The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel: Poetics of the Brain (Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine) 3030828158, 9783030828158

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel Poetics of the Brain

Sonja Boos

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Jessica Howell Department of English Texas A&M University College Station, TX, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial board Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Oxford, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613

Sonja Boos

The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel Poetics of the Brain

Sonja Boos Department of German and Scandinavian University of Oregon Eugene, OR, USA

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-030-82815-8    ISBN 978-3-030-82816-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Nastasic / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Dora, who saved me For Britton, who anchored my soul And Colette, who completed us The members of the faculty in German and Scandinavian at the University of Oregon grieve for their colleague and friend Sonja Boos, who succumbed to cancer just as this book was being readied for press. She was forty-eight. Her courage and calm in the face of her illness gave us strength as we watched its advance. We hold her memory dear, just as we cherish the friendship of her husband, Britton, and two daughters, Dora and Colette.

Preface

A classic nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, Adalbert Stifter’s bourgeois realist novel Indian Summer (Der Nachsommer, 1857) depicts the process of the main character Heinrich Drendorf’s maturation, first in his father’s regimented household and subsequently under the tutelage of the enigmatic Freiherr von Risach, who becomes a mentor to Heinrich.1 Von Risach’s almost fairy-tale-like residence, the so-called Rosenhaus, is the center of a methodically ordered world devoted to science, artisan crafts, and gardening, among other things. The master of the house imposes an unyielding hierarchical and serial order to his sophisticated collections, making his estate the object of scrupulous museal preservation. Heinrich is attracted to von Risach and his estate, for he senses a unity between the man and his dwelling, an integrity and harmony that derives from his mentor’s targeted search and acquisition of unique objects that form a greater appreciation and deeper understanding when synergistically combined with other similar items. Heinrich is deeply impressed by both the ideological and economical value of von Risach’s possessions. But as the reader follows Heinrich, whom von Risach escorts from one room to another, pontificating on the artful inlay of yet another cabinet, she may begin to wonder why and if the lengthy descriptions of refined objects and exotic plants are poetically warranted. Where do we draw the line between 1  Adalbert Stifter, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 10 vols., ed. Wolfgang Frühwald and Alfred Doppler (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1982), Vol. 4. “Der Nachsommer.” Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer, trans. Wendell W.  Frye (New York: P. Lang, 1985).

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mimetic representation, realistic verisimilitude, and poetic excess? And how does this line affect how we perceive the distinction between collecting—either for art’s sake, or as a uniquely modern way of interacting with material culture—and pathological hoarding?2 This is hardly a problem of diagnostic reasoning. To claim that Stifter suffered from collector’s mania (Sammelsucht) would mean to mistake the work of art for some alleged causes that brought it to existence. While critics agree that there is a tension in Stifter’s prose between a façade of emotional restraint and moderation that barely conceals an underlying darker passion or simmering obsession, there is little purpose in diagnosing von Risach as if he were a real person.3 Although a strain of manic behavior is present in Indian Summer and other works by Stifter on the level of its characters’ behaviors, any such attempt would fallaciously use a medical register of knowledge to draw conclusions about fictional bodies. Rather, the question of hoarding is significant with respect to poetic form, as it determines the organization and function of the novel’s narrative elements. Stifter’s Indian Summer creatively conveys the condition of obsessive collecting through its narrative structure, by thematically and textually replacing action with stasis, desire with order, and nature with ritual. While the novel makes a pathological form of collecting legible at the level of storytelling, the scientific community of Stifter’s era had yet to recognize it as a peculiar form of psychopathology. This is not to deny that collector’s mania was already on the horizon as an object of scientific study at the time and that it in fact existed all along, independently of its discovery and codification.4 One commentator of the period thus noted a new surge of medical interest in how an “innocent and useful passion” (“unschuldige und nützliche Liebhaberei”) for objects can transform into a pathological form of “collection addiction, collection passion, collection 2  Emile Durkheim, Suicide, ed. George Simpson, trans. John A.  Spaulding and George Simpson (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1951), 247–249. 3  See on this Claudia Öhlschläger, “Ethik Kleiner Dinge. Adalbert Stifter, Francis Ponge, W.G. Sebald,” Weimarer Beiträge 62.3 (2016): 325–345. Other critics who have associated Stifter’s idiosyncratic style with obsession, mania, and compulsive inclinations include Georg Kaiser, Elizabeth Strowick, Helena Ragg-Kirkby, and Theodor W.  Adorno, who notes: “Stifter erlag dieser Obsession des Sammelns, die spätestens seit den Feldblumen ein poetologisches Prinzip seiner Texte bildete, mit Bewusstsein.” Theodor W.  Adorno, “Über epische Naivität,” Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1981), 37. 4  See on this Daniel Lord Smail, “Neurohistory in Action: Hoarding and the Human Past,” Isis 105, 1 (2014): 101.

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mania” (“Sammelsucht, Sammelleidenschaft, Sammelwuth”).5 Yet it will take decades for psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Erich Fromm (1900–1980) to suggest an etiology of what is today defined as hoarding disorder.6 Through its manic description of tedious descriptive detail, Stifter’s novel gives concrete narrative shape and visible form to a medical phenomenon that was not yet articulated scientifically. Prefiguring a scientific discovery even without fully understanding it, Indian Summer renders the disorder visible and knowable to the reader. No less notably, the novel presciently detaches the question of hoarding from the question of value and meaning. Risach’s things aren’t superfluous—at least not to him. Indian Summer knows that value must be understood through the eyes of the hoarder. The novel foreshadows our present-day understanding that obsessive collecting is less about acquisition than it is about filling emptiness—not the existential emptiness of a life without meaning that has been evoked by other commentators, but more concretely and more precisely: the emptiness of a life lived in solitude.7 As the “doctor” advises Tiburius, the Waldsteig’s protagonist, who is unambiguously portrayed as a compulsive hoarder: “You must marry, but before that you must go to a spa and find your wife.”8 This insight into the link between loneliness and hoarding has only recently reached the scientific community. It is significant, then, that loneliness pervades the lives of all the main characters in Indian Summer: Heinrich as a young boy is ill-at-­ ease in society, his father is a solitary figure, Roland—the artist—has 5  K.  Back, “Ansprache,” Organ für Autographensammler und Autographenhändler 1, 2 (1859): 18. 6  The DSM-5 defines hoarding disorder as “persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value.” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM–5 (Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Association, 2013). In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud conceptualized hoarding behaviors as part of an anal-retentive personality that was characterized as miserly and overcontrolling of one’s environment. Sigmund Freud, “Character and Anal Eroticism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), Vol. 9: “Jensens ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works (1906–1908),” 169–175. Erich Fromm defined hoarding orientation as a “nonproductive character type” marked by compulsive cleanliness and an obsessive need to save material possessions and emotional experiences. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), 65–67. 7  See Brigid Haines, Dialogue and Narrative Design in the Works of Adalbert Stifter (London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1991), 4. 8  Adalbert Stifter, Brigitta, with Abdias, Limestone, and The Forest Path, trans. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (London: Angel Books, 1990), 157.

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withdrawn from worldly society, and von Risach lives in relative seclusion.9 And this knowledge is not restricted to this particular novel either. As Margaret Gump notes, Risach’s isolation “recalls the loneliness of Georg in Der Waldgänger, of Jodok in Die Narrenburg, or Hugo in Das alte Siegel, of the uncle in Der Hagestolz. All the people in these stories are lonely men, whom fate, at the very best, grants a brief respite from their isolation.”10 In Stifter’s narratives, collecting and hoarding figure as compensatory behaviors that are overcome through interpersonal relationships. That Stifter’s writings firmly establish the link between the obsessive need for hoarding and the hoarder’s lack of personal contact and close relationships—and that they do so one and a half centuries before modern-­ era neuroscience reaches the same tentative conclusion—provided the initial rationale for this book.11 Other examples for German-language novels anticipating neuroscientific writings were not hard to come by. The literary works included in this study are not anomalies but are representative of, and typical for, the authors and their epochs. In the case of Stifter and Kafka, neurological problems (hoarding and body schema disorder) can be traced across many of the authors’ works. A degree of obsession with symmetry is present in each of Keller’s novellas. A different approach would be to map a neurological problem across the writings of a range of different authors. For instance, the chapter on memory in Fontane could be productively expanded by including the novelists who are at the center of Frauke Berndt’s study of anamnesis in Moritz, Keller, and Raabe.12 Figures of the double could be mapped across the works of Hoffmann, Storm, and Kleist, in addition to Jean Paul. Taken as a whole, the case 9  See on this Christine Oertel Sjogren, “Isolation and Death in Stifter’s Nachsommer,” PMLA 80, 3 (1965): 254–258. 10  Margaret Gump, Adalbert Stifter (Woodbridge, CT: Twayne Publishers, 1974), 68. 11  A 2012 neuroscientific study investigating the neural basis of hoarding disorder suggests that hoarders’ decisions about possessions are hampered by abnormal activity in brain regions used to identify the emotional significance of things. A 2018 follow-up study assigns great significance to the emotional attachment that individuals place on possessions as a way of compensating for a lack of emotional warmth experienced in their early years: “Recollections about the lack of emotional warmth experienced by participants with Hoarding Disorder distinguished them from those with anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and healthy participants.” https://neurosciencenews.com/compulsive-hoarding-disorder-9038/ 12  Frauke Berndt, Anamnesis. Studien zur Topik der Erinnerung in der erzählenden Literatur zwischen 1800 und 1900 (Moritz, Keller, Raabe) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999).

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studies serve to illustrate particular perspectives that are informed by a rather small proportion of the large body of literature available. They offer an entry into a topic that may evolve into a useful conceptual framework for a new theory of the German novel. At the very least, this study is intended to provide insight and inspiration to other scholars interested in the historical evolution of the form of the novel against the backdrop of neuroscientific discovery, and more broadly, those working to delineate the rich and complex history of literature’s entwinement with science and the production of medical knowledge. Eugene, OR, USA

Sonja Boos

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support from Oberlin College’s Department of German Studies and from the University of Oregon’s Department of German and Scandinavian, the Oregon Humanities Center (OHC), the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), and the Office of the Provost. Thanks to the members of the nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures research interest group: Nina Amstutz, Mayra Bottaro, Cory Browning, and Mai-Lin Cheng. Thank you also to Kenneth Calhoon, Jocelyn Holland, Sarah Pourciau, and Tobias Wilke for providing valuable feedback in the process.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 Neuroscience   7 Chapter Outline  14 2 Dissecting the Subject: Brain Localization in The Nightwatches of Bonaventura 21 Beginnings  24 The Organ of the Soul  26 Craniology  37 3 Fiction’s Scientific Double: Hallucinations in Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs 47 Phantasms  50 Case Histories  58 The Figure of the Double  62 Unthought  67 4 A Tale from the Right Hemisphere: Amusia and Aphasia in Franz Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician 71 Amusia  73 Absolute Music  83 Realism  89 Cerebral Hemispheres  95

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Contents

5 Symmetry as Narrative Structure: OCD in Gottfried Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet101 Monomania 105 An Obsessive Idea 110 Symmetry 116 Pedophilia 122 6 Writing Against Forgetting: Korsakoff’s Syndrome in Theodor Fontane’s On Tangled Paths129 Memory Recuperation 130 Amnesia 135 Pseudo-reminiscences 143 Condensation 150 7 Allegory, Modernity, Learning to See: Cytoarchitectonics in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge157 Scientizing Medicine 164 Autopsy of the Soul 169 Brain Ablation 176 8 Reading Gestures: Body Schema Disorder and Schizophrenia in Franz Kafka’s Prose183 The Body Schema 189 Animals 195 Humans 202 Schizophrenia 208 Afterword213 Bibliography219 Index245

List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2

Korbinian Brodmann (left) working at the Oscar Vogt Institute, Berlin. Photograph. Korbinian-Brodmann-Museum Hohenfels 178 Korbinian Brodmann, Medial Surface of the Right Hemisphere [possibly from a Flying Fox (Pterobus Edwardsi)], Drawing. Korbinian-Brodmann-Museum Hohenfels 179

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This study attempts to revise the critical tradition that has long viewed nineteenth-century German narrative as symptomatic of an “inward turn” aligned with the psychological focus of Romanticism. This tradition provides the foil against which Poetics of the Brain seeks to reinterpret key works of fiction with respect to the nascent discipline of neuroscience. In pairing works by Klingemann, Jean Paul, Grillparzer, Keller, Fontane, Rilke, and Kafka with contemporary writings on the nervous system and cognitive function, the study not only investigates the specific cultural conditions that enabled neuroscience to emerge within the German-­ speaking world but also speculates as to the role that literature might have played in its emergence. The idea that the Romantics discovered the unconscious is a common trope in literary criticism.1 A modern theory of the psyche is broadly presumed to have emerged at the threshold of the nineteenth century in Germany. It was the brainchild of the post-Kantian philosopher F. W. J. Schelling and the Romantic poets Friedrich Schlegel, J. W. Ritter, and Novalis, according to literary theorists, who unearthed the “psyche”

1  See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 199–204.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_1

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or “soul” (Seele) as the mind’s inner medium.2 The Romantics’ fascination with the foreign and the exotic animated a slew of experimental investigations that shed light on the mind’s interior processes.3 Literary theorists concede that this kind of secular research into the self was not without precedent. It carried on a tradition of inwardness that was already a hallmark of the Bildungsroman as it emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century. The classic German genre was, after all, plotted with the help of the new psychologies, such as Karl Philipp Moritz’ Magazine for Empirical Psychology (Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde) and Johann Christian Reil and Johann Christoph Hoffbauer’s Contributions to the Advancement of Mental Therapeutics (Beyträge zur Beförderung einer Curmethode auf psychischem Wege). Neither did this “inward turn of narrative” end with the Romantic period.4 It found its logical continuation in the distinctive internalization of the Poetic Realist novel whose major representatives, Theodor Storm, Gottfried Keller, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Wilhelm Raabe, and Theodor Fontane, relegated the self to an idealized inner landscape that would take precedence over concrete and material reality. The intensified inwardness of the Enlightenment’s psychological novel and the aestheticizing solipsism of the Romantics became the heritage of German realism. According to this familiar account, poetic inwardness, in its three distinct literary-historical iterations, reveals a tendency toward withdrawal that is uniquely German in its main characteristic. More than its European counterparts, the German novel is inherently engrossed with the personal and interior life of a highly scrutinized psychological subject. Poetics of the Brain revises this dominant narrative about the distinctive psychological inwardness and introspective depth of the German novel by reinterpreting the novel’s development from the perspective of the nascent discipline of neuroscience rather than psychology. Neuroscience is the scientific study of the brain and the nervous system and their impact on behavior and cognitive function. As was the case with psychology and psychiatry, its emergence was contemporary with the rise of the German novel. This was a new science that, just as psychology and psychiatry, 2  See Matt Ffytche, The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth the Modern Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 3  J. C. Reil’s coinage of psychotherapie, Carl Moritz’ Magazine for Empirical Psychology and many other similar initiatives. 4  Erich Kahler, The Inward Turn of Narrative, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958).

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had yet to earn the faith and respect of the medical community. This study poses the question: How did this rapidly evolving field emerge in the context of nineteenth-century cultural practices and what were the conditions for its emergence in the German-speaking world specifically? Where did neuroscience begin and how did it broaden in scope? And most crucially, to what degree did it owe its existence to literature? Various studies acknowledge that literary and medico-scientific practices have long been mutually constitutive. But neuroscience is an inherently materialist science that entails an overall shift of focus from the mind (or psyche, or soul) to the material brain as the processor of experience. If German literature is as preoccupied with the brain and the nervous system as it is with the mind’s psychological functions, then our historiography of the novel needs radical revision. Placed within the paradigmatic realm of neuroscience, German novels seem to initiate less an inward journey that leads to the realization of radical subjectivity than a making visible, a literal bringing to the surface of the organic basis of cognition and behavior. Beyond psychologizing the body, this literature reads the body in the fullness of its physicality, as the irreducible site of material practice. It epitomizes a literary tradition that conceives of the relationship between fiction and the body as one that is determined not by the transformation of material into ideas, but by embodied fictional imagination, a literary tradition that, as Peter Boxell suggests, “sees the novel as the art form that is the most attentive to the material weight of the body, rather than that in which the body tends to disappear.”5 How does a novel describe the experience of living inside a body and how does it represent the cerebral functions that organize our experience? How does a narrative depict the idiosyncratic processes of cognition and behavior as facilitated by the human nervous system? What exactly does literature know about brain anatomy? Poetics of the Brain argues that German novels of the nineteenth century render nonliterary and specifically neuroscientific knowledge through literary form by way of structurally embodying the forms it is ostensibly describing. In some cases, certain aspects of brain function and, no less importantly, malfunction, are presented allegorically through narrative or rhetorical features. For instance, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura (Die Nachtwachen des Bonaventura, 1804) imitates and exposes as flawed modularistic views of the brain, a critique that is conveyed through the work’s episodic structure. Franz 5

 Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 77.

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Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician (Der arme Spielmann, 1848) pushes back against emerging theories of hemispheric lateralization through conspicuous shifts in narrative perspective. Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910) issues a critique of neuroanatomy and the practice of brain ablation through the employment of the rhetorical device of allegory. In other examples, it is the malfunctioning of the brain that is embodied through idiosyncratic forms of textual dysfunction. Gottfried Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet (Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, 1856/76) conveys the priority of intrusive thoughts in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) through the textual device of symmetry, while Theodor Fontane’s On Tangled Paths (Irrungen, Wirrungen, 1887/1888) self-referentially problematizes the neurological basis of long- and short-term memory loss by juxtaposing two complementary forms of forgetting. The following discussion is not limited to an analysis of literary representations of proto-neuroscientific themes or motives. Going beyond a mere topical treatment of scientific subjects in literary narratives, Poetics of the Brain demonstrates that the evolution of the German novel’s textual norms and conventions correlates with the formation of a neuroscientific discourse within the framework of scientific thought. The study takes on the largely unexplored task of explaining how the German novel’s poetic properties anticipated, assisted, intensified, and disrupted the medical articulation of neuroscientific concepts. It argues that the literary depictions of cerebral function in a set of literary works often predate their articulation within the scientific field of neuroscience. With the exception of The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, the novels and novellas discussed in this study foreshadow, rather than reflect, major breakthroughs in the scientific understanding of brain function and development. They formulate various kinds of brain pathologies avant la lettre, thereby questioning the dichotomous categories through which we characterize scientific versus humanistic inquiry, empirical reasoning versus artistic practice, or speculative versus experimental methods. Poetics of the Brain conceives of the relationship between literature and neuroscience as a matter less of intellectual or creative influence than of convergence, which is more subtle and complex. Rather than distinguishing between theory and practice, or science and literature, this study takes these divergent forms of intellectual engagement to be interconnected. Their relationship is best described as a complex system of transferences resembling what Gilles Deleuze once defined with respect to the

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interaction between art and theory as “a system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical.”6 The premise of convergence implies that literature can independently develop theoretical knowledge and that it can arrive at similar conclusions as early modern neuroscience, making these conclusions visible through narrative structure and form. It suggests that the textual logic of literature plays a significant role in the scientific study of thinking, creating art, and acting in life. Authors as diverse as Theodor Fontane, Franz Grillparzer, Franz Kafka, Gottfried Keller, August Klingemann, Jean Paul, and Rainer Maria Rilke not only thematized the mysteries of cognition, imagination, and memory in their narrative prose, but effectively anticipated neuroscientific insights by employing them as structuring models. Crucially, the literary production of medico-scientific knowledge is not restricted to the works of authors who received medical training and whose work emerged from observations made in clinical practice.7 Instead of focusing on the many doctor-writers in the German tradition—Georg Büchner, Arthur Schnitzler, Alfred Döblin, and Gottfried Benn prominent among them—this study highlights authors whose works incorporate an intuitive and implicit understanding of neuroscientific knowledge, one that is not dependent on an explicit one-way knowledge transfer from authoritative sources. What these lay examples reveal is that from its earliest beginnings, neuroscience is culturally embedded in the historical context in which it is situated. Its expertise infiltrates and draws from all levels of society and myriad areas of knowledge. It follows that Poetics of the Brain reverses the expectation of cause and effect underlying the current interdisciplinary fusion between cognitive science and literary studies.8 Cognitive literary studies have produced a wealth of new works theorizing the cognitive-evolutionary aspects of

6  Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,” Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), 206. 7   See Michael Worbs, Nervenkunst. Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1983). 8  While the school of “cognitive poetics” purportedly “account[s] for the relationship between the structure of literary texts and their perceived effects,” it still applies cognitive linguistics and psychology to literary texts, rather than vice versa. Reuven Tsur, Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 1.

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reading fiction.9 For instance, they have argued that fiction prompts the reader to get into the minds of characters and participate in a process of perspective formation. Contemporary discussions of Theory of Mind (ToM) in particular have helped delineate the strategies by which we construe normative narratives, questioning, for instance, how the mind allows us to attribute mental states to literary characters.10 This has led to an improved understanding of the material workings of the brain during the reading process. For instance, Emily Troscianko has dedicated a book-­ length study to the question of how, in Kafka’s prose, cognition serves as the necessary mediator between the fictional worlds made available to the reader on the one hand, and the operations in his or her embodied mind on the other.11 Fritz Breithaupt, in his reading of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (Effie Briest, 1894/95), has identified the reader’s “sadistic empathy” with a suffering character as a key motivation for reading literature.12 According to Breithaupt, this kind of paradoxically advocative and exploitative empathy is the structural effect of an “implicated reader” who seeks to prolong that which “enables his or her emotional involvement” and “preserves his presence” in the novel.13 Ralph Müller, finally, takes a two-­ pronged approach to explaining the emotional effects of metaphors in Rilke’s thing-poems (Dinggedichte). While he borrows cognitive poetics’ method of reconstructing the emotional experiences afforded by metaphors, he nevertheless pays close attention to the embeddedness of language in discursive and generic traditions.14 By looking at literature as an object of knowledge and by appealing to the cognitive and neurological processes and mechanisms underlying affective reading, these interdisciplinary studies have provided new and insightful answers to the question of how literary texts establish meaning.

9  The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 10  Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 11  Emily Troscianko, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (New York: Routledge, 2014), 2. 12   Fritz Breithaupt, “Empathic Sadism: How Readers Get Implicated,” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Literary Studies, 440–459. 13  Ibid., 453–454. 14  Ralph Müller, “Kognitive Poetik und Korpusstilistik. Ein Zugang zur Metaphorik bei Rainer Maria Rilke,” Literatur und Kognition: Kognitive Poetik, ed. Martin Huber and Simone Winko (Paderborn: Mentis, 2009), 203–217.

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Poetics of the Brain represents a significant shift in the meaning and focus of cognitive approaches to literary studies. Instead of applying contemporary developments in cognitive science to literary texts, it acknowledges the need for work that examines the conceptual and practical dimensions of literary knowledge within the context of the historical interaction between neuroscience and nineteenth-century prose literature. Poetics of the Brain considers as crucial the under-examined historical links between the development of brain research and neurology into the distinct academic discipline of neuroscience and the rise and transformation of the modern novel. It argues that the form of the novel is particularly suited to representing and enacting the mechanisms and architecture of the human brain. Nineteenth-century novels capture the emergent scientific fascination with the mysteries of cerebral function in the process of artistic production. This has great implications for the future of brain research as a scientific endeavor. The literary construction of cerebral and cognitive functions and their figural representation within the literary text itself invests science with metaphorical meaning. By amplifying and interrogating scientific frames of reference, literature provides new horizons of meaning in the production of medical knowledge.

Neuroscience Today it is virtually impossible to read about human experience and behavior in a context that would fail to invoke its cognitive underpinnings and neuronal foundations. In recent years, the number of research reports presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience has exploded. Many of these new findings make their way into the popular press where we learn about the actual and hypothetical possibilities suggested by new brain and mind technologies. An expanding frontier of investigation thus focuses on brain-scanning techniques that would use the brain as a portal to thought, thereby enabling practices of “mind-reading” or even “mind uploading.”15 It is also difficult to ignore new research that debunks free will as an illusion and as a result casts doubt on our conceptual framework 15  See Sharon Darwish, “Will neuroscientists ever be able to read our minds?” Guardian, April 9, 2015, accessed April  7, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/science/occamscorner/2015/apr/09/will-neuroscientists-ever-be-able-to-read-our-minds, and Amy Harmon, “The Neuroscience of Immortality. Mileposts on a Long and Uncharted Road,” New York Times, September 12, 2015, accessed April 7, 2021, http://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2015/09/03/us/13immortality-explainer.html

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for understanding selfhood and subjectivity.16 This is indeed the “era of the brain supremacy,” as Kathleen Taylor defines our epoch, “in which we are likely to gain precision control—and perhaps remote and non-invasive control—of the human brain, and thus of human minds.”17 The current materialist paradigm of neuroscience, according to which all mental processes are effects physically generated or organically conditioned by the nervous system, finds its historical precedent in the proto-­ neuroscientific mindset of the nineteenth century. Inaugurated by the work of Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) at the turn of the eighteenth century, the emerging field of neuroscience was characterized by the systematic attempt to correlate brain structure with sensory, motor, and cognitive function.18 Moving beyond mere morphological characterizations of the brain, Gall for the first time aimed for an analysis of its functional organization, and many European physiologists and anatomists followed his example.19 The logical end of this line of inquiry was the claim that the human mind was purely the result of bodily processes in the brain. It is hardly surprising that Gall’s work met with considerable opposition from political and religious authorities. As one commentator notes, “it was viewed as implying materialism and determinism and denying the unity of the mind (and soul) and the existence of free will.”20 The idea that the thinking thing inside us might be a material brain rather than an immaterial soul challenged the widely accepted Cartesian mind/body dualism positing the mind as a distinct, metaphysical entity. The first neuroscientists explained the central nervous system in terms of other disciplines because neuroscience was not yet recognized as a academic discipline in its own right. Neuroscience began when traditional, anatomically and physiologically oriented brain research broadened in 16  See, for instance, Eliezer J. Sternberg, My Brain Made Me Do it: The Rise of Neuroscience and the Threat to Moral Responsibility (New York: Prometheus Books, 2010). 17  Kathleen Taylor, The Brain Supremacy (blog). http://blog.oup.com/2012/11/thebrain-supremacy/. Accessed April 7, 2021. See also K. Taylor, The Brain Supremacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 18  According to Clarke and Jacyna, modern neuroscience was formed after 1800. Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 19  See Olaf Breidbach, “The Origin and Development of the Neurosciences,” Theory and Method in the Neurosciences, ed. Peter K.  Machamer et  al. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). 20  Charles G.  Gross, A Hole in the Head: More Tales in the History of Neuroscience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 94.

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scope and became more interdisciplinary, bringing psychology and biology together under the umbrella of a new discipline that would engage a range of discourses covering a gamut of subjects: neurology, psychiatry, psychology, neuroanatomy, and psychopathology. It is virtually impossible to overstate the impact of this new paradigm on the educated general populace of modern Europe.21 Popular reading materials were distributed widely to the reading public, announcing in sometimes quite sensationalist terms the epistemological and metaphysical consequences of this emerging field of research. Gall’s craniology thus indicated that “destiny lay in the shape of one’s skull,” while Samuel Thomas von Soemmering’s anatomical work on the cranial nerves announced the “discovery of the material seat of the soul.”22 By the mid-nineteenth century, a number of basic neuroscientific concepts still considered valid today had thus been established. Paul Broca’s (1824–1880) epochal discovery of the speech production center in the left frontal area of the brain led to the realization that the two cerebral hemispheres were not identical.23 Building on Luigi Galvani’s (1737–1798) discovery that nerves and muscles were electrically excitable, Eduard Hitzig (1838–1907) and Gustav Fritsch (1838–1927) demonstrated that the cerebral cortex responded to electrical stimulation and that cortical localization pertained to more than just speech.24 In psychopathology, the terms of the new materialist paradigm were set with Wilhelm Griesinger’s (1817–1868) proclamation that “mental disease is 21  See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) and The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 22  On the public debate that was incited by this discursive event see Friedrich Strack, “Soemmerings Seelenorgan und die deutschen Dichter,” Frankfurt aber ist der Nabel dieser Erde. Das Schicksal einer Generation der Goethezeit (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1983), 202. An 1805 article in the Europäische Aufseher thus mocks the idea that “the fate of every human is written on his forehead, in his neck, or on the vertebra, or behind the ears.” (translation mine) (“Das Schicksal jedes Menschen ist ihm an die Stirne, oder im Nacken, oder auf dem Wirbel, oder hinter die Ohren geschrieben.”) Quoted in Sigrid Fehler-Klein, Die Schädellehre Franz Joseph Galls in Literatur und Kritik des 19. Jahrhunderts. Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte einer medizinisch-biologisch begründeten Theorie der Physiognomie und Psychologie (Jena: Gustav Fischer Verlag, 1990), 23. 23  Paul Broca, “Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé; suivies d’une observation d’aphemie,” Bulletin de la Société Anatomique de Paris 6 (1861): 330–357. 24  Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig, “Über die elektrische Erregbarkeit des Großhirns,” Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medizin 37 (1870): 300–332. Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig, “On the Electrical Excitability of the Cerebrum,” Some Papers on the Cerebral Cortex, trans. and ed. G. von Bonin (Springfield, MA: Thomas, 1960), 73–96.

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brain disease” (“Geisteskrankheit ist Gehirnkrankheit”).25 While the history of clinical neuroscience is replete with attempts to explain the biological mechanisms underlying mental pathology, it was Griesinger’s work on the role of brain lesions in mental disease that was to determine the progress of German systematic psychiatry for the next forty years, regardless of the fact that no relationship had yet been established between brain pathology and mental disorder.26 The biological explanation of mental disorder became the prevailing neuroscientific paradigm of the nineteenth century. It was further advanced by the eminent German neurologist Oscar Vogt, who in the late 1890s declared that a thorough and comprehensive investigation of the brain’s anatomy and physiology would be one of the most important tasks of science in the approaching twentieth century.27 To Vogt’s mind, cerebral localization had provided repeated demonstrations that mental diseases and cognitive irregularities had their ultimate seat in the nervous system, which itself represented the apogee of organic evolution.28 The centrality of the nervous system became an accepted principle in physiological and medical discourse, culminating in the idea that disturbances of the mind and behavior were caused by focal brain pathology. Encouraged by a range of seminal discoveries in the pioneering field of neuroscience, physiologists and anatomists working in the nineteenth century had little difficulty distancing their logic of inquiry from the theological and metaphysical questions that had still constrained their predecessors’ search for truth. The academic elite and the general public were equally captivated by their successes, which further increased confidence in new experimental methods. At the same time, the form of the novel developed to represent the kinds of figurations of cognition and psychopathology that were being enthusiastically entertained by contemporary neuroscientists. Viewing the human mind as the function of a material entity, 25  Wilhelm Griesinger, Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten (Stuttgart: Krabbe, 1845). Wilhelm Griesinger, Mental Pathology and Therapeutics (New York: William Wood, 1882). Quoted after Katja Günther, Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 26  See Oxford Textbook of Psychopathology, ed. Paul H.  Blaney et  al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 23. 27  Fernando Vidal, “Brainhood, Anthropological Figure of Modernity,” History of the Human Sciences 22.1 (2009): 7. 28  See Anne Stiles (ed.), “Introduction,” Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–23.

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nineteenth-century neuroscientists treated the human subject as a fallible but ultimately predictable object of inquiry, while German novelists began to explore the fluidity of subjectivity at the expense of constructing a traditional ethical subject. Physiological and subjective pathology became not only the genre’s thematic focus but also its form, while a skeptical attitude toward the presumption of a human subject began to structure the novel itself. Authors ranging from Klingemann to Kafka explored individual subjectivity in its multiple variants and permutations, but always with an eye on its material basis. It is thus both in response to and as a shaper of these new scientific perspectives that nineteenth-century novels become ever more fascinated with representing and capturing the phenomena of madness and genius, pathology and sanity, criminality and normality, as well as the fluidity of the boundaries between these categories.29 While the development of the modern novel mirrors the upsurge of a scientific interest in the brain, it would be wrong to view the literary preoccupation with cerebral (dys)function as a mere reactive impulse to the latest intellectual stimulus from the scientific world. This is not to deny that some of the most urgent discoveries in the brain sciences of the era may have captivated the imagination of nineteenth-century German novelists, illuminating in the process a number of literary theoretical questions that have been notoriously tricky for literary theorists to tackle: What is memory, and how does it correlate with other cognitive capacities? How do imagination and creativity conspire to define temporal and spatial perception? And how does hemispheric lateralization determine how we experience reality? These questions became not only the novel’s thematic focus but also came to determine its form, while a skeptical attitude toward the presumption of a human subject began to structure the novel itself. In that sense, the German novel also fulfills the function of preserving a level of mystery and hermeneutic ambiguity in a world obsessed with the materialism of natural science. Literature stimulates critical reflection even when it meets scientific innovation with suspicion and anxiety or when it capitulates to the insight that the human mind can never be fully captured.

29  On the significance of psychology in modernist literature, see Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 6–7. See also Richard T.  Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 273–274.

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The textual and aesthetic experimentations associated with Romantic, Poetic Realist, and high modernist German prose literature represent symptomatic responses to experimental investigations conducted by contemporary neuroscientists and psychopathologists in the long nineteenth century. Symptomatic because there are elements in these novels that configure and construe unspoken scientific insight as symbolic of something that remains concealed, thereby pointing to a latent content the text itself cannot fully articulate. Indeed, brain research was just one of many scientific topics that were problematized everywhere in nineteenth- and early-­ twentieth-­century literature, which in this context fulfilled its function as the all-encompassing foundational meta-discourse in which the Foucauldian epistemes of “rational” argument and “factual” scientific discourses were embedded, and so could be reflected upon. Science, and in particular neuroscience—a new discipline that had yet to come into being and legitimize itself in the course of the nineteenth century—was (and still is) subject to critique in literature. Whether explicitly or implicitly, literature competes for authority with the scientific discourses it anticipates, inserting itself in the discussion of neurological phenomena and cerebral functions. It is a common trope in Western intellectual history to claim that science is the authoritative discourse toward the less certain status of literature. Science informs literature, while literature merely reflects scientific trends without significantly altering them. On the other end of the academic spectrum, the opposite claim has received sustained attention: Literature reveals scientific knowledge we already have but do not know we possess. It expands our humanistic self-understanding and alters the cultural values attached to the scope and language of scientific inquiry. It takes on a conceptual or even practical role in answering and raising scientific questions. Poetics of the Brain contends that in the long nineteenth century, knowledge about the human brain emerged at the margins or even outside of the disciplinary boundaries demarcating what counted (and arguably still counts) as the legitimate domains of science’s “privileged” way of knowing. Following Michel Foucault, it understands knowledge as a discursive formation that comprises a heterogeneous group of textual and non-textual, literary and quotidian, technical and apocryphal practices through which meaning is continually negotiated in relation to

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structures of (political) power, (academic) authority, and (literary) culture.30 German novelists often take the strong stance of participants rather than observers, especially in the long nineteenth century when scientific discoveries circulated widely and beyond specialized professional circles.31 It would be wrong to conceive of literature as a secondary response to science, a realm that merely popularizes or critiques neuroscientific inquiry, instead of a discourse that is constitutive of knowledge itself. This insight applies as much to contemporary forms of cultural expression as it does to nineteenth-century literature. As Barbara Stafford notes, visual and sensory arts are constitutive, not merely illustrative of basic mental operations such as intuiting, inferring, associating, hallucinating, feeling arousal, and categorizing. … The role of culture is not just to stand outside, critiquing science, nor is science’s position external and acting on culture, rather we are discovering that at the most profound levels our separate investigations being to a joint project. … Findings from neuroscience are putting pressure on venerable questions long held to be the property of cultural historians of every stripe: the nature of the subject and intersubjective relationships, mimesis, affect, the varieties of illusion, automaticity versus will, and the many shapes of uncertainty.32

As a study of the relations between the humanities and the natural sciences, Poetics of the Brain demonstrates that in the nineteenth century,

30  Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Routledge, 1989). 31  See Anne Stiles, who writes: “A series of neurological experiments had a profound impact on late-Victorian Gothic novels … in turn, these novels often influenced the direction of future neurological research. This symbiotic relationship extends to matters of form and content. Neurologists and authors shared a fascination for boundaries and their transgressions, especially the evanescent mind–body divide and the limits of human free will. Explains the surprising numbers of neurological references in the novels … novelists did not simply accept but criticized the linear perspective of neurological science, and its rigid biological determinism.” Anne Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. See also Louise Henson et al., Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (London: Routledge, 2004). 32  Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2.

