Franz Grillparzer. Группа авторов
through with markers of this crisis.1 What is more, this frame cannot hold the framed story in2 – the monk’s story cannot be sublated, and the frame repeatedly cracks.3 What Henry Remak has identified as „die klassische Funktion des Rahmens“ in the novella, namely to stabilize „[das] Einmalig-Unerhörte […] der berichteten Begebenheit“ and to keep in check „[das] Sprengende […] des Inhalts“ of the narrative,4 is precisely the kind of work that the frame in Grillparzer’s text refuses to do. Georg Simmel, in his 1902 essay on the aesthetic function of the frame in painting, observed that the „Grenzen“ of a work of art mark „jene[n] unbedingetn Abschluß, der die Gleichgültigkeit und Abwehr nach außen und den vereinheitlichenden Zusammenschluß [die Einheit aus Einzelheiten im Kunstwerk] nach innen in einem Akte ausübt.“ Simmel goes on to ascribe to the frame that is added to the work of art a function that both symbolizes and enhances its existing boundary:
Was der Rahmen dem Kunstwerk leistet, ist, daß er diese Doppelfunktion seiner Grenze symbolisiert und verstärkt. Er schließt alle Umgebung und also auch den Betrachter vom Kunstwerk aus und hilft dadurch, es in die Distanz zu stellen, in der allein es ästhetisch genießbar wird.5
The possibility of aesthetic distance is what Grillparzer’s monk denies both to the two travelers listening to him and to us as readers. Early on in the framed narrative, the monk characterizes Starschensky (i.e., himself) as someone who enjoys „ein über alles gehendes Behagen am Besitz seiner selbst“ and as an individual for whom „Abwesenheit von Unlust“ is „Lust“ (SW 3: 123).6 The monk/Starschensky then interrupts the narrative and turns to his listeners: „Habt Ihr noch Wein übrig? Gebt mir einen Becher! Der Graf [Starschensky] war so schlimm nicht.“ (SW 3: 123) A short time later, immediately after he describes the looks of Elga, his future wife, the monk/Starschensky turns to his listeners, who, as he had ascertained earlier, have no relations with women, and references his sexual excitement: „Nicht wahr, davon wißt Ihr nichts, Malteser? Ja, ja, bei dem alten Mönch rappelts einmal wieder! Laßt uns noch eins trinken!“ (SW 3: 124) Here, the cracks in the boundary that was supposed to separate the framed narrative from the frame narrative force both the intra-diegetic listeners and the extra-diegetic readers into an uncomfortable intimacy with an inebriated and sexually titillated monk.7
The dialectic of „Distanz und Einheit, Antithese gegen uns und Synthese in sich”8 that Georg Simmel believes is guaranteed by the aesthetic distance a frame can provide between an artwork and its beholder is impossible to achieve in Grillparzer’s text. „[J]ene inselhafte Stellung, deren das Kunstwerk der Außenwelt gegenüber bedarf“ can only be maintained by an intact frame:
Deshalb darf der Rahmen nirgends durch seine Konfiguration eine Lücke oder Brücke bieten, an der sozusagen die Welt hinein könnte oder an der es in die Welt hinaus könnte.9
Grillparzer’s text, through its cracked frame, undercuts any possibility of aesthetic distance between listener and storyteller, between reader and narrator; and a resolution, containment, and dialectical sublation of the epistemological crisis at the text’s heart is foreclosed.
Gender and Knowledge: You Can Look, But Can You Touch?
