear as to how to address the man. He seems to not fit into the established categories of rank and class in Berlin society and, therefore, is, perhaps, the harbinger of a future in which social and military rank will be irrelevant. Botho, the scion of decayed nobility with manor houses, unproductive fields, and carp-ponds, represents the past; the factory-owner and cult-leader, Gideon Franke, seems to point the way to the future.

But what of the other Gideon Franke, the cooper on Ohm Street who lost an eye to his trade. Why does Fontane cast a glance in his direction. First, and most obviously, the mention of the tradesman Gideon Franke, complete with his address, is a warrant as to the book’s realism. The author injects detail into the book that isn’t obviously thematic and has no narrative significance. This detail warrants to the reader that the book is rooted in the messy, indecorous, and random reality of the every-day world in which we live. I will have more to say about cooper Franke as an index of verisimilitude. Here, it suffices for me to observe, that inserting this anecdotal vignette into the novel is a device for assuring the reader that the book is true – Frau Doerr has a city gazetteer; you can look people up.

All of these conjectures and references are, certainly, very interesting but the reader might legitimately ask what this has to do with the main narrative line in Fontane’s book. (Indeed, the paragraph above in this essay shows how far afield annotation of references to Franke’s past leads the reader.) This shell of religious speculation, however, encloses another non sequitur　– that is, the misidentification of Franke with the tradesman notable for having only one functioning eye.

Bakhtin argued that the novel is a polyphonic form. Novels contain different voices without necessarily privileging any specific perspective. (The Russian formalist’s analysis, of course, presupposes an ideology that discovers evidence of class struggle in all cultural artifacts. Irrungen,Wirrungen can be readily accommodated to Bakhtin’s model: the book dramatizes interactions between members of the decayed feudal class and the lower working classes, providing dialogue in diction specific to each category. Gideon Franke, the new middle-class capitalist – he owns a factory – ultimately mediates between high and low.) Irrungen, Wirrungen is composed in four voices: Fontane’s compassionate, cosmopolitan and mildly ironic narrative in which we find embedded the demotic slang and dialect of the street, the snarky libertine voices of the young Prussian military officers and noblemen, and the stilted diction that Franke uses with Botho during their interview. From a narrative perspective, the film is binocular (two-eyed): the lower class is viewed through the lens of anachronistic upper class families; conversely, the upper class is assessed against the backdrop of their relationships with their servants: high looks down on low whilst low gazes up on high. This perspective is materialized in the two narratives that the book sutures together with innumerable parallisms and rhymes: Botho’s love affair with Lene provides a critique of his marriage to Kaethe – similarly, Botho is explicitly compared with Gideon Franke. Thus, the books’ narrative is fundamentally binary: two things are compared and contrasted.

The cooper’s dead eye suggests that one of the two elements compared is ruined. When Kaethe returns from taking the waters at Schlangenbad ("Serpent’s bath"), the servants post a sign reading "Welcome" – but they spell the word wrong "Wilkommen" with one "L" as opposed to the proper orthography "Willkommen." Of course, Lene’s name begins with an "L". (And Lene is associated with clear handwriting but with some misspellings; by contrast, Kaethe spells words right but her handwriting is illegible.) Lene says that leaving out the "L" means that she and Botho will experience only "half" of the happiness otherwise possible to them. This statement, read in the context of Kaethe’s flirtation with a dashing Scottish military man at the spa, seems ominously portentous. "L" means Lene and half of Botho and Kaethe’s marriage is disfigured by his dissatisfaction with the silly and shallow Kaethe whom he contrasts with the simple but profound lower class girl. One half of a binary pair is damaged – one eye is ruined and white as a fish’s bladder. In Fontane’s world, love isn’t wholly blind – one eye keeps a shrewd gaze directed at social and economic realities: love is only half-blind.

And why is the simile of the "fish’s bladder" used to describe the damaged and blind eye? Fontane’s Berlin is watery, a floating world. (This is simply realistic: Berlin in the 1870's consists of a central walled city with adjacent small villages located along the Spree, Havel, and Damm rivers. The terrain is swampy with numerous lakes. In modern Berlin, the water table is 8 to 10 feet below grade and construction sites have to pump vast amounts of water away from where work is being performed.) Botho meets Lene as a result of a boating incident – Lene and two female friends using a row-boat are almost capsized and drowned by a steamship plying one of the rivers. The resort, Hankel’s Ablage (or "wharf where goods are warehoused"), overlooks a river and its habitues go boating. And, of course, Botho’s family has a manor, some farmland, and a carp pond. Thus, fish’s bladder is a simile consistent with the book’s terrain and milieu.