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culture and knowledge remained entangled with one another and were never split into “two cultures.”33

Chapter Outline Poetics of the Brain is structured in three parts, which deal with Romantic, Poetic Realist, and modernist German novels (as well as novellas and a few short stories), respectively. In each chapter, a literary work is paired with a neuroscientific discovery, usually one that occurred simultaneously but independently, sometimes in separate corners of the German-speaking world and beyond. When the Russian doctor Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff first provided an etiological description of what came to be called Korsakoff’s syndrome in 1887, Berlin-based novelist Theodor Fontane was working on final revisions of On Tangled Paths, a novella that firmly establishes the link between memory loss and alcoholism in Prussian society. And when Czech psychiatrist Arnold Pick first diagnosed body schema disorder in 1908, Franz Kafka published his first in a long line of prose fictions that vividly illustrate the kinds of body schema alterations that often accompany ego regressions. There is also the case of a literary author directly citing and effectively ridiculing the neuroscientific literature of his era. August Klingemann’s The Nightwatches of Bonaventura lampoons Viennese craniologist Franz Joseph Gall and Samuel Thomas von Soemmering’s 1796 treatise On the Organ of the Soul. But even if some literary texts make explicit references to neuroscientific research, the objective of Poetics of the Brain is not to trace the actual reception of neuroscientific literature by literary authors or vice versa, or to draw conclusions about who influenced whom and what direct impact one discursive actor has had on another through a set of textual interventions or even biographical interactions. Instead, this study takes a series of representative case studies to map more broadly how poetic practices have been intrinsic to the production of neuroscientific knowledge. The hope is that this will pave the way for a fuller analysis of the historical correlation of literature and neuroscience in and beyond the nineteenth century. The selected seven case studies highlight specificity as well as the applicability to a wide range of materials, as they take up demonstrable—textual and conceptual—correspondences between scientific writings and fictional 33  See John G. Fitch, The Poetry of Knowledge and the ‘Two Cultures’ (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2018).

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texts to show that science and literature are indeed “interdependent fields.”34 While the case studies do not provide literary analyses of scientific writings, they will attend to specific institutional policies and practices within the medical field and, whenever appropriate, inquire into the question of how the scientific community refines its criteria, asserts its credibility, and counters the contingencies of scientific investigation. This will help illuminate how and why the field of neuroscience was able to emerge as a dominant medico-scientific discipline in the course of the nineteenth century. Taking its cue from an ironic reference to Samuel Thomas von Soemmering and Franz Joseph Gall in Klingemann’s The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, Chap. 2 looks at the theory and practice of brain localization and its implications not just for the birth of modern neurosciences but also for the Romantic novel’s idiosyncratic formal organization. Conjuring chance rather than historical or moral purpose, the episodic form of the Nightwatches illustrates the sporadic, non-processual view of human cognition and behavior that lies at the center of Gall’s craniological map of the brain, with its division of various cerebral functions into specialized domain-specific modules. The chapter also argues that the novel’s protagonist both symbolizes and deconstructs Soemmering’s notion of an “organ” of the soul. In his unstable and volatile state, “Kreuzgang” uniquely embodies the nervous impulses that according to Soemmering pass into the central nervous system in the form of movement. In Chap. 3, a comparison of the structural parallels between Nicolai’s rationalist inductive and Esquirol’s materialist theories of hallucinations shows that hallucinations in the nineteenth century figure as a battleground of scientific events and cultural forces, of empirical facts and confabulated stories. This is because hallucinations are understood as both material mental representations of nonexistent phenomena and, paradoxically, verifiable symptoms of delusional insanity. The chapter explores how Esquirol’s work on hallucinations allowed the genre of the case study to take hold within the field of neurology and become an invaluable tool in the medicalization of imagination and fantasy. The purpose of this inquiry is to trace the process by which hallucinations ceased to be the other of science and instead became its literary counterpart. The second part of the chapter shows that the inflationary use of the figure of the double in the 34  James J. Bono, “Making Knowledge: History, Literature, and the Poetics of Science,” Isis 101, 3 (2010): 556.

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work of Jean Paul testifies to this muddling of the distinction between factual and fictional writing, speculative philosophy, scientific reasoning, and literary imagination. At the same time, Jean Paul’s eccentric and sprawling novels emerge as a powerful response to science’s disciplining of literature’s otherness and a veritable explosion of scientific knowledge. The second part of the book continues to explore how the figuration of modern empirical knowledge is intertwined with questions of literary modes and narrative structures. Specifically, it locates objects of neuroscientific knowledge within the formal and generic conventions of a set of novels and novellas by three German Poetic Realists: Franz Grillparzer, Gottfried Keller, and Theodor Fontane. Chapter 4 analyses Grillparzer’s novella The Poor Musician through the lens of the medical case study, a genre of prose narrative that emerged contemporaneously with the literature of Poetic Realism. Both narrative modes assert an authoritative position by virtue of providing an accurate representation of reality, thereby projecting a very nineteenth-century way of looking at the empirical world. The chapter argues that Grillparzer’s novella participates in the formation of a neurological discourse on the status of music processing in the brain, while also reflecting on the conditions of possibility for neuroscience and literary texts to work together. Staging the emergence of competing cognitive models for music processing through the insertion of a diegetic narrative act and frequent shifts in narrative focalization, the novella anticipates contemporary neurological debates on the links between aphasia and amusia, and in particular August Knoblauch’s definition of tone-deafness and note-blindness. Moreover, the novella’s juxtaposition of different narrative planes provides a critical commentary on the two functional modes of hemispheric activity scientists first began to notice in the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 4 submits that the hemispheric lateralization of music and language as it is performed in the novella’s narrative structure also has implications for the novel of Poetic Realism, a literary articulation that is centrally concerned with the nature of knowledge itself. Chapter 5 continues the discussion of literature as a source of scientific knowledge, but also as a critique of the historical contingencies of medical experimentation. A close reading of Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet demonstrates that the novella not only challenges Esquirol’s explanation of monomania but effectively anticipates pioneering research on obsessive-­ compulsive disorder conducted by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Wilhelm Griesinger, and Carl Westphal in Austria and Germany. This is because

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Keller’s novella is organized according to rigid symmetrical patterns and yet falls apart into two distinct parts, suggesting that it is structured by an obsessive idea that results in a pathological obsession with symmetry. At the same time, A Village Romeo and Juliet is actively engaged in negotiating the terms and conditions of its own coming-into-being and survival as literature in an age that was motivated by the desire to advance public morality through scientific discovery. The chapter sheds light on the textual strategies by which the novella generates the appearance of normalcy and propriety, while at the same time testing the public’s readiness to assimilate and accept the wider applications of experimental psychopathology. If the bifurcated structure of Keller’s novella paradoxically reinforces the novella’s inner coherence, the bipartite construction of Fontane’s On Tangled Paths performs two complementary forms of forgetting that connects the two parts of the story and conveys their deeper significance, namely, its concern with the question of how memory and literature, as mutually illuminating constituents of knowledge, can help make sense of an ever-changing world. Memory in On Tangled Paths is depicted as a process that is meaningful precisely because it is exposed to the vicissitudes of modernity. Read as a commentary on the neuroscience of memory loss, the novella exposes and displaces the instabilities of the Second German Empire onto the latest findings of neurology. Mobilizing tropes of remembering and forgetting, it anticipates Korsakoff’s groundbreaking distinction between anterograde and retrograde amnesia as well as his insight that neuronal damage resulting from excessive alcohol consumption leads to short- and long-term memory loss. Chapter 6 further argues that On Tangled Paths itself engages in a process (and tests the limits) of memory recuperation. This is because the novella is based on an elaborate form of data processing, as its author Fontane painstakingly recorded visual and verbal memory aids before the facts could leave his working memory. The novella’s somewhat mundane genesis from a set of detailed notebooks is consistent with the poetological program of Fontane’s late realist style in that it self-referentially problematizes the neurological basis of forgetting. The third part of Poetics of the Brain ventures into the contested terrain of literary modernism. It examines the ways in which our understanding and acceptance of neuroscientific knowledge is both facilitated and challenged by modernism’s break with discursive and generic conventions. Chapter 7, thus, looks at a central allegory in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge to show how the rhetorical mode of allegory serves

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to expose a conflict that split views of the human psyche at the turn of the century. In the novel, Malte’s vision of a partially demolished Parisian tenement building strips away the frailty and alienation of the modern consciousness to convey a deeper connection between the poet, his textual practice, and the medico-scientific practice of brain ablation. But Malte’s allegorical mode of seeing also stands in stark contrast with the exacting scientific gaze of the clinicians he goes to see at the Salpêtrière hospital. At stake in Rilke’s novel are the terrors of electroshock therapy, the biopolitical mismanagement of corpses, and the practice of human autopsy, which were all part of a move to ‘scientize’ the field of neuroanatomy in the course of the nineteenth century. Read against the clash within the field of neuroscience between experimental psychology, psychiatry, and neuroanatomy, Malte’s brief encounter with the medical profession highlights the binarism between the biological-physiological and the metaphysical realms. Opposed to the kind of neuroanatomy that was facilitated by new technologies of brain ablation and increasingly sophisticated skills in manipulating specimens, the novel addresses the complicated kinds of interdependences between the soma and the anima. In that way, Poetics of the Brain comes full circle back to Soemmering’s speculations on a cerebral seat of the soul. Chapter 8, finally, uses body schema and body image disorder as well as schizophrenia as a lens of reading the gestures of Kafka’s characters, thereby showing that these conditions are symptomatic of a fractured sense of self in modernism. Engaging with a range of Kafka’s human and nonhuman figures, the chapter focuses on descriptions of bodily movement that betray a sense of being out of sync with and within one’s own body and one’s spatial environment as well as an imagination of one’s own body that is mediated through its outside perception by others. Examples drawn from Kafka’s novels and short stories show that bodies in Kafka serve as the site of an interplay between a modernist poetics and early-­ twentieth-­century neuroscientific research into schizophrenia and body schema disorder, a neuropathological condition that involves difficulties in identifying body parts or their relative relations to one another. Hence, the chapter understands Kafka’s bodies as bodies that can be mapped and made predictable through their failing sensory-motor processes, even if the latter are inflected by the symptoms of schizophrenia, which used to be a poorly understood condition, mainly because of a perceived lack of biological markers.

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To summarize, Poetics of the Brain is conceived as a series of case studies that reveal how, in the context of a specific cultural and historical setting, poetic imagination challenges and supplements scientific knowledge. While the book does not offer a conclusive proposal for a general theory of poetics, it does provide an account of the significance of a (neuro) science-­oriented approach to understanding nineteenth-century German narrative prose literature. The importance of studying the practice of literature with an eye on how it constructs new forms of knowledge about the brain lies in the idea that there is something of a dialectical relationship between neuroscience’s means of representing its emergent knowledge and the figural, rhetorical operations within fictional texts.

CHAPTER 2

Dissecting the Subject: Brain Localization in The Nightwatches of Bonaventura

Finally, there is a reasoning soul in this machine; it has its principal site in the brain, where it is like the fountaineer who must be at the reservoir, whither all the pipes of the machine are extended, when he wishes to start, stop, or in some way alter their actions. —René Descartes

It is an ironic twist of German literary history that the novel’s rise to dominant narrative form coincides with its nihilistic overturning through a self-­consciously subversive example of the genre. Published anonymously in 1804 under the eponymous pseudonym, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura (Nachtwachen von Bonaventura) presents a reversal of the novel’s recently acquired status as the master-genre of Romantic literature, as famously proclaimed by the Romantic poet Friedrich Schlegel.1 The novel’s conceit is that an eccentric nightwatch1  August Klingemann, Nachtwachen von Bonaventura, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012). August Klingemann, The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, trans. Gerald Gillespie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Hereafter cited in the text. Friedrich Schlegel defined the novel as the distinctively modern genre that epitomized a “progressive, universal poetry” (progressive Universalpoesie) reuniting all the separate species of poetry. Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel. Kritische Ausgabe seiner Werke, ed. Ernst Behler et al., 35 vols. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöning, 1958–), Vol. 2: “Charakteristiken und Kritiken I [1796–1801],” 182.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_2

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man named Kreuzgang spies on his fellow men and reports back on their follies in a series of sixteen seemingly disjointed chapters. Through this nihilist protagonist and proxy, “Bonaventura” challenges the idea that modern prose literature should serve as a vehicle for exploring consciousness introspectively. Conceived as a crusade against the Romantic notions of self-analysis and self-expression, the novel can be read as a literary commentary on a methodological shift in brain research in the period around 1800.2 Klingemann’s scornful anti-­ idealist critique rethinks the place of unquestioned scientific orthodoxy in its relation to both empirical and speculative interpretations of the human mind. Inaugurating an era where aesthetic responses to the surrounding world betrayed literature’s growing interest in interacting with reality, The Nightwatches makes two prominent early neuroscientists objects of ridicule. In an undisguised reference to the Viennese physiologist Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), Kreuzgang mocks a “Doctor Gall in Vienna” (14) (“Doktor Gall in Wien”) (20). He also makes a conspicuous allusion to Prussian anatomist Samuel Thomas von Soemmering (1755–1830) and his influential treatise On the Organ of the Soul when Kreuzgang professes to admire Soemmering’s work “because it never grudges spending time and effort on so hypothetical an object as the soul” (120–121) (“weil sie es sich nicht verdrießen läßt an einem so hypothetischen Gegenstand, als es die Seele ist, Zeit und Mühe zu verschwenden”) (130). These two scientists’ twin appearance in the novel is no coincidence. Clearly, the rising prominence of both Soemmering and Gall in and beyond the world of science at the turn of the century calls the interdisciplinarity of early brain research—and ultimately also the inevitability of neuroscientific progress and its growing influence on the humanities— into stark relief. This is not to neglect the vital and encompassing role of satire in The Nightwatches. Kreuzgang parodies everything and everyone, inserting himself into an impressive range of historical discourses including—but not limited to—Kabbalism, alchemy, mysticism, Idealism, Romanticism, and psychiatry. Despite the long-winded dispute over the true identity of the novel’s author, now agreed to be the Braunschweig 2  Commentators have established August Klingemann, director of the court theatre in Braunschweig, as the author of the Nightwatches. Jost Schillemeit, “Bonaventura: der Verfasser der ‘Nachtwachen’” Studien zur Goethezeit 2006, 309–437. Ruth Haag, “Noch einmal: Der Verfasser der ‘Nachtwachen von Bonaventura,’” Euphorion 81 (1987): 286–297.

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theatre director and writer Ernst August Friedrich Klingemann, most commentators have been in agreement that only a consummate expert on the founding discourses of Western culture as well as the intellectual currents of the day could have produced such a learned novel.3 As an unruly medley of commentary and storytelling, the novel is testimony to the constitutive role of literary knowledge—especially for the Romantics, who deemed the adoption of concepts drawn from a range of interdisciplinary discourses an essential criterion for literature’s “universality” (Schlegel). Previous studies have overlooked the significance of Soemmering’s and Gall’s neuroanatomic inquiry for The Nightwatches. What makes these two figures key to understanding the novel are their roles as counterparts to Kreuzgang’s parody of German idealism. Gall and Soemmering serve as straw men for Kreuzgang’s mischievous anti-dualist and anti-monist critique. What may at first appear as gratuitous name-dropping serves satirical purposes: The novel offers a mocking commentary on the budding neuroanatomical and psychiatric movements marking the change from ancient anatomical dissections of the brain to modern neuroscience. Soemmering and Gall not only figure as characters in the novel, however. On a more profound level, their pioneering models of the brain come into relief through the novel’s peculiar structural organization, which enacts and at the same time critically deconstructs the localizationist view advocated by both Gall and Soemmering. In so doing, the novel proposes unorthodox new hypotheses with regard to the mind–body divide, as well as the localization of mental faculties. These hypotheses are presented in the form of an ironic restaging of Soemmering’s paradoxical and ultimately futile quest for an actual, tangible soul. On the level of narrative structure and form, the novel reenacts the Gallian brain through its episodic narrative, which is not only symptomatic of fragmentary perception and consciousness, but also suggestive of Gall’s radical materialism and its implicit reduction of free will. Just as Soemmering’s and Kant’s disagreement over a possible seat of the soul is formally embodied in Kreuzgang’s shifting identities and (as it were) soulless quest, Gall’s craniological ideas are structurally and metaphorically enacted in the narrative’s proto-­ Gallian, “verticalist” organization.

3  For an overview of the debate, see Gerald Gillespie, “Afterword: Authorship and Reception,” The Nightwatches of Bonaventura, 127–135.

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Beginnings Modern neuroscience began with the research and theories of Franz Joseph Gall who for the first time aimed for an analysis of the brain’s functional organization to understand the relationship between mental events and the organic body.4 Until then, brain research had been restricted to physiological analyses and morphological characterizations of the nervous system. The decades near the turn of the century, however, brought a new methodological framework that was centered on the mind’s embodied functioning. Working within the disciplinary framework of cerebral anatomy, brain researchers in Austria and Prussia inaugurated a debate about the localizability of mental processes, which lies at the core of neuroscience as a scientific discipline. In the effort to understand the behavioral principles and organic mechanisms underlying the brain’s functional organization, Gall shifted his attention to the neuronal structure and reactivity of brain tissue.5 Challenging the anti-localizationist legacy of Swiss anatomist Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), which had dominated the field of neurology since the eighteenth century, Gall pioneered a system for

 See Oliver Breidbach, “The Origin and Development of the Neurosciences,” 9.  Gall did not publish an authorized version of his findungs until his 1806 Untersuchungen ueber die Anatomie des Nervensystems ueberhaupt, und des Gehirns insbesondere. Ein dem französischen Institut ueberreichtes Mémoire von Gall und Spurzheim; nebst dem Berichte der H. H. Commissaire des Institutes und den Bemerkungen der Verfasser über diesen Bericht (Paris und Strasburg: Treuttel und Würtz, 1809). He subsequently published (albeit in limited circulation) a massive four-volume work in French, entitled Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux (Paris: E. Scholl, 1810–1819). The first two volumes of the work were coauthored by Johann Spurzheim. A subsequent revised version of the same work, which was aimed at a general public, omitted the name of Spurzheim. F. J. Gall, Sur les fonctions du cerveau et sur celles de chacune de ses parties (Paris: Ballière, 1822–1825). Translated as Franz Joseph Gall, On the Functions of the Brain and each of its Parts: with Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head, 6 vols., trans. Winslow Lewis (Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1835). By that time, Spurzheim’s phrenology had superseded Gall’s craniology in general popularity. For a general introduction to Gall’s work, and the legacy of craniology in the Anglo-Saxon world in particular, see John van Wyhe, “The Authority of Human Nature: the Schädellehre of Franz Joseph Gall,” The British Journal for the History of Science 35.1 (2002): 17–42. See also Stanley Finger, Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function (London: Oxford University Press, 1994), 32–38. 4 5

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classifying the human mind into a series of diversified organs, each of which had a unique function that correlated with a mental faculty.6 In 1796, the same year in which Gall began lecturing at Vienna University, Samuel Thomas von Soemmering published his celebrated treatise On the Organ of the Soul (Über das Organ der Seele, 1796). The work was a detailed functional interpretation of the brain’s putative morphology that helped establish our present classification of cranial nerves.7 In theory, Soemmering agreed with Gall’s morphological interpretation of the brain and his admiration of Gall’s work is well-documented: In a diary entry dating from May 2, 1807, Soemmering approvingly notes his participation in a guided visit of a Munich prison during which Gall demonstrated the correlation between a prisoner’s moral depravity and the shape of his skull.8 The two scientists shared the goal of looking at the brain in a new way to prove through physiological analysis that major parts of the nervous system could be divided functionally, a project that did nothing less than overcome the Cartesian dualism that had hindered progress in brain research for one and a half centuries. Yet Soemmering didn’t go as far as Gall, who viewed the brain as the sole somatic source of a unified consciousness. In Soemmering’s view, the brain was simply an organic tool for mediating the relationship between the soul and the body. The Nightwatches is critically engaged in the formation of a neuroscientific discourse on brain localization, as it was pioneered by Soemmering and Gall at the turn of the eighteenth century. Klingemann employs literary experimentation in the service of critiquing these scientists’ attempts to tackle the brain’s complexity. In the novel, a curious preoccupation 6  See Tadeusz Zawidzki and William Bechtel, “Gall’s Legacy Revisited: Decomposition and Localization in Cognitive Neuroscience,” The Mind as a Scientific Object: Between Brain and Culture: Between Brain, ed. Christina E.  Erneling et  al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 295–296. 7   Samuel Thomas Soemmering, Über das Organ der Seele (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolodius, 1796). Hereafter cited in the text. Translations mine. 8  Soemmering writes: “Zuerst führte man uns in das Kämmerchen zu einem Dieb u[nd] Mörder—Ein höchst widerliches, trauriges Geschöpf, welches den sogenannten Diebssinnhügel am Schedel so auffallend ausgezeichnet hat, als wie ihn nachher nur b[e]y wenigen wahrnahmen.” (“First we were led into a small chamber before a thief and murderer—an extremely revolting, sad creature, upon whose cranium the so-called “thief’s ridge” was so strikingly displayed, as could be detected in few others.” ) Cited after Gunter Mann, “Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) und Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring: Kranioskopie und Gehirnforschung zur Goethezeit,” Samuel Thomas von Soemmering und die Gelehrten der Goethezeit (Stuttgart und New York: Urban und Fischer, 1985), 181.

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with neuroanatomy thus merges with the creative logic of poetics. The Nightwatches is a unique site of knowledge production that reflects on the aesthetic and philosophical implications of scientific progress in relation to the Romantic novel’s idiosyncratic formal features. How, it effectively wonders, can a novel’s narrative and representational strategies assist the formation of neuroscientific knowledge? And how, more broadly, should literature respond to the emerging discipline of modern neuroscience and its reinvention of subjectivity?

The Organ of the Soul It would hardly have escaped Klingemann’s notice that Soemmering’s treatise was conceived as an intervention into the locationalist debate, which had gained intensity since René Descartes (1596–1650) attempted to localize the soul in the pineal body. Decartes did not think of the pineal gland as the part of the body in which the mind is lodged, but as the part through which mental functions are exercised. In his mechanistic understanding of cerebral physiology, low-pressure images of sensory stimuli appeared on the surface of the pineal gland, a single organ that was suspended in the middle of the brain ventricles. Here the images underwent a process of transformation. They were received by animal spirits—liquids flowing through the nerves—and turned into impressions to effect motion. Descartes believed that it was from the tiny fibers of the substance of the brain that mental decisions were translated into mechanical actions. Given his materialistic interpretation of the notion of “idea,” and his mechanistic explanation of human behavior in general, some historians of science have considered Descartes the first localizationist.9 Yet the idea of compartmentalization is ultimately incompatible with Cartesianism, not the least because Descartes located the mind as a whole in the body.10 The French philosopher thereby reinstated the separation between two distinct kinds of substances, a mechanical body and the immaterial mind. As Descartes 9  Claus Heeschen goes even further, arguing that localizationism “is as old as Plato who divided the mind into three distinct components and assigned them to three different parts of the body.” Claus Heeschen, “Franz Joseph Gall,” Reader on the History of Aphasia, ed. Paul Eling (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1994), 9. 10  Furthermore, as Heeschen points out, the French philosopher “anticipated the possible counter-argument that such a huge thing as the human mind should not be located in such a tiny organ as the pineal body and suggested that the mind as a ‘res nonextensa’ is not dependent on the physical dimensions of its seat.” Heeschen, “Franz Josef Gall,” 8.

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famously concluded in his Discourse on Method (1637): “This ‘me,’ that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from my body.”11 In the history of brain research, various iterations of Cartesianism effectively blocked the localizationist debate and with it any attempt to naturalize human consciousness and subjectivity. Roughly one and a half centuries after Descartes formulated his cogito, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) reasoned that ideas, as the raw matter of knowledge, somehow had to derive from realities existing independently of the human mind. Yet, as Claus Heeschen points out, Kant still relied on the Cartesian paradigm when he contended “that the soul had no bodily instantiation and did not need it and that it was only the activities of the soul that had to be bound to certain corporeal loci.”12 It was thus in response to Kant’s transcendental idealism and a long development of idealistic philosophy that Soemmering wrote a small treatise, On the Organ of the Soul, in which he proclaimed that the seat of the soul was to be localized in the brain.13 Based on a combination of a priori reasoning and empirical research, the treatise was driven by Soemmering’s ambition to make the invisible soul substantial at last. Soemmering dissected numerous human brains and announced his discovery of a sensorium commune or “common sensory organ” (Gemeinschaftliche Empfindungsstelle), a single location where all sense perceptions and nerve impulses were synesthetically received and bundled (32).14 According to Soemmering, the sensorium commune “consisted of the liquid of the brain ventricles (aqua ventriculorum cerebri), or was located in the liquid of the brain ventricles, or at least would have to be searched for in the liquid of the brain ventricles; in short: that the liquid of the brain ventricles had to be its organ” (“dass dies Sensorium commune in der Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen [Aqua Ventriculorum Cerebri] 11  René Descartes, Discourse on the Method: And, Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 22. 12  Heeschen, “Franz Joseph Gall,” 9. 13  On the reemergence of the notion of an “organ of the soul” in German philosophical and biological debates at the end of the century, and especially in Ernst Platner’s pioneering work, see Leif Weatherby, Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibnitz and Marx (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 117. 14  The term sensorium commune derives from Aristotle who in De Anima defines the koinê aesthesis (sensus communis in Latin) as a higher-order perceptual capacity that cooperates with both basic sensory perception and human rational thinking. See Pavel Gregoric, Aristotle on the Common Sense (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See on this also Helmut Müller-Sievers, The Science of Literature: Essays on an Incalculable Difference (Boston: DeGruyter, 2015), 75.

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bestehe, oder in der Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen sich finde, oder wenigstens in der Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen gesucht werden müsse; kurz: dass die Flüssigkeit der Hirnhöhlen das Organ desselben sey” (Ibid.). Convinced that these sensory impulses or “motions” (Bewegungen) could not simply come to a halt but had to be relayed somewhere, albeit in a different form, Soemmering concluded that they merged into the liquid that was located at the end of the nerves and that indeed “touched” the latter: When this movement, which results from a sensation induced by a nerve impulse, overreaches the limit of the brain, than no other solution is possible than this one:—‘This movement is transferred from the nerve ending at the outer limit of the brain to the liquid of the brain ventricles, which touches the former.’ That this transfer of movement, which results from the nerves and travels from the nerve ending at the outer limit of the brain to the liquid of the brain ventricles, the movement itself is changed, is the principal proof of my proposition. (Wenn diese in einem Empfindung erregenden Nerven erfolgende Bewegung weiter als seine Hirnendigung sich erstreckt: so ist schlechterdings nichts anders denkbar, als:—‘Diese Bewegung geht aus der Hirnendung des Nervens in die mit dieser Hirnendigung in Berührung stehende Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhle unmittelbar über.’ Dass bei diesem Übergehen der durch die Nerven erfolgenden Bewegungen aus den soliden Hirnendigungen der Nerven in die Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen eine Änderung der Bewegung vorgeht, ist gerade der wichtigste Beweis für meinen Satz.) (48)

As the title of his treatise suggests, Soemmering never actually claimed to have traced the soul itself—the soul was, after all, immaterial—but he did believe that he had found its organ in form of the liquid that was present in the brain ventricles. This organ functioned as a kind of switch point between the body and the invisible soul. Careful not to blur the boundaries between metaphysics and science, Soemmering stressed that he assumed a strictly materialist position: he had never set out to localize the soul itself. He also distanced himself from the question of whether a liquid can be “animated,” a question that was not physiological but metaphysical in nature:

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Before I answer the more subtle questions: ‘Is it possible to accept as a priori justified that the liquid of the brain ventricles contains the sensorium communis?’ I have to touch on the proposition of the most transcendental physiology, which leads far into the remote fields of metaphysics, namely: “Can liquid be animated?” For here too it is the case that—as Kant says—in the antagonism of reason that ventures beyond the limits of possible experiences, the task is not actually physiological, but transcendental. (Bevor ich zu den subtilen Fragen komme: ‘Lässt’s sich etwa auch a priori einsehen, dass die Feuchtigkeit der Hirnhöhlen das Gemeinschaftliche Sensorium enthält?’ muß ich vorher den Satz der transcendentalsten, bis in die fernsten Gefilde der Metaphysik führenden, Physiologie –nämlich: ‘Kann eine Feuchtigkeit animiert seyn?’ ein wenig berühren. Es geschieht nämlich auch hier, das—wie Kant sagt—überhaupt in dem Widerstreite einer sich über die Gränzen möglicher Erfahrung hinauswagenden Vernunft angetroffen wird, dass die Aufgabe eigentlich nicht physiologisch sondern transcendental ist.) (37)

Given his trepidations about crossing disciplinary boundaries, it is odd that Soemmering sought out Kant to write a critical introduction to his treatise. Kant readily responded to Soemmering’s request for a philosophical commentary and the latter included Kant’s letter as an appendix to his publication. Sommering must have been blinded by excitement. How else could he fail to realize that Kant’s response provided anything but the philosophical support he had hoped for?15 Instead of giving his metaphysical and physiological speculations legitimacy, Kant openly refuted the very basis of Soemmering’s methodology: “The required solution of the task regarding the seat of the soul, with which metaphysics is supposed to come up, leads to an impossible magnitude (√-2) and one can say to the person who undertakes to provide it, with the words of Terence: nihilo plus agas, quam si des operam, ut cum ratione in sanias.” (“If you try to impose certainty on uncertainty by reason, you’d achieve no more than if you set about going insane by reason.”16) Insisting that the soul could not in principle be described physiologically, Kant’s condemnation of Soemmering’s 15  See Breidbach, “The Origin and Development of the Neurosciences,” 10. Also Paolo Pecere, “Kant’s Über das Organ der Seele and the Limits of Physiology: Arguments and Legacy,” Kant’s Shorter Writings: Critical Paths Outside the Critiques, ed. Robert Hanna et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016), 214–230. 16  Terence, The Eunuch, II. 61–63. Terence, ed. and trans. John Barsby, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1: 321.

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project is unequivocal. Soemmering’s treatise nevertheless appeared with a dedication to Kant and despite the rebuff, it resonated powerfully with his lay and medical audience, and his philosophical and scientific readers. For the latter, On the Organ of the Soul opened new routes of research that would influence eminent neuroscientists like Paul Broca (1824–1880) and Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) and eventually culminate in a series of groundbreaking neuroanatomical theories linking cognitive functions to specific regions in the brain’s cerebral cortex. But Soemmering’s publication also left its mark in the domain of literature, as it ostensibly inspired Kreuzgang’s quest for even as much as a trace of a soul-like substance. The novel is itself an epistemological project, if an ironic one, as it generates a clever commentary on the pitfalls of asking the kinds of elusive questions that drive Soemmering’s, and by extension Kreuzgang’s, inquisitive minds. By repeating in endless variations his conviction that life is futile and lacking in meaning, Kreuzgang’s reflections pose an epistemological challenge that goes to the heart of Terence’s assertion (as referenced by Kant) that reason cannot control a situation that is devoid of reason. This sort of probing nihilism culminates in Kreuzgang’s insight that there are no grounds for believing anything at all. The Nightwatches’ basic premise of epistemological uncertainty is underpinned by the gradual disintegration of its cast of characters into a confounding set of elusive identities. The protagonist in particular descends into an introspective spiral of illusion and delusion as it arises in the wake of Kant. Kreuzgang’s world is truly a fiction. This shows the significance of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s transcendental idealism as a satirical foil for the novel.17 When Kreuzgang references “[Fichte’s] logical/ rigorous system” (72) (“[ein] konsequentes System wie Fichte”) (83), he is alluding to the Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre, 1794/95), which represents the idealist philosopher’s elaborate effort to ground his anti-dualistic philosophical system upon the concept of subjectivity.18 In his strangeness and indefinability, Kreuzgang embodies the Fichtean first 17  See on this Detlef Kremer, “Identität und Selbstauflösung: Klinger und die ‘Nachtwachen’ von Bonaventura,” Der deutsche Roman der Spätaufklärung: Fiktion und Wirklichkeit, ed. Harro Zimmermann (Heidelberg: Winter, 1990), 289. 18  Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Die Wissenschaftslehre 11. Vortrag im Jahre 1804, J.  G. Fichte Gesamtausgabe der Bayrischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ed. R. Lauth and H. Gliwitzky (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt: Friedrich Frommann, 1985). Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (New York: AppletonCentury Crofts, 1970).

