Franz Grillparzer. Группа авторов
must be Fremde; and their appearance excludes the possibility that they could be „eingeborne Polen.“ Further insight can only be granted by a narrator who we thought was sharing all of his knowledge all along, but who instead apparently toyed with us and now asserts his omniscience belatedly with the pronouncement „Und so war es auch.”2
The epistemological uncertainty that pervades the narrative frame is evident as the two imperial messengers approach the monastery to ask for shelter for the night. A „Pförtner“ invites them in, but he states that the abbot will not be able to welcome them as evening prayers are already in progress. The narrator continues:
Die Angabe des etwas mißtrauisch blickenden Mannes ward durch den eintönigen Zusammenklang halb sprechend, halb singend erhobener Stimmen bekräftigt, die, aus dämpfender Ferne durch die hallenden Gewölbe sich hinwindend, den Chorgesang einer geistlichen Gemeine deutlich genug bezeichneten. (SW 3: 119 [my emphases])
It is the gatekeeper whose gaze is described as „mißtrauisch,“ but his attitude of mistrust curiously seems to be transferred both to the „Fremden“ themselves and to us as readers. The gatekeeper’s „Angabe” – possibly just a neutral statement – morphs under his mistrustful gaze into a mere claim that needs to be „bekräftigt.“ This Bekräftigung, though, is in turn weakened by the paradoxical auditory sensation of an „eintönige[r] Zusammenklang“ of voices that are „halb sprechend, halb singend” – hovering, as it were, between the realms of the prosaic and the poetic. To make matters worse, the voices are perceived only in a muffled manner, „aus dämpfender Ferne,“ and distorted through „hallende Gewölbe.“ All of these qualifiers result in a signification that is merely „deutlich genug,“ but not necessarily beyond doubt. The narrator seems to imply here that we as readers may have to settle for a truth value that is just about good enough – “deutlich genug” – and that ultimate knowledge, whether sought with touch, vision, or even hearing, remains obscured in a world in which our sensual perception is imperfect.
The passage quoted above can also point us to another one of Grillparzer’s poetological observations: „Der wesentliche Unterschied der Novelle vom Drama besteht darin, daß die Novelle eine gedachte Möglichkeit, das Drama aber eine gedachte Wirklichkeit ist.“ (SW 3: 292) As Katherine Arens puts it in her gloss on Grillparzer’s statement, the novella genre, then, „has probability rather than realism on its side.”3 In a literary space in which realism is not the coin of the realm, we have to settle for the possible and the probable – that which is „deutlich genug.“
From the „deutlich genug“ signification in the acoustic realm, the messengers now move into an architectural space that aims to signify through „absichtliche […] Genauigkeit“:
Die beiden Fremden traten in das angewiesene Gemach, welches, obgleich, wie das ganze Kloster, offenbar erst seit kurzem erbaut, doch altertümliche Spitzformen mit absichtlicher Genauigkeit nachahmte. (SW 3: 119 [my italics])
Paradoxically, the „absichtliche Genauigkeit“ of the stylistic imitation both conceals and reveals the artificiality and inauthenticity of the monastery’s architecture. Additionally, the faux-Gothic style points us back towards the Middle Ages and simultaneously forward, beyond the text’s diegetic era of the 17th century’s Ottoman wars, and towards the time of Grillparzer’s writing of the text and Romanticism’s Gothic revival.4 Beyond the fact that here we once again encounter an unstable temporality, the pseudo-Gothic monastery is, of course, a trope that signals to us that we are about to enter Schauerromantik terrain.