Finally, the image of the cooper, a master craftsman, disfigured by the practice of his trade seems, as I have intimated above, descriptive of Fontane’s art. A cooper devises a structure that arches back into itself so as to contain contents under pressure. Such a structure is an analog for the novel. The two stories bend together, combining elements of high and low that are usually disparate. The tension of sexual attraction pulls the double narrative together although their elements strain to be apart. Clearly, Botho and Lene don’t belong in the same plot, but the narrative seals them together and, in fact, holds them in a proximity that casts a skeptical eye on the socially acceptable relationship between the Baron and Kaethe, two characters that also don’t really belong together. Bakhtin’s model of the novelistic genre’s polyphony presupposes the co-existence within a narrative of elements that don’t match, disparate levels of society, intelligence, and interest. The novelist’s work is to bend these opposing forces into a well-wrought structure.

In the novels of Dickens and Elliot, that is to say, in the novels written during the middle of the nineteenth century, a Roman was built from narrative into which the narrator’s commentary was inserted. Thus, a reader discovered in most novels a story or plot, narrated in detail, together with the writer’s analytical commentary on this plot and its characters. The commentary might be empathetic, analytical, ironic or sardonic – but readers expected the author to intervene from time to time and explain his or her perspective on the events narrated or what the story was supposed to mean. By contrast, Fontane presents his story without explicit editorializing. Instead, he displaces the commentary by interpolating symbolic objects or anecdotes. Fontane invests incidental details with relevance to his narrative – the reader’s role is to decode material that is apparently non sequitur or merely peripheral to the main action. These peripheral details, when examined in light of the novel’s plot and thematic concerns, usually have symbolic or metonymic meaning that provides a commentary on the book’s plot and characters.

For instance, Fontane begins Irrungen, Wirrungen with a paragraph about the cottage that Lene rents from Frau Doerr and her husband. In the first sentence, he provides the literal address of the property – a gesture suggesting (ostensibly) Fontane’s truthfulness, and indexing the text to a veridical reality. But the description of the property, then, veers into symbolic territory: the premises are located on a sliver of land implying that their inhabitants are socially inconsequential; buildings and trees form a Kulisse, that is, stage scenery that obscures the view into the recesses of the property where Lene lives; finally, there is a decaying tower, a diminutive structure inhabited by birds. The concealed (secret) garden and the fairy-tale tower establish a faint, but pervasive sense of the uncanny – Lene has bewitched Botho or, perhaps, Botho appears as the gallant prince who may redeem Lene from her poverty and uncertain reputation and restore her to the role of princess. In his book on Adolf Menzel, the great German artist of the Gruenderzeit (the age of Bismarck), Michael Fried comments on the painter’s obsessive sketching and his incorporation of incidental make-shift details into his paintings. Menzel is the master of incidental details that take on a poetic character. He shows us the backyards of homes in shabby, neglected neighborhoods, a dusty lot with an old wooden privy with door askew, a strange sluice rigged to run water from a rural-looking hand pump into some sort of trough. We are shown damaged shingles, tattered bushes, the back court to a yellow palazzo where workmen are napping after their lunch in a green glade of trees with odd labyrinthine paths forking out around them. These details are prosaic in the extreme, but, somehow, this makeshift apparatus provides a commentary on the principal subject of the canvas – in his boldest pictures, the makeshift, incidental stuff is the subject of the picture itself.

Fontane’s "poetic" realism invokes the same faintly uncanny, baffling mood that we find in many of Menzel’s best paintings. The effect arises from an oscillation between foreground and subject – sometimes, the junk lying around in Menzel’s paintings is directly significant to our understanding of his subject. Similarly, the incidental details in Fontane’s novel sometimes loom up over the author’s plot and themes that seem to recede into the distance. The notion of the Doppelgaenger or the double is ubiquitous in German literature and introduces the uncanny ("unheimlich") into the narrative. Here Gideon Franke, factory-owner and religious zealot, has a double, at least, in name. This detail injects a faint element of the uncanny into Fontane’s novel – this is the poetic trace-element in the book’s alloy.

At the end of the novel, Kaethe returns from the spa. She acknowledges an innocent, or, perhaps, not so innocent, flirtation with a Scotsman also taking the waters at Schlangenbad. After praising the other man, Kaethe asks for a "sacred kiss", perhaps to signify Botho’s forgiveness – he is supposed to plant the Geweihkuesse on her forehead. Geweih means something like consecrated, sacred, or holy. But there is another meaning to the word: Geweih also means the antlers of a stag. To be "horned" is to be cuckolded. So the kiss upon which Kaethe insists may have a sinister meaning – either reflecting on something that happened at the spa or premonitory. Impetuously, Kaethe insists on a trip to Charlottenberg and its imperial palaces. (She describes the air in Berlin as suffocating after her sojourn at the bath.) Botho and Kaethe tour a mausoleum on the palace grounds. Botho lectures the bubble-headed Kaethe "man-splaining" to her the history of the old Prussian kings. He mentions one ruler who was under the influence of a general reputed to be a mystic, necromancer, and member of the Illuminati. For a brief moment, Botho and Kaethe, a couple whose marriage is haunted, as it were, by Lene’s ghost, are touring the uncanny kingdom of the Dead.