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principle of self-positing (“the I posits itself as self-positing”)—he personifies “the pure I” (“das reine Ich”) or even consciousness itself. But the novel also offers a haunting critique of Fichte’s system. Kreuzgang knows that Fichte is caught up in an ineluctable circularity and thus he paints the prospect of a universe marked by tedium and nothingness, which naturally results from the idealist philosopher’s concept of self-positing freedom: “I had now ceased thinking everything else and was thinking only myself! No object was to be found round about but the great dreadful I, which feasted on itself and in devouring constantly regenerated itself. I was not sinking, for there was no longer space; just as little did I float upward.” (107) (“Ich hatte jetzt aufgehört alles andere zu denken, und dachte nur an mich selbst! Kein Gegenstand war ringsum anzufinden, als das große schreckliche Ich, das an sich selbst zehrte, und im Verschlingen stets sich wiedergebar. Ich sank nicht denn es war kein Raum mehr, eben so wenig schien ich emporzuschweben.”) (116) Kreuzgang is an emblem of idealism’s failure to assume or solidify a definitive concept of identity: “I’ve already often made a start, sitting before the mirror of my imagination, at portraying myself; I have always, however, bashed in the damned countenance when I finally found that it resembled a puzzle painting that, regarded from three different standpoints, presents one of the Graces, a monkey, and en face the devil.” (49) (“Ich bin schon oft daran gegangen vor dem Spiegel meiner Einbildungskraft sitzend, mich selbst leidlich zu portraitiren, habe aber immer in das verdammte Antlitz hineingeschlagen, wenn ich zuletzt fand, daß es einem Vexiergemälde glich, das von drei verschiedenen Standpunkten betrachtet, eine Grazie, eine Meerkatze und en face den Teufel dazu darstellt.”) (56) Kreuzgang here echoes the idealist paradigm of knowledge according to which we know only what we create or what we produce according to the laws of our mental activity. As Kreuzgang justifies his solipsistic meanderings, “so very much does all reside in ourselves and there is nothing real outside of us” (103) (“so sehr liegt alles in uns selbst und ist ausser uns nichts Reelles”) (112). This is consistent with the conceit of Klingemann’s  novel. The entire work appears to be the product of Kreuzgang’s mind, a relentless fantasy that springs forth from his imagination in a tireless act of will.19 Channeling the basic tenets of Fichte’s theory  Jeffrey Sammons aptly  identifies an “artistic meaning in the external form of the Nachtwachen” and its seemingly “chaotic, uncontrolled potpourri” structure. Jeffrey Sammons, Die Nachtwachen von Bonaventura. A Structural Interpretation (De Hague: Mouton, 1965), 32. 19

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of subjectivity, Kreuzgang incessantly performs the I’s recognition of its self-identity (“A = A”), even though he of course discards his identities as quickly as he takes them on. As a result, his activity of self-positing reveals a tautological anxiety about the act of the self-positing I. There is no certainty in the declarative “I am.” But more is at stake in the novel than an ironic critique of Fichte’s idealism. What makes The Nightwatches a truly modern masterpiece of German literature is the fact that it is open to multiple readings while rejecting the idea that we can ever lay claim to a true or complete interpretation. As a literary reflection upon the conditions of possibility of constituting knowledge, scientific or not, the novel stands at an intellectual crossroad: as the example of Soemmering’s “transcendental physiology” showed, around 1800, a metaphysical claim about the idea of a “soul” could be supported by anatomy. This suggested new itineraries for humanists and scientists alike. Not only did it lead to a narrowing down of philosophy’s focus from soul to mind, a move that was anticipated by Aristotle and Descartes, but only fully realized by Kant and after him Hegel.20 It also inaugurated a further shift, namely, from the mind to the brain in the search for a physiological explanation and etiology of human cognition, a shift that occurred not only in the life sciences but also in some branches of philosophy.21 At the dawn of neuroscience, the Kantian faculties of the mind were thus increasingly interpreted by natural scientists as the cognitive abilities of a material brain. Hence they became the object of physiological analysis and, in the case of Gall, measurement. Echoing the ideas formulated by Kant and Soemmering, The Nightwatches engages a soul quest that mocks both the transcendental-­ idealist and the physiological-materialist paradigms. In Klingemann’s telling, a soul can neither be proven to exist nor located as a material entity. Instead, Kreuzgang’s search for truth, meaning, and knowledge is a spiritual farce that treats souls with blasphemous and macabre mockery: One is ordained to be “claimed” by the devil (4) (“dass der Teufel … seine Seele … abfordern würde”) (12), another one is overwhelmed by “dark feelings” (38) (“dunkeln Gefühle”) (44), and a last one is oxymoronically 20  See Walter Kaufman, Discovering the Mind. Goethe, Kant, Hegel (New York: McGrawHill, 1980). 21  Georg Northoff credits Schopenhauer as the first person to introduce the brain into philosophy. See Georg Northoff, Minding the Brain: A Guide to Philosophy and Neuroscience (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 226.

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presented as the “personified soul of a marionette” (16) (“gleichsam die personifizirte Seele einer Marionette”) (22). Souls in The Nightwatches are anthropomorphized, ironized, and trivialized, but never are they corroborated in their metaphysical or neuroanatomical meaning, as an abstract substance or cerebral entity. However, despite its nihilistic swagger, the novel invokes a set of thought-provoking conjectures about the necessary conditions of experience once the idea of a transmutable soul has been replaced by the notion of an intelligent mind or, even more contentiously, once it has been shattered by the discovery of the central nervous organ as the ultimate command system of the human body. Kreuzgang’s character speaks to the former idea insofar as he embodies common assumptions about persons with no soul. He is the offspring of a union between a “gypsy” and an “alchemist,” who have conceived him in a satanic rite. But he is also a constant and formidable mental presence. When Kreuzgang remarks that “The story kept revolving in my head during my nightwatch” (14) (“Die Geschichte ging mir während meiner Nachtwache sehr im Kopfe herum”) (20), he insinuates that he is acting not merely as the observer and chronicler of the events around him but, more significantly, as the novel’s unifying consciousness. Kreuzgang’s occupation aligns him with what Kant famously defined as Anschauung (“intuition”). As a watchman, he performs those acts of sensible perception through which objects are visually apprehended. As Kreuzgang notes: “The late Kant has already demonstrated . . . how time and space are mere forms of sensual perception; now you know, however, that neither occurs any longer in the spirit world.” (46) (“Schon der seelige Kant hat … dargethan, wie Zeit und Raum nur bloße Formen der sinnlichen Anschauung sind.; nun wißt ihr aber daß beide in der Geisterwelt nicht mehr vorkommen”) (53) As the narrator of The Nightwatches, however, Kreuzgang’s role is hypothetically extended to a more objective form—Kant’s “transcendental unity of apperception” (transzendentale Einheit der Apperzeption). In a sense, he figures as that pure, original, and unchangeable consciousness that Kant believed to be the ultimate foundation of the unity of experience.22 This is most evident in Kreuzgang’s “tendency to color, to reshape and even to transform these events by the force of his 22  “This transcendental unity of apperception forms out of all possible appearances, which can stand alongside one another in one experience, a connection of all these representations according to laws.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Second Edition, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Howard Caygill (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 136. [A108]

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personality and by the occasional interplay of his own life history,” as Ellis Finger describes the dominant narrative authority contained in this figure.23 Of course, this unified form of cognition does not remain unbroken. The novel’s humor revolves around precisely the discrepancies between Kreuzgang’s sentient mind and the world he encounters. Kreuzgang is often unable to synthesize external objects of cognition, because they fail to correspond to the categories of understanding, or because they lie outside of space and time and hence cannot be an object of experience: “A single tone quavered gravely and earnestly through the void—it was time chiming out, and eternity now set in.” (57) (“Ein einziger Ton bebte schwer und ernst durch die Öde – es war die ausschlagende Zeit, und die Ewigkeit trat jetzt ein.”) (116) The novel stages a series of encounters between Kreuzgang and ghost-like figures, appearances that are not “in accord” with the universal, unifying conditions of apperception. These ghosts represent the Kantian noumenal world haunting the knowable phenomenal world, contradicting the very premise of objective empirical judgment. The supreme role played by the Kantian notion of apperceptive experience in general, and Kreuzgang’s mental perceptions in particular, also comes to the fore in the novel’s idiosyncratic punctuation, which Gerard Gillespie has described as one that “indicate[s] shift of focus or trailing off of a thought, [contributing] to the sense of following a movement of mind.”24 Published in the year of Kant’s death, The Nightwatches seems to suggest that the Kantian unity of apperception is precisely not a given and that as a result, a new kind of narrative is necessary to compensate for the ambiguity, diversity, and unbound diffuseness of experience that was traditionally the object of the storyteller.25 As J.  M. Bernstein notes with respect to such a new act of narrative remembering, it “must elicit from experiential heterogeneity of meaning by means of an act of unification. In this way, novel narrative ordering in recollection becomes the practical 23  Ellis Finger, “Bonaventura through Kreuzgang: Nachtwachen as Autobiography,” The German Quarterly 53, 3 (1980), 283. 24  Gillespie, “Introduction,” xiv. 25  Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), II. 2: 438–464. Translated as Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” Selected Writings: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 143–166.

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analogue of the synthetic unification of the manifold of perception.”26 The Nightwatches provide very little in terms of confirmation that through narrative, a fundamental unity of the perceiving mind could be accomplished. Narrated through the prism of Kreuzgang’s mental activity, the novel rather functions as an allegorical reflection on the meaning of subjectivity, as Kreuzgang’s perception is notable in its tendency to split into multiple characters, creating a kind of Bakhtinian polyphony in which the narrator’s voice is drowned out by the other characters’ chatter.27 Interpreted with Soemmering rather than his interlocutor Kant, Kreuzgang’s soulless existence brings into relief the second idea, namely, that the metaphysical concept of the soul could be substituted with the rather more prosaic notion of cerebral cortex activity. Read in this way, Kreuzgang would personify something so new and conceptually irreverent that it would have to be left unsaid. Kreuzgang is a cryptic figure who effectively redefines the relationship between fiction and science, speculative thought and experimental observation. In his unstable, volatile state, he appears as a mercurial creature whose lightness of being disguises a set of unusual biochemical properties that also make him an unlikely human character. What if Kreuzgang was indeed like mercury, a liquid substance rather than a human being? Does he perhaps embody the liquid of the brain ventricles, which Soemmering suspected to be “animated”? This would explain Kreuzgang’s ability to not only spontaneously shift shape, but also to deploy his agility to shape the events around him. In that way, Kreuzgang would neither figure as the central nervous system, as the entity that receives sensory signals relating to external and internal stimuli, nor would he represent consciousness, as the entity that translates the internal responses to stimuli into sensory, motor, and associative functions. Rather, he could be said to embody the nervous impulses themselves, passing into the central nervous system in the form of movement. In this interpretation, Kreuzgang can be understood as an intermediary, transitional figure that connects the medullary substance with the body, thereby making activity and sensation possible. This is consistent with his status as the facilitator of a seemingly endless stream of fluid and haunting encounters. Kreuzgang’s name, a word that traditionally designates the 26  J. M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism, and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 135. 27  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

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inner atrium of a cloister, implies the act or process of crossing and may thus allude to the sensorium commune’s primary role of receiving and coordinating the transfer of all the impulses sent to individual nerve centers. What follows from this reading is a peculiar and final twist on Soemmering’s idea of a seat of the soul. In his irrational compulsion to embrace the internal contradictions and the mysterious and nihilistic dimensions of nocturnal life, Kreuzgang reveals as absurd the notion of a stable subjectivity, let alone the idea of a soul. Kreuzgang seems possessed, literally lacking a soul, yet he figures as a container of sorts—not in the sense of a vessel of the kinds of coherent thoughts and personal memories that constitute subjectivity, but more in the sense of an electrical receptacle of frantic activity and the impulse of storytelling and playacting as a pathological condition. In this manner, Kreuzgang figures among the first cases of multiple personality disorder that were reported in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the difference that in modern case histories only residual reference is made to diabolic or demonic possession. Yet these new etiological descriptions of altered self-perception and behavior resonate powerfully with Kreuzgang’s shifting identities.28 His permanent role-playing is suggestive of umgetauschte Persönlichkeit (“exchanged personality”) as first described by German anthropologist and animal magnetist Eberhard Gmelin (1751–1809).29 Gmelin’s most prominent case involved a twenty-year-old woman in Stuttgart who began to behave and speak like a French lady after encountering aristocratic refugees from France. The woman suddenly mastered the French language and also spoke her native German tongue with a French accent. In his elusiveness and deceptive ploys, Kreuzgang reflects the nascent anxiety about the psychological and perceptual implications of multiple personality disorders such as the one treated by Gmelin.30 Moreover, it speaks to Klingemann’s own playful evasion of his role as the novel’s author. The ever-expanding confluence of neurological discourses on perceptual disorders and a correlated phenomenon, the emergence of the Doppelgänger motive in nineteenth-century German literature, will be the focus of Chap. 3. 28  See on this Oliver Hepp, “Ein transzendentaler Buffo: Kreuzgang und die romantischironische Struktur der Nachtwachen. Von Bonaventura,” Deutsche Schillergesellschaft: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 53 (2009), 171–172. 29  Eberhard Gmelin, Materialien für die Anthropologie (Tübingen: Verlag der Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1791). 30  Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious, 127.

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Craniology In ways both obvious and subtle, Gall’s conceptual rethinking of the brain’s anatomy is contained in the narrative structure and episodic organization of The Nightwatches. Before delving into a close analysis of how the novel’s form mirrors the conceptual tenets of Gall’s craniology, it is worth citing in full the explicit reference to Gall: In this general confusion, and with the uncertainty whether one had a genuine devil’s head before oneself, it was decided that the head would be sent to Dr. Gall in Vienna, so that he might hunt out the unmistakable satanic protuberances on it; but then the church suddenly meddled in the game and declared that it was to be regarded as the first and last instance of such determinations. (14) (In dieser allgemeinen Verwirrung und bei der Ungewißheit, ob man ein ächtes Teufelshaupt vor sich habe, wurde beschlossen, daß der Kopf dem Doktor Gall in Wien zugesandt würde, damit er die untrüglichen satanischen Protuberanzen an ihm aufsuchen möchte; jetzt mischte sich plötzlich die Kirche ins Spiel, und erklärte daß sie bei solchen Entscheidungen als die erste und letzte Instanz anzusehen sei.) (20)

The inclusion of this passage in the novel illustrates that Gall’s craniological theory circulated widely and across disciplinary boundaries.31 However, Kreuzgang’s burlesque proposition was not intended as a bow to Gall’s scientific contribution. It is nevertheless accurate in two crucial particulars. Firstly, Kreuzgang is correct in intimating that Gall’s investigation of the cerebral cortex had been condemned by the Roman Catholic Church because it broke the taboo of dualism. Under pressure exerted by the church, Emperor Franz II issued a decree that banned Gall’s views as materialistic and morally perilous, because it had effectively “exorcised” 31  Franz Josef Gall, “Das Programm,” Der Neue Teutsche Merkur 3 (1798): 311–382. Reprinted in Franz Joseph Gall. Naturforscher und Anthropologe, trans. and ed. Erna Lesky (Bern: Huber, 1979). Note that Gall’s letter was first presented to the public in a literary journal, the December 1798 edition of Der Neue Teutsche Merkur. This may explain why the journal’s editor, Christoph Martin Wieland, found it necessary to include a note in which he assured his readers that they would find Gall’s system of importance and that its author was a uniquely qualified authority. See Christoph Martin Wieland, “Des Herrn D. F. J. Schreiben über seinen bereits geendigten Prodromus über die Verichtungen des Gehirns des Menschen und der Thiere an Herrn Jos. Fr. Von Retzer” (Ibid.).

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the soul from modern brain research. In 1805, Gall was thus forced to leave his lecturer position at the University of Vienna. He went on a lecture tour in Europe and eventually settled in Paris.32 Secondly, it is true that Gall’s neuroanatomical method, known first as Schädellehre (doctrine of the skull) and later as Kraniologie (craniology), examined “the existence of certain [mental] qualities along with the existence of certain protuberances.”33 According to Gall’s theory, a given “protuberance” would indeed point toward a specific human quality or mental faculty, as Kreuzgang’s statement suggests, although the reference to a “satanic” protuberance pointing at “devilish” qualities further distorts Gall’s already charlatan theory for the purpose of satirical comedy. On a more serious note, Gall’s specific contribution to neuroscience consisted in his venturing into the field of comparative anatomy to demonstrate that the brain was not a functionally homogeneous but a highly diversified tissue. Indeed, Gall viewed the brain as an “intricate machine” (“verwickelte Maschine”), a complex modular system made up of separate independent regions with several specialized areas (“jedes System ist in seinen Kräften unabhängig, und keines kann die Ursache eines andern seyn”).34 Recognizing the brain as the seat of all mental functions, including a person’s moral and spiritual character, Gall contended that each of these functions could be assigned to a special preformation of the mind. In his understanding, all higher cognitive functions and basic character traits were thus innately determined. They resided in the mind in abstract form and could find expression in various behavioral tendencies and at discrete moments in time: “The different constituent parts of the brain, each of which is destined to a peculiar function, are equally subjected to successive development and destruction. This explains how instincts, propensities, and talents do not all either appear or fail, at the same period of life.” (76–77) 32  After enjoying a wave of initial popularity, Gall was dismissed as fraudulent by some. His ideas nevertheless spread throughout and beyond Europe in the 1820s and 1830s. 33  Franz Joseph Gall, On the Functions of the Brain and of Each of its Parts, Vol. 1: “On the Origin of the Moral Qualities and Intellectual Faculties of Man, and the Conditions of their Manifestation,” 14. Hereafter cited in the text. It is important to note that Gall objected to the notion of craniology: “The object of my researches is the brain. The cranium is only a faithful cast of the external surface of the brain, and is consequently but a minor part of its principal object. The title then is as inapplicable as would be that of maker of rhymes of a poet.” (18) See Andrew P.  Wickens, A History of the Brain: From Stone Age Surgery to Modern Neuroscience (London: Psychology Press, 2015), 135. 34  Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Untersuchungen über die Anatomie, 17. Translation mine.

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More contentious is Gall’s alleged discovery of a correlation between certain distinctive behaviors and cerebral expansions in the animal kingdom, which led him to believe that the skull was indeed molded by the shape of the brain. He thus began to classify the cranium’s underlying brain areas by way of external morphological criteria. Convinced that by examining bumps on human and animal craniums he could localize mental faculties, Gall ventured to literally measure his subjects’ characteristics or idiosyncracies. In his search for correlations between propensities and skull protuberances, Gall examined individuals who either had a moderate deficiency or were lacking entirely in a given moral predisposition or cognitive faculty. His goal was to establish that in these individuals, the corresponding cranial protuberance was also lacking. By 1802, Gall had collected over 300 skulls and had 120 head casts of people with special talents or propensities.35 It is important to note that in order to localize specific traits and cognitive faculties in the brain, Gall had to look for individuals with very one-­ sided talents in the extremes of society, such as geniuses, criminals, prostitutes, and monomaniacs (understood as “lunatics” obsessed with one particular fixation). This necessity accounts for Gall’s individual-­ psychological approach to neuroscience. He was simply not interested in average human beings but instead sought out extreme and exceptional individuals whose skulls had a pronounced and obvious protuberance. It is these extreme individuals who also populate the fictional world of The Nightwatches. The novel’s curious cast of characters includes an excommunicated freethinker who stubbornly rejects last communion in the moment of his death, a priest who speaks in the person of the devil himself, an Ursuline nun who has given birth to a child, a boy who shoots himself out of ennui, and a Don Juan who is plagued by incestuous and fratricidal mania. None of these characters is perfectly normal nor are they in any way representative of the average individual. But the similarity between Gall’s craniology and The Nightwatches extends beyond the novel’s focus on abnormal characters. As Gall began to notice patterns of correlation between protuberances in certain locations and corresponding personality traits, he developed a cranial map that allowed him to identify a total of twenty-seven different dispositions, qualities, and mental faculties. Gall termed the latter 35  See Sherrie Lynne Lyons, Species, Serpents, Spirits, and Skulls: Science at the Margins in the Victorian Age (New York: SUNY Press, 2009), 63.

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Grundkräfte der Seele (“fundamental forces of the soul”) to convey the idea that they encompassed character and temperament traits in addition to cognitive ones. Here is a comprehensive list of all twenty-six fundamental forces: . . . the instinct of propagation, that of the love which both man and animals bear to their young, the instinct of attachment and friendship, of self-defense and courage, the carnivorous instinct, and the propensity to destruction, the sentiment of property, and the inclination to theft, cunning and prudence, pride and boldness, vanity and ambition, circumspection and foresight, educability, the sense of localities, or relations of space, the memory of words and persons, the sense of spoken language, or the talent for philology, the sense of the relation of colors, or the talent for painting, the sense of the relation for sounds or the talent for music, the sense of the relations of numbers, or the talent for arithmetic and mathematics, the sense of mechanics, of drawing, of sculpture, of architecture, comparative sagacity, the metaphysical spirit or tendency, the caustic spirit or that of repartee the talent of induction, the poetic talent, the moral sense and benevolence, or mildness, the talent of imitation, of mimicry or acting, the sentiment of religion and of God, firmness of character…. (89–90)

Many of Gall’s moral and intellectual predispositions can be matched up with The Nightwatches’ cast of characters. For instance, the freethinker represents “firmness of character,” the priest displays “metaphysical spirit or tendency,” the suicidal boy stands for “propensity to destruction,” the nun evokes both “instinct of propagation” and “the sentiment of religion and of God,” and Don Juan represents the “the sentiment of property.” Finally, Kreuzgang himself unites in his person several key Gallian faculties: he is “cunning,” has “poetic talent,” and a “talent of imitation, of mimicry or acting.” It is thus entirely in keeping with Gall’s craniological thinking that Kreuzgang deems his mental faculties and personal idiosyncrasies anatomically verifiable, as when he states: “I would like to present myself as I am to skilled psychologists for dissection and anatomy-study in order to see whether they would have read out of me what I now actually read.” (120) (“Ich möchte mich selbst, wie ich bin, geschickten Psychologen zur Secirung und Anatomierung vorlegen, um zu sehen, ob sie das aus mir herauslesen würden, was ich jetzt wirklich las.”) (129–130) It should be said that the novel’s characters are stereotypes rather than genuine, nuanced individuals. In no way do they compare with the psychologically formed characters that have become the gold standard of

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German prose literature since the publication of Karl Philip Moritz’s “psychological novel,” Anton Reiser (1785/90). Kreuzgang undergoes neither a process of external adjustment nor internal change, and he lacks moral and emotional complexity. His nightly strolls are no spiritual journeys and his casual encounters carry little in terms of significance or psychological value. The possible social, religious, or economic causes of Kreuzgang’s melancholy remain unexplored. Instead, the novel stages a shallow conflict between causal necessity and freedom that is never resolved.36 In their depersonalized, psychological flatness, Klingemann’s characters resemble the two-dimensional stock characters of the commedia dell’arte, which subvert the audience’s expectations, but never beyond the limits of their set identities.37 The Nightwatches’ stock figures are referred to by their special talents, roles, or personality traits rather than a given name. Monikers such as “the tragic lover,” “the freethinker,” “the nun,” “Don Juan,” or “Hanswurst” create the impression of instant recognizability, suggesting that readers immediately know what they stand for in each individual case. The characters of The Nightwatches are reduced to a function of the narrative. They provide comic relief and disrupt the development of anything that could be construed like a plausible plot. Their role is to produce the ironic reversals that keep pushing the novel into absurd extremes and away from psychological development. For instance, the “tragic lover” is a cliché character whose desperation and motivation to commit suicide is never explained. What is important about him is not that his despair drives him to commit suicide, nor that he fails to follow through and successfully takes his life. Rather, his role is to take on a disguise and then reveal his true identity as an actor. This surprise unraveling of the “tragic lover” has a sobering effect on Kreuzgang, as it exposes his world (and that of the story) as nothing but a fictional conceit, a “false world,” (92) (“falsche Welt”) (100) devoid of meaning and purpose: 36  See Ellis Shookman, Eighteenth Century German Prose: Heinse, La Roche, Wieland, and Others (New York: Continuum, 1992), xxii–xxiii. 37  For a close analysis of the patterns of commedia elements within the Nightwatches, see Gerald Gillespie, “Kreuzgang in the Role of Crispin: Commedia dell’arte Transformations in Die Nachtwachen,” in Herkommen und Erneuerung: Essays für Oskar Seidlin, 1911–1984, ed. Edgar Lohner (Tübingen: Niemeyer; 1976), 185–200. On the influence of the theatrical tradition of commedia dell’arte in an eighteenth-century German cultural context, see Jocelyn Holland, “The School of Shipwrecks: Improvisation in Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung and the Lehrjahre,” Goethe Yearbook 15 (2008): 19–33.

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In the cemetery a young man was dawdling in the moonlight … I could come quite close to him, and he did not notice me, because he was busy inducing a moderate desperation in himself through vehement gesticulation and declamation—these are proven means and I actually used to know an early morning preacher who could be moved to tears by nothing other than hearing himself speak; gradually he succeeded in this; indeed, he finally drew a pistol and set it to his forehead several times until he had at least reached such a peak that he was bold enough to squeeze the trigger—it misfired, and at this violent motion, his false hairpiece slipped off …. “I am at the court theatre,” the young man interjected, making a bow to express thanks for the once again attached hairpiece. —“Besides, the pistol is unloaded.” (89, 92) Auf dem Gottesacker trieb sich ein junger Mensch herum im Mondenschein, ich konnte ganz nah an ihn kommen und er bemerkte mich nicht, weil er beschäftigt war durch heftiges Gestikuliren und Deklamiren sich in eine mäßige Verzweiflung zu bringen—das Mittel ist probat, und ich kannte wirklich einen Frühprediger der durch nichts zu Thränen zu bewegen war, außer wenn er sich selbst sehr heftig reden hörte;–es gelang ihm allmälig damit, ja er zug zulezt ein Pistol und sezte es sich verschiedene male an die Stirn, bis er endlich eine solche Höhe erreicht hatte, daß er kühn genug war es abzudrücken—es versagte, und bei der heftigen Bewegung entfiel ihm ein falscher Haarzopf …“Ich stehe am Hoftheater”—fiel der junge Mann eim inden er eine Danksagungsverbeugung für den wieder angehefteten Haarzopf machte.—“Das Pistol ist übrigens ungeladen.” (97, 100)

Like most of the novel’s characters who tend to be both shallow and ironic, cliché and yet utterly unpredictable, the figure of the “tragic lover” illustrates and at the same time parodies Gall’s radically compartmentalized vision of the brain’s anatomy. In Gall’s direct localizationist view, the human mind is organized in a domain-specific way, whereby certain brain areas exist for the sole purpose of carrying out distinct mental processes. As Gall contends: “When we see that nature follows such a course, how can it still be doubted that each part of the brain has different functions to fulfill, and that as a consequence, the brain of man and animals must be composed of as many special organs as the man or animal has distinct moral or intellectual faculties, inclinations, and aptitudes for work.”38 Just 38  Franz Josef Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Anatomie et Physiologie du Systême nerveaux et général, et du Cerveau en particulier, avec des Observations sur la Possibilité de reconnoitre plusieurs Dispositions intellectuelles et morales de l’Homme et des Animaux, par la Configuration de leur Têtes (Paris: F. Schoell, 1812), Vol. 2: 254. English translation cited

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as specific brain regions are responsible for unique psychological faculties, each such faculty is exclusively in charge of one particular mental trait upon which people can then differ. Accordingly, Gall maintained that the human faculties had to be autonomous and independent of each other. What was unique to Gall’s approach to brain localization, then, was his concept of verticalism: Gall pioneered the idea that the mind was divided into autonomous domain-specific modules.39 Contrary to “horizontal” faculties that referred to specific processes of brain activity such as perception, memory, imagination, and attention that required input from different domains, Gall’s “vertical” faculties were bound to the specific nature of their subject. His system thus differentiates between different mnemonic faculties that specialize in  remembering facts and things (Sachgedächtnis), words (Wortgedächtnis), and individuals (Personensinn), respectively. It is thus not the process of remembering but the object of remembrance that determines its location in the brain and its functional status within Gall’s craniological system. Gall’s craniology places little emphasis on distinguishing between specific and qualitatively different cognitive processes. This is best conveyed in his use of the umbrella term “sense” (Sinn) to refer to a rather differentiated range of mental faculties: “Provided with senses, [people] enter into communication with the immensity of nature; associate with all the beings which surround them, and a continual action and reaction are established between animate and inanimate beings.” (108) Gall’s catalog of mental faculties details seven senses, namely, of place, person, language, color, architecture, metaphysics, and mimicry. This suggests that “sense” for Gall surely involves perception and sensation, but also conscious recognition and memory: “We must seek for our ideas and our knowledge partly in the phenomena of the external worlds, and their judicious employment, and partly in the innate laws of the moral and intellectual faculties: by pursuing these two rules we shall arrive at practical and general truths.” (109–110) And yet, Gall structures the brain not according to processual relations but by distinct categories. As his assistant and later collaborator Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832) elaborates, Gall believed that “each external sense and each external faculty has its peculiar after Tadeusz Zawidski and William Bechtel, “Gall’s Legacy Revisited: Decomposition and Localization in Cognitive Neuroscience,” The Mind as a Scientific Object: Between Brain and Culture, 296. 39  Heeschen, “Franz Josef Gall,” 12.

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consciousness, perception, memory, judgment, and imagination; in short, that the modes of action are alike in each external sense and in each organ of the brain.”40 Thus, according to Gall, memory, perception and the other “modes of action” cited above were not independent unitary forces correlated across multiple cognitive tasks. For, if there were such a thing as one single faculty of memory, we should be capable of recalling everything and anything and would no longer suffer vexing gaps in memory. An ambitious attempt to link a psychological theory of human behavior with an anatomical interpretation of the human cranium, Gall’s modularistic theory was rooted in his conviction that the human cognitive capacities were restricted to his newly cataloged subject-domains. With its objective to map and efficiently organize each mental faculty and all aspects of human behavior, it resulted, however, in a reductively simple understanding of the human brain as a whole. The Nightwatches critically engage Gall’s conception of autonomous human faculties by challenging the special properties and historical limits of literary form. Specifically, the novel’s episodic structure, which is borrowed from traditional oral narrative and dramatic forms such as the romance novel and the commedia dell’arte, disrupts and exposes as flawed the “regulatory” and “organizing” function of Gall’s purportedly holistic system. This critique is achieved through the episodic nature of The Nightwatches, which lacks consistent development and dramatic coherence, just as Gall’s craniology relies on a narrowly defined but ultimately unstable set of classificatory criteria. In essence, Kreuzgang’s quest takes on the variety format of a vaudeville performance with recurring comic routines that are episodically disconnected from the overall scenario. This is a text that is neither plot- nor character-driven. With a series of incidents strung together as if inevitably, The Nightwatches unfolds without us being able to clearly discern the relationship between its events and the muddled cast of characters. Each episode deals with a restricted amount of information, echoing with precision Gall’s vertical analyses of specific cerebral domains that are likewise limited in scope, obscuring a larger vision for the sake of local scale. Just as Gall’s catalog listed senses as if they were strictly 40  Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Phrenology: Or the Doctrine of the Mental Phenomena, 2 vols. (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1834), Vol. 2: “Philosophical Part,” 33. Spurzheim eloborates: “I consider the word sensation as an expression altogether general. Every act of consciousness or every perception of any impression, whether external or internal, is sensation.” Ibid., 288.

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independent of one another, without a necessary causal relation between them, the novel’s sixteen individual episodes are dissociated, fragmented, and generally not causally connected.41 Recurring leitmotifs, such as the figures of the madman and the devil, the idea of masquerading, and the trope of nothingness, percolate from scene to scene without much impact on the work’s overall meaning. And as in Gall’s system, the emphasis in the novel is not on the process of perceiving or remembering, which might bestow some significance on these otherwise unmotivated episodes, but on the arbitrary, absurd, and oblique nature of the things and people thus perceived or remembered: “You still remember my fool’s cell—if you have not otherwise lost the thread of my story … In this cell I lay, as in a den of a sphinx shut in with my riddle.” (99) (“Du erinnerst dich doch an mein Narrenkämmerchen, wenn du anders den Faden meiner Geschichte … nicht verloren hast. In diesem Narrenkämmerchen lag ich wie in der Höle der Sphynx, mit meinem Räthsel eingeschlossen.”) (108) In addition, acts of memory in The Nightwatches are usually negated or skeptically dismissed: “On account of the many examples that here crowd my memory, I have lost the thread of this periodic sentence and prefer to break it off entirely so as to begin anew.” (68) (“Ich habe der vielen Beispiele halber, die sich hier meinem Gedächtnisse aufdrängen, den Faden des Perioden verlohren, und reiße ihn lieber ganz ab, um von neuem anzuheben.”) (75) In The Nightwatches, things and people occur as seemingly isolated, random transients, but they also recur as if wreaking a powerful internalized fatality. In that way, the novel deconstructs the sense of order we would expect to underlie a narrative from the Romantic period. While the occurrence of unlikely or coincidental episodes is not unusual in Romantic literature, such events usually carry a sense of moral freedom and the feeling of responsibility within a providential universe. Furthermore, they do not seem improbable because they are interpreted as real events by the characters, with the result of inducing the reader to suspend judgment. By contrast, The Nightwatches consists of a loosely constructed course of coincidental episodes that favor absurd, pseudo-moralistic messages about providence, conjuring chance rather than historical or moral purpose. With its lack of development or an emerging structure of significance, the novel works away from the tension between ironic discourse and objectivity that contemporary poets like Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, 41   See Patrick Bridgwater, The German Gothic Novel in Anglo-German Perspective (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 298.

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Novalis, or Friedrich Schlegel were concerned to establish. Illustrating a sporadic, non-holistic view of human cognition and behavior, The Nightwatches relates to the Romantic novel like Gall’s cranogical map of the brain relates to modern connectionist conceptions of human cognition: both privilege a focus on localized, specific function over an emphasis on procedural technique and higher-level, interconnected processual organization.42 There is one more aspect of The Nightwatches’ critical engagement with Gall’s neuroscientific inquiry. A course of vignettes that are not neatly bounded but in effect bleed into one another, The Nightwatches conceives of Gall’s vertically organized brain in darkly allegorical terms. The novel itself figures as an anti-Gallian brain in which the functional areas (chapters) are no longer self-contained and neatly separated but loosely entangled and randomly scattered in a way that suggests isolation and indeed dysfunctionality. This is a disorienting terrain that one can only traverse (read) by parting with the attitude of anatomical precision and scientific exactitude that Gall had hoped to bring to the (dissecting) table. At the same time, The Nightwatches transports the reader far beyond the realm of Romantic art, where the fragment is still imbued with past and future meaning, “complete in itself and separated from the rest of the world like a hedgehog” (“von der umgebenden Welt ganz abgesondert und in sich selbst vollendet … wie ein Igel”), as Schlegel memorably observed.43 The work delivers a biting critique of Romantic literature as it pits the form of the novel against the endlessly expanding horizon of absurdity and contingency that characterizes Kreuzgang’s subjectivity. Redoubling Kreuzgang’s sense of bewilderment and futility to ever more anarchic effect, The Nightwatches anticipate modernism’s deconstruction of all epistemologies—scientific or literary—through the invocation and cancellation of Gall’s modularistic system of knowledge.

42  Connectionism views thinking as an activity within a massive interactive network that involves multiple neural connections between parallel nodes taking place simultaneously. 43  Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, 2: 197.

CHAPTER 3

Fiction’s Scientific Double: Hallucinations in Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs

In 1799, three years after the publication of Soemmering’s treatise On the Organ of the Soul, the Berlin publisher and polemical writer Christoph Friedrich Nicolai presented his Memoir on the Appearance of Spectres or Phantoms occasioned by Disease, with Psychological Remarks (Beispiel einer Erscheinung mehrerer Phantasmen. Nebst einigen erläuternden Anmerkungen) to the Royal Society of Berlin.1 In this autobiographical account, Nicolai recounts how he was visited by hundreds of “figures of both sexes” (“Gestalten beiderlei Geschlechts”), parading through his house “like people at a fair where all is bustle” (169) (“so wie etwa auf einem Markte, wo sich alles nur vordrängt” (17). The figures appeared over a period of eight weeks during day and nighttime, usually when Nicolai was at home alone, but never at his own beckoning (“so gelang es mir doch nie, sie auf mein Verlangen außer mir zu sehen”) (16). Although Nicolai insisted that he was in good health and mental condition (“in der größten Ruhe und Besonnenheit”) (16) when seeing these figures, his memoir was ruthlessly mocked by the young Romantics as well as 1  Friedrich Nicolai, “Beispiel einer Erscheinung mehrerer Phantasmen. Nebst einigen erläuternden Anmerkungen. Vorgelesen in der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin den 28. Hornung 1799,” Neue Berlinische Monatsschrift 1 (1799), 1–38. An English translation appeared as F. Nicolai, “A Memoir on the Appearance of Spectres or Phantoms occasioned by Disease, with Psychological Remarks,” A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts 6 (1803): 161–179. Hereafter cited in the text.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_3

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by Nicolai’s long-standing adversary, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.2 By contrast, the sphere of science took his account more seriously. Nicolai pioneered the psychiatric understanding of hallucinations (Phantasmen)— perceptual experiences (“Sinnestäuschungen”)—that, contrary to apparitions and visions (“Gesichte”), did not involve a disembodied soul or spirit (“Geist”). Note that with its reference to “specters” and “phantoms,” the title of the memoir’s English translation is rather misleading. Although Nicolai did not use the term “hallucinations,” he nevertheless preempted the wide recognition and usage of the concept in the medical field, as he was quoted by virtually every physician and psychopathologist interested in the physiological, optical, and perceptual implications of the phenomenon, including John Ferriar (1761–1815) in Scotland and Brierre de Broismont (1797–1881) in France.3 In 1826, the eminent German physiologist Johannes Müller (1801–1858) cited Nicolai’s report in support of his own theory of hallucinations, proclaiming that they were pathological perceptions based on internal sensory images rather than external objects.4 Nicolai’s concept of phantasms granted that the viewer 2  See Goethe’s satirical reference to a “Mr ArseyPhantarsey” (“Proktophantasmist”) in the Walpurgis Night sequence in the first part of Faust. As David Luke notes, Goethe’s neologism derives from εἴδωλον (“anus”) and φαντασία (“apparition”). The term is also homophonous with the German word for dung (“Mist”). Johann W. von Goethe, Faust: Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 170 n106. Despite his scorn for Nicolai’s observations, Goethe was to find great interest in the work of Czech physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje (1787–1869), whose writings on optical hallucinations offered an understanding of the links between psychology and sensory physiology. Johann Purkinje, Beiträge zur Kenntniss des Sehens in subjectiver Hinsicht (Contribution to the Understanding of Vision from the Subjective Point of View) (Prague: Calve, 1819). 3  John Ferriar, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (London: Cadell and Davies, 1813), 95, and Brierre de Broismont, Des Hallucinations, ou Histoire raisonnée des Apparitions, des Visions, des Songes, de l’Extase, du Magnétisme et du Somnambulisme (Paris: G. Baillière, 1845). Brierre de Broismont, A History of Dreams, Visions, Apparitions, Ecstasy, and Somnabulism (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1855), 31. 4  Johannes Müller, Über die phantastischen Gesichtserscheinungen: Eine physiologische Untersuchung (On Imaginary Apparitions) (Koblenz: Jacob Hölscher, 1826). Müller interpreted hallucinations as “fantastic apparitions,” and explained them as the result of overactivity of a putative faculty or power of “imagination” or “fantasy” triggered by an internal stimulus to the deep substance of the eye. See The Neuroscience of Visual Hallucinations, ed. Daniel Collerton et al. (Hoboken: Wiley, 2015), 8. For an overview of earlier philosophical and nosological uses of the term hallucination, see Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 241.