Gothic Intimacies
True to Schauerromantik conventions, the text soon introduces us to „eine seltsame Menschengestalt“ wrapped in „ein abgetragenes, an mehreren Stellen geflicktes Mönchskleid, das sonderbar genug gegen den derben, gedrungenen Körperbau abstach“ (SW 3: 120).1 The prolonged touch between body and clothing captured in the term „abgetragen“ draws us into a degree of intimacy with the monk from which we instinctively recoil. We experience relief from this discomfort through the distancing effect produced by the visual Abstechen of the robe from the „derben, gedrungenen Körperbau.“ The detailed description of the monk’s appearance ends with a passage focused on his gaze:
Das Auge, klösterlich gesenkt, hob sich nur selten; wenn es aber aufging, traf es wie ein Wetterschlag, so grauenhaft funkelten die schwarzen Sterne aus den aschfahlen Wangen, und man fühlte sich erleichtert, wenn die breiten Lider sie wieder bedeckten. (SW 3: 120)
The unsettling intensity of the monk’s gaze shields it from legibility, and the onlookers feel themselves repelled and distanced, much like observers of an eerie night sky, as they encounter the „schwarzen Sterne.“ At the same time, the emancipation from touch and thus from proximity to and physical intimacy with strangers that a modern epistemology of sight seemed to guarantee is also negated here. Rather, the distance of the gaze is replaced with a disquieting reintroduction of proximity via an eye that seems to touch those it encounters: „Die dunklen Augen des Mönchs hoben sich bei dieser Rede [des einen Fremden] und hafteten mit einer Art grimmigen Ausdruckes auf dem Sprechenden“ (SW 3: 121 [my italics]). The unsettling combination of vision and figurative touch, of distance and proximity in the monk’s gaze is accompanied by a touch that is out of proportion to the environment to which it relates. When the Fremden suggest that a „gottgeliebter Mann“ must have built the monastery, the monk responds with a „schmetterndes Hohngelächter,“ and „[d]ie Stuhllehne, auf die er sich gestützt hatte, brach krachend zusammen“ (SW 3: 121–122). Here, touch once again conveys affect, but rather because touch turns destructive, revealing the force of barely contained rage. The breaking of the chair, a structure used to support the human frame, also foreshadows the instability of the narrative scaffolding, i.e., of the frame that will support the monk’s story.
It bears mention that the communicative situation that prompts the monk’s telling of his story is not altogether typical of the way in which Binnenerzählungen within novellas are usually set up in the frame. Whereas it frequently is the desire of the characters in the frame to be distracted from their present situation that prompts the narration of the framed narrative, in the case of Grillparzer’s novella, the Fremden actually are perfectly content to talk amongst themselves. They are engrossed „im eifrigen Gespräch; vielleicht vom Zweck ihrer Reise, offenbar von Wichtigem“ (SW 3: 120). They are not at all eager to be transported away from their usual business or from the attention they pay to each other by a tale presented to them by another party. Rather, they resist going along with the reader’s generic expectation that they will welcome the company of another person who might be expected to distract them with a story, and it is rather „ungern“ that the Fremden „unterbrechen […]“ their conversation (SW 3: 120) as the monk enters unbidden to light a fire the visitors insist they don’t need. The monk, we might say, forces his way into the discursive space to open up the possibility of the telling of what will turn out to be his confessional tale. The dual impulse of aggression and servility that marks the monk’s entry into the text will continue to characterize his behavior throughout the novella.
The monk finally begins to relate the story of the monastery’s founding, and as mentioned above, only at the closing of the narrative frame at the end of the novella will it be revealed that Starschensky, the framed story’s protagonist, is not only the monastery’s founder, but also in fact the monk. As numerous scholars of Grillparzer’s text have observed, the fact that the monk chooses not to relate a first-person narrative but rather reports about himself in the third person affords him heightened interpretive powers over the story’s characters, in particular over Elga, his/Starschensky’s love interest and, later, his wife.2 The assumption of absolute interpretive power over Elga repeats on a symbolic level the monk’s/Starschensky’s bloody murder of Elga, whom Starschensky had suspected of adultery.3 The murder represents both the climax of the monk’s/Starschensky’s story, and the culmination of the epistemological crisis at the heart of Grillparzer’s text.
Framing and Transgression
The severity of this epistemological