Franz Grillparzer. Группа авторов
of Vienna, and the rise of Metternich’s repressive regime. It is roughly within this time frame that the struggle between the epistemological dominance of touch on the one hand and sight on the other plays out on the field of Western philosophy and science; and it is the crisis that results from this struggle that is, I maintain, of central import in Grillparzer’s Kloster bei Sendomir.
Certainties Unsettled
As the Enlightenment dawned, an epistemology in which knowledge could be gained through touch was increasingly marginalized and associated with the Middle Ages, now supposedly „an age when people groped about blindly.”1 The „Dark Ages“ were to be vanquished by a culture of light – as Foucault reminds us, one of the „great mythical experiences on which the philosophy of the eighteenth century had wished to base its beginning“ was the topos of „the man born blind restored to light.”2 The roots of this topos go back, of course, to Descartes. Foucault elaborates:
For Descartes and Malebranche, to see was to perceive (even in the most concrete types of experience, such as Descartes’s practice of anatomy, or Malebranche’s microscopic observations); but, without stripping perception of its sensitive body, it was a matter of rendering it transparent for the exercise of the mind: light, anterior to every gaze, was the element of ideality – the unassignable place of origin where things were adequate to their essence – and the form by which things reached it through the geometry of bodies; according to them, the act of seeing, having attained perfection, was absorbed back into the unbending, unending figure of light.3
As Foucault points out, though, a concept of perception through sight that takes place in a light both anterior and exterior to the observer is replaced already towards the end of the 18th century by a concept that locates the power to see truth no longer in the light that previously surrounded objects of perception but rather in the gaze of the observer:
At the end of the eighteenth century, however, seeing consists in leaving to experience its greatest corporal opacity; the solidity, the obscurity, the density of things closed in upon themselves, have powers of truth that they owe not to light, but to the slowness of the gaze that passes over them, around them, and gradually into them, bringing them nothing more than its own light. The residence of truth in the dark centre of things is linked, paradoxically, to this sovereign power of the empirical gaze that turns their darkness into light.4
If we read the rise of an epistemology of sight with Foucault, we must remind ourselves that such an epistemology is neither homogenous in itself, nor did it remain stable over time.5 Moreover, the distance associated with an epistemology of sight did not simply replace the proximity associated with an epistemology of touch. Rather, as Constance Classen reminds us, cultural practices associated with touch and sight coexisted far into the 19th century:
There can be no straightforward narrative of a decline in the cultural importance of touch accompanied by a corresponding rise in the cultural importance of sight. The sensory patterns of history are too complex. Older tactile practices long coexisted with the new emphasis on more disembodied modes of social interaction and religious practice.6
The European Enlightenment’s fraught terrain, marked by differing and shifting ways of finding and ascertaining truth, finds its Austrian manifestation in Grillparzer’s Vienna. Günter Schnitzler examines the tensions that prevail in Metternich’s Austria between the legacy of Joseph II. and Baroque Catholicism, between late-Enlightenment liberalism and conservatism:
Alle […] aufklärerischen und liberalen Tendenzen gehen […] eine im Grunde „unmögliche“ Verbindung mit dem geistigen und kulturellen Erbe der Donaumonarchie ein: die barock-katholische Welt bleibt in der Spätaufklarung Österreichs ebenso anwesend wie die Innerlichkeit und auch der Irrationalismus, der das direkte Eingreifen unbeherrschbarer Mächte möglich scheinen läßt; so werden noch die Wunder durch die Kirche nicht als Glaubensangelegenheiten, sondern auch in der Theorie und der Beweisbarkeit anerkannt. Das Barock-Gegenreformatorische erhält sich in gleicher Weise wie die religiöse und kulturelle Überlieferung bis hin zur habsburgnahen spanischen Welt, und zugleich rezipieren die Spätaufklärer der Grillparzer-Zeit die Texte von Leibniz, Wolff und vor allem von Kant.7