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was aware of their illusory nature, as is consistent with the notion of pseudo-hallucination, defined as a hallucination accompanied by “insight.” By contrast, Müller’s concept of hallucinations, which he also termed Gesichtserscheinungen, implied that the viewer did not know that his visions were imaginary. Despite Nicolai’s reputation  as an apparition  skeptic who effectively pioneered the understanding that hallucinations occurred in the absence of an external stimulus, it is French alienist Jean-Étienne Esquirol (1772–1840) who is credited with devising the etiological criteria for the phenomenon first described in the German thinker’s pamphlet. It is a well-known fact that in 1803, Esquirol coined the term hallucination to describe events that are experienced as sensory perceptions but are in fact not grounded in reality: “A person is said to labor under a hallucination, or to be a visionary, who has a thorough conviction of the perception of a sensation, when no external object, suited to excite this sensation, has impressed the senses.” (“Un home en délire qui a la conviction intime d’une sensation actuellement perçue, alors que nul objet extérieur proper à exciter cette sensation n’est à portée de des sens, est dans un état d’hallucination. C’est un visionnaire.”)5 Whereas illusions are misperceptions of actual visual stimuli, hallucinations are sensory perceptions in the absence of external objects. Hallucinations are based on a false judgment, that is, the subject’s mistaken assumption that the perception reflects an external reality. Concurrent with the increased usage and application of the concept of hallucination in the medical field and the myriad case studies describing hallucinations was a veritable explosion of the motif of the double in German-language narrative prose during the nineteenth century. But what exactly does German literature know about the subject of hallucinations? If the figure of the double has been invoked in nineteenth-century prose ever since Jean Paul Richter famously coined the term in his novel Siebenkäs (1796–97), it is not merely for the sake of suspense and mystery. In a literature that knows itself as “production of its own theory,” as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy write in The Literary Absolute, 5   Étienne Esquirol, “Hallucinations,” Dictionnaire des Sciences Médicales (Paris: Panckoucke, 1814), 186–193, 189. English quotes refer to Étienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies. Treatise on Insanity (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 93. Hereafter cited in the text. On the varied uses of the term in previous centuries, see Jan Dirk Blom, A Dictionary of Hallucinations (New York: Springer, 2010), 219. [electronic book]

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doubles are oftentimes mobilized to comment on literature’s otherness.6 They figure as the other of science and in that sense act as a doubling of the kinds of hallucination narratives—medical case studies on the subject of hallucinations—that were flooding the neuroscientific field at the time. Thus, this chapter interprets the figure of the double as a key episteme of the nineteenth-century production of knowledge. It situates the figure within an interdiscursive configuration of clinical, psychiatric, literary, and philosophical discourses of its era. As a Foucauldian episteme that connects scientific and other discourses at a given historical moment, the figure of the double levels the playing field between the discursive practices of literature and those of neuroscience through operations of analogy, association, and contiguity. It generates the seemingly unending proliferation of Doppelgänger figures in German prose literature and at the same time propels a veritable explosion of scientific knowledge about hallucinations as a key symptom of mental illness in nineteenth-century psychiatry and psychopathology. Last but not least, it informs the medical case study as the genre that increasingly—and with ever greater confidence—combines observational data with authorial judgment and aesthetic strategies of verisimilitude. Already implied in Jean Paul, but enunciated more clearly in the works of Poetic Realism, is that hallucination narratives challenge the conventional distinction between the novel as a literary formulation and the medical case study as a new form of scientific text.

Phantasms Like Soemmering’s anatomical contribution to the philosophical discussion of dualism, Nicolai’s physiological-philosophical pamphlet shows that in his time, the boundaries separating academic disciplines were still relatively fluid. The current distinction between science and other subjects, and the modern conception of philosophy as a distinct academic discipline, only became institutionalized over the course of the nineteenth century. The intellectual and academic landscape of the Enlightenment permitted interdisciplinary conjecture, and scholars were eager to connect

6  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barbard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1978), 12.

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scientific realms otherwise held apart.7 While Soemmering’s search for the soul was exceptional in its boldness of explanation and its leaps into both speculative and physiological possibilities, he was certainly not the only researcher to dabble in interdisciplinary work by combining questions of metaphysics and neuroanatomy. Nicolai’s memoir in particular echoes Soemmering’s attempt to think the metaphysical concept of the soul physiologically, as a form of cerebral cortex activity. While Nicolai in his pamphlet does not offer a direct reference to Soemmering’s work, the author seems both receptive to and skeptical of “certain hypothetical notions of respecting things really unknown” (“hypothetische Ideen über das Unbekannte”), as he criticizes and at the same time admires “the labours of our German philosophers, founded jointly upon modern speculation and modern chemistry simultaneously” (162) (“die Bemühungen der neuesten deutschen Physiologen, die sich auf die neuere Spekulation und auf die neuere Chemie zugleich stützen”) (4). As a fervent advocate of popular philosophy and a social utilitarian rationalist, Nicolai reiterates a characteristically “enlightened” emphasis on “observations of facts” (“geprüfte Erfahrung”) combined with “deliberate reason” (163) (“reife Betrachtung”) (5), as opposed to both the gullibility of blind faith in supernatural apparitions and the “wool-gathering” [omitted in translation] (“Träumereien”) (38) and formalism inherent in Fichte’s and Kant’s speculative thought respectively.8 (Nicolai was famous for his satirical attacks on Kant and Fichte.) His memoir is a clear and forceful attempt to dispel the belief in ghosts through rational philosophy while combining the inductive method of reasoning with a measure of commitment to what one commentator has defined as a “new breed of psychological investigation.”9 7  See George Sebastian Rousseau, Enlightenment Borders: Pre- and Post-modern Discourses: Medical, Scientific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 7. 8  On Fichte’s dispute with Nicolai, see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Introductions to the Wissenschaftslehre and Other Writings, 1797–1800, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 102–103. 9  Shane McCorristine, Spectres of the Self: Thinking about Ghosts and Ghost-Seeing in England, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 42. As Nicolai concedes: “I am well aware that no general conclusions can be drawn from a single instance; but still the experience of a single case, if accurately observed and faithfully described, is sufficient to destroy hypotheses which have too long been honoured with the name of systems.” (177). (“Ich weiß wohl, dass aus einem einzelnen Falle keine allgemeinen Schlüsse zu ziehen sind. Hier doch kann eine einzige Erfahrung, genau beobachtet und treu aufbehalten, Hypothesen zerstören, welche lange mit dem Namen Systeme sind beehrt worden.”) (34)

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In his depiction of the figures and phantasms that visited him, Nicolai thus repeatedly underscores that these apparitions had to be recognized for what they really were, “extraordinary consequences of indisposition” (167) (“die merkwürdigen Folgen einer Krankheit” (12) and the result, he concluded, of foregoing his annual bloodletting.10 As Nicolai elaborates: The inclined reader should trust that my use of words such as tense, etc. refer neither to the mode of origination of such states nor to the resulting condition of the nerves, but simply indicate that something unnatural has to occur in the most delicate parts of the organization of the human body, if the sensorium commune, whatever it may be, is to be fallaciously affected from the outside. [translation mine, footnote omitted in original translation] (Man wird mir wohl zutrauen, dass ich durch die Worte angespannt usw. nicht die Entstehungsart solcher Zustände oder die Beschaffenheit der Nerven dabei bestimmen will, sondern dass diese Worte nur überhaupt anzeigen sollen, dass irgend etwas Widernatürliches in den feinsten Theilen der Organisation des menschlichen Körpers vorgehen müsse, wenn das sensorium commune, es sei nun was es wolle, auch von außen so irrig afficiert wird.) (14)

It is hardly surprising that Nicolai’s bizarre autobiographical narrative quickly established itself as the prevalent theory of hallucinations. Not only does its author confidently credit his powers of observation and reflection for having prevailed over a disturbing and potentially threatening experience: “I endeavored as much as possible to preserve my composure of mind.” (167) (“So suchte ich um so mehr Besonnenheit zu behalten, um in recht deutlichem Bewusstsein dessen, was in mir vorging, zu bleiben.”) (14) He also takes into account clinical data presented and evaluated by his personal physician, the renowned Jena physiologist Hofrath Hufeland, who was treating him for digestive and venereal complications. Reasoning that the phantasms were neither ghosts nor the symptom of mental distress, Nicolai insists that his state of mind at the time had nothing to do with his seeing phantasms: “On the whole I could trace no connection which the various figures that thus appeared and disappeared to my sight had, either with my state of mind, or with my employment, and the other thoughts which engaged my attention.” (167) 10  See also Charlotte Craig, “To Hell and Back: Four Enlighteners and the Devils,” Lessing Yearbook 20, ed. Richard E. Schade (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 45–60.

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(“Im Ganzen war zwischen meinem Gemütszustand, zwischen meinen Beschäftigungen und übrigen Gedanken, und zwischen den mannigfaltigen mir vorkommenden und wieder verschwindenden Gestalten, gar kein Zusammenhang zu entdecken.”) (14) As his use of the more descriptive and neutral term “figures” (“Gestalten”) as opposed to “specters” (“Geister”) implies, Nicolai took care to distinguish his response from the apparitions reported by the mentally insane and the superstitious, which he took to confirm “what delusive facility the imagination can exhibit” (“wie leicht die Einbildungskraft uns auf falsche Begriffe führt”) even in “those who are in the perfect use of their senses” (164) (“auch Personen bei völlig richtigem Bewusstsein”) (8). As Nicolai concedes, the phantasms existed solely as mental representations and they derived from “a consciousness which was disordered” (178) (“aus einem kranken Ich”) (36)—but not insane. Nicolai’s narrated experience of phantasms corresponds in some important particulars to Esquirol’s definition of hallucination, which is the basis of the one that is still employed today.11 Both writers take care to differentiate hallucinations from the kinds of apparitions or visions that belong to the theological and mystical realms, and both compare hallucinations to dreams, with the difference that in the case of hallucinations, the “dreamer” is wide awake. By finally stressing that hallucinations occur in the absence of an external stimulus, Nicolai and Esquirol rigorously distinguish between hallucinations, defined as sensory errors that have no material basis in reality, and illusions—false perceptions of stimuli derived from an external source. According to Nicolai’s account, The phantasms appeared to me in every case involuntarily, as if they had been presented externally, like the phenomena in nature, though they certainly had their origin internally; and at the same time I was always able to distinguish with the greatest precision phantasms from phenomena. (168)

11  The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM–5) of the American Psychiatric Association defines a “hallucination” as “perception-like experiences that occur without an external stimulus. They are vivid and clear with the full force and impact of normal perceptions, and not under voluntary control. They may occur in any sensory modality, but auditory hallucinations are the most common in schizophrenia and related disorders. Auditory hallucinations are usually experiences as voices, whether familiar or unfamiliar, that are perceived as distinct from the individual’s own thoughts. The hallucinations must occur in the context of a clear sensorium.” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM–5, 87–88.

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(Die Phantasmen erschienen mir schlechterdings unwillkürlich, als würden sie mir von außen dargestellt, gleich den Phänomenen in der Natur, ob sie gleich gewiß bloß in mir entstanden; und dabei konnte ich, so wie ich überhaupt in der größten Ruhe und Besonnenheit war, jederzeit Phantasmen von Phänomenen genau unterscheiden, wobei ich mich nicht ein einzigmal geirrt habe.) (16)

It is in these terms that Nicolai anticipated Esquirol’s emphasis on the distinction between natural phenomena and phantasms—what Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet define as “the irrefragable aspect of what is perceived and the undeniable interiority of causation that is realized in [Esquirol’s concept of] hallucination.”12 As the authors point out, implied in the hallucinatory phenomenon is a “contradictory tension between the materiality of the manifestation and the ideality of its origin and tenor, between the positivity of its form and subjectivity of its substance, between its perceptual certainty and the independence of its sense organs.”13 Of particular note in Esquirol’s and Nicolai’s definition of hallucination is their shared conviction that hallucinations were rooted in the body. Despite their appearing as subjective phenomena in the perceptual register, they could not be understood without reference to physical disease. Hoping to disprove the popular belief that hallucinations were a spiritual or purely psychological condition, Nicolai thus maintained that his hallucinations were the result of “obstruction in the small muscles of the abdomen” (165) (“Verstopfungen in den feineren Gefäßen des Unterleibes”) (11). Esquirol, for his part, argued that the presence of hallucinations in the body manifested as spasms in the brain (“dans une sorte d’état tétanique du cerveau”) (189).14 His insistence that they did not, however, take the form of brain lesions foreshadows his lifelong effort to detach mental disease and madness from the material brain.15 In a rebuttal to 12  Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet, Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 237. 13  Ibid. 14  The term “tétanique” is omitted in English translation. Note that the term does not designate the tetanus disease (“lockjaw”) but is used in its original meaning, referring to a muscular cramp caused by electrical current. 15  Swain and Gauchet, Madness and Democracy, 152. As one contemporary observer notes: “Esquirol versicherte mich, zwölfhundert Gehirne von Wahnsinnigen genau untersucht, nie aber eine einzige organische Veränderung gefunden zu haben, die man nicht auch bei Leichen von Subjekten fände, die niemals im Leben einen zerrütteten Geist zeigten.” Johann Ludwig Casper, Charakteristik der französischen Medicin: Mit vergleichenden Hinblicken auf

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Gall’s craniological theorizing about the influence of cerebral structure on mental function, Esquirol’s once reported that “he had dissected the brains of more than twelve hundred subjects who had died of mania, and that he did not in a single instance discover any morbid appearances which are not found also in subjects who had never suffered any mental diseases whatever.”16 Whether treated as a digestive, circulatory (Nicolai), or inflammatory, neural (Esquirol) disease, the remedy of choice consisted in the application of medicinal leeches, a treatment that was immensely popular in nineteenth-century Europe.17 Far less self-evident than the treatment was the question of how to ascertain and prove the existence of hallucinations, given that they had their material basis and causal origins in a domain that was notoriously hard to gain access to. The roots of hallucinations were tricky because they were emotional, affective, indeed “moral”—caused by nervous rupture rather than cervical lesion.18 Hallucinations stemmed from physical processes that were confined to the nervous system and impermanent, leaving no organic change that could be examined even postmortem. As Esquirol writes: “This convulsive state produces the most frequent and the most fleeting hallucinations.”19 Paradoxically, then, the only material “proof” of hallucinations offered by both Nicolai and Esquirol was the avowed discrepancy between the presence of the apparitions as visions and their absence as actual phenomena. Sometimes, this discrepancy could be corroborated by the testimony of a neutral, objective observer. In the case of Nicolai, he repeatedly asked his wife to confirm the absence of the Gestalten who visited him. Nicolai also called his doctor Hufeland as his “living and unexceptionable” witness (165) (“ein noch lebender und unverwerflicher die Englische (Characteristics of French Medicine: With A Comparative View to the English) (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1822), 426. 16  See on this John Eberle, A Treatise on the Practice of Medicine, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Grigg & Elliot, 1835), 2: 159. 17  Mary De Young, Encyclopedia of Asylum Therapeutics, 1750–1950s (Jefferson: McFarland, 2015), 63. 18  James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848) defined moral insanity as “madness consisting in a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations.” J.  C. Prichard, Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, and Haswell, 1835). 19  “[Cet] état convulsive du cerveau … produit les hallucinations les plus multiplies et les plus fugitives.” Esquirol, “Hallucinations,” 191.

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Zeuge”) (10). As far as Esquirol’s patients were concerned, it was the doctor himself who documented the absence of an external source in his patients’ hallucinations. Ostensibly, hallucinations could only be discerned ex negativo, as not having a material basis in reality, as nonempirical facts. Yet Esquirol did not believe that his etiology was scientifically meaningless simply because it was not strictly speaking falsifiable.20 Other forms of mental disease studied by Esquirol and his colleagues at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris expressed themselves as disorders in behavior, thinking, or judgment, all of which could be scrutinized, evaluated, classified, and interpreted at length. By contrast, hallucinations were unique in that they could only be corroborated by reference to witness testimony. Since the only observable symptoms were the visions themselves, the disease manifested strictly in the form of descriptive accounts, as narrative. As a result, hallucinations offer a particularly suited test case for exploring the intersections between fiction and psychopathology, and between the emergence of neuroscience and the German novel in the nineteenth century. More pointedly, the term “hallucination” in and of itself reveals the correspondences and convergences between neuroscience and fiction, suggesting that a single medico-scientific concept can help unmask cultural assumptions powerful enough to infiltrate both disciplines. These assumptions become apparent in the light of the peculiar connotations pertaining to the semantic field of the term hallucination. As Esquirol points out, he chose the term because of its ambiguous etymology and because it had no “determined acception.”21 It is true that since its inception, several origins have been suggested. The term hallucination is believed to derive from both the Latin verb alucinor, which translates as “to be delirious, to ramble on, to fabulate, talk idly, prate, dream, to follow no definite train of thought,” and the Ancient Greek ἀλύω (alúō), which means “being restless, uneasy, distraught, beside oneself,” and secondarily “to roam about, wander” in one’s mind.22 Other suggested 20  Falsifiability was not a problem for science until Karl Popper used falsification as a criterion of demarcation to distinguish between scientific and nonscientific theories. Karl Popper, “Zwei Bedeutungen von Falsifizierbarkeit” (1989), Handlexikon der Wissenschaftstheorie, ed. Helmut Seiffert and Gerard Radnitzky (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag 1992), 82–85. 21  Esquirol, “Hallucinations,” 193. 22  See on this Tony James, Dream, Creativity, and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 69.

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origins are the Greek word ἄλλος (állos, “other”), invoking the connection between the hallucinating subject and the hallucinated object, and the Latin expression ad lucem (“to the light”), a term relating to illumination, enlightenment, and, by extension, to vision.23 The contradictory meanings of the term’s designation convey the ambiguities and displacements in the phenomenon it describes. Its unresolved nature in turn mirrors the history of the medical debate on whether or not the afflicted person is indeed “enlightened” or rather “beside themselves.” In that way, the phenomenon itself figures as a battleground of scientific events and cultural forces. As the signifier of a mysterious, non-­ falsifiable mental process, the term “hallucination” puts pressure on some of the basic assumptions of the day’s philosophical and intellectual currents. It invokes an implicit critique of the inductive method of positivism, since it derives a generalizing hypothesis without empirically verified data. At the same time, it challenges empiricism’s insistence on the senses as the only source of knowledge by postulating a form of vision that is independent of an object that would excite the body’s visual system. The concept finally contests the validity of Kant’s transcendental idealism in that it asserts the primacy of external appearances over internal representations. To cite Nicolai’s witty critique: The critical philosophers maintain that knowledge deduced from observation is merely empirick, and therefore not to be depended upon; it is perhaps true that nature has assigned us no greater certainty than this respecting our ideas. But could we be truly conscious of our grounds of reason, if the appearances called external, which follow laws that do not depend on the representations of the mind, did not continually agree with those representations? Are we possessed of any other criterion? Does not the great theoretical philosopher, when he sees every thing yellow, conclude that his eye is jaundiced; or when every thing appears black to him, that his brain is affected? In these cases he does not trust his imagination or mental powers alone. (177) (Sagen die kritischen Philosophen: die aus der Beobachtung entspringende Erkenntnis wäre nur empirisch, also nicht sicher; so kann es gar wohl sein, 23  See J. Christian, “Hallucination,” Dictionnaire Encyplopédique des Sciences Médicales, ed. D.  A. Dechambre and A.  Lereboullet (Paris: Masson, 1886), 77–120, 77. Quoted after G. E. Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms: Descriptive Psychopathology since the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 61–62.

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dass uns von der Natur nicht größere Sicherheit unserer Begriffe zugestanden ist. Allein, würden wie uns denn ganz fest unserer Vernunftmäßigkeit bewusst sein, wenn nicht die äußern Erscheinungen, welche Gesetzen folgen die nicht von den Vorstellungen in unserm Gemüte abhangen, beständig mit unsern Vorstellungen übereinstimmen, Haben wir ein anderes Kennzeichen? Schließt nicht der größte theoretische Philosoph, wenn er alles gelb sieht, er habe die gelbe Sucht, und wenn ihm alles schwarz vor den Augen flimmert, sein Gehirn sei gedrückt; und trauet also nicht seinen bloßen Vorstellungen?) (33–34)

But more than anything, the concept of hallucinations troubles established conceptions of truth and knowledge by suggesting that the visions are both completely fictitious and yet, in a sense, very real. The discovery of hallucinations drove the scientific world to acknowledge the possibility that an error could be productive and a fictional narrative inherently meaningful. This idea had noticeable implications for the realignment of disciplinary boundaries as it helped push the limits of what would be considered objective science and of what would emerge as science’s accepted modalities of (self-)representation. If a confabulated story could be regarded as empirical fact, didn’t that mean that a narrative could, at least under the right circumstances, be considered clinical data?

Case Histories It is no coincidence that the discovery of hallucinations is inextricably linked with the reinvention of the case history, a genre of medical inquiry that began to dominate the field as medicine asserted itself as an empirical science around 1800. Already Esquirol’s mentor, the French psychiatrist and chief physician of the Salpêtrière, Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), had begun to listen to his patients and engage them in lengthy conversations.24 Widely credited for the development of a more humane psychological approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, Pinel assembled detailed case histories, so-called historiettes (little stories), that promised to identify important factors of his patients’ history and yield a better and

24  See Foucault’s analysis of Pinel’s strategy of “seeing and knowing” (i.e., his use of enquiry, observation, and dialogue) and his privileging of descriptive practice over anatomical investigation. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A. M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2003), 131–151.

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fuller understanding of their disease.25 In his dictionary entry on “hallucinations,” Esquirol likewise supports his etiology of hallucinations with twenty clinical vignettes that are scattered throughout the text. The cases are drawn from clinical experience he obtained during his rounds at the Salpêtrière, which had become a major research hospital committed to the systematic observation, recording, and archiving of vast amounts of clinical data.26 While not all of Esquirol’s clinical cases are easily reconciled with the exact nosological details of hallucinations, their sheer quantity certainly facilitated the process of classification. Seriality is a critical component of the case history, and one that helped transform Esquirol’s clinical practice into a coherent and compelling narrative27: One laboring under a hallucination desires that certain odors which annoy him should be removed … . Another believes he chews bloody flesh …. A melancholic sees bees constantly issuing from his mouth. A maniac [hears] the roar of thunder. (106) (Un halluciné veut qu’on écarte des odeurs importunes … Celui-là croit mâcher de la chair crue … Un mélancholique voyait sortir continuellement des abeilles de sa bouche. Un maniaque entend gronder le tonnerre) (190)

As a form of narration that is based on the systematic review of relevant data, Esquirol’s psychiatric case studies helped to promote hallucinations as a major symptom of delusional insanity.28 As a new object of scientific knowledge, hallucinations in turn lend themselves to a new form of vivid exposition. Adopting strategies of literary representation for his clinical vignettes, Esquirol wrote in a taut, gripping style that presented the events and their medical circumstances in a simple yet powerful language: So that these insane believe to see, hear, taste, feel, touch things that can have no real existence other than in themselves, except for themselves, at least for themselves; their senses, their sensing limbs have nothing to do 25  Philippe Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique sur l’Aliénation mentale ou la Manie (Paris: Richard, Caile et Ravier, Year 1800). Philippe Pinel, A Treatise on Insanity, trans. D. D. Davis (Sheffield: W. Todd, 1806). 26   See Michaela Ralser, “Der Fall und seine Geschichte. Die klinisch-psychiatrische Fallgeschichte als Narration an der Schwelle,” Wissen. Erzählen. Narrative der Humanwissenschaften (Bielefeld: Transkript, 2006), 115–126, 117. 27  Ibid., 118. 28  On the etiology of “delusion” see Chap. 5.

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with their delirium; they the disconnected from the exterior world, they are in a state of hallucination. (111) (En sorte que ces malades croient voir, entendre, goûter, sentir, toucher des choses qui ne peuvent avoir aucune existence réelle, sinon en elles-mêmes, du moins pour eux; leurs sens, les extrémités sentantes ne sont pour rien dans leur délire; ils n’ont rien à démêler avec le monde extérieur; ils sont dans un état d’hallucination.) (188)

Esquirol’s relatively short sentences allowed for a maximum of plot-­ driven suspense and even a hint of character development: A lady reads in an account of the condemnation of a criminal. She sees everywhere the bloody head separated from the body, and covered in black crepe. This head projects over her left eye, and inspires her with such inexpressible horror as to cause her to make several attempts upon her life. (109) (Une dame lit, dans un journal, la condamnation d’un criminal. Elle voit partout une tête ensanglantée, séparée du tronc, revêtue d’un crêpe noir. Cette tête fait saillie audessus de l’oeuil gauche, inspire à la dame une horreur inexprimable, et lui fait tenter plusieurs moyens pour se détruire.”) (190)

Another idiosyncrasy of Esquirol’s vignettes is their insistence on medical histories that are devoted to the eccentric and marginal. By featuring “extraordinary” and “strange” cases, Esquirol’s vignettes attest to the correspondence between the medical case study and the novella, an emerging literary genre that is likewise structured on an “unprecedented event that has occured” (“eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit”), according to Goethe’s famous dictum.29 In a similar way, hallucinations are significant and noteworthy because they are improbable and yet perceived as real. Whether referring to a common man who believes himself to be surrounded by multiple police agents, or a lady who sees and confers with

29  Johann Peter Eckermann, “Gespräche mit Goethe,” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et  al., 40 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1999), Vol. 39: “Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens,” 221. Cited by David Wellbery in his Afterword to Volume 11 of Goethe’s Collected Works, trans. Judith Ryan (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers New York, 1988), 294.

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deceased individuals, each hallucination is based on a unique, extravagant, and exceptional occurrence: A man is arrested, thrown into the dungeon; as he is released from prison he sees and hears informers everywhere, police agents ready to arrest him again … . I once had in charge an old merchant who, after a very active life, was seized with amaurosis at about forty-one years of age. Some years after he became a maniac. He was very much agitated, and spoke in a loud voice with persons whom he believed he both saw and heard. He beheld the most singular objects, and his visions often threw him into a complete state of enchantment. There was at the Salpêtrière in 1816, a Jewess, thirty-three years of age. She was blind, also a maniac. She saw the strangest sights. (108) [translation modified, italics added] (Un homme est arrêté, jeté dans les cachots; rendu peu après à la liberté, il voit, il entend partout des dénonciateurs, des agens de police prêts à l’arrêter de nouveau … J’ai donné des soins à un ancient négociant qui, après une vie très-active fut frappe de goutte-sereine vers l’âge de quarante-un ans. Quelques années après il devint maniaque; il était très-agité, parlait à haute voix avec des personnes qui’il croyait voir et entendre; il voyait les choses les plus singulières; souvent ses visions le jetaient dans le plus vif enchantement. Il y avait à la Salpêtrière, an 1816, une juive, âgée de trente-huit ans; elle était aveugle et maniaque; elle voyait les choses les plus étranges.) (189) [italics added]

Esquirol’s case studies of hallucinations are premised on epistemological uncertainty. Hallucinations are a subject worthy of serious scientific investigation because they are ambiguous and unheard of, of uncertain source. Yet their status changes as soon as they have been recorded, examined, and classified by a medical researcher. Once incorporated into a case study, hallucinations attain “a particular kind of normative function,” as they now pertain to a context that “reviews norms from an apparently abnormal perspective and thereby repositioning them.”30 In other words, they become exemplary. Situated on the threshold between the subversive and the exemplary function of the medical case study, Esquirol’s medical descriptions expose the dubious conventions on which science depends. Considered in their double character, they exemplify the laws and 30  Andrew Webber, “The Case Study,” A Concise Companion to Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Culture, ed. Laura Marcus and Ankhi Mukherjee (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 34–48, 38.

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conventions of narrative, which is likewise not confined to the creative shaping of fiction as opposed to the objective facts of science. These case studies illustrate that the formation of discursive and narratological norms is an essential aspect of the dynamics of scientific discourse as it carves out new areas of research, especially in fields that are still developing. In the nineteenth century, the narratives emerging from ever-evolving and accelerating neuroscientific inquiries in particular were persuasive enough to shift the threshold of scientific logic and rationality. Owing to Esquirol’s tireless efforts to establish a nosology of mental illness based on disturbances of emotion and perception rather than defects of reason, hallucinations were soon considered a central component symptom of “delirium” (délire), present in eighty percent of the mentally ill.31 Despite their evanescent appearance, hallucinations were quickly absorbed into a medical field that would eventually be called psychiatry and that from the outset had been almost purely descriptive, just as Esquirol’s vignettes were swiftly assimilated and accepted despite their focus on a rather unstable and erratic—unfalsifiable—concept. As hallucinations became an essential part of Esquirol’s larger project of treating, medicalizing, and regulating insanity, the genre of the medical case history ceased to be the Other of science to become the scientific double and counterpart of literature instead.32

The Figure of the Double How, then, is this neuroscientific revolution reflected upon in narrative fiction? How does nineteenth-century literature participate in the process by which the boundaries between fact and fiction, science and fantasy are shifted? How do new forms of narrative subjectivity counter the onslaught of objective scientific knowledge, as famously asserted by Freud?33 What, in other words, does literature know about the brain as the somatic basis  See Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms, 240.  Esquirol toured mental hospitals throughout France to compile a detailed description of the conditions in which the insane lived throughout the nation. Demonstrating that the reforms undertaken in Paris had not penetrated the provinces, his account established a program of reform directed both at the government and the medical profession. 33  Freud writes: “Es berührt mich selbst noch eigentümlich, dass die Krankengeschichten, die ich schreibe, wie Novellen zu lesen sind, und dass sie sozusagen des ernsten Gepräges der Wissenschaften entbehren.” Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, Studien über Hysterie (Leipzig/ Wien: Deutike 1895), 120. Quoted after Ralser, “Der Fall und seine Geschichte, 122. 31 32

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for vision(s) and how does it participate in the medicalization of imagination and fantasy? Through the inflationary use of Doppelgänger figures, German novels and novellas visually emphasize the regulation and disciplining of hallucinations within the medical field. In the process, these literary works subvert the distinction between factual and fictional writing, speculative philosophy, literary imagination, and the discursive practices that would come to define the field of neuroscience. Of course, when Jean Paul coined the term Doppel[t]gänger in his novel Siebenkäs (1796–97), the experience of a double vision was much more narrowly defined than those described in Esquirol’s dictionary entry on hallucinations.34 At its first mention in the German original, the term appears in the plural referring to the novel’s protagonist Siebenkäs and his friend and travel companion Leibgeber. Note that the English translator omits Jean Paul’s neologism instead of devising a corresponding term in the target language: “On arriving at a column … Leibgeber said: ‘Now, march back—your wife is anxious—it is already past eleven o’clock.’” (44) (“Da die Doppeltgänger vor eine Säule kamen … so sagte Leibgeber: ‘Jetzt marsch, zurück!’ Deine Frau ängstigt sich ab, es ist über 11 Uhr.”) (66) [italics added] In the German original, a subsequent footnote defines “Doppeltgänger” as “people who see themselves”: “so heißen Leute, die sich selber sehen” (Ibid.). There is nothing about this prosaic scene that bespeaks the uncanny experience of hallucinations. Not only are Siebenkäs and Leibgeber physically present, real characters instead of phantasms or visions divorced from reality. As his name suggests, Leibgeber (“body giver”) resembles Siebenkäs very closely; the main difference is that he walks with a limp. A detailed list of shared attributes assimilates the friends into one entity—“one soul assigned to two bodies” (10) (“zu einer in zwei Körper eingepfarrten Seele”) (39).

34  Jean Paul, Blumen- Frucht- und Dornenstücke; oder Ehestand, Tod und Hochzeit des Armenadvokaten F. St. Siebenkäs in Reichsmarktflecken Kuhschappel. Ein treues Dornenstück, Werke, ed. Gustav Lohmann, 6 vols. (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1959), Vol. 2: “Siebenkäs und Flegeljahre,” 7–565. Jean Paul, Flower- Fruit- and Thornpieces; or, The Married Life, Death and Wedding of the Advocate of the Poor, Firmian Stanislaus Siebenkäs, trans. Edward Henry Noel (London: William Smith, 1845). Hereafter cited in the text. On the first appearance of the term Doppelgänger in the novel in slightly different meaning see Paul Fleming, The Pleasures of Abandonment: Jean Paul and the Life of Humor (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 126.