Early on in the framed narrative, the monk/Starschensky establishes a gendered view of the world. In his first encounter with Elga, Starschensky gets to listen, glimpse, and touch before he gets to look. On a trip to Warsaw – a city he has already identified to his listeners as the root of all evil1 – he is addressed during a dark night by an at first disembodied „weibliche Stimme“ that „zitternd and schluchzend“ asks him for help. Starschensky can barely discern her, but „Hals und Arme schimmerten weiß durch die Nacht.“ He follows her to a modest abode and then finds himself alone with her „auf dem dunklen Flur,“ where „[e]ine warme, weiche Hand ergreift die seinige“ (SW 3: 123). The „weibliche Stimme“ is now augmented with body parts – a white neck, white arms. The imagery hovers uncomfortably in the vicinity of necrophilic fetishism and eerily foreshadows both Starschensky’s murder of Elga and the erotic memories of her in which he continues to indulge after her death. He then pivots his story, though, and makes Elga come to life in the recollection of the touch of her „warme, weiche Hand.“ At this point in the framed narrative, Starschensky/the monk again breaks through the frame, interrupting the flow of his story to engage with his listeners. After this retardation of his increasingly erotically charged narrative, he continues:
Ein bis dahin unbekanntes Gefühl ergriff den Grafen bei der Berührung der warmen Hand. Sie erzählen ein morgenländisches Märchen von einem, dem plötzlich die Gabe verliehen ward, die Sprache der Vögel und andern Naturwesen zu verstehen, und der nun, im Schatten liegend am Bachesrand, mit freudigem Erstaunen rings um sich überall Wort und Sinn vernahm, wo er vorher nur Geräusch gehört und Laute. So erging es dem Grafen. Eine neue Welt stand vor ihm auf, und bebend folgte er seiner Führerin, die eine kleine Türe öffnete, und mit ihm in ein niederes, schwacherleuchtetes Zimmer trat. (SW 3: 124 [my italics])
Here, the touch of a woman’s hand produces an affect which in turn touches („ergriff“) Starschensky. The circuitous mediatedness of this description of Ergriffenheit is heightened by the interpolation of a reference to yet another narrative, a „morgenländisches Märchen.“ The exoticism inherent in the adjective „morgenländisch“ foreshadows the exoticized perception of the warm hand’s owner, whose appearance will be revealed in the first „Strahl des Lichtes“ (SW 3: 124) that will soon penetrate the „niederes, schwacherleuchtetes Zimmer.“ For now, the light-filled natural world of the „morgenländisches Märchen“ and the „neue Welt“ that opens up to Starschensky stand in odd contrast to the scene’s actual claustrophobic and dimly lit setting.2
The fact that the touch of Elga’s hand conjures in Starschensky/the monk associations to a fairy tale about the ability to understand the language of animals is no accident. Constance Classen links „the gendered nature of perception“ to „the scriptural account of the Fall“ and the hierarchy of the senses:
Touch, taste and smell were generally held to be the lower senses and thus were readily linked to the lower sex – women. Similar associations were made between touch, taste, and smell and the lower classes, the lower (non-European) races, and […] the lower species. […] [Women’s] association with the senses of touch, taste, and smell reinforced the cultural link between femininity and the body, for these senses were closely tied to intimate bodily experience. The distance senses of sight and hearing, by contrast, were associated with the perception of the external, masculine world.3
We might read the association of the orientalist world of the fairy tale with the touch of a woman’s hand as the lure of a feminine world that, under the veneer of the peaceful image of nature and exotic animals, is not open and enlightened, but beastly and base, narrow and dark like the room Starschensky enters with Elga. The idea that the codes of this feminine world are actually meaningful, that they have „Wort und Sinn,“ is literally a fairy tale. The reality is that a world associated with racial others and women has nothing to offer but „Geräusch“ und „Laute.“ The touch of a woman’s hand opens the door merely to carnal knowledge.
Creation and Procreation: Generating Doubt
As the framed narrative proceeds, it becomes ever more clear that there is no way to separate an epistemology of touch and its associations with nature, femininity, and physical intimacy from an epistemology of sight and its associations with culture, masculinity, and distance. For one, after Starschensky’s sensuous side is awakened by the touch of the girl’s hand, he finally gets to look at her face and her entire body, and he concludes that she is „schön in jedem Betracht.“ She has curly black hair, light blue eyes, and „üppig aufgeworfene[…], beinahe zu hochrote[…] Lippen“ (SW 3: 124). Now that he has had a look, Starschensky would clearly like to touch again. Elga pleads for help for her father, a nobleman who has fallen into poverty when his properties were seized as a result of the anti-patriotic political activities in which his two sons engaged.1 The sons, along with their co-conspirators, are banished. Elga’s appeal to Starschensky’s „ritterliche[n] Instinkt”2 is successful. Starschensky uses his wealth and his influence to restore