Grillparzer, an outspoken critic of Metternich8 and of the stifling effects his bureaucratic absolutism and censorship had on Austrian intellectual life, and an avid reader of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and particularly Kant, nevertheless saw limits to the benefits enlightened reason could bestow upon humankind. Günter Schnitzler outlines Grillparzer’s skepticism towards the Enlightenment:
Grillparzer [erhob] fortwährend […] Vorwürfe vornehmlich gegen eine Aufklärung, deren Rationalismus zudem mit einem Erkenntnis- und Zukunftsoptimismus gepaart ist. Der skeptisch-desillusionistischen Haltung des österreichischen Spätaufklärers steht dies doch recht fern: Grillparzer hegte im Bereich der Ethik erhebliche Zweifel an einer beständigen Entwicklung zum „besseren Menschen“, wie es vor allem in rationalistischen Systemen propagiert wurde; aber auch in der Erkenntnistheorie zweifelte er – trotz der intensiven Kantstudien – an einer angemessenen, theoretisch fundierten Möglichkeit, Erfahrungswirklichkeiten zu fassen […].9
Just as Grillparzer was critical of narratives of progress and felt dubious about the possibility of epistemological certainty, Das Kloster bei Sendomir reflects a world in which stability, insight, and human perfectibility are unobtainable. Set in 17th-century Poland, a country that in the 18th century would suffer three partitions at the hands of the Habsburg Empire, Prussia, and Russia, and in the city of Sandomierz, which, in Grillparzer’s lifetime, was ruled alternately by Austria and Russia, Grillparzer embeds his story in a topography whose stability, as Grillparzer’s readers know, exists on borrowed time10 and whose state will soon, beyond the frame of the story, be as fractured and torn as Vienna’s intellectual landscape in Metternich’s Austria. It is, then, on this fraught terrain that we encounter Grillparzer’s protagonist, an emotionally unstable monk who relates the story of the monastery’s origins and who turns out to be identical to the hero of the framed narrative he presents, the Graf Starschensky.
Framing Uncertainty
The epistemological uncertainty that marks Grillparzer’s text announces itself already in its subtitle: „Nach einer als wahr überlieferten Begebenheit.“ The formulation sidesteps a more direct statement – such as „Nach einer wahren Begebenheit” – an element typical of the novella genre, of course. Instead, the phrasing makes plain that the title’s implied narrator is not willing or able to vouch for the truth value of the text’s events. Rather, the responsibility for the truth – or lack thereof – of the events is delegated to the anonymous forces of Überlieferung.1
The subtitle gives way to a narrative that we will soon identify as the novella’s frame. A broad vision of the Sendomir province’s landscape narrows into a close-up description of „zwei Reiter“ approaching the eponymous monastery:
Die Kleidung der späten Gäste bezeichnete die Fremden. Breitgedrückte, befiederte Hüte, das Elenkoller vom dunklen Brustharnisch gedrückt, die straffanliegenden Unterkleider und hohen Stulpenstiefel erlaubten nicht, [die Reiter] für eingeborne Polen zu halten. Und so war es auch. Als Boten des deutschen Kaisers zogen sie, selbst Deutsche, an den Hof des kriegerischen Johann Sobiesky, und, vom Abend überrascht, suchten sie Nachtlager in dem vor ihnen liegenden Kloster. (SW 3: 119 [my italics])
Here, the representation of textiles in particular evokes affect through an emphasis on their haptic qualities. The narrative reflects on the nexus of vision, touch, and the textual construction of meaning. Having been prompted by Schreyvogel to turn his Sendomir sketch into a prose story, Grillparzer seems to probe the notion of Stoff in all of its senses – sujet, matter, substance, textile. Though the Bezeichnung the visual appearance of the textiles accomplishes in the passage above is one of exclusion and circumscription, the text here nevertheless invites the reader to imagine a tactile relationship with the characters in the text: terms like „gedrückt“ and „straffanliegend“ suggest intimacy as the textiles literally touch and press against the bodies of the characters. The visual