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Jean Paul, however, quickly extends the literal sense of the term Doppelgänger. In its subsequent iterations, it comprises a broader meaning and one that is more easily reconciled with the concept of hallucination. As Siebenkäs’ Doppelgänger, Leibgeber now represents a complementing role for the former, one of two “opposite poles” (48) (“ungleichnamige Pole”) (69). As Siebenkäs’ alter ego, he remains a separate entity, but not the active one in the sense that he sees and recognizes himself in the other. Instead, he is the one who is recognized, apprehended.35 As such, the figure of the double foreshadows a disturbing and potentially traumatizing form of hallucination that French mesmerist Charles Féré (1852–1907) defined in 1891 as autoscopy, denoting the visual hallucination of an image of a duplicate self, seen from an extracorporeal but egocentric visio-spatial perspective.36 Consider the librarian Schoppe of Jean Paul’s novel Titan (1800–1803), a figure possessed of an obsessive fear of his multiple alter ego(s).37 Schoppe’s harrowing experience culminates in a series of upsetting encounters with his own reflection when he is left to wait in a hall of mirrors, itself a figure of Schoppe’s own existence and his inability to distinguish between his own self and the objective world it generates. After he experiences a series of autoscopic hallucinations, including one in which he encounters his double Siebenkäs, Shoppe perishes from shock. Characteristically, Doppelgänger scenes in German narrative prose literature of the nineteenth century focus on the experience of the subject who sees rather than emphasizing the specific features of the object thus perceived. Like hallucinations, a Doppelgänger vision is not to be conflated with the thrilling experience of seeing ghosts. While it bridges the gap between Romantic fiction and the gothic romance, the figure of the double has its origins in the critique of Idealism. However, it nevertheless invokes a specter: as the mental image of a treacherous experience, the figure lends itself to the production of an epistemological crisis, announcing Leibgeber’s “slide into Fichteanism” (Adrian Daub) or Siebenkäs’ 35  John Herdman defines the figure as “a second self, or alter ego, which appears as a distinct and separate being apprehensible by the physical senses (or at least, by some of them), but exists in a dependent relation to the original.” John Herdman, The Double in 19th-Century Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1990), 14. 36  Charles Féré, “Notes sur les hallucinations autoscopiques our spéculaires et sur les hallucinations altruistes,” Compes Rendues Hebdomedaires des Séances at Mémoirs de la Société de a Biologie 3 (1891), 451–53. 37  Jean Paul, Titan, Werke, Vol. 3. Jean Paul, Titan: A Romance, trans. Charles Timothy Brooks (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co, 1873)

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descent into what Andrew Webber refers to as “the primal scene of ‘Obsubjektivism.’”38 Moreover, the figure of the double provokes encounters with oneself, with one’s duplicate, and in the process conjures up images of split or double personalities. Embodying the “division between selfhood and alterity,” the Doppelgänger figure materializes as the individual “comes face-to-face with her own past and the perspectives he has held up to this point,” as Webber writes.39 According to Niklas Luhmann, it thus exemplifies the experience of the modern Kantian individual who can no longer simply perceive the world for itself (an sich).40 In other iterations and especially in Jean Paul’s work, the figure of the double often entails a humorous critique of the doctrines of Fichte’s subjectivist philosophy.41 The subject who sees the double here represents Fichte’s self-positing, absolute “I” that is unable to break the circularity of its solipsistic isolation from the world. In this version of the Doppelgänger figure, the similarity of the subject with his double is converted into self-­ identity and the act of reflection into a desperate, quasi-hallucinatory act of never-ending self-positing.42 This, then, is the specter that haunts many of Jean Paul’s characters and especially the protagonist of Titan. It is the specter of Idealist notions of subjectivity—a consequence of the ego’s infinite and unfulfilled quest for meaningful subject–object relationships. As if unavoidably, the novel’s critique of Fichtean autonomy leads Schoppe into a mirror phobia, instigating his concentrated and sustained effort at avoiding his self for the remainder of the novel.43 Beyond excoriating and lampooning the Idealist search for ultimate self-knowledge and an ever-elusive synthesis of the imagination, the figure of the double crucially appears in contexts addressing the fate and purpose of literature. When a Doppelgänger figures in a nineteenth-century German novel or novella, it almost inevitably elicits a reflection on the text’s status 38  Andrew  Webber, The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 59. Adrian Daub, Uncivil Unions: The Metaphysics of Marriage in German Idealism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 255. 39  Webber, The Doppelgänger, 59. 40   Niklas Luhmann, “Eine Redeskription ‘romantischer Kunst’,” Systemtheorie der Literatur, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann and Harro Müller (Munich: Fink, 1996), 325–44, 337. 41  On Jean Paul’s parody of infinite poetic reflexivity, see Fleming, The Pleasures of Abandonment, 36–44. 42  See on this Webber, The Doppelgänger, 29–33 and Christof Forderer, Doppelgänger in der Literatur seit 1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999), 37–51. 43  On the novel’s ventriloquism of Fichte’s as well as Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s antiFichtean positions, see Daub, Uncivil Unions, 250.

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as literature and the possibility of claiming epistemological certainty through narrative means. This self-reflexive function is inscribed in one of the original enunciations of the figure. In Jean Paul’s autobiographical Self-Life-Description (Selberlebensbeschreibung, 1818–19), the narrator remembers an autoscopic hallucination he experienced in  childhood: “One morning, when I was a very young child, I stood on our doorstep looking toward the woodpile on my left when, all of a sudden, the inner vision ‘I am [an] I’ descended from the sky like a flash of lightning in front of my eyes, and it has remained aglow ever since.” [translation modified] (“An einem Vormittag stand ich als ein sehr junges Kind unter der Haustüre und sah links nach der Holzlege, als auf einmal das innere Gesicht, ‘ich bin ein Ich’, wie ein Blitzstrahl vom Himmel vor mich fuhr and seitdem leuchtend stehen blieb.”)44 The narrator interprets this vision as the birth of his self-consciousness or self-awareness (“Geburt meines Selbstbewusstseins”), which explains why he thinks he might have been destined to become a philosopher (“ob er nicht vielleicht mehr der Philosophie als der Dichtkunst zugeboren war”). The next sentence, however, bridges the gap between the philosophical phenomenon, the psychiatric diagnosis, and the literary event by subsuming all three under the notion of an “eternal” vision: “My I had beheld itself for the first time and forever.” (“Da hatte mein Ich zum ersten Male sich selber gesehen und auf ewig.”) (Ibid.) The literary register here imbues the philosophical and psychiatric domains with a spiritual aura and an affirmation of the primacy of textual practice. An act of seeing that had been elusive, fragmentary, and notoriously difficult to capture is rendered meaningful and permanent through its association with the eternal force of writing. The hallucination becomes stable and memorable in the moment in which it is identified and captured as text. The next passage further qualifies the autoscopic vision as a modality of writing and, specifically, of autobiographical literature: It is unlikely that memory should play me false, as nothing that anyone else might have told me could have mingled with, and added to, something that happened in man’s innermost sanctum und whose novelty alone invested such ordinary concomitant circumstances with permanence. (337)

44  Selberlebensbeschreibung, Jean Paul, Werke, Vol. 6: “Schmelzles Reise nach Flätz,” 1038–1103, 1061. Jean Paul, “Self-Life-Description,” Jean Paul: A Reader, ed. Timothy Joseph Casey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 322–359, 336. Hereafter cited in the text.

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(Täuschungen des Erinnerns sind hier schwerlich gedenkbar, da kein fremdes Erzählen in eine bloß im verhangnen Allerheiligsten des Menschen vorgefallne Begebenheit, deren Neuheit allein so alltäglichen Nebenumständen das Bleiben gegeben, sich mit Zusätzen mengen konnte.) (1061)

What are the narrator’s strategies for convincing the reader that his memory of the hallucination is untainted and accurate? How can he assert with so much confidence that the experience was “real” and more than just a product of his imagination? Like Nicolai and Esquirol before him, Jean Paul interprets the radically subjective nature of the experience not as a hindrance to knowledge but rather as its condition of possibility. Implied in Jean Paul’s assertion that the privacy and secrecy of the experience guarantees its authenticity is the claim that only the autobiographical writer could have fully captured it. This does not preclude the possibility that autoscopic hallucinations could be transmitted in the form of an oral description that would be faithfully transposed into written form by a conscientious doctor. But it certainly means that the value of autobiographical testimony as a narrative model is implicit in the passage. Another strategy Jean Paul’s autobiographical narrator shares with the philosopher Nicolai and the psychiatrist Esquirol is the invocation of a productive fusion of “mundane” (“alltäglich”) and “sacred” (“Allerheiligste”) elements, which resonates with the dichotomy between the exceptional and the exemplary, and the erratic and the normative, as outlined above. This dichotomy is not only at the heart of the genres of the case study and the novella, it is also an integral component of Schlegel’s Romantic conception of progressive universal poetry and is hence firmly grounded in the literary tradition. Whether theorized by a philosopher, a psychiatrist, or a poet, autoscopic hallucinations are conceptually consistent with the bourgeoning Romantic figurations of the double around 1800. As staged scenes of self-reflection, these self-hallucinations are inherently ironic in the Romantic sense, as they are infused with mystery and arbitrariness, affecting the spheres of emotional, intellectual, and social life.

Unthought Since they were first invoked by Jean Paul, Doppelgänger figures have been mobilized in various contexts and disciplines including aesthetics, philosophy, psychoanalysis, religion, ideology critique, social theory, and

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feminism.45 Concerned by the looseness of its definition, critics have cautioned that the exact contours and features of the figure of the double are highly variable. It is true that the imaginative power of the double lies precisely in its ambiguity and openness to multiple interpretations. The double can signify opposition or sameness, but similarity as well. Moreover, the figure can stand for complementarity, as in the Platonic conception of twin souls who are no more than two aspects of the same soul, or for substitutability and mistaken identity, as in the classical comedy of errors, a genre that enjoyed considerable success among Romantic authors like Brentano and Joseph von Eichendorff.46 In literature, its use often plays with the condition of being infinitely multiplied, as in dystopian visions of cloning, or on the impossibility of discerning between what is illusive and what is real, as in Heinrich von Kleist’s use of the Doppelgänger motive.47 In psychoanalytic thought, the double figures prominently as a symbolic representation of the contest between conflicting forces that are present in the unconscious.48 From a medico-scientific perspective, the concept is thus easy to fault for “being used indiscriminately for a case of biological twinship and for a case of psychopathic hallucination, with no apparent realization that the two are entirely different things,” as one commentator suggests, arguing further49: “Too loose a definition would encompass the entire canon. Friends, brothers, enemies, lovers, complementary and antagonistic characters, parallel lives, impostors, disguised characters, good and bad cops, past and future selves, all could under some view be 45  See, for instance, Otto Rank, Der Doppelgänger. Eine psychoanalytische Studie (Wien: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1925); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993); Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of The Copy. Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996); Dimitris Vardoulakis, The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). 46   Ralf Simon, “Romantische Verdoppelungen—komische Verwechslungen. Von der romantischen Reflexionsphilosophie über die Verwechslungskomödie zur Posse und zurück,” Das romantische Drama. Produktive Synthese zwischen Tradition und Innovation, ed. Uwe Japp et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2000), 259–280. 47  See on this Chava Eva Schwarcz, “Der Doppelgänger in der Literatur—Spiegelung, Gegensatz, Ergänzung,” Doppelgänger. Von endlosen Spielarten eines Phänomens, ed. Ingrid Fichtner (Bern: Haupt, 1999), 1–14, 13–14. 48  Webber, The Doppelgänger,10. 49  Sebastian Dieguez, “Doubles Everywhere: Literary Contributions to the Study of the Bodily Self,” Literary Medicine: Brain Disease and Doctors in Novels, Theater, and Film, ed. Julien Bogousslavsky and Sebastian Dieguez (Basel: Karger, 2013), 77–115, 80.

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considered instances of the literary double, and this does not even include animals, objects, places, cities, and worlds, all of which have also been ‘literary doubles’ at some point.”50 It bears mentioning that contemporary neuroscientists explain the wide appeal of stories of the double with the fact that they tap into human cognitive architecture and its mechanisms by “[providing] our species with a phantom companion onto which our actions, beliefs, desires, emotions, and needs can be safely projected and which can serve as a sophisticated simulation device for planning, anticipating, comparing, and fantasizing.”51 The popularity of the literary double is thus taken as evidence that cultural inventions are facilitated and indeed determined by evolutionarily older brain circuits and their structural constraints. This process is termed “cultural recycling of cortical maps.”52 A different rationale emerges when the figure of the double is examined from within the critical framework of the history of ideas. In this view, the double’s popularity and disparity would go hand-in-hand, revealing not so much a lamentable decline (in specificity, in validity) but rather a basic principle of knowledge production, according to which knowledge is historically constructed, contingent on change, and structured on difference and variability. Viewed as a Foucauldian episteme and as a symptom of modernity, the figure of the double is situated within an interdiscursive configuration of practices that work across the fields of medicine, psychiatry, literature, and philosophy. A full Foucauldian discursive analysis would be certain to unsettle the understanding that hallucinations are a sign of madness and foreground the historical constructedness of the idea that hallucinations stem from a vivid imagination. It would arrive at a similar conclusion as the one drawn by contemporary neuroscientists who argue that autoscopic hallucinations are not necessarily pathological, but “part of our normal cognitive architecture.”53 In The Order of Things, Foucault develops a similar conception of the double—which he also terms “the unthought”—in that he acknowledges its “indispensible,” “insistent,” “inexhaustible,” and “unavoidable” nature.54 Epitomizing the 50  Ibid. See also Pierre Jourde and Paolo Tortonese, Visages du Double. Un Thème littéraire (Paris: Nathan Université, 1996). 51  Dieguez, “Doubles Everywhere,” 78. 52  S. Dehaene and L. Cohen, “Cultural recycling of cortical maps,” Neuron 56, 2 (2007): 384–98. Quoted after Dieguez, “Doubles Everywhere,” 79. 53  Dieguez, “Doubles Everywhere,” 16. 54  Foucault, The Order of Things, 356.

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quintessential modern experience of a deep-structure psychological and epistemological alienation, which is born out of “the old privilege of reflexive knowledge,” the double for Foucault illustrates the circularity inherent in phenomenology’s paradoxical aim to elaborate the transcendental conditions of human experience from within the empirical reality of man.55 As such, Foucault’s double resonates with the Romantic-Idealist Doppelgänger figure who likewise “implies an imperative that haunts thought from within.”56 Significantly, the double according to Foucault emerges in the nineteenth century as the synonym for the irreducible Other of Western rationality: “[The unthought is] in relation to man, the Other: the other is not only a brother but a twin, born not of man, nor in him, but beside him and at the same time in an identical newness, in an unavoidable duality.”57 As Foucault argues in The Order of Things, the quest for an origin and a subject of knowledge, undertaken prominently by nineteenth-century humanists, arose from a context that privileged language while ignoring its inherently figurative nature. Foucault thus contends: “What we discover is the rhetorical dimension of words: that freedom of the sign to alight, according to the analysis of representation, upon some internal element, upon some adjacent point, upon some analogous figure.”58 After all, language according to Foucault developed along the lines of three rhetorical figures—synecdoche, metonym, and metaphor—and hence it consists of words that have, and are themselves, doubles: inherently relational and constantly in flux. As the result of an infinite process of substitution, articulated knowledge—knowledge qua language, knowledge qua literature— provides clarity and identifies hidden similarities between things and ideas. But it is also haunted by multiple doubles. As such, literary knowledge converges with a plethora of hallucination narratives in the emerging ­discipline of neuroscience and the rise of the double in the domain of literature. As a figure of substitution, that is: as a metaphor for metaphor, the figure of the double embodies the gradual process of replacement and displacement by which the nineteenth-century production of knowledge gradually renders literary fiction into science’s double.59 55  Ibid. Along the same lines, Vardoulakis defines the double as the emblematic “subject of modernity.” Vardoulakis, The Doppelgänger, 73. 56  Ibid. 57  Ibid. 58  Ibid., 126. 59  See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

CHAPTER 4

A Tale from the Right Hemisphere: Amusia and Aphasia in Franz Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician

Franz Grillparzer’s novella The Poor Musician (Der arme Spielmann, 1848) tells the tragic life story of an eccentric street musician who distinguishes himself through his peculiar, expressive style of violin play.1 Despite his humility and love of humanity, this biblical Jacob never receives a blessing from his father and is despised by society for his clumsy but passionate approach to music. Composed of basic harmonies and fundamental musical materials that eschew melodic meaning, Jacob’s play offers a unique proposition: that music could be enjoyed absolutely, on its own terms, conveying nothing other than the divine beauty of its sounds. For Jacob, music needs no connotation of extra-musical elements to warrant its existence, but neither does it necessitate intricate melodies or complex harmonies to be enjoyed and appreciated. Through the musician’s play the novella thus reflects upon an aesthetic transformation that music was undergoing in the mid-nineteenth century through the emergence of absolute music. At the same time, the novella tests a view that was inspired by the advent of realism in literature, namely, that beauty, perfection, and sanity are on the wane in art as in reality. It does so by contrasting an 1  Franz Grillparzer, “Der arme Spielmann,” Sämtliche Werke, ed. Peter Frank and Karl Pörnbacher, 4 vols. (Munich: Hanser,1964), Vol. 3: 146–186. Franz Grillparzer, “The Poor Musician,” German Novellas of Realism 1, ed. Jeffrey L. Sammons, trans. J. F. Hargraves and J. G. Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1989), 214–252. Hereafter cited in the text.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_4

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allegedly empirical representation of common reality with a secondary— imaginative and immersive—narrative that explores the mimetic power of language qua music. It is well established that The Poor Musician confronts literary-­ theoretical discourses of the time and that it prefigures the music aesthetics of Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), Grillparzer’s Viennese contemporary, who pioneered the concept of “absolute music.”2 What has not been explored is how these aesthetic tenets interact with the emerging field of neuroscience and how the novella participates in the formation of a neurological discourse on the links between music and language processing. This is not to deny the novella’s grasp of music’s affective significance. Recent work in affect theory suggests a few areas worth exploring in relation to Grillparzer’s conception of music as affective force. As Peter Höyng has argued, Grillparzer viewed music as a physiological and sensual phenomenon that had “a stronger affective impact” than poetry, as it “cannot be cognitively conceptualized.”3 And Katra A. Byram has observed that The Poor Musician stages “highly affective responses to Jakob’s distorted reproductions [of music and language].”4 Clearly, Grillparzer’s novella engages in debates that were being had at the time about the affective underpinnings of musical experience. Hanslick’s concern with the neurological mechanisms involved in what he terms “pathological hearing” finds its precedent in an autobiographical sketch from 1822, in which Grillparzer described how combinations of sounds “prickled his nerves” and “incited his temper” to engage in an imaginative play with musical images (“der als Nervenreiz Gemüt und Phantasie aufregt”).5 A close reading of his novella in terms of affect theory would be certain to

2  On Grillparzer’s literary realism, see Katra A.  Byram, “German Realism’s Proximal Others: Franz Grillparzer’s The Poor Fiddler and Theodor Storm’s Ein Doppelgänger,” Realism’s Others, ed. Geoffrey Baker and Eva Aldea (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 49–68. On music, see Thomas Horst, “Unendlichkeit und Grenze: Zu Grillparzers Musikästhetik,” Franz Grillparzer, ed. Helmut Bachmaier (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 343–358, and most recently, John Neubauer, The Persistence of Voice: Instrumental Music and Romantic Orality (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 82–88. 3  Peter Höyng, “For Heaven’s Sake: I have You Walk into the Dark.’ Grillparzer’s Containment of Beethoven and the Ambivalences of their Melusina-Project,” Goethe Yearbook 17 (2010): 284–285. 4  Byram, “German Realism’s Proximal Others, 55. 5  Franz Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, ed. August Sauer, Reinhold Backmann, 20 vols. (Vienna: Schroll, 1909–1948), Vol. 16: “Anfänge einer Selbstbiographie,” 15.

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reconfigure our understanding of how historical audiences may have experienced and made sense of music. Yet the aim of this chapter is to consider a different way in which The Poor Musician bridges cognitive and aesthetic theory. It argues that the novella prefigures (by several decades) and at the same time defies nascent neuroscientific insights into the parallels between music and language processing. These parallels consist in the dichotomy in both music and language processing between an expressive versus a receptive mode of cognition. Anticipating August Knoblauch’s (1836–1919) pioneering study on the etiologies of paramusie and paragraphie versus tone-deafness and note-blindness, respectively, the novella explores the ironies and contradictions inherent in Jacob’s performance: This musician does not seem to apprehend the music he so greatly enjoys. As a second line of inquiry, the novella traces the hemispheric lateralization of music and language, which serves as another important marker of the link between aphasia and amusia. This is achieved on a narratological level, namely, through frequent shifts in focalization, enabling the reader to better understand a new subfield of neuroscientific knowledge, the tenets of which the novella both illustrates and reverses. Correlating the protagonist’s apparent neurological deficit to music-theoretical and literary discourses of the time, the novella takes a problematizing rather than dogmatic approach to the binaries of rational/intellectual and emotional/pathological music and language cognition, when viewed as separate and contradictory discourses. The Poor Musician sketches out a third position that envisions a spontaneous, creative, and exalted mode of music appreciation and narrative expressivity. Read against the grain of Hanslick’s concept of absolute music and the early tenets of realist literature, Jacob’s “excessive” musical sensibility becomes readable as an intervention against the canonization of aesthetic taste.

Amusia The German physician and anatomist August Knoblauch remains largely unrecognized for his groundbreaking research in the fields of neurology and music cognition in the late 1880s, although this neurocognitive work is remarkable for several reasons. He was the first neurologist to recognize music processing as a higher-level cognitive activity similar to language, thereby pioneering the idea that music likewise involved a complex neurological network of multiple interconnected centers and pathways. He also

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proposed a diagrammatic model of music representing the multilevel flow of information that is involved in the sensory processing, conceptualization, and storage of musical memory. What is more, Knoblauch developed a set of analytical categories that came to form the groundwork of later neurological studies of music. He thus identified five centers involved in music processing and two additional centers that were activated in singing, and he provided a detailed analysis of nine musical disorders that could occur if specific centers or conducting pathways between these centers were damaged. An interruption in the pathway between the auditory and motor center for tones might thus result in impairment in the ability to sing in pitch. Knoblauch termed this condition paramusia (Paramusie). A lesion of the auditory center of tones might result in impairment in the writing of notes, which he termed paragraphia (Paragraphie) (332/344). Knoblauch’s system subsumed both paramusia and paragraphia under the concept of amusia (Amusie), a term he coined to signify a “disorder of the faculty of musical expression” (330) (“Störung der musikalischen Leistungsfähigkeit”) (343).6 According to Knoblauch’s definition, amusia may result in “loss of volitional singing, repetition of tones or melodies, singing of notes, volitional writing of notes, [and] writing of notes after hearing a melody” (330–331) (“Unterbrechung des willkürlichen Gesangs, des Nachsingens, des Absingens nach Noten, des willkürlichen Notenschreibens, [und] des Notenschreibens nach gehörter Melodie”) (343). Though it results from lesions on the motor center for tones, amusia will not abolish the patient’s comprehension of music. As Knoblauch explained, a patient with amusia will retain “the understanding of tones, the understanding of written notes, [and] the ability to copy notes” (Ibid.) (“das Tonverständnis, das Notenschriftverständnis, [und] die Fähigkeit des Abschreibens von Noten”) (Ibid.).7 In contrast to amusia, which 6  August Knoblauch, “Über Störungen der musikalischen Leistungsfähigkeit infolge von Gehirnläsionen,” Archiv für klinische Medizin 42 (1888), 331–352. August Knoblauch, “On Disorders of the Musical Capacity from Cerebral Disease,” Brain, A Journal of Neurology 13 (1889), 317–340. Hereafter cited in the text. Knoblauch worked with Wilhelm H.  Erb (1840–1921) at the Asylum for the Insane at the University of Heidelberg. 7  Subsequent authors have used his term in a more general sense, defining it as a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but that can also encompass musical memory and recognition. Following up on Knoblauch’s research, Wallaschek and Edgren have proposed classifications of the amusias. Richard Wallaschek, Primitive Music: An Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music, Songs, Instruments, Dances and Pantomimes of Savage Races (London: Longmans, 1893); J. G. Edgren, “Amusie (musicalische Aphasie),” Deutsches Zentralblatt zur Nervenheilkunde 6 (1895): 1–64. See also Probst who published

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presents as a difficulty in music production, tone-deafness (Tontaubheit) and note-blindness (Notenblindheit) affect the ability to comprehend aural and written music, respectively. Resulting from lesions in the auditory center for tones, tone-deafness impairs understanding melodies or writing notes to dictation, while note-blindness affects the ability to sing or play from written notation. Crucial in Knoblauch’s system, then, is the distinction between a productive (motor) and a receptive (sensory) function in music processing.8 This distinction is consistent with the differentiation of two areas in the cerebral cortex that control language processing, named after the researchers who discovered them: Broca’s area is responsible for fluent speech production and Wernicke’s area for comprehension of speech and text. Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician presents an instructive case of tone-­ deafness and note-blindness that elucidates Knoblauch’s classification of receptive music disorders, even though the latter had yet to be noticed by the scientific community. The first neurologically plausible account of music impairment in German-language literature, the novella both reinforces and complicates the reader’s negative assumptions about musicality and its relationship to other cognitive functions, most notably language processing, but also perception, imagination, and memory. This is partly because the first description of the novella’s protagonist Jacob is given through the lens of an unnamed first-person narrator who is struck by the pathos implicit in the contrast between the fiddler’s poor performance and Jacob’s positive (and arguably delusional) self-assessment: He stood bald and bareheaded, as these fellows do, with his hat as a collecting box on the ground before him. As he worked away on his old and very cracked violin, he kept time with his foot and also by moving the whole of his bent frame in the same rhythm. But all the trouble he took to give unity to his performance was fruitless, for his playing seemed merely an incoherent sequence of sound without either measure or melody. Nevertheless, he clinic-pathological studies of amusical persons. Moritz Probst, “Über einen Fall vollständiger Rindenblindheit und vollständiger Amusie,” Monatschrift für Psychatrie und Neurologie 9, 1 (1901): 5–21. For further discussions of amusia, see also E. Feuchtwanger, Amusie: Studien zur Pathalogischen Psychologie der der akustischen Wahrnehmung und Vorstellung und ihre Strukturgebiete besonders in Musik und Sprache (Berlin: Springer, 1930) and S. E. Henschen, Klinische und anatomische Beiträge zur Pathologie des Gehirns (Stockholm: Nordiska Bokhandeln, 1920), Vol. 5: “Über Aphasie, Amusie und Akalkulie.” 8  See J.  K. Johnson, A.  B. Graziano, “August Knoblauch and Amusia: A NineteenthCentury Cognitive Model of Music.” Brain and Cognition 51 (2003): 109.

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was completely taken up by his work: his lips quivered and his gaze was—I assure you—fixed in the score before him yes, really, a score! [translation modified] (217) Barhäuptig und kahlköpfig stand er da, nach Art dieser Leute, den Hut als Sammelbüchse vor sich auf dem Boden, und so bearbeitete er eine alte vielzersprungene Violine, wobei er den Takt nicht nur durch Aufheben und Niedersetzen des Fußes, sondern zugleich durch übereinstimmende Bewegung des ganzen gebückten Körpers markierte. Aber all diese Bemühung, Einheit in seine Leistung zu bringen, war fruchtlos, denn was er spielte, schien eine unzusammenhängende Folge von Tönen ohne Zeitmaß und Melodie. Dabei war er ganz in sein Werk vertieft: die Lippen zuckten, die Augen waren starr auf das vor ihm befindliche Notenblatt gerichtet—ja wahrhaftig Notenblatt! (149)

Through this caustic portrayal, the narrator cues us in to the fact that Jacob’s utter lack of self-awareness borders on the pathological. To the neurologically informed reader, the description would further suggest a diagnosis that Knoblauch was to articulate in his 1888 article “On Disorders of the Musical Capacity from Cerebral Disease” (“Über Störungen der musikalischen Leistungsfähigkeit infolge von Gehirnläsionen”). With his inability to understand written and aural music, the “poor musician” exhibits common symptoms associated with both tone-deafness and note-blindness. His incoherent play suggests that he can neither read music notation nor comprehend notes or melodies, and as a result is unable to recognize that his play does not correctly reproduce the music on the page. His rapid fingering cannot conceal the fact that he is unable to replicate the music as it is meant to be played. Prompted by the narrator’s curiosity, Jacob concedes that he isn’t exactly musically gifted: “And with that he opened his mouth, from whence there issued a few hoarse and harsh sounds. ‘I have not been gifted with a musical voice,’ he said, and reached for his violin.” (229) (“Nun öffnete er den Mund und brachte einige heisere rauhe Töne hervor. ‘Ich habe von Natur keine Stimme’, sagte er, und griff nach seiner Violine”) (162). Luckily, Jacob’s faculty of volitional playing is not affected by his lack of musical talent. This is consistent with Knoblauch’s etiology of tone-deafness: “This time he certainly played with the right expression—the tune of a tender but otherwise quite ordinary song, his fingers trembling on the strings while finally a few tears rolled down his cheeks.” (“Er spielte, und zwar diesmal mit richtigem Ausdrucke, die Melodie eines gemütlichen, übrigens gar

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nicht ausgezeichneten Liedes.”) (Ibid.) While Jacob is capable of spontaneously generating a simple melody, he doesn’t seem to understand music of greater complexity: A soft, but confidently intoned sound grew very loud, sank, and died out, immediately rising again to the shrillest of shrieks: in fact, it was always the same note repeated with a kind of joyful insistence. At last there came an interval—the fourth. Where the musician had previously reveled in the resonance of the individual note, now the almost voluptuous savoring of harmonic balance was still more perceptible. Quick alternation in fingering and the use of the bow were repeated and joined in a very jerky manner by the intervening part of the scale, with an accentuated third. To this was joined the fifth, first with a tremolo like a soft weeping, sustained and then dying out, then repeated into eternity with a rapid whirl, with the same intervals every time and the identical notes. So this was what the old man called fantasizing! It was certainly fantasizing as far as the violinist was concerned, but not for the listener. (222–223) [translation modified] Ein leiser, aber bestimmt gegriffener Ton schwoll bis zur Heftigkeit, senkte sich, verklang, um gleich darauf wieder bis zum lautesten Gellen emporzusteigen, und zwar immer derselbe Ton, mit einer Art genussreichem Daraufberuhen wiederholt. Endlich kam ein Intervall. Es war die Quarte. Hatte der Spieler sich vorher an dem Klange des einzelnen Tones geweidet, so war nun das gleichsam wollüstige Schmecken dieses harmonischen Verhältnisses noch ungleich fühlbarer. Sprungweise gegriffen, zugleich gestrichen, durch die dazwischenliegende Stufenreihe höchst holperig verbunden, die Terz markiert, wiederholt. Die Quinte darangefügt, einmal mit zitterndem Klang wie ein stilles Weinen, ausgehalten, verhallend, dann in wirbelnder Schnelligkeit ewig wiederholt, immer dieselben Verhältnisse, die nämlichen Töne. Und das nannte der alte Mann Phantasieren!—Obgleich es im Grunde allerdings ein Phantasieren war, für den Spieler nämlich, nur nicht auch für den Hörer. (155)

With its distorted musical dynamics and grotesquely inconsistent rhythmical structure, Jacob’s musical performance is barely recognizable as such. While he does not play “discordant tones and false intervals” (“unrichtige Töne und falsche Intervalle”) per se, his inability to comprehend the music’s harmonic intricacies indicates a “lesion in the auditory center for tones” (“Ausfall des Tonklangbildcentrums”) (Ibid.), which according to Knoblauch impairs the perception of musical tones and harmonies. In contrast, Jacob’s ability to copy notes and write musical

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notation has remained intact. This speaks to Knoblauch’s observation that the auditory center for tones is not involved in motoric functions. As the narrator reports: “He pointed to his music book and leafed through it. To my astonishment it contained extremely difficult compositions by old and famous masters, written out carefully though in a very formal hand: black with runs and double stops.” (220–221) (“Er zeigte dabei durchblätternd auf sein Musikbuch, in dem ich zu meinem Entsetzen mit sorgfältig aber widerlich steifer Schrift ungeheuer schwierige Kompositionen alter Meister, ganz Schwarz von Passagen und Doppelgriffen erblickte.”) (153) It is striking how cogently and presciently Grillparzer writes about the nuances of pathological music processing. While Jacob is capable of producing ugly but accurate handwritten copies of existing musical compositions, he is unable to cognitively process them—hence the narrator’s sarcastic reference to the musician’s ostensible playing from sheet music without making musical sense. This “poor musician” prefigures an 1870 study by German psychiatrist Carl Ferdinand Finkelnburg (1832–1896), which described the case of a violinist who could no longer read musical notes.9 Finkelnburg’s paper is a remarkable exposition in which he aligns the patient’s music alexia with aphasia and other language disturbances with a similar etiology. He concludes that these disorders are only some of several possible manifestations of a larger, more complex disorder termed asymbolia (Asymbolie) where the ability to process concepts by means of abstract, conventional signs is partially or completely impaired: “Obviously the deficiency of word production represents only an aliquot—though the one interfering most with the living conditions and the most conspicuous for the surrounding—part of the total disturbance which extends more or less to all brain processes mediating the manifestation of conceptual ideas by learned sensory signs of any kind—symbols.”10 It is clear enough why Finkelnburg would argue that music symbolizes emotional meaning and that it consists of abstract signs that need to be interpreted, ignoring the fact that music, once played, conveys meaning 9  Carl Ferdinand Finkelnburg, “Über Aphasie und Asymbolie.” An English translation (“A Translation of Finkelnburg’s (1870) Lecture on Aphasia as “Asymbolia” with Commentary”) was published in Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorder 44, 2 (1979): 156–168. 10  Carl Maria Finkelnburg, “Über Aphasie,” read at the Niederrheinische Gesellschaft in Bonn, Medicinische Sektion, 21 March 1870. Abstracted in Berliner klinische Wochenschrift 7 (1870): 449–450. 460–462. RJ Duffy and BZ Liles, “A Translation of Finkelnburg’s (1870) lecture on Aphasia as “Asymbolia” with Commentary, Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 44, 2 (1979): 461.

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directly by conveying it to the unconscious.11 Susan Bernstein has written persuasively about the “conflict between the conceptual mediation of language and the immediacy associated with music,” which is part of a broader discussion about the limits of language that has been present throughout Western intellectual history.12 As Bernstein argues: “Music consistently brings language up to its own limit, a limit that can form a blind spot or redirect us to think differently [about] how evaluations and definitions of music are articulated in relation to implicit notions about language, knowledge, and being.”13 Knoblauch understood that by studying the similarities and the differences between music and language he could shed light on the functional and structural properties of each, while also discovering how the brain works more generally. In a similar manner, Finkelnburg’s concept of asymbolia points to a paradigm shift in the study of aphasia in that it considers a range of pathological disturbances of function, including language, gesture, and, significantly, music. It is an early example of how neurological descriptions of music impairment can further our understanding of general cognitive dysfunctionality. In this capacity, Finkelnburg’s study resonates with a larger body of neurological research spanning the nineteenth century where an interest in investigating music abilities in neurological patients emerged mainly as a tool for assessing patients with aphasia. This is particularly true for the latter half of the nineteenth century, which saw the development of new concepts of cerebral localization of functions. Taking up Gall’s discovery of a “musical organ” in the brain, prominent neurologists like Pierre Flourens (1794–1867) and Adrien Proust (1834–1903) applied themselves to the study of relative impairments and preservations of various cognitive functions.14 Often, this neurological research was inspired by the observation of patients with severe expressive aphasia who had retained “the faculty of singing words, i.e. the production of articulated words as a vehicle for melody” (326) (“die Fähigkeit des Textsingens, d.h. die Hervorbringung

11  See Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 96. 12  Susan Bernstein, Virtuosity in the Nineteenth Century. Performing Music in Heine, Liszt, and Baudelaire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 13  Ibid., 3. 14  Pierre Flourens, Recherches expérimentales sur les propriétés et les fonctions du système nerveux dans les animaux vertébrés (Paris: Crevot, 1824); Adrien Proust, “De l’Aphasie,” Archive Générale de Médicine 4, 19 (1872): 310.

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des articulirten Wortes als Vehikel für den gesungenen Ton”) (339), as Knoblauch puts it. At the time, Knoblauch’s detailed analysis of music processing was unprecedented in the field of modern neurology. Language was and remained the most commonly studied cognitive function during the nineteenth century. While there had been extensive interest in the link between aphasia and amusia, no one had ventured to describe the actual, dynamic patterns of music. To be sure, already in the eighteenth century neurologists had observed that some patients with severe expressive aphasia had retained the ability to sing the text of songs.15 Knoblauch, who incidentally based his analysis of music processing on existing classifications of aphasia, was aware of several earlier descriptions of musical abilities in aphasic patients that were documented by prominent neurologists such as Finkelnburg in Germany, and Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) and Joseph Grasset (1849–1918) in France.16 He also referred to observations by Sir William Gowers (1845–1915) and John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911) in England.17 However, with the exception of Charcot, these earlier neurologists made only cursory remarks about dysfunctions of music processing in relation to speech disorders.18 By studying music in terms of its cognitive structure and by providing a detailed, diagrammatic model of the latter, Knoblauch’s work addressed a large and important gap in the neurological understanding of music cognition. 15  Olof Dahlin, “Beräattelse om en dumbe, som kan siumga” (On a mute who can sing) (Stockholm: Kungl. Svenska Vetensk. Acad. Handlung, 1745) 6, 114–115. Gesner thus described patients who were unable to verbalize but had preserved ability to sing the words of a song. J.  A. P.  Gesner, Sammlung von Beobachtungen aus der Arzneigelahrtheit und Naturkunde (Nördlingen: C. G. Beck, 1770). 16  Jean-Michel Charcot, “On the Different Forms of Aphasia,” Lectures reported by Dr. G.  Rummo Gazz. Degli Ospitali 38, 40, 44, 49, 50, 59, 60, 61 (1883); Joseph Grasset, Traité pratique des Maladies du Système nerveux, with Georges Rauzier, 2 vols. (Paris: Masson, 1878–1894); Karl Maria Finkelnburg, “Über Aphasie und Asymbolie nebst dem Versuch einer Theorie der Sprachbildung,” Archiv der Psychiatrie 6 (1876). “Niederrheinische Gesellschaft. Sitzung vom 21. März in Bonn,” Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift 8 (1870): 449–450, 460–462. Early neurological literature abounds with references to aphasic patients who had retained the ability to sing. See, for instance, Falret, (1864), Trousseau (1865), Bouilland (1865), and Steinthal (1871) in Germany. 17  Sir William Gowers, 1887 and John Hughlings Jackson, “On affections of speech from disease of the brain,” Brain 1 (1878) 1: 304–330. 18  Julene K.  Johnson, Marjorie Lorch, Serge Nicolas, and Amy Graziano, “Jean-Martin Charcot’s role in the 19th century study of music aphasia,” Brain 136 (2013): 1662–1670.

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At stake in the novella’s literal figuration of the link between aphasia and amusia is that it resists any easy subsumption of music cognition into higher-level linguistic abilities, as it was routinely done by neurologists of the era. In Grillparzer’s depiction, the musician presents with the opposite symptom: Contrary to the numerous case studies produced throughout the nineteenth century, which invariably examined individuals with partial or complete loss of speech but preserved musical capabilities, Jacob has retained his ability to speak extemporaneously in fluid, stylistically perfect, and grammatically coherent sentences despite his music impairment. We know this because the novella is told by two first-person narrators whose accounts complement each other, as they have different foci and intentions and provide different types of information. The novella’s frame narrative is inaugurated by an unnamed narrator who recounts his first encounter with Jacob on the fairgrounds of Brigittenau, at the outskirts of Vienna. His account is propelled by his derisive and incredulous attitude toward the musician’s deviant performance, causing him to follow Jacob to his home in Leopoldstadt, a district in central Vienna. A conversation ensues during which the intradiegetic narrator solicits Jacob’s life story. The embedded account then represents the novella’s backstory, telling Jacob’s life through his own reflections and gradually drawing the reader into the protagonist’s unique perspective. The frame narrator has made it clear from the outset that Jacob converses with eloquence and civility and even speaks Latin with great fluency. But it is only when Jacob begins his own account with the following admission of cognitive limitation that the full extent of his rhetorical dexterity emerges: I was the second of three sons: my two brothers gained high positions in the government service: but they are now both dead and I am the only one still alive …. My father was an ambitious and violent man. My brothers delighted him, but I was called a dunce and I was really slow. If I remember it rightly … I should have found it quite easy to learn all sorts of things, if they had only given me time and arranged things properly. (226) (Ich war der mittlere von drei Brüdern, die in Staatsdiensten hoch hinaufkamen, nun aber schon beide tot sind; ich allein lebe noch … Mein Vater war ehrgeizig und heftig. Meine Brüder taten ihm genug. Mich nannte man einen langsamen Kopf; und ich war langsam. Wenn ich mich recht erinnere … so wäre ich wohl imstande gewesen, allerlei zu erlernen, wenn man mir nur Zeit und Ordnung gegönnt hätte.) (159)

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Jacob’s eloquence is also shown physically through the obvious ease in which the otherwise awkward figure now controls his scrawny limbs: “[He] became visibly more relaxed. Now his whole body seemed to loosen up as, without too much fuss, he took my hat from my hands and placed it on the bed. He sat down, crossed his legs and generally assumed the position of a man who enjoys telling his tale.) (Ibid.) (“Er war während des letzten [Satzes] zusehends ungezwungener geworden. Seine Gestalt verlängerte sich. Er nahm mir ohne zu große Umstände den Hut aus der Hand und legte ihn aufs Bette; schlug sitzend ein Bein über das andere und nahm überhaupt die Lage eines mit Bequemlichkeit Erzählenden an.”) (158) Through the power of his own speech, the gawky, unmusical laughing-stock is transformed into a graceful and mesmerizing storyteller. The novella is structured on the tension between two competing narrator figures, one a representative of the educated middle class who believes himself the creator of sophisticated anthropological reportage, the other a melancholy artist-figure who, far from finding acceptance as a virtuoso violinist, is presented as an irredeemable outcast. Because of this doubling of the narrators, one an established author, the other a destitute fiddler, the novella has been said to include two alternative autobiographical sketches or self-portraits in which Grillparzer pitches two alter egos against each other.19 To be sure, both narrator figures share obvious intellectual and biographical characteristics with Grillparzer, a lyrical and dramatic poet who by way of his mother, Anna Franziska, belonged to the well-­ known musical family Sonnleithner, and who almost passed from the memory of his contemporaries before becoming one of the most popular authors of his era.20 But the feature that most aligns Jacob’s story with Grillparzer’s biography is the detailed and involved description of music, which mirrors Grillparzer’s own passionate interest in music and musical theory. What is at stake in the novella is the triangulation of music as the subject of biography, neurological debate, and aesthetic theory. As one 19  See most prominently, Richard Brinkmann, “Franz Grillparzer: Der arme Spielmann. Der Einbruch der Subjektivität,” Wirklichkeit und Illusion. Studien über Gehalt und Grenzen des Begriffs Realismus für die erzählende Dichtung des 19. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1957), 141. 20  Grillparzer remains one of the most prominent but also enigmatic figures of Austria’s cultural history. The seven biographies that appeared within the first three decades after his death alone bear witness to his great acceptance and his status as one of Austria’s foremost national heroes.

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commentator rightly notes, the choice of music as the story’s catalyst and thematic and narrative constant is not accidental.21 Music allows The Poor Musician to resonate with future meaning that will unfold in the sphere of science rather than literature. But music also imbues the novella with topical interest. Through the figure of Jacob, the novella engages a major aesthetic transformation that music was undergoing in Grillparzer’s time through the reemergence of a long-standing debate about the relative status of texted and untexted music.

Absolute Music One of the key figures to advocate “pure instrumental music” in mid-­ nineteenth-­century Vienna was the music critic Eduard Hanslick, a contemporary of Grillparzer.22 In On the Musically Beautiful (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 1854), Hanslick presented a critical program that stood in deliberate opposition to idealist modalities of music appreciation, which dominated the musical world of mid-century Europe.23 Hanslick famously rejected text-based musical genres that conveyed extra-musical ideas or programmatic imagery. Opera, tone poem, and song aroused the imagination and conjured up feelings in the listener, thereby neglecting the “essence of music in sound and motion.”24 Hanslick focused his critical attention on music that has “no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks

21  Carmen Barbu, “Grillparzer’s ‘The Poor Musician’: The Artist-Hermit in Search of a Community,” Arcadia 43, 1 (2008): 50. 22  Grillparzer often advocated similar views, arguing, for instance, that “where words no longer reach, sounds will speak” (“Wo Worte nicht mehr hinreichen, sprechen die Töne.”). Grillparzer, “Der Freischütz, Oper von Maria Weber” (1821), Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, 16 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1887), Vol. 11: 217. Hanslick and Grillparzer never met, but Hanslick became aware of Grillparzer’s interest in his work in May 1869. See Lauren Freede, “The Critic as Subject: Hanslick’s Aus meinem Leben as a Reflection on Culture and Identity,” Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression, ed. Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan, and Wolfgang Marx (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2013), 207n54. 23  Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig: Rudolph Weigel, 1854). Eduard Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution Towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music (London: Novello, 1891). See Kevin Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 30. 24  Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 67.

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nothing but sound.”25 Advocating music in purely theoretical terms, he promoted the view that the formal parameters of a composition constituted music’s sole and exclusive content and object. The conflict between program music as dramatic narrative and absolute music as purely formal structure is projected onto the protagonist of Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician and incorporated into the pattern his life reflects. Suggestive of Hanslick’s polemic against distracting extra-musical connotations, Jacob repeats the mantra that music ought to be enjoyed as pure sound and form: When sitting like this, I heard someone singing in the neighborhood courtyard. I heard several songs; but only one made a really deep impression on me. It was so simple, so moving and the emphasis so exactly right, that there was no need to catch the words. I believe that in general words spoil the effect of music. (229) (Wenn ich nun so saß, hörte ich auf dem Nachbarshofe ein Lied singen. Mehrere Lieder heißt das, worunter mir aber eines vorzüglich gefiel. Es war so einfach, so rührend und hatte den Nachdruck so auf der rechten Stelle, dass man die Worte gar nicht zu hören brauchte. Wie ich denn überhaupt glaube, die Worte verderben die Musik.) (161–162)26

As a matter of fact, Jacob’s eccentric approach to music—his penetrating insistence upon certain sounds and intervals, accompanied by the deep satisfaction he derives from the vertical system of simplistic harmonic relations—can be read as an anticipation of Hanslick’s theorization of absolute music.27 Jacob thus praises “the eternal blessing and divine favor of tone and sound; the miraculous way in which it accords with the famished and thirsty ear” (“die ewige Wohltat und Gnade des Tons und Klangs, seine wundertätige Übereinstimmung mit dem durstigen, zerlechzenden Ohr”), while disparaging the act of “superimposing words that at the worst are to be recited” (230) [translation modified] (“Hinzufügung  Ibid., 162–163.  In another telling episode, Jacob plays a waltz that fails to incite the children to dance. Thus, his play cannot provide that “powerful nervous stimulus,” which according to Hanslick affects the listener and impels him to dance through the elements of rhythm. Hanslick, On the Beautiful in Music, 129. 27  See on this Christoph Vratz, Die Partitur als Wortgefüge: sprachliches Musizieren in literarischen Texten zwischen Romantik und Gegenwart (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2002), 256. 25 26

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allenfalls auch zu sprechender Worte”) (163). But Jacob not only appreciates music for music’s sake, he effectively attributes a divine origin to it. Foreshadowing Hanslick’s description of the musical subject, “which is no less a vital spark of the divine fire than the beautiful of any other art,” the fiddler advocates music that is “held together by the hand of God.”28 Jacob’s problem consists in his people’s failure to cherish music the way he does. His labored performance in the streets of Vienna makes him the object of scorn and ridicule and even his own family seems to loathe the sound of his pitiful practice: “When I took up my violin in the evening twilight to play for my own pleasure, without a score, they took it from me, saying that my fingering would be ruined; they complained that their ears were in torment and said that I should be content with lessons—yet these were torture to me.”) (226–227) (“Wenn ich abends im Zwielicht die Violine ergriff, um mich nach meiner Art ohne Noten zu vergnügen, nahmen sie mir das Instrument und sagten, das verdirbt die Applikatur, klagten über Ohrenfolter und verwiesen mich auf die Lehrstunde, wo die Folter für mich anging.”) (159) The critical voice of the narrator rationalizes Jacob’s lack of musical mastery in terms of his inability to sustain dissonance and drop a few notes to stay in beat, thus failing to apply strategies that are indicated for the sake of performance: “He rid himself of the dissonances in as short a time as possible, whereas, out of conscientiousness, he did not miss a note of the passages that were too difficult for him, but rendered them in a time far too slow when set against the entire piece: this will surely give a clear idea of the confusion that resulted.” (224) (“Da er nun zugleich die Dissonanzen so kurz als möglich abtat, überdies die für ihn zu schweren Passagen, von denen er aus Gewissenhaftigkeit nicht eine Note fallen ließ, in einem gegen das Ganze viel zu langsamen Zeitmaß vortrug, so kann man sich wohl leicht eine Idee von der Verwirrung machen, die daraus hervorging.”) (157) The latter aspect of Jacob’s alleged music impairment is significant as a related cognitive disability emerges in a passage detailing his academic difficulties: “My brothers displayed the nimbleness of mountain goats by skipping from height to height of learning, but I could hardly pass any obstacle; if there was a single word I could not understand, I had to start all over again.” (226) (“Meine Brüder sprangen wie Gemsen von Spitze zu Spitze in den Lehrgegenständen herum, ich konnte aber 28  Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 174. (“welcher ein nicht geringerer Funke des göttlichen Feuers ist, als das Schöne jeder andern Kunst … gehalten von Gottes Hand”) (81).

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durchaus nichts hinter mir lassen, und wenn mir ein einziges Wort fehlte, musste ich von vorne anfangen.”) (159) Of course, young Jacob’s refusal to skip words on a page is nothing but laudable. Given his inability to fill in the blank space of missing words in his mind, a hasty reading as exemplified by his brothers’ “skipping” would interfere with his reading comprehension. As Eva Geulen notes, the brothers learn because they forsake the larger picture.29 Contrary to them and in opposition to his tutor and his imposing father, Jacob knows that understanding  word sequence is imperative for reading and textual composition, especially in Latin: “So I was always pressured. New information was always waiting to occupy the space where the old still lingered, and I became obstinate.” [translation modified] (Ibid.) (“So ward ich denn immer gedrängt. Das Neue sollte auf den Platz, den das Alte noch nicht verlassen hatte, und ich begann stockisch zu werden.”) (Ibid.) The novella anticipates cognitive, developmental, and humanistic theories that explore the auditory patterns and segmental features shared by music and language to understand how we make sense out of sound. Apparently, Jacob struggles with both language and music reception because both involve complex and meaningful aural and phonological sequences. Grillparzer’s intuition about a single cognitive capacity that supports both music and language would turn out to be a full discovery of the mechanisms underlying our species’ uniquely powerful communicative abilities. It is ironic that the narrator disqualifies his interlocutor’s method of note reading and word processing as unwarranted in its exaggerated “conscientiousness.” Again, this obscure character primes us to judge Jacob’s dedication to music as a sign of moral weakness or a character deficit. Clearly, this kind of harsh judgment is both an ill-informed and an unjust one. It is not just that it drives Jacob to hate music as a child.30 It also exposes the frame narrator who seeks to validate himself as a man of culture as musically ignorant. His critique of Jacob’s performance reveals itself as flawed when the once-laughable musician gains an authoritative voice to speak of cognitive values and their rules of application: “I was searching for the word within me—trying to connect it with the rest of the  Eva Geulen, “Stellen-Lese,” Modern Language Notes 116, 3 (2001): 499.  “Thus they even drove me into hating music, which is now the delight and at the same time the support of my life … In all my life I have never hated anything or anyone as much as I hated the violin at the time.” (226) “So hatten sie mir die Musik, die jetzt die Freude und zugleich der Stab meines Lebens ist, geradezu verhasst gemacht … Ich habe zeitlebens nichts und niemand so gehasst, als ich damals die Geige hasste.” (159) 29 30

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passage” (227) (“Ich [suchte] das Wort in meinem Innern und im Zusammenhange mit dem übrigen”) (160). Jacob’s enigmatic turn of phrase captures a profound aspect of music in general while being strikingly resonant with Hanslick’s formalist music aesthetics in particular. It neatly encapsulates the creative act of the composer, which Hanslick defined as the “slowly progressing work of moulding a composition— which at the outset floated in mere outlines in the composer’s brain—into a structure, clearly defined down to every bar,” a process, Hanslick adds, that “requires quiet and subtle thought.”31 We are predisposed to read Jacob’s account through the prism of the narrator’s prejudiced opinion. The latter goes to great lengths to establish Jacob as an overly emotional man who is unqualified to judge any kind of musical expression. Jacob himself concedes that he reacts strongly to music, as when he first hears a young woman singing a song in the courtyard. (The singer turns out to be Barbara Griesler, who despite her lack of musical training inspires awe in Jacob.) But it is the frame narrator who dismisses Barbara’s piece as a homely song with little merit and certainly not prone to arouse such emotional response. And it is also he who construes Jacob’s reaction to his own music as borderline pathological. In his account, the offensive sensuality of Jacob’s violin play is evoked through a chain of signifiers describing his performance as one marked by excessive affect and sensory redundancy. To once again cite from the narrator’s description of Jacob’s play: “Where the musician had previously reveled in the resonance of the individual note, now the almost voluptuous savoring of harmonic balance was still more perceptible … a tremolo like a soft weeping.” And what is worse, this poor musician actually enjoys his music: “The old fellow lapped up through his playing … while his face would often take on a look of ecstasy.” [translation modified] The narrator’s polemic takes on a more profound significance when read against the backdrop of Hanslick’s critique of pathological listening, which Jacobs seems to embody. Promoting a form of “aesthetic” listening distinguished from the “pathological hearing of music,” Hanslick was convinced that “when music is performed only to excite ‘indefinite feelings’ and to supply food for the ‘emotions,’” it “enervates, effeminates, 31  Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 100. (“. . .  die schrittweis vorgehende Arbeit, durch welche ein Musikstück, das dem Tondichter anfangs nur in Umrissen vorschwebte, bis in die einzelnen Takte zur bestimmten Gestalt ausgemeißelt wird . . . ist so besonnen und kompliziert”) (95).

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and benumbs its votaries.”32 Note how Hanslick’s language, emphasizing the neurological mechanisms involved in pathological hearing, considers the nerves as the locus of emotions and emotional numbness. This speaks to Grillparzer’s frame narrator who construes Jacob as a pathological musician. In his mind, Jacob’s overly excited and nervous reveling in sensations and emotions may well “prevent the development of that strength of will and power of intellect which man is capable of,” as Hanslick suspects.33 The narrator thus seems to corroborate that music, when enjoyed emotionally rather than aesthetically, “as a thing of beauty,” creates the forces that eventually cause Jacob’s self-induced fall into poverty and his loss of social status. By this account, Jacob, while not getting what he deserved, certainly got what he brought onto himself. His naiveté and foolishness come hand-in-hand with his indulgence in the forbidden affective dimensions of his musical practice. The key to the novella is the gap between the narrator’s confrontational nature and disapproving stance toward Jacob’s conduct and the musician’s self-analysis. An entirely different (musical) reality emerges from the intriguing picture Jacob paints of his musical attitude, which is both receptive and intellectual in nature: “The note forced its way to the very quick of my being and then issued forth again” (229) [translation modified] (“Der Ton drang in mein Inneres hinein und aus dem Innern wieder heraus”) (162), he thus reminisces, suggesting that he is perfectly able to aesthetically appreciate musical beauty: [When] the tonic firth harmonizes with the first, and the fifth likewise, and the Nota sensibilis rises like a hope fulfilled, the dissonance is suppressed as if it were by some form of willful malice or presumptuous pride and the miracle of suspension and inversion are wrought, by means of which even the second succeeds to grace within the bosom of the harmony. (230) [Wenn] der dritte Ton zusammenstimmt mit dem ersten, und der fünfte desgleichen, und die Nota sensibilis hinaufsteigt wie eine erfüllte Hoffnung, die Dissonanz herabgebeugt wird als wissentliche Bosheit oder vermessener Stolz und die Wunder der Bindung und Umkehrung, wodurch auch die Sekunde zur Gnade gelangt in den Schoß des Wohlklangs. (163)

 Ibid., 129.  Ibid.

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Jacob here gives voice to Hanslick’s dictum that “the form (the musical structure) is the real substance (subject) of music—in fact, it is the music itself, in antithesis to the feeling.”34 The peripheral narrator of the frame narrative pathologizes Jacob’s musical mind and interprets his passionate approach to music as the behavior of someone who is mentally ill or morally reprehensible. Yet it is not easy to see why the narrator would employ hyperbolic terms such as “hellish concert” (“höllisches Konzert”) and “madness” (224) (“Tollheit”) (156) to describe a musical performance that is simply void of tonal tension and harmonic ambiguity [translation modified]. By contrast, Jacob’s own narrative implies that he is neither tone-deaf and note-blind nor excessively emotional. Instead, he reveals himself as a representative of the view on absolute music defended by Hanslick and Grillparzer, a view the narrator essentially fails to grasp. Another ironic twist occurs during the course of Jacob’s autobiographical account. There are hints of other views in which the sound emanating from Jacob’s violin is not as unpleasant and unbearable as the narrator makes it seem. Jacob’s neighbors do not seem to mind his playing. They shake it off as harmless “scraping away” (222) (“kratzen”) (154) and Barbara even asks him to give music lessons to her child.35 Were it not for these voices, the frame narrative might convince the reader that Jacob is utterly amusical. The implications of this discrepancy are significant, as it triggers a conflict over how to define cognitive impairment and musical expertise, and ultimately also over the power to narrate Jacob’s story.

Realism Much of the existing scholarship on The Poor Musician is focused on the novella’s autobiographically inspired narrator figures who are said to convey competing aspects of Grillparzer’s own personality. For instance, the author reportedly shared Jacob’s quiet contemplative nature and his distrust of general society. His  Autobiography (Selbstbiographie, 1852)

 Ibid., 128.  Pointing to the frequently noted dishonesties in the narrator’s self-narration, Barbu suggests that the narrator “may be just as manipulative when representing Jakob.” Barbu, “Grillparzer’s ‘The Poor Musician,’” 57. See also John M.  Ellis, “Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann,” The German Quarterly 45, 4 (1972): 662–683. 34 35

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even  bears a  stylistic resemblance to Jacob’s simple yet elegant prose.36 The primary narrator is in turn interpreted as a reflection of Grillparzer’s psychologically and socially complicated identity. He appears to be an established bourgeois author who longs for an exceptional encounter to initiate creativity. The narrator is set in contrast to Jacob, a fluid artist figure who for Grillparzer constitutes either a desired ideal (thus the argument advanced by Keller and Stifter), or else an image of horror (Paulsen) or shame (Kafka).37 What is more, commentators have successfully traced autobiographical elements in Jacob’s self-narrative, arguing that Grillparzer here engages with memory through narrative so as to negotiate his father issues, his mother’s musical legacy, his fear of exams, the Biedermeier atmosphere of his parental home, or his affair with Kathi Fröhlich, Grillparzer’s life-long fiancée.38 In an excellent psychoanalytical study, Wolfram Mauser reads Jacob’s tale as a radical phantasy in which Grillparzer crosses the line from autobiography to a psychologically inflected staging of his innermost fears.39 But none of these accounts capture the strangeness of the frame narrative’s internal focalizer whose attention to Jacob’s pathology seems itself pathological. The narrator’s diagnostic impulse, while neither grounded on reasoned analysis nor causally linked through scientific evidence, nevertheless reinforces the idea that he speaks form a place of authority. Of course, by the frame narrator’s own account, his “scientific” focus is 36  See Ian Frank Roe, Franz Grillparzer: A Century of Criticism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1995), 13. Franz Grillparzer, Selbstbiographie, ed. Albrecht Keller (Frankfurt/Main: Diesterweg, 1908). This autobiography brings down the narrative of Grillparzer’s life to 1836, where it stops abruptly. 37  Gottfried Keller, Gesammelte Briefe in vier Bänden, ed. Carl Helbling, 4 vols. (Bern: Benteli, 1952): Vol. 3.1, 161; Adalbert Stifter, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. August Sauer (Prague: Calve, 1927): 26, 328; Wolfgang Paulsen, “Grillparzers Erzählkunst,” Germanic Review 19 (1944), 59–68; W.  Paulsen, “Der gute Bürger Jakob: Zur Satire in Grillparzers ‘Armen Spielmann,’” Colloquia Germanica 2 (1968): 272–298; Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1966), 101. See on this Wolfram Mauser, “Franz Grillparzer ‘Der arme Spielmann’—oder: Von der Lust an einer Angst-Biographie,” Phantasie und Deutung: Psychologisches Verstehen von Literatur und Film, ed. Wolfram Mauser (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1986), 57–69. 38  See Kurt Franz, “Franz Grillparzer: Der arme Spielmann,” Deutsche Novellen von Goethe bis Walser, ed. Jakob Lehmann (Berlin: Cornelsen Verlag Scriptor, 1980), 164. 39  As Mauser writes: “Er will keineswegs sagen, der arme Spielmann, das bin ich, wohl aber: der könnte ich sein, wenn Symptome, die mich ängstigen, mein Leben völlig beherrschen; und es gibt Anlaß, dies zu befürchten.” Mauser, “Franz Grillparzer ‘Der arme Spielmann,’” 61.

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mandated by the “psychological” and “anthropological” demands of storytelling that have to reconcile the contingencies of his own personal passions with the notion of scientific truth and objective meaning. To be sure, the narrator’s impassioned description of the rituals and popular festivities on the fairgrounds at the beginning of the novella superficially testify to his self-proclaimed identity as a “man passionately devoted to [his] fellows and especially to the ordinary folks” (216) (“ein leidenschaftlicher Liebhaber der Menschen, vorzüglich des Volkes”) (147), who is driven by “insatiable appetite for the study of human behavior” (218) (“anthropologischem Heißhunger”) (150). But it quickly becomes clear that the narrator operates mostly as a voyeuristic subject who observes and then reimagines and poeticizes the object of his pseudo-medical gaze. His reaction during his initial meeting with Jacob is thus marked by an affective response that reveals his craving desire for narrative and analytical power. As the narrator confesses: “I was trembling with desire for context.” [translation modified] (“Ich zitterte vor Begierde nach dem Zusammenhange.”) (8) Peppered as it is with mixed or irrelevant metaphors, his “empirical” analysis of Viennese folk culture is complemented by an aestheticizing ideology. Clearly, the narrator is eager to convey an aura of sophistication and artistry that would divorce him from the ignorant masses. He seeks to elevate his description of a lowly popular festival into a work of higher art by employing a range of stylistic effects, blissfully ignorant of how the latter contradict his alleged anthropological interest in folk ritual. As evident from many examples in the first and last sections of his account (and the novella) in particular, he revels in a pompous style that is weighed down by too many metaphors and lengthy digressions.40 Note how the narrator combines baroque enumeration of descriptive detail with the grand allegorical style of the classics: So it continues, until at last the broad haven of pleasure opens before them: woods and meadow, music and dancing, wine and good food, shadow-­ shows and rope-dancers, illuminations and fireworks to create a Cockaigne or Eldorado, a true worldly paradise that, unfortunately or luckily, depending on how you look at it—lasts only for two days, to disappear again like the dream of a summer’s night, which lives on as a memory and at most a fond hope. (215–216)

40  Politzer characterized the narrator as a liar and a bad writer. Heinz Politzer, Franz Grillparzers “Der arme Spielmann” (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1967).

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(Und so fort und immer weiter, bis endlich der breite Hafen der Lust sich auftut und Wald und Wiese, Musik und Tanz, Wein und Schmaus, Schattenspiel und Seiltänzer, Erleuchtung und Feuerwerk sich zu einem pays de cocagne, einem Eldorado, einem eigentlichen Schlaraffenlande vereinigen, das leider, oder glücklicherweise, wie man es nimmt, nur einen und den nächst darauffolgenden Tag dauert, dann aber verschwindet, wie der Traum einer Sommernacht, und nur in der Erinnerung zurückbleibt und allenfalls in der Hoffnung.) (147)

As Carmen Barbu puts it succinctly, the narrator’s writing “bears the marks of good writing but is just form for the sake of form.”41 In contrast, Jacob’s embedded narrative is flowing and spirited, beaming with the kind of life and lived experience the narrator seeks to capture in vain. Jacob’s simple and truthful tale impresses itself on the imagination with the force of tragedy, while the narrator from his distanced, critical stance can only evoke a glossy, artificially enhanced version of reality. What we have then is not an autobiographically inflected meditation on the potential loss of creativity and authenticity implicated in certain artistic professions—writing versus music, drama versus performing arts. The poor musician does not stand as an alternative biography for Grillparzer, reflective of a bad decision that led him down the career path of an (initially unsuccessful) dramatist in lieu of an accomplished virtuoso career. After all, the musician of the novella is neither more successful nor less vulnerable than the frame narrator, and his creative freedom comes at the price of ridicule and ultimately much acquiescence. If Grillparzer here plays with two competing alter egos, the split occurs between different dimensions, namely, between his factual, objective and his impulsive, creative sides, a dichotomy that is also reflected in the two competing forms of writing displayed in the novella. Pitting two narrative styles against each other, the novella portrays the anonymous narrator who frames Jacob as a pitiful character as unsympathetic and his narrative as one-sided, serving him to highlight nothing but his own “anthropological” sensibility. Thus, the novella can be read as a reflection on precisely these aspects of writing—it is a commentary on the relationship between realism and reality, suggesting that the frame narrator’s detached and analytical depiction of human existence cannot come close to the exalted experience of music and the superior wisdom of life itself. This narrator’s  Carmen Barbu, “Grillparzer’s ‘The Poor Musician’,” 59.

41

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pseudoscientific description of Jacob is patronizing at best and at worst an invitation to adopt his prejudiced view of one socially inferior individual by raising him to the position of subject matter without reaching a deeper understanding of his existential predicament. Realists of this variety are prone to the conceit that their treatment of everyday reality shows things in all their seriousness and  as they really are. In the words of Robert C. Holub, they “perpetrate the fiction … that they are not fiction at all.”42 Moreover, the narrative mode of realism, as exemplified by the frame narrative of The Poor Musician, appropriates many of the techniques of the medical case study, a genre of prose narrative that emerged contemporaneously with the literature of Poetic Realism. Both narrative modes assert an authoritative position by virtue of presenting “truth” based on “realism” (in the sense of exact representation), thereby projecting a very nineteenth-­century way of looking at the (empirical) world. At the same time there is, paradoxically, a blurring of the boundaries between science and fiction. This is consistent with nineteenth-century scientists’ realization that they could increase the persuasive impact of their writing by citing novelists and philosophers and by adopting some of the storytelling techniques of narrative fiction. It also speaks to literary authors’ appropriation “of the techniques of the clinical medical gaze of this period,” as Pamela K. Gilbert writes, such as “the focus on detailed and apparently objective description of minute but meaningful signs that must be interpreted by an expert (an author, and by flattering extension, the reader); careful cataloguing of physiological reactions (blushes, pallor, faintness), and a focus on the normative and everyday flawed, middle-class protagonist.”43 Observing Jacob’s life with a cold and “scientific” eye, the 42  Robert C. Holub, Reflections of Realism: Paradox, Norm, and Ideology in NineteenthCentury Germany (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 32. 43  Pamela K.  Gilbert, “Sensation Fiction and the Medical Context,” The Cambridge Companion to Sensation Fiction, ed. Andrew Mangham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 183. These normative individuals, however, need not always be ordinary. As a borderline-satirical take on the genre of the artist novella, The Poor Musician presents single situations and episodes from the life of an artist whose individuality and social embeddedness are mutually interpenetrated. As the musician resists certain forms of bourgeois complacency, the normative gives way to an uncommon, eccentric character. Without his realizing or intentionally doing it, one contested normal thus yields to another: “‘In the evenings I remain at home, and’—at this his voice dropped lower and lower, a flush came over his face and his gaze became fixed upon the ground—‘then I play from inspiration, without any score and for myself alone. Fantasizing, I believe, is the term given to it in books on music.’ We had both fallen silent; he, from shame that he had betrayed his innermost secret; I, from the

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narrator’s gaze presents a sharp contrast with Jacob’s passionate narrative style, which takes a different, heartfelt, and spontaneous approach to representing reality. It is worth noting that the novella’s narrative setup is shaped after Honoré de Balzac’s short story Facino Cane (Facino Cane, 1836), which is included in the Scènes de la vie parisienne (Scenes from Parisian Life) section of his novel sequence La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy).44 As in The Poor Musician, the first-person narrator of Balzac’s story is a student who has as his only hobby people-watching, claiming a “faculty of penetrating to the soul without neglecting the body; or rather, a power of grasping external details so thoroughly that they never detained me for a moment, and at once I passed beyond and through them. I could enter into the life of the human creatures whom I watched.”45 The budding scholar’s attachment to what he believes to be scrupulous scientific exactitude is contrasted with a secondary narrator, the novella’s titular hero Facino Cane, who displays a penchant for the mystical and fantastical facets of storytelling. Like Jakob, he emerges as a visionary figure whose musical talent (he is a clarinettist) is enhanced by a hidden spiritual essence.46 Balzac’s juxtaposition of competing narrators results in a critical examination of the value judgments that often provide the ideological foundation for the realist tradition.47 A similar impetus is behind Grillparzer’s critical exploration of the narrative conventions behind realist texts. surprise that this man should speak of the highest reaches of art, when he was unable to give a clear rendering of even the simplest waltz.” (219–220) (“‘Abends halte ich mich zu Hause, und’—dabei ward seine Rede immer leiser, Röte überzog sein Gesicht, sein Auge suchte den Boden—‘da spiele ich denn aus der Einbildung, so für mich ohne Noten. Phantasieren, glaub ich, heißt es in den Musikbüchern.’ Wir waren beide ganz stille geworden. Er, aus Beschämung über das verratene Geheimnis seines Innern; ich, voll Erstaunen, den Mann von den höchsten Stufen der Kunst sprechen zu hören, der nicht imstande war, den leichtesten Walzer fassbar wiederzugeben.”) (152) 44  Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine, 9 vols., ed. Pierre-Georges Castex (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1977), Vol. 6 “Facino Cane,” 1019–1032. Honoré de Balzac, Selected Short Stories of Balzac, trans. Sylvia Raphael (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 235–247. 45  Ibid., 235. 46  William R. Paulson, Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Blind in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 150. 47  On the tension between science and empire, romance and empiricism in Balzac’s work, see Geoffrey Baker, Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the NineteenthCentury Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009).

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Cerebral Hemispheres The two styles of storytelling exemplified in the novella bring the discussion back to the neuroscientific understanding of the brain and with it, the question of neuropathology. The polarity between the narrator’s mimetic regime and Jacob’s spontaneous, intuitive creativity echoes the two functional modes of hemispheric activity, which scientists first began to notice in the mid-nineteenth century. In a much-noted 1861 article, Broca observed an asymmetry of function related to language and thereby effectively reopened the cerebral localization debate years after Gall had been discredited. Broca associated the faculty of speech with the left frontal area, arguing that “we are left-brained with regard to language and also for actions that are much simpler and cruder.”48 Broca’s work on the left hemisphere specialization for language resonated broadly and led to wide speculation about the organic causes of aphasia among Europe’s leading neurologists. It also inaugurated a series of groundbreaking discoveries relating to hemispheric differences.49 It bears mentioning that Knoblauch located the auditory center for tones near the superior temporal lobe (Schläfenwindung), and the motor center for tones near the left third frontal convolution, called Broca’s area (339) (Stirnwindung) (351), both located in the left cerebral hemisphere. That is to say, Knoblauch believed music to be a left-hemisphere function. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere was widely believed to be less complex than the left and not involved in the mind’s more advanced mental functions and therefore remained largely neglected. It was not until the turn of the twentieth century that scientists began to notice the right hemisphere’s ability to make fine discriminations in global patterns, and realize that it was better equipped than the left hemisphere to handle spatial perception, imagistic thought, memory, and, crucially, key aspects of music processing. 48  Paul Broca, “Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé, suivies d’une observation d’aphémie,” Bulletin de la Société Anatomique 36 (1861): 330–357. An English translation of Broca’s report was published as Ennis Ata Berker, et al., “Translation of Broca’s 1865 report. Localization of speech in the third left frontal convolution,” Archives of Neurology 43 (1986): 1068. Today the left frontal area is named after Broca, although its localization through Broca was anticipated by an obscure French country doctor named Marc Dax (1770–1837) who discovered in 1836 that patients with damage to the left side of the brain had trouble understanding speech. 49  The proposition that the hemispheres have distinct functions was further pursued by Carl Wernicke as well as English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911), among others.

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According to the structural-functional approach suggested by familiar hemisphere specialization theories, one may be tempted to align the novella’s narrator figure with the rational, linguistic faculties of the left hemisphere, as the latter communicates concepts (such as music or harmony) in a clear, unconfused, and authoritative manner. The musician would in turn embody and express key faculties of the right hemisphere: memory (enabling him to tell his life story in great detail) and the spatial orientation and visual patterning required for his reception—and enjoyment—of music. Yet the dichotomy between the narrator’s and the musician’s cognitive modalities is not as absolute as it appears, and neither is hemispheric specialization. Just as both hemispheres can deal with either kind of material—words or images—but in different ways, both characters in the novella share faculties and deficiencies associated with both the left and right hemispheres: the musician’s eloquence speaks to his superior linguistic faculties, which are left-hemisphere localized, while his inability to pick up the sarcastic mockery of his audience suggests a right-­hemisphere dysfunction. The frame narrator in turn applies himself (if not always successfully) to the use of metaphoric language and visual imagery, both perceptual and cognitive faculties associated with right-hemisphere functioning. Significantly, the hemispheric divide between the frame narrator and the musician is structured along a different functional distinction that was unknown to the scientists of the day, namely, that between familiarity (left hemisphere) and novelty (right hemisphere). Iain McGilchrist has shown this distinction to be essential for understanding hemispheric specialization. It also has actual and important bearing on the competing definitions of a “realist” text, as it concerns the nature of knowledge itself. As Gilchrist writes: “We use the word ‘know’ in at least two importantly different senses. In one sense knowledge is essentially an encounter with something or someone, therefore with something ‘other’ … . This kind of knowledge permits a sense of the uniqueness of the other. It is also uniquely ‘my’ knowledge … and it is not fixed or certain.”50 According to Gilchrist, this kind of knowledge is a matter of kennenlernen, of encountering something anew. It is a usually appreciative exploration of novelty. This right-­ hemisphere way of experiencing reality is embodied by Jacob’s musical activity, which the fiddler himself terms “fantasizing,” suggesting that it involves an act of imagination, and hence a form of thought in which  McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, 95.

50

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something excitingly new is brought to conscious awareness. As an act of fantasizing, his play also connotes an indulging in daydreaming, a conjuring of the fragile reality of possibilities. Music, for Jacob, is and remains new, always unheard, and never complete. He plays even the masters with utmost curiosity, as if he were hearing them for the first time. Music for him is, not unlike his own biography, a story of unfulfilled longing.51 The novella’s protagonist through his music gives a demonstration of how to encounter the novelty of that “unprecedented event that has occurred,” which Goethe defined as the key to the form of novella.52 At the same time, he is the novella’s peculiar unheard-of sensational novelty. Attracting the narrator’s “[complete ] attention” (217) (“ganze Aufmerksamkeit”) (149) by way of his “whole nature” (218) (“das ganze Wesen”) (150), Jacob constitutes the very premise of novelty, as he ignores the rules of musical performance and is relatively unconcerned about being faithful to the original. What is more, the style of his violin playing parallels his narrative method, which is likewise subjective and particularizing, inviting immersion into this deeply personal narrative fiction. The novella’s scientifically inclined narrator exemplifies a different kind of knowledge. His “anthropological” account mimics the way in which the left hemisphere structures and classifies stimuli according to definite and detailed categories, independently of their context. The left hemisphere takes over once the right hemisphere has appreciated something (as) new, and once this something has become familiar. Hence, the function of the left hemisphere is a form of secondary process thinking that knows in the sense of wissen—it pins down with precision and finality. When the left hemisphere is done processing a bit of information it has become, as McGilchrist writes, “routine, inauthentic, and lacking in the spark of life.”53 It follows that the strength of the left hemisphere’s mode of knowledge lies in the fact that “its findings are repeatable. Its qualities are the inverse of those previously outlined, and they are associated with the left hemisphere: an affinity with the non-living; with ‘pieces’ of information; general, impersonal, fixed, certain and disengaged.”54 51  Roland Duhamel, “Jacobs Kampf mit dem Engel—Zur Ästhetik des Armen Spielmann,” Aneignungen, Enfremdungen. The Austria Playright Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), ed. Clemens Ruthner et al. (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 137. 52  See Chap. 3. 53  McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, 96. 54  Ibid.

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Despite being intrigued by his encounter with the fiddler, the narrator analyzes him in a deliberate, methodical manner that misses the spiritual aspects and the deeper significance of his life. Readers cannot miss the ambivalence of statements such as these from the end of the novella, where the narrator learns about Jacob’s sacrificial death and resolves to visit Barbara in her apartment:55 A few days later—it was Sunday—driven by my obsessive curiosity, I went to the butcher’s house, and gave as a pretext for the visit a desire to have the old man’s fiddle as a memento. I found the family together: no particular impression seemed to have left its mark upon them. The violin was hanging on the wall: it had been placed—with some attempt at symmetry—near the looking-glass and opposite a crucifix. (251–252) (Ein paar Tage darauf—es war ein Sonntag—ging ich, von meiner psychologischen Neugierde getrieben, in die Wohnung des Fleischers und nahm zum Vorwande, dass ich die Geige des Alten als Andenken zu besitzen wünschte. Ich fand die Familie beisammen ohne Spur eines zurückgebliebenen besondern Eindrucks. Doch hing die Geige mit einer Art Symmetrie geordnet neben dem Spiegel und einem Kruzifix gegenüber an der Wand.) (186)

It is not just that the narrator in his investment in the deceased musician is driven by psychological (and hence analytical) curiosity rather than sincere grief. The image of two symmetrically arranged objects (violin and crucifix) signifying values that are intrinsic to Jacob’s life (music and love/ atonement) but disengaged from the referential context of his concrete existence, captures the abstract, symbolic processing and categorical thinking exemplified by the frame narrator’s mode of experience. Clearly, this character appreciates the neat but impersonal display of symbolic items that fix and thereby generalize the particulars of the musician’s reality. This also explains why he has no quandaries about asking to purchase and carry away the violin but not the crucifix. This ambivalent gesture of honoring and at the same time obliterating everything Jacob stood for complicates an already troubling image of a world in which left-hemisphere dominance begins to have a profound effect on Austrian society’s cultural 55  “Weil er seine Musik vergisst, kann Jakob handeln; weil er handelt und dabei sein Leben verspielt, hört er im Sterben die Musik der Engel.” Günter Peters, “Verfallsgeschichten vom Fortschritt der Kunst. Künstlerfigurationen bei Hoffmann, Diderot, Balzac, Poe und Grillparzer,” Arcadia 29, 2 (1994): 168.

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values and intellectual priorities. The story of a unique and peculiar life, which also contains a tale of music’s power to evoke emotion through abstraction and imagination, ends on a note of resignation, as the protagonist’s cerebral love for music is defeated by the rationalistic and scientific mindset that has come to define the post-Enlightenment age. The novella also exposes as flawed the newfangled dichotomy between the supposed “rationality” and “rigor” of the sciences and the alleged “fuzziness” and “ambiguity” of the domain of arts and literature, which was further exacerbated by the claim, first articulated by the English physician Arthur L. Wigan (1785–1847), that a single cerebral hemisphere was sufficient to be a person.56 (Wigan’s claim was based on the postmortem examination of a brain that was missing an entire cerebral hemisphere, which he interpreted as proof that the brain is a closely opposed pair of two minds rather than a single organ of two halves.) Rather than embracing such a dichotomous view, the novella envisions the brain as a site where the antagonistic, irreconcilable domains of reason versus intuition could be substituted with a productive, dynamic interaction between the cognitive modalities of wissen and kennen. This might even result in the readers’ new openness to other perspectives, and in their acquiring new literary and musical tastes.

56  “Each cerebrum is a distinct and perfect whole as an organ of thought.” Arthur L. Wigan, New View of Insanity: The Duality of the Mind Proved by the Structure, Functions, and Diseases of the Brain, and by the Phenomena of Mental Derangement and Shown to be Essential to Moral Responsibility (London: Longman, 1844), 26.

CHAPTER 5

Symmetry as Narrative Structure: OCD in Gottfried Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet

Gottfried Keller’s novella A Village Romeo and Juliet (Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, 1856/76) opens on a scene of bucolic innocence.1 Two farmers named Marti and Manz drive their furrows across magnificent fields stretching over a sunny hill high above the prosperous town of Seldwyla, Switzerland. The men look and are dressed alike and their strong and yet graceful movements coincide in perfect harmony. Manz and Marti plow in a synchronized, indeed symmetrical, fashion. After passing each other on the summit of the hill, they gradually move away from one another until they disappear behind the curve of the slope, only to ascend again:  Conceived in 1847, the novella was first published in the first volume of the Keller’s collection The People of Seldwyla (Die Leute von Seldwyla; Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1856) and then in a revised edition on its own (G.  Keller, Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe; Stuttgart: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1876). Gottfried Keller, Sämtliche Werke: historischekritische Ausgabe, ed. Walter Morgenthaler et al., 10 vols. (A. M.: Stroemfeld, 1996–2013). Gottfried Keller: Stories, ed. Frank G. Ryder (New York: Continuum, 1982), 53. Hereafter cited in the text. 1

An earlier version of this chapter was published as “‘A Weird Sense for Symmetry’: Obsession and Compulsion in Gottfried Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet,” The Germanic Review 88 (2019): 185–201. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_5

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Thus from a little distance they looked exactly alike, for they represented the original type of the region; and at first sight one could have distinguished them only by the fact that the one wore his white cap with the peak tipping forward over his brow, while the other’s fell back on his neck. But even that distinction alternated between them, depending upon the direction in which they were plowing; for when they met and passed each other on the crest of the ridge, where there was a fresh east wind blowing, the one who was facing it had the peak of his cap thrown back, while that of the other, with the wind behind him, stuck out in front. In between there was each time a moment when the gleaming caps stood upright, fluttering in the breeze and shooting skyward like two tongues of white flame. (53) (So glichen sie einander vollkommen in einiger Entfernung; denn sie stellten die ursprüngliche Art dieser Gegend dar, und man hätte sie auf den ersten Blick nur daran unterscheiden können, daß der eine den Zipfel seiner weißen Kappe nach vorn trug, der andere aber hinten im Nacken hängen hatte. Aber das wechselte zwischen ihnen ab, indem sie in der entgegengesetzten Richtung pflügten; denn wenn sie oben auf der Höhe zusammentrafen und aneinander vorüberkamen, so schlug dem, welcher gegen den frischen Ostwind ging, die Zipfelkappe nach hinten über, während sie bei dem andern, der den Wind im Rücken hatte, sich nach vorne sträubte. Es gab auch jedesmal einen mittlern Augenblick, wo die schimmernden Mützen aufrecht in der Luft schwankten und wie zwei weiße Flammen gen Himmel züngelten.) (75)

Although it is beautifully structured by the balanced repetitive motion of caps and plows, this opening scenario is not as simply harmonious as it appears. While it is true that most of Keller’s works, and the novella A Village Romeo and Juliet in particular, are deeply entrenched in geometrical order and symmetry—a fact that Keller commentators have recognized from the first—the question remains as to what causes and controls this insistence on recurring symmetrical patterns.2 In William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, which evidently inspired Keller’s novella, symmetry is an important rhetorical device. As in other works by the master playwright, thematic patterning and parallel constructions are what gives speech its power and what orders the prose and gives it resonance,

2  See Walter Silz who first noted the “manifest symmetrical patterning of the whole story.” Walter Silz, Realism and Reality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 82.

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underscoring the closed nature of the experience drama offers.3 But in Keller’s novella, the parallelisms and symmetrical lines are so distinctive and abundant that they have puzzled the imagination of generations of commentators. Going beyond a mere imitation of Shakespeare, the geometrical configurations point toward a higher principle, embodying, as Winfried Menninghaus has shown, the categories of aesthetics and fate, which in the process become synonymous with the subject matter of the novella.4 Menninghaus’ observation only partially captures the significance of the novella’s geometrical properties, which effectively exceed the reach of aesthetic experience and philosophical reasoning. In its overstatement of order and symmetry, the novella reveals the insecure status of its own formal properties, pointing toward an aporia of legitimacy at the heart of the realist project. A Village Romeo and Juliet is often said to stand out among other Poetic Realist novellas, because it abandons the realist doctrine of verisimilitude and also because it falls apart into two seemingly independent halves, featuring different plot lines and characters. The present reading, while not opposed to this interpretation, aims to push the novella’s rhetorical structure and poetic form more closely together. The aim is to recuperate the novella’s fairy-tale-like ending as a logical consequence of what will be shown to be its pathological obsession with symmetry. The chapter will lay out how the novella’s poetic and textual idiosyncrasies, and most notably the profusion of symmetrical and parallel structures, are overdetermined with respect to the specific nature of their effect on the text. Significant as signs, indeed symptoms, of the novella’s psychopathology, they convey the text’s organization around an intrusive thought that lies at the heart of the bourgeois obsession with the traditional family unit and in particular, its children. The present study corroborates Eric Downing’s contention that “from a larger socio- and literary-historical perspective … realism itself could seem a pathological construction, its own ever-repeating imposition of a single, sustained, and repressive fiction

3  See James Ryan, “The Symmetrical Structure of Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Newsletter 50, 4 (2000): 97–98, 100. 4  Winfried Menninghaus, Artistische Schrift: Studien zur Kompositionskunst Gottfried Kellers (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 107, 126. For the first inquiry into the function of geometrical structures in Keller’s work, see Gabriel Imboden, Gottfried Kellers Ästhetik auf der Grundlage der Entwicklung seiner Naturvorstellung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1975).

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designed to conceal a feared, ever-changing reality.”5 However, it shifts the theoretical emphasis from Downing’s engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis and central tenets of the Frankfurt School to earlier milestones of medico-scientific knowledge and the discovery of a psychopathological condition that is contemporaneous with the emergence of Poetic Realism in the middle of the nineteenth century. While Downing highlights repetition as a function of the Freudian return of the repressed, the present reading seeks to expand more fully our understanding of symmetry as a function of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)—a type of mental illness the nosological categorization of which originated in France, Switzerland, and Germany during Keller’s time.6 To rephrase Downing’s argument in terms of a historical encounter of neurology, psychopathology, and literature, what is concealed in Poetic Realism and in Keller’s novella is not “a feared, ever-changing reality” broadly conceived, but a concrete, intimate, and morally reprehensible obsession, which ultimately causes the text’s repetitive insistence on symmetrical patterns.7 As a second aim, the present reading of A Village Romeo and Juliet enquires into the relationship and epistemological links between neuroscientific theory and literary practice to recognize Keller’s novella as a prime example of Poetic Realist prose literature that interacts with and gives shape to questions raised in experimental psychopathology. The novella was conceived in an age that was motivated in great measure by the desire to advance public morality through neuroscientific discovery. Exploring the borders between normality and pathology, it stands out as an extended, active attempt to negotiate the terms and conditions of its own coming-­ into-­ being—and survival—as literature. A Village Romeo and Juliet is exemplary in its use of textual strategies that generate the appearance of normalcy and propriety while at the same time testing the public’s readiness to assimilate and accept the wider application of neuroscientific knowledge.

 Downing, Double Exposures, 17–18.  Ibid., 18. Downing’s discussion of nineteenth-century realist fiction is based on his understanding that the latter is “firmly grounded in repetition as part of its efforts to maintain and convey a uniform, regular version of the world,” while at the same time resisting repetition as it breaks with “the dominant modes of representation and signification.” Ibid., 260. 7  Ibid. 5 6

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Monomania Within the diegesis of the text, the catalytic event that leads to the novella’s shift into an experimental, psycho-medical register occurs shortly after Marti and Manz’s children arrive with lunch. The farmers sit down to eat and exchange a few complicit remarks about a stretch of land separating their respective fields. Both men have recently received an offer to lease this middle field but neither one has any desire to farm it, as this unclaimed property has lain fallow for years. It is significant that the farmers’ candid discussion makes their lack of interest in the fallow field explicit, as that same afternoon, Marti and Manz, who have now finished plowing their fields, each cut a big furrow in the adjacent wilderness, thereby adding strips of the land to their respective properties: But when they reached the end of the last furrow and one of the farm hands started to quit for the day, his master called out, “What are you stopping for? Turn around again!” “But I thought we were through,” said the man. “Shut up and do as I say!” cried the master. And they turned around and plowed a deep furrow in the middle, ownerless field, making the weeds and stones fly. These latter, however, the farmer did not stop to throw aside; he very likely thought there would be time enough for them later, and for the present was content to do the work in a very rough way. And so the man plowed swiftly up in a gentle curve, and when he reached the crest and the fresh wind again blew back the tip of his cap, whom should he pass on the opposite side but the other farmer, who, with the tip of his cap forward, was likewise plowing a deep furrow in the middle field and throwing the clods of earth aside. (58) (Als nun, mit der letzten Furche zu Ende gekommen, der Knecht des einen halten wollte, rief sein Meister: “Was hältst du? Kehr noch einmal um!”— “Wir sind ja fertig!’ sagte der Knecht. “Halt’s Maul und tu, wie ich dir sage!” der Meister. Und sie kehrten um und rissen eine tüchtige Furche in den mittlern herrenlosen Acker hinein, daß Kraut und Steine flogen. Der Bauer hielt sich aber nicht mit der Beseitigung derselben auf, er mochte denken, hiezu sei noch Zeit genug vorhanden, und er begnügte sich, für heute die Sache nur aus dem Gröbsten zu tun. So ging es rasch die Höhe empor in sanftem Bogen, und als man oben angelangt und das liebliche Windeswehen eben wieder den Kappenzipfel des Mannes zurückwarf, pflügte auf der anderen Seite der Nachbar vorüber, mit dem Zipfel nach vorn, und schnitt ebenfalls eine ansehnliche Furche vom mittlern Acker, daß die Schollen nur so zur Seite flogen. jeder sah wohl, was der andere tat, aber

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keiner schien es zu sehen und sie entschwunden sich wieder, indem jedes Sternbild still am andern vorüberging und hinter diese runde Welt hinabtauchte.) (82)

This bold illegal act of plowing can be regarded as a compulsion, since it is in conflict with the needs and goals of the farmers’ egos. In Freudian parlance, Marti and Manz’s impulses are ego-dystononic (ichdyston), as the farmers ultimately know that they require each other’s friendship and support more than the barren strip of land.8 Their compulsion thus marks the onset of the novella’s concern with obsessive-compulsive disorder, for it is not a singular feat. As the years pass, both men repeat this action with every plowing, so that each fall the middle acre shrinks in size while becoming ever more densely covered with weeds and stones. When the neglected field is finally auctioned off and purchased by Manz, the two men fall into a severe dispute over a triangular corner that Marti had, according to Manz, only recently chopped off the latter’s newly acquired addition. Manz thus protests: Everything will have to be properly straightened out. These three fields always lay there side by side, as if they were marked off by a ruler. You’ve got a strange sense of humor, trying to run such a ridiculous curlicue between them. People would make fun of us if we let that crooked piece stay there— it has to go, I tell you! (60) (Alles muß zuletzt eine ordentliche grade Art haben; diese drei Äcker sind von jeher so grade nebeneinander gelegen, wie nach dem Richtscheit gezeichnet; es ist ein ganz absonderlicher Spaß von dir, wenn du nun einen solchen lächerlichen und unvernünftigen Schnörkel dazwischen bringen willst, und wir beide würden einen Übernamen bekommen, wenn wir den krummen Zipfel da bestehen ließen. Er muß durchaus weg!) (85)

The argument soon turns the once friendly neighbors into implacable enemies. The dispute becomes even more adversarial as Marti and Manz fall into the hands of swindlers, let themselves be drawn into all kinds of doubtful ventures and lotteries and, in a series of compulsive actions that defy any notion of good judgment or even common sense, gamble their 8  Freud, “On Narcissism. An Introduction,” The Standard Edition, Vol. 14: “On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works (19014–1916),” 99.

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fortunes away. What marks Marti and Manz’s self-destructive behavior and actions as compulsive is that they are, on the one hand, felt to be unacceptable and repugnant by them and inconsistent with their idealized self-image and ego-ideal, and, on the other, that they put principle before self-interest. As a result, the two men experience increasing Leidensdruck—a sense of being compelled to act to alleviate stress and suffering.9 The narrator notes a change in the farmers’ essence and personality (“eine Änderung in [ihrem] Wesen”) and a new form of “harshness” (63) (“Rauheit”) (89) in their comportment. Child abuse and other violent and self-destructive actions follow suit. Previous commentators have explained the farmer’s purposeless and compulsive actions with their moral disposition, which is inflected by the social context of a disintegrating village community, itself viewed as a sign of modernity. According to this line of reasoning, it is the “social deterioration and loss of caste,” or else the “destructive impact of bourgeois greed and fear of difference,” that are to blame for Manz and Marti’s flawed behavior.10 Other interpretations point to the inevitable link between the men’s senseless actions, on the one hand, and the rules of capitalist competition or arbitrary property laws, on the other hand.11 While these interpretations rightly underscore the importance of contingency underlying the farmers’ social condition, they somewhat soften the arbitrary and irrational nature of their actions. Manz and Marti’s decision to drive their plows into the barren middle field is strikingly unmotivated and entirely without precedent, especially when seen against the backdrop of the men’s initial consensus about the unutilizability of this particular strip of land. Marti and Manz’s actions contradict the logic of capitalist accumulation and the economics of property rights. They are, however, clearly legible within the emerging field of neuroscience and the clinical study of neurological disorders, which had gained momentum since the 1830s. Given that the act of plowing is coupled with an obsessive  Oliver Freudenreich, Psychotic Disorders: A Practical Guide (Cham: Humana, 2020), 414.  See Silz, Realism and Reality, 86, and Petra Fachinger, Rewriting Germany from the Margins: “Other” German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s (Québeck City: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001), 26. 11  See Jörg Kreienbrock, “Das Kreditparadies Seldwyla. Zur Beziehung von Ökonomie und Literatur in Gottfried Kellers Die Leute von Seldwyla,” Gottfried Keller,“Die Leute von Seldwyla”: Kritische Studien, ed. Hans Joachim Hahn (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 129 and Eva Geulen, “Habe und Bleibe in Kellers ‘Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe,’” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 129 (2010): 253–263. 9

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insistence on symmetry, it becomes intelligible as an instance of what French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne Esquirol had identified in 1838 as monomania, a particular form of partial insanity marked by anomalous and involuntary behavior in which the intellectual faculties, however, remained largely intact.12 In the nineteenth century, patients entering the Charenton asylum (later to be renamed Esquirol Hospital after its famous director) were very likely to be diagnosed with monomania.13 The diagnosis was indeed given an inflated role in explaining abnormal behavior such as, most conspicuously, the uncontrollable obsessions that lead to criminal conduct.14 As an elusive but ubiquitous medical term, monomania provides a fitting diagnosis for Marti and Manz, whose mental derangement is instigated by an unexplained, debilitating obsession with symmetry that springs from what seems to be their otherwise healthy minds. Marti and Manz don’t fall apart in a way that would indicate advanced dissociative states, but they nevertheless act in an inexplicable, erratic manner. By insisting on the men’s “remarkable sense for symmetry and straight lines” (62) (“wunderbarer Sinn für Symmetrie und parallele Linien”) (88), and by emphasizing that the farmers’ disagreement focuses strictly on symmetrical lines and a “ridiculous curlicue,” the novella evokes a crucial correspondence between monomania and the farmers’ peculiar obsession, thereby affirming Esquirol’s conviction that his new disease-concept was intrinsically linked to hemispheric asymmetry. To Esquirol’s mind, the delirium, which often accompanied states of monomania, resulted from a “duplicity of the brain,” as when the two hemispheres were not “equally excited” and as a result “[did] not act simultaneously.”15 As Esquirol writes: “Man no longer has the faculty of directing his action, because he has lost the unity of his mind.”16 As a recurring action intended to recover symmetry even if it lacks any sense or purpose, the farmers’ act of plowing is legible as the symptom of another mental dysfunction whose history and etiology began to take shape during the second part of the nineteenth century. In 1867, 12  Étienne Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales considérées sous les Rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal (Paris: J. - B. Baillière, 1838). Étienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies, xii. 13  Lennard J. Davis, Obsession: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 68. 14  See, for instance, Johannes B. Friedreich et al., Die Grundbegriffe des Criminalrechts und seine leitenden Grundsätze (Nürnberg: Friedrich Korn’schen, 1861); and Joseph A. Knop, Die Paradoxie des Willens (Leipzig: Louis Pernitzsch, 1863). 15  Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 363. 16  Ibid.

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Austro-­German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), then on staff at the progressive Illenau Asylum in Baden, first introduced the notion of obsessive thought (Zwangsvorstellung) into German psychiatry, when he described intrusive, recurring ideas that could morph into uncontrollable urges: “From the sensation of pain arise discrete bleak ideas that, animated by the latter, progress into obsessions and finally motivate actions” [translation modified]. (“Aus dem schmerzlichen Fühlen [erheben sich] einzelne finstere Vorstellungen, die von diesem immer wieder neu angeregt zu Zwangsvorstellungen werden und schliesslich zum Handeln anregen”).17 The word Zwang (compulsion, force, restraint) derives from the middle high German twanc, from the the old high German dwang.18 The term Vorstellung was understood by some German psychiatrists as mental experiences (obsessive ideas) and by others as precursors to action (compulsions). This explains the conflicting translations of the compound word Zwangsvorstellung into British and American English as “obsession” and “compulsion,” respectively. As Ronald Chase observes, “the now familiar obsessive-compulsive disorder arose as a compromise between the two English translations.”19 A year after KrafftEbing’s definition, German neurologist Wilhelm Griesinger coined the term obsessional brooding (Grübelsucht) to describe an addictive form of compulsive, nonsensical self-questioning.20 In a 1877 lecture, finally, Griesinger’s former student Carl Westphal (1833–1890), now professor of psychiatry and neurology in Berlin, defined intrusive thoughts as “obsessive ideas which, in the presence of intact intelligence and with no disorder of the emotional life or affect, intrude into the foreground of consciousness against the will of the concerned individual; they do not allow themselves to be banished, and they obstruct and divert the normal course of ideas.” (“[Vorstellungen] welche bei übrigens intakter Intelligenz und ohne einen gefühls- oder affektartigen Zustand bedingt zu sein, gegen und wider den Willen des betreffenden Menschen in den Vordergrund des Bewusstseins treten, sich nicht verscheuchen lassen, den normalen Ablauf 17   Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Beiträge zur Erkennung und richtigen forensischen Beurtheilung krankhafter Gemütszustände für Ärzte, Richter und Verteidiger (Contribution to the Discernment and Correct Forensic Evaluation of Pathological States for Physicians, Judges, and Defendants) (Erlangen: Enke, 1867), 36. 18  See Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms, 141. 19  Ronald Chase, The Making of Modern Psychiatry (Berlin: Logos 2018), 32. 20  Wilhelm Griesinger, “Über einen wenig bekannten psychopathischen Zustand” (On a Little-Known Psychopathological State), Archiv für Psychiatrie 1, 3 (1868): 626–635.

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der Vorstellungen hindern und durchkreuzen.”)21 As the first diagnosis specifically defining a partial form of insanity, obsession-compulsion presented a new way of thinking about a kind of disease whose combined effect of obsessive thinking and compulsive activity could not be explained through psychological causes.22

An Obsessive Idea Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder in which people have intrusive thoughts or ideas (obsessions) that make them feel driven to do something (compulsions) against their better knowledge. While the former are sometimes harder to detect—albeit present in their purest form in the novella—the latter are palpable in the explicit focus on the farmers’ pointless actions and their awareness of it. Mark G. Ward observes that Marti and Manz “know what they are doing as they plough back and forth, remorselessly shaving the extra furrow from the disputed land between them.”23 Deep down they know that their actions are not consistent with their self-interests and ego ideal. But if Manz and Marti’s compulsions are offered by the text as a medical curiosity, it is one from which the novella fails to distance itself. There is indeed a consistent link between the pathological development of the characters, on the one hand, and the way in which their obsessions seem to disrupt the regulatory and organizing function of literary form on the textual level. This link reveals the intellectual contagiousness of the neuroscientific knowledge the novella figuratively and literally represents. It shows that Marti and Manz’s obsessive pathology is replicated by the structural and formal organization of the novella, which is in turn mirrored in Marti and Manz’s mental disintegration as it progresses through minor transgressions and increasingly criminal acts. In other words, the double pathology of the text and the figures that occupy it is mutually reinforcing. It pervades the novella’s 21  Carl Westphal, “Über Zwangsvorstellungen” (On Obsessive Thoughts), Berlinische klinische Wochenschrift 46.14 (1877): 669. English translation cited after Edward Shorter, A Historical Dicionary of Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 199. 22  See Carl Wernicke, “Über fixe Ideen,” Deutsche Medizinische Wochenzeitung, 23 (1892): 581. Cited in Wolfgang Warda, “Zur Geschichte und Kritik der sogenannten psychischen Zwangszustände,” Archiv für Psychiatrie, 39, 2 (1905): 240. 23  Mark G.  Ward, Perspectives on German Realist Writing: Eight Essays (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1995), 18.

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narrative structure, but also internally motivates the diegetic experience of the characters. Jointly, they lose their grip on the kind of “reality” that the novella seems nevertheless intent on faithfully and mimetically representing. The novella’s intrinsic epistemological concern with reality and fantasy echoes Esquirol’s conception of monomania and anticipates the German notion of obsessive ideas. In A Village Romeo and Juliet, medical knowledge and the textual apprehension of obsessive-compulsive disorder converge in a poetics of psychopathology that fails to reaffirm the mimetic program of Poetic Realism. Instead of providing unmediated, unbroken access to an original extra-textual world, the novella calls into question the very project of realism, as the excess of symmetry disrupts the genre of the novella from within and ultimately causes a return to the fantastic genre. This return is, however, not regressive. It represents an inevitable move forward into the progression—but not recognition—of the novella’s psychopathology. The event that inaugurates the novella’s shift from reality to fantasy and from innocence to guilt is the play of the farmers’ children in the wilderness of the adjacent middle field. Robert C. Holub sees in the scene the introduction of a structure of incestuous desire that will permeate the entire novella. As Holub contends, the children’s interaction is marked by “feelings of guilt and shame, the intimation that they are destined for each other, and the impression that a mysterious power is simultaneously pushing them together and pulling them apart.”24 Holub also observes that the scene has salient sadistic undertones, as the playing children undress a doll, penetrate it with their fingers, mutilate it, and finally bury it “alive.” Next the children engage in what is a barely concealed sexual encounter sustained by the fantasy of “playing doctor”: The boy saw the teeth, and, holding the girl’s head, examined them curiously. “Guess,” he cried, “how many teeth we have?” The girl thought for a moment, as if counting up carefully, and then said at random, “A hundred!” “No, thirty-two!” he exclaimed. “Wait, I’ll count them.” Then he counted the little girl’s teeth, and as the number did not come out thirty-two, he kept beginning all over. The girl held still a long time, but as the eager ­counter did not seem about to stop, she got up hurriedly, exclaiming; “Now let me count yours!” The boy then lay down among the weeds, and the girl  Holub, Reflections of Realism, 126.

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leaned over him, putting her arms around his head. He opened his mouth and she began to count; “One, two, seven, five, two, one,”—for the pretty child had not yet learned to count. (58) (Der Knabe sah die Zähne, und dem Mädchen den Kopf haltend und dessen Zähnchen neugierig untersuchend, rief er: “Rate, wie viele Zähne hat man?” Das Mädchen besann sich einen Augenblick, als ob es reiflich nachzählte, und sagte dann auf Geratewohl: “Hundert!”—“Nein, zweiunddreißig!” rief er, “wart, ich will einmal zählen!” Da zählte er die Zähne des Kindes, und weil er nicht zweiunddreißig herausbrachte, so fing er immer wieder von neuem an. Das Mädchen hielt lange still, als aber der eifrige Zähler nicht zu Ende kam, raffte es sich auf und rief: “Nun will ich deine zählen!” Nun legte sich der Bursche hin ins Kraut, das Mädchen über ihn, umschlang seinen Kopf, er sperrte das Maul auf, und es zählte: Eins, zwei, sieben, fünf, zwei, eins; denn die kleine Schöne konnte noch nicht zählen.) (82)

While the scene introduces the (sexual) terms in which the children’s relationship will unfold, it also has another effect that has gone unmentioned in the secondary literature: it acknowledges and makes explicit the children’s sexual immaturity.25 Their effort at enumerating thirty-two teeth in each other’s mouths is rendered futile by the fact that neither one has reached adult maturity and thus cannot possibly possess thirty-two permanent teeth. The younger child, Vreni, who is only five and thus too young to know how to count, still has her primary teeth, of which there are but twenty, while the seven-year-old Sali may have developed a few permanent six-year molars and central incisors but surely does not have his twenty-eight permanent teeth and four wisdom teeth in place (the latter do not erupt until the age of sixteen or sometimes as late as twenty). Given that teeth are biological markers of the transition between child- and adulthood (whereby maturity is reached when all twenty baby teeth have been replaced by permanent dentition), the scene anticipates the children reaching sexual maturation, but in so doing thematizes the fact that this moment has precisely not yet occurred. It is through the symbolism of teeth that the text recognizes the importance of age in sexual functioning 25  See, for instance, Eduard Hirschmann, Gottfried Keller: Psychoanalyse des Dichters, seiner Gestalten und Motive (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1919); Allen McCormick, “The Idyll in Keller’s Romeo und Julia: A Study in Ambivalence,” German Quarterly 35 (1962): 270; Menninghaus, Artistische Schrift, 126–130; Erika Swales, The Poetics of Scepticism: Gottfried Keller and Die Leute von Seldwyla (Providence: Berg, 1994), 80–97.

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as it informs the generational gap between children and fathers.26 The incestuous implications of the scene pertain less to the romantic bond between the quasi-siblings Vreni and Sali, as others have argued, than to the imagined (or implied) pedophilic contact between the children and their fathers. This logic is evident in the framing of the encounter. As the children play their fathers plow, an act that is of course itself a sexual metaphor and thereby integral to the sexual imagery of the entire scene. This is a plowing into land the men don’t own and that is therefore illegitimate, a plowing also into virginal soil and into the very land on which their children, who are just a stone’s throw away, engage in a barely concealed sexual activity.27 The scene thereby problematizes the children’s insufficient stage of libidinal development from the perspective of their fathers who are through their plowing implicated in the sexual imagery. It is Marti and Manz and not their children who are the source of incestuous pathology. The brief intermezzo on the middle field is a disguised pedophilic fantasy that will inevitably reemerge in the text in the form of an obsessive idea, and hence in a form that suggests a breach in the conventions of realist prose. For the activity of “playing doctor” represents not an actual event within the fictional context of the novella, but rather an inner event that is constantly rejected only to reappear again. Decades before Freud mobilized the concept of repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang), this deceptively innocent novella evokes a structurally related mental phenomenon, obsessive ideas—irresistible, recurring, obsessive ideas that cannot be fended off by the conscious mind.28 26  The symbolism of teeth links the physical experience of pain and loss to the physical changes caused by dentition in the infant, as well as its repetitions around the sixth year and during puberty. See Sandor Lorand and Sandor Feldman, “The Symbolism of Teeth in Dreams,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 36 (1955): 146. 27  On the symbolism of plowing, in which a female role is assigned to the earth and a male role to the penetrating plow, see Walter A. Weisskopf, The Psychology of Economics (London: Routledge, 1955), 144. 28  See Ludwig Wille, “Zur Lehre von den Zwangsvorstellungen,” Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 12 (1882): 28. In a similar vein, Freud defined “obsessions” (Zwangsvorstellungen) as “disguised and transformed self-reproaches about acts of sexual aggression in childhood” (“aus der Verdrängung wiederkehrende Vorwürfe, die sich immer auf eine sexuelle, mit Lust ausgeführte Aktion der Kinderzeit beziehen”). Sigmund Freud, “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” The Standard Edition Vol. 3: (1893–1899) “Early Psycho-Analytic Publications,” 169; Sigmund Freud, “Weitere Bemerkungen über die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen,” Neurologisches Zentralblatt (1896): 438. In Keller’s novella, the etiology of intrusive thoughts crosses into psychoanalytic territory

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Resulting from their feelings of guilt, in turn linked to the inhibited incestuous desire toward their offspring or perhaps to the memory of a repressed childhood experience, Marti and Manz’s obsessive ideas are what set off their compulsive plowing. These compulsive acts have the beneficial effect of gradually—and symbolically—annihilating the site of their transgression and guilt. Yet while it is true that as the middle field dwindles the men’s children cease to interact (at least temporarily), the obsessive ideas all but disappear with it. As the organizing principle of the obsessive-­ compulsive pathology, they take possession of both the men’s lives and the text. This structure, whereby a singular obsessive idea leads to a series of compulsive acts, is entirely consistent with the conclusion embraced by German psychiatrists in the nineteenth century according to which obsession reflects a disorder of intellectual function.29 As Krafft-Ebing explained the link between obsessive idea and compulsive act: There are numerous nervous and emotional patients who complain of certain troublesome, annoying thoughts, the absurdity and irrevelancy of which they perfectly comprehend, but of which they cannot rid themselves. They complain that these thoughts constantly force their way into their conscious logical and associated ideas, disturbing the course of them and causing much annoyance. Indeed, such thought may be associated with impulses to carry out the corresponding acts, which in some instances the patients recognize as silly or revolting. (Es gibt zahlreiche Gemüths- und Nervenkranke, die darüber klagen, dass sie gewisse quälende, lästige Gedanken, deren Ungereimtheiten und Ungehörigkeit sie vollkommen einsehen, nicht los werden können, dass diese Gedanken sich beständig in ihr bewusstes logisches associirtes Vorstellen eindrängen, sie in dem Ablauf desselben stören, dadurch beun-

insofar as they are structured on what Freud termed the “polymorphous perversity” of the sexual instinct. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” The Standard Edition, Vol. 7: “A Case of Hysteria: Three essays on sexuality and other works” [1901–1905], 150. 29  The French thesis, according to which obsessions resulted from disturbances of emotions, prevailed into the twentieth century. See Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms, 149. In Germany, Ludwig Wille was a prominent critic of the “intellectual” thesis who argued for an emotional origin of obsessions.

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ruhigen, ja selbst sich mit Impulsen zu entsprechenden Handlungen verbinden, die, je nach Inhalt, der Betreffende lächerlich oder abscheulich findet.)30

We have in this definition all the key concepts built into the German diagnosis of what is today defined as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Firstly, it was considered a disorder of the intellect and not of emotion or volition, as scientists in Britain and France maintained. As the German compound word suggests, the Zwangsvorstellung automatically and repeatedly forces itself into the conscious mind. As a representation, it is by definition mental. Secondly, such obsessive ideas were thought of as precursors, or what one scientist called the “intellectual seeds,” of compulsive activities, termed Zwangshandlungen in German.31 Some well-known examples of such actions include hoarding, compulsive washing, and counting. Another prominent and, for the purposes of this study, crucial variation presents as an obsession about symmetry, as when people engage in repetitive ordering and rearranging.32 Like Manz, who feels threatened by Marti’s “ridiculous curlicue,” obsessive individuals often report feeling acutely uncomfortable unless they perform certain tasks in a balanced, symmetrical manner. Within these terms, the act of plowing into the middle field can plausibly be seen as the manifestation of an obsessive thought.33 Finally, the above definition stresses an aspect of conscious awareness that is persists in the inability of patients to “rid themselves” of an idea. Compulsive patients know that their obsession is ridiculous or 30  Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer Grundlage für praktische Ärzte und Studierende (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1897), 68. Richard von KrafftEbing, Textbook of Insanity: based on Clinical Observations for Practitioners and Students of Medicine (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1905), 63. 31  Wolfgang Warda, “Zur Geschichte und Kritik,” 248. 32   A.  S. Radomsky, S.  Rachman, “Symmetry, Ordering and Arranging Compulsive Behaviour,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 42, 8 (2004): 893–913. 33  While it did seem irrational and economically unmotivated within the conceit of the story, it is a crucial emotional outlet, an annual ritual providing relief from the intrusive thought. Derek Hillard defines it as a ritual enacting the destruction and renewal of community in a “post-mythical age.” This chapter argues that the plowing is a manifest symptom of the farmers’ obsessive compulsion. Unable to cope with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the ritual fails to generate any improvement for Marti and Manz, but has instead the adverse effect of highlighting the loss of community and social interaction which is at stake in it. Derek Hillard, “Violence, Ritual, and Community: On Sacrifice in Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe and Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter,” Monatshefte 101, 3 (2009): 361.

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detestable and will therefore attempt to resist the intrusive thought. In his seminal 1877 lecture, Westphal thus differentiated between compulsive patients who are aware of the irrational and dysfunctional nature of their intrusive thoughts, and delusional patients who no longer recognize their delusions as fantasies.34 The greater the resistance the compulsive patient brings to bear against his disease, the greater the obsession, thus fed and reinforced. Nineteenth-century psychiatrists nevertheless considered this resistance the decisive factor for the distinction between Zwangsvorstellung and the more serious pathology of delusion, or what German scientists called Wahnidee. As the Austrian pathologist Salomon Stricker wrote: “this much is certain: that the dominating idea alone does not cause madness. Something else has to occur. It seems to me that this other something is the disappearance of the relationship between the dominating ideas and [the patient’s] potential knowledge of it” [translation mine]. (“so viel steht fest, dass die dominirende Vorstellung allein noch nicht den Wahn ausmacht. Es muss noch etwas anderes hinzutreten. Dieses Andere scheint mir darin zu liegen, dass die Beziehungen zwischen den dominirenden Ideen und einem Theile des potentiellen Wissens erloschen sind.)35 Contrary to obsessions, which are constantly dismissed by the mind as irrational, delusions are accepted as real.36

Symmetry Previous commentators have asked whether Manz and Marti “know” their cause to be bad.37 As a representative example of German realist prose, the narrative style of the novella occludes any direct access to the characters’ consciousness, even though the auctorial narrator does seem to have more insight into the experience of especially Vrenchen, whose passionate nature is a driving force of the plot. Despite her temperamental, oscillating character, Vrenchen functions as a paradoxical kind of counterbalance to the manic logic of the narrative. For instance, when Vrenchen asks “Sali, why shouldn’t we belong to each other and be happy?” (104)  See Westphal, “Über Zwangsvorstellungen,” 687.  Salomon Stricker, Studien über das Bewußtsein (Wien: Braumüller, 1879), 94. 36  In Freud’s definition, they are ich-synton (ego-syntonic), as they are experienced as consistent or harmonious with the total personality and the person is not bothered by it. Freud, “On Narcissism. An Introduction,” 99. 37  Walter Silz, “Motivation in Keller’s Romeo und Julia,” German Quarterly 8 (1935): 2. 34 35

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(“Sali! warum sollen wir uns nicht haben und glücklich sein?”) (141), thereby demonstrating her steely resolve to do whatever it takes to fulfill her dream, the text transforms her demand into a rhetorical question that implies the superior pathological force of the mania which is propelling her story. Little does Vrenchen know that she no longer operates within the conventional boundaries of realist prose or Shakespearean drama. The logic of good storytelling as well as the intricacies of her and Sali’s psychological state of mind matter increasingly less. Given the lack of figural speech and subjective points of view there is but minimal evidence of what—and if—the farmers think and know. The few statements of indirect speech and reported thought provide little indication of whether Marti and Manz are aware of their growing insanity: “It seemed . . . as if his severity were intended to stifle his own consciousness of wrong-doing, which was now quietly beginning to show its effects.” (61) (Es schien . . . als ob er mit dieser Arbeitsstrenge gegen sein eigenes Blut das Unrecht betäuben wollte, in dem erlebte, und welches nun began, seine Folgen ruhig zu entfalten.”) (86) As a second example illustrates, the men are more concerned with their respective enemy’s state of mind: “But each held to the conviction that the other, in trying with such open insolence to defraud him, must necessarily take him for a contemptible fool.” (63) (“Beide aber trafen zusammen in der Überzeugung, daß der andere, den einen so frech und plump übervorteilend, ihn notwendig für einen verächtlichen Dummkopf halten müsse.”) (88) The implied author, by contrast, seems to have a keen understanding of the forces that shape their mental and moral decline. He not only condemns their actions as morally reprehensible “crime” (59) (“Frevel”) (63) and socially injurious “torture” (83) (“Qual”) (88), but he also expands on the subject of the men’s blatant ignorance by supplementing it with his own theory of insanity: The thoughts of these hitherto sensible men were now cut as fine as chopped straw, each being filled with the strictest sense of justice in the world. Neither one of them could or would understand how the other, with such manifest and arbitrary injustice, could claim for himself the insignificant corner in question … and each gave himself over without restraint to the passion of strife and the decay that resulted. From then on their lives were like the torturing nightmare of two condemned souls, who, floating down a dark stream on a narrow board, fall to quarreling, thrash the air, and seize and

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destroy each other, each thinking he has hold of the cause of his misfortune. (62–63) (Die Gedanken der sonst so wohlweisen Männer waren nun so kurz geschnitten wie Häcksel; der beschränkteste Rechtssinn von der Welt erfüllte jeden von ihnen, indem keiner begreifen konnte noch wollte, wie der andere so offenbar unrechtmäßig und willkürlich den fraglichen unbedeutenden Ackerzipfel an sich reißen könne . . .  und jeder sah sich in seiner wunderlichen Ehre gekränkt und gab sich rückhaltlos der Leidenschaft des Streites und dem daraus erfolgenden Verfalle hin, und ihr Leben glich fortan der träumerischen Qual zweier Verdammten, welche, auf einem schmalen Brette einen dunklen Strom hinabtreibend, sich befehden, in die Luft hauen und sich selber anpacken und vernichten, in der Meinung, sie hätten ihr Unglück gefaßt.) (88–89)

With just a hint of awareness of the obsessive-compulsive disorder embedded in narratorial comment rather than being placed in figural consciousness, the text begins itself to fall victim to Manz’s “weird sense for symmetry and parallel lines.” In the novella, Manz’s astonishing obsession with symmetry is more influential than Marti’s capricious insistence on a curlicue—a deflection from the original field’s straight and balanced lines that is clearly negatively connoted. This accusation, and the imbalance that is implied by it, represents the kernel of the novella’s psychopathology. The text’s obsession with symmetry is the outward symptom of the obsessive-­compulsive disorder at its thematic center. For the parallelisms and symmetries are not only evoked in the opening scene but compulsively reiterated throughout the text. Like the plowing, which is not merely a metaphor but an actual practice and plot-driving device within the text, the act of writing manifests along symmetrical patterns that predict a steady increase of mental insanity. The narrative proceeds according to the same well-paced movement that has marked the plowing, with its sentences evenly arranged along the parallel lines on the page, imitating shuttles that are laterally passed back and forth through a shed and in turn aligned, through the primal trope, with the work of fate and the weaving of destiny: “Thus the shuttles of fate pass one another, and ‘what he is weaving, no weaver knoweth.’” (59) (“So gehen die Weberschiffchen des Geschickes an einander vorbei und ‘was er webt, das weiß kein Weber!’”) (83) This self-referential avowal announces the integrated nature of the text by suggesting that the obsession with symmetry has affected every

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level—that is the allegorical, discursive, and even compositional-textual properties—of the narrative. The figure of a synchronized movement along parallel lines recurs once again in the novella, at a point when the enemies have surrendered the care of their land and live by fishing a nearby river. At this final encounter, a river separates the men just as they had previously been separated by a strip of wilderness. Approaching from the opposite sides of the water, Marti and Manz meet along the same reverse lines that had guided their plowing along parallel fields: So it happened one evening as [Marti] was walking along the bank of a rather deep and rapid stream, in which, under a sky overcast with storm clouds, the trout were busily jumping, that he unexpectedly met his enemy Manz, coming along the opposite shore. (72) (So kam es, daß, als er eines Abends einen ziemlich tiefen und reißenden Bach entlang ging, in welchem die Forellen fleißig sprangen, da der Himmel voll Gewitterwolken hing, er unverhofft auf seinen Feind Manz traf, der an dem andern Ufer daherkam.) (100–101)

In the passage that follows, the parallelistic structure is taken up in yet another form. Operating as the structuring device of an entire narrative sequence, the figure of “passing one another” (“an einander vorbei”) has now invaded the discursive and narrative properties of the novella. The narration proceeds along two parallel plot lines in which the simultaneous demise of the two families is depicted by way of scenes that intersect and thereby illustrate that the events happen concurrently. One wife dies while the other one turns into a spiteful shrew; Vreni leads a hard-working, miserable life, while Sali enjoys a modicum of freedom and even luxury; Marti, who still lives on his farm, barely subsists as a result of his indolence and Manz, having moved to the city, is a destitute tavern keeper. Both live restlessly and in a dull sort of despair, punctured only by occasional fishing excursions. Their inevitable encounter at the river represents the culminating point of the novella’s first part. At first, the symmetrical structure is reinforced by the introduction of a quasi-filmic form of parallel editing avant la lettre38: The fast-paced exchange of dialogue between Marti and 38  In an essay dating from 1949, Sergei Eisenstein compares Dickens’ experimentations with innovative narrative techniques such as the use of multiple points of view, cross-cutting between parallel actions, and the combination of close-ups and panoramas, to D. W. Griffith’s

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Manz that ensues, followed by the wistful gaze exchanged between Sali and Vreni, makes connections between fathers and children while at the same time establishing their irresolvable differences. Until the dynamic of parallel lines is supplanted with a direct and literal confrontation, the narrative abides by an experimental mode of storytelling that enforces a variety of points of view and thereby highlights a feeling of adversary perception and hostility: “You mongrel!” Marti called over, and Manz yelled back: “You ass!—what a fool you are!” And Marti ran like a tiger along the bank, seeking a place to cross. The reason he was the more furious of the two was that he supposed Manz, being an innkeeper, had at least enough to eat and drink, and was leading a fairly pleasant existence, while life was tiresome for him on his dilapidated farm, and that was unfair. Meanwhile Manz too was furiously striding along on his side of the stream. Behind him followed his son, who, instead of listening to the angry quarrel, stared in curiosity and surprise at [Vreni], who was following her father and looking down at the ground in shame, so that her brown curly hair fell over her face. (72) (“O du Hund!” schrie Marti herüber und Manz hinüber: “O du Kalb, wie dumm tust du!” Und jener sprang wie ein Tiger den Bach entlang und suchte herüberzukommen. Der Grund, warum er der Wütendere war, lag in seiner Meinung, daß Manz als Wirt wenigstens genug zu essen und zu trinken hätte und gewissermaßen ein kurzweiliges Leben führe, während es ungerechterweise ihm so langweilig wäre auf seinem zertrümmerten Hofe. Manz schritt indessen auch grimmig genug an der anderen Seite hin; hinter ihm sein Sohn, welcher, statt auf den bösen Streit zu hören, neugierig und verwundert nach Vrenchen hinübersah, welche hinter ihrem Vater ging, vor Scham in die Erde sehend, daß ihr die braunen krausen Haare ins Gesicht fielen.) (101)

The composition of the scene recapitulates the logic of obsession and compulsion that has led to the men’s demise. The narrative perspective rhythmically and symmetrically alternates between the characters and thereby formally, indeed syntactically, commits to a seemingly balanced form of interaction between the feuding families. And yet the narrative fails to integrate the men’s perspectives. This is indicated by the prevalent legendary development of parallel action. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and Ourselves” (Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today), Film Form: Essays in Film Theory and The Film Sense (New York: Meridian, 1957), 195–255.

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animal metaphors (dog, ass, tiger), which index varying degrees of volition and which, in the case of the men’s resemblance to frightening but beautiful tigers, calls to mind Northrop Frye’s notion of “fearful symmetry” in reference to William Blake’s poem “The Tyger.”39 Clearly, Marti and Manz are once again distracted by an obsessive idea that is once again triggered by their children’s impending encounter, which they perceive as a threat. As a result, the parallelism that organized the opening scene collapses. The two threads of action merge as the men are interlocked in a tight embrace, fighting to push each other from a wooden bridge. There is however another crucial variation. Sali pulls the men apart and thereby asserts his masculinity, while Vreni overcomes her timidity and returns his gaze. It is thus that the children assert control over the novella’s signifiers. The scene anticipates that in true Shakespearean fashion and notwithstanding the various obstacles to their union “passion lends them power, Time means to meet.”40 Symmetry and order, which paradoxically stand for mental dysfunction, now give way to a fragile disequilibrium that seems to at least superficially stop the obsessive-compulsive disorder from taking its course. This is made possible through the text’s erasure of the father figures (one is almost beaten to death and committed to an insane asylum, the other one fades into oblivion) and with them, of patriarchal order. Thus freed, the novella shifts to another set of characters and to a different thematic preoccupation. The fathers’ pathological obsession with order and symmetry is substituted with their children’s metaphorical rejection of order. Sali and Vreni choose to live—and die—outside the bounds of society. The story of the two feuding men fades into the background and focuses on their children, thereby splitting the novella into two almost equal parts. Sali and Vreni, who have by now reached the stage of sexual maturity, join a “black fiddler” and his bohemian entourage. After a semi-orgiastic celebration and dance, the black fiddler performs a mock marriage between the Shakespearean “star-cross’d lovers” and leads them in a procession back to the field of the opening scene of which he is the legitimate but dispossessed heir.41 Aware that they cannot achieve their deep desire for respectability and bourgeois morality, Sali and Vreni 39  Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry. A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947). 40  William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.  Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1055–1099 (II, Chor, 13–14). 41  Ibid. (I.1.5).

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relinquish their claim to an upright life. They purloin a barge on which to consummate their illicit marriage and deliberately end their ostensibly dishonored lives.

Pedophilia Much criticism has been launched against the allegedly “romantic” turn of the novella. Most famously, Theodor Fontane reproached Keller for his use of romantic elements that could not be reconciled with the tenets of realism: “The second part [of the story] is, if not a fairy-tale, like a fairy-­ tale. Und why is that? Because it is easier to attain the register of fairy-tale than that of reality.”42 Beginning with Gerhard Kaiser, a new generation of critics, while still acknowledging that the “absoluteness” and “ideality” of Sali and Vreni’s passion for each other is reminiscent of a Romantic conception of love, sees in its clashing with reality and in its ultimate defeat a degree of critical engagement that passes beyond an uncritical acceptance of bourgeois morality.43 Yet as Holub has argued, their love is not as pure and ideal as Kaiser makes it seem, as it betrays the lovers’ longing for petty-­ bourgeois respectability, prevented only by their inability to conform to the basic moral standards held up in their social milieu.44 More convincing is Holub’s suggestion that the realism of the first half of the novella “is just a diversion from another kind of ‘realism’ recounted in the primeval fairy tale about ‘little brother’ and ‘little sister.’”45 Holub here alludes to the repressed sexual desire that he sees concealed in the ambiguous nature of Sali and Vreni’s love and destiny. Sali and Vreni’s love and destiny: “The symbolic breaking of the incest taboo, one of society’s strongest prohibitions, sheds light on both the ostracism of the lovers from society and the 42  Theodor Fontane, “Otto Brahms’ Gottfried Keller,” quoted in Alfred Zäch, Gottfried Keller im Spiegel seiner Zeit. Urteile und Berichte über den Menschen und den Dichter (Zürich: Scientia, 1952), 110 (translation mine). For a summary of the multiple familiar fairytale motives that are woven into the second part, see Edgar Hein, Gottfried Keller. Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (Munich: Oldenburg Verlag, 1987), 69–72. 43  Gerhard Kaiser, “Sündenfall, Paradies und himmlisches Jerusalem in Kellers Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe,” Euphorion 65 (1971): 39. See also Heinrich Richartz, Literaturkritik als Gesellschaftskritik: Darstellungsweise und politisch-didaktische Intention in Gottfried Kellers Erzählkunst (Bonn: Bouvier, 1975), 66. 44  See Holub, Reflections of Realism, 112–113. 45  Ibid., 131. The notion of “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen” alludes to the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm bearing the same name.

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necessity of death as a solution.”46 While this is a compelling thesis that indeed explains some of the “otherwise obscure motives and utterances” in the text, it does little to resolve the topical and rhetorical discrepancy between the novella’s two parts—the fact that the text splits into two almost separate stories that have two different sets of protagonists and two altogether different messages.47 Neither does it explain why the repressed incestuous desire can now return in the form of a consciously transformed “reality.” Interpreting the fairy tale as a “diversion” from an “original” event, Holub suggests that the latter “resembles structures associated with incest, and that these structures may ultimately have their source in Keller’s biography.”48 While diversion is a trope well established in modern, psychoanalytically informed literary theory, the language of the novella resonates with the historical vocabulary of the era’s etiology of OCD. In the novella’s prefatory paragraph, Keller alludes to the presence of a forbidden tale hidden beneath the plot: “To tell this story too would be an idle invention if it were not based on a true occurrence, thereby attesting to how deeply every beautiful fable, itself the foundation of great poetry, is rooted in human life.” (“Diese Geschichte zu erzählen würde eine müßige Nachahmung sein, wenn sie nicht auf einem wirklichen Vorfall beruhte, zum Beweise, wie tief im Menschenleben jede jener Fabeln wurzelt, auf welche die großen alten Werke gebaut sind.”)49 Keller later added a revised version of this message to the reader in which he suggested that “such [fables] are relatively few in number, but again and again they appear in new guises, and when they do the writer’s hand is compelled to preserve them.” (52) [translation modified, emphasis added] (“Die Zahl solcher Fabeln ist mäßig; aber stets treten sie in neuem Gewande wieder in die Erscheinung und zwingen als dann die Hand, sie festzuhalten.”) (74) The passage employs a perfectly obvious linguistic marker of the psychopathological register. In its use of the verb “compel” (“zwingen”), it suggests that the author saw himself forced to write the tale, thereby drawing attention to the obsessions and compulsions that have a direct bearing on the  Ibid., 117.  Ibid., 128. 48  As Holub asks suggestively: “Could the compulsion forcing Keller to capture the fable have a different source than he is willing, or perhaps able, to identify?” Ibid., 108. 49  Quoted in Gottfried Keller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Thomas Böning, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–1996), Vol. 4: “Die Leute von Seldwyla,” 693. Translation mine. 46 47

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text. More specifically, the note suggests that the act of writing was itself the result of a greater force. The original “fable” was a powerful Zwangsvorstellung that wrote the text and itself into it, while the adverbs “again and again anew” (“stets” and “wieder”) evoke the repetitive nature of an underlying obsession. The pedophilic fantasy will not remain a single occurrence—it is there again, ever recurring. This resonates with the above-mentioned bona fide conviction of nineteenth-century psychopathologists, according to which the disturbing factor of an obsession resides not so much in its content as in the fact of its constant recurrence.50 By finally announcing that his tale appears at each time “in new guises,” Keller suggests that it is cloaked in an aura of fantasy that only assumes a semblance of reality. Even he, the author who in the revised version is metonymically reduced to a hand, is unable to tell the spontaneously recurring tales apart from a would-be original version. Innocent love has transformed into incestuous lust and incestuous lust has morphed into pedophilia. As reality is invaded by an obsessive idea, which subsequently grows into a delusional fantasy, the tale begins to clash not just with moral and social norms, but ultimately also with the laws of causality. With its dubious motives of a semi-successful patricide and the under-motivated double suicide of the lovers, the story deviates from its literary Shakespearean precedent, but that hardly increases its plausibility. To the contrary, this shift only helps to further the novella’s process of transformation by which the traditional tale of a harmful family feud turns into the fantastic account of a sinister family secret. It is entirely in keeping with the logic of obsessive-compulsive disorder that the novella should be less and less able to inhibit its latent fantasy and disguise the sexual character of its fable. Scientists after Keller agreed that the more an obsessive idea is repressed, the more momentum it builds. The repressed pedophilic fantasy becomes dominant in the second part, as a sexual union among (with) the children is now explicitly reiterated and reimagined outside the bonds of matrimony and a “proper” socioeconomical context. As the novella surrenders to these sexual fantasies, the text crosses the boundary between obsessive-compulsive disorder and delusional insanity. Indeed, the recurrence of the obsessive idea is moving to more extreme levels, while the movement of the narrative becomes faster and frantic, arguably even hallucinatory. The realistic atmosphere of 50  See Emil Kraepelin, Psychiatrie. Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und Ärzte (Leipzig: Barth, 1899), 184.

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the first part of the novella becomes warped by the sexual fantasy. Overcome by “blissful intoxication” (“begieriger Seligkeit”) and a “wild and painful mood” (“schmerzhaft wilde Laune”) the lovers move toward suicide “with tears of joy” (“heißen Tränen”), as Vreni “lean[s] feverishly on Sali’s breast” (113–117) (“fieberte das arme Vrenchen immer heftiger an Salis Brust”) (149–152). As the pathology spreads, the compulsion is replaced by a delusion that knows neither limits nor boundaries and becomes more forceful and also more permanent.51 Put in medico-­ scientific terms, the Zwangsvorstellung causing the text’s obsession with symmetry becomes predominant, while the resistance to the obsessive idea is gradually weakened. Ultimately, to reiterate the main difference between obsessive ideas and delusions, only the former are recognized for what they are. The remainder of the text is unaware of its irrational and dysfunctional nature; it is a fantasy that believes itself to be factual. As the text’s parallel structures yield to a parallel world, the novella becomes deeply entrenched in, indeed it becomes itself, the delusion. By viewing the novella through the lens of historical psychopathology, it is easy to see how its two parts logically relate to another by means of necessity. The obsessive idea of the first part intensifies and spreads into the text, while the second part emerges as a necessary consequence and as its expression. The formally bifurcated structure of the work paradoxically reinforces the novella’s inner coherence, linking obsession to delusion and repressed guilt to the relatively free unfolding of a sexual fantasy. As a result, a different narrative economy and with it a new way of reading the novella crystallizes. The fairy-tale-like second part is based on, and in actual fact lives out, one of society’s greatest taboos, namely, that of sexual feelings directed toward juveniles. First described in 1886 by Krafft-Ebing, erotic pedophilia (Päderastie) is defined as a psychosexual perversion that lies outside of the social norms surrounding sexual orientation and behavior.52 Given however its frequency and presumed “contagiousness” in nineteenth-century society, which is well attested by the earlier Freud, 51  According to Jakob Frohschammer, “The total dominance of the delusion is the common endresult of monomania” [translation mine] (“Die totale Herrschaft der Wahnidee ist wohl das gewöhnliche Endergebnis der Monomanie”). Jakob Frohschammer, Die Phantasie als Princip des Weltprocesses (Munich: Theodor Ackermann, 1877), 570. 52  See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung (Stuttgart: Enke, 1886), 414. R. v. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis. With Special Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1965), 371.

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pedophilia is loaded with anxiety and guilt and as a result is disguised as a fairy-tale fantasy.53 In other words, the imagined sexual union with either Sali or Vreni is masked as a sexual union between the two—but one that is conspicuously invested by the gaze of their fathers. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that at the end of the novella, a socially acceptable reality and with it, literary realism, must reassert itself ever more firmly. Mirroring the first two sentences of the novella’s introductory paragraph, the last two sentences vindicate its programmatic thrust in one final, grandiose moment of repetition and symmetry: Later the bodies were found below the city, and when it was ascertained where they came from, the papers reported that two young people, the children of two poverty-stricken, ruined families that lived in irreconcilable enmity had sought death in the water, after dancing and celebrating together all day at a church fair. Probably—so the papers said—this occurrence had some connection with a hay boat from the same region, which had landed in the city without a crew; and the assumption was that the young people had stolen the boat to consummate their desperate and God-forsaken marriage—another sign of the increasing spread of moral and emotional degeneracy. (118) (Als man später unterhalb der Stadt die Leichen fand und ihre Herkunft ausgemittelt hatte, war in den Zeitungen zu lesen, zwei junge Leute, die Kinder zweier blutarmen zugrunde gegangenen Familien, welche in unversöhnlicher Feindschaft lebten, hätten im Wasser den Tod gesucht, nachdem sie einen ganzen Nachmittag herzlich miteinander getanzt und sich belustigt auf einer Kirchweih. Es sei dies Ereignis vermutlich in Verbindung zu bringen mit einem Heuschiff aus jener Gegend, welches ohne Schiffleute in der Stadt gelandet sei, und man nehme an, die jungen Leute haben das Schiff entwendet, um darauf ihre verzweifelte und gottver-

53  Freud’s “seduction theory” of neurosis, first published in 1895 and abandoned by 1897, explains the frequency of hysteria in his patients with the improbably large number of sexual assaults on children through near relatives; see Gerald N.  Izenberg, “Seduced and Abandoned: The Rise and Fall of Freud’s Seduction Theory,” The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. Jerome Neu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25–43. On the link between sex and the nineteenth-century conception of contagion see Bashford and Hooker who argue that “through most of the nineteenth century ‘contagious diseases’ meant sexually transmitted diseases—transmission through the closest and most problematized contact of all.” Alison Bashford, ed., Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001), 4.

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lassene Hochzeit zu halten, abermals ein Zeichen von der um sich greifenden Entsittlichung und Verwilderung der Leidenschaften.) (158–159)

The reader confronts another doubling. By returning to and reaffirming the initial setting of the novella—the town of Seldwyla and the river which flows by it—these final sentences give the novella closure and formal coherence while endowing it with an aura of factuality and legitimacy. The faithfully realistic depiction of the fictional town gives all of the novellas in the Seldwyla collection a subtly poetic stamp. But more than that, the ending also refers the reader back to the novella’s first part, which was focused on the children’s “poverty-stricken, ruined families,” linking the fairytale romance to the real circumstances of their tragic double suicide, which it corroborates by referring to the reliable source of a newspaper. The reference of this passage is to a story from the Züricher Freitagszeitung of September 3, 1847, which Keller repeatedly highlighted as his main source of inspiration for writing the novella.54 The narrator’s air of gratuitous moralizing, his lamenting “the increasing spread of moral and emotional degeneracy,” was however added by the author himself. Clearly, the psychopathological scenario played out in A Village Romeo and Juliet was far from being recognizable outside of the medico-scientific discourse it engages. Ultimately, the radical modernness and scientific accuracy of the ideas conveyed is truncated by what appears to be arbitrary blame and a rather feeble attempt at finding a culprit (although it is not clear for what), as if the neuroscientific knowledge that had invaded the text could simply be stopped, as if the very concept of neuroscience and psychopathology could be denied and repressed.55 As Poetic Realism subtly enacts—rather than openly discusses—the as-yet relatively unfamiliar facts posited by contemporaneous psychopathology, the reality of obsession-­compulsion is entrusted to the realm of delusion and fantasy.

 Keller, Sämtliche Werke 4, 690–691.  Hence the “anxious practices in which selves and societies sought (vainly) to secure clear boundaries.” See Bashford, Contagion, 5. 54 55

CHAPTER 6

Writing Against Forgetting: Korsakoff’s Syndrome in Theodor Fontane’s On Tangled Paths

Theodor Fontane’s novels carry the reader into late-nineteenth-century Wilhelmine society. Pairing a subversive undercurrent of social critique with emphatic attention to a range of compelling characters, they form a vivid literary representation of the impact of modernity on the traditions of both the Prussian nobility and the common man in Berlin’s urban society.1 Fontane’s remarkably evocative and penetrating narrative style firmly fixes his reputation as a major exponent of Poetic Realism. Honed in several decades of journalistic practice, the unprecedented wealth and accuracy of descriptive detail displayed in his prose is not merely a matter of creative intuition or literary genius. As Petra S. McGillen has convincingly argued, it is an effect of the author’s ardent work ethics, compounded by his meticulous collecting and processing of social, historical, geographical, architectural, and demographic data.2 Fontane’s fascination with the 1  On Fontane’s criticisms of economic and social modernity, see, for instance, Theodor Fontane, “Brief an seinen Sohn Theodor. Berlin 9. Mai 1888,” Richard Brinkmann and Waltraud Wiethölter (eds.), Theodor Fontane, 2 vols. (Dichter über ihre Dichtungen 12) (Munich: Heimeran, 1973), Vol. 2: 425–426. 2  Petra S. McGillen (formerly Spies), The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Theodor Fontane was a full-time journalist from 1849 until 1870, working first as a writer and foreign correspondent for the Prussian intelligence agency Zentralstelle für Presseangelegenheiten and subsequently as an editor of the conservative Neue Preussische Zeitung.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_6

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painterly gift of drawing from memory is well-documented, as is the fact that his memory was faulty.3 Can Fontane’s numerous notebooks and diaries be understood as a material representation of the author’s fear of retention loss, acting as a bulwark against forgetting? The aim in this chapter is to shed light on the links between Fontane’s mnemonic practice of writing and the neuroscience of memory-loss as it is enacted and commented upon in one exemplary expression of Fontane’s Poetic Realist prose, the novel On Tangled Paths (Irrungen, Wirrungen, 1887/1888).4 Specifically, the chapter argues that the novel anticipates and critically explores the understanding, pioneered by the Russian neuropsychiatrist Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff (1854–1900), that neuronal damage resulting from excessive alcohol consumption can lead to shortand long-term memory loss.5 To use the terms introduced by Korsakoff, On Tangled Paths gives visible form and substance to the successive degrees of knowledge about anterograde and retrograde amnesia as both a neurological dysfunction and a narrative problem.

Memory Recuperation A total of more than 2000 preserved and edited diary pages testify to Fontane’s methodical—if not pedantic—management of vast amounts of information. This data is derived from a range of sources, including popular scientific journals, address directories, bibliographical dictionaries, and 3  Nora Hoffmann, Photographie, Malerei und visuelle Wahrnehmung bei Theodor Fontane (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 77n214. Charlotte Jolles, Fontane und die Politik. Ein Beitrag zur Wesensbestimmung Theodor Fontanes (Berlin: Aufbau, 1983). 4  Theodor Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, 25 vols. (Nymphenburger Ausgabe), ed. Edgar Groß, Kurt Schreinert, Rainer Bachmann (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagsanstalt, 1995): Vol. 3: “Grete Minde, Irrungen Wirrungen, Unterm Birnbaum.” Theodor Fontane, On Tangled Paths, trans. Peter James Bowman (London: Penguin Classics, 2013). Hereafter cited in the text. 5  Korsakoff first published his findings in a series of three articles in his native Russian that go back to research he did for his doctoral thesis. The first two articles remain untranslated. Sergei Sergeievich Korsakoff, “Disturbance of psychic function in alcoholic paralysis and its relation to the disturbance of the psychic sphere in multiple neuritis of nonalcoholic origin,” Vestnik Psichiatrii IV (1887); S. S. Korsakoff, “A few cases of peculiar cerebropathy in the course of multiple neuritis,” Yejenedelnaja Klinicheskaja Gazeta 5, 6, 7 (1889); S. S. Korsakoff, “Psychic disorder in conjunction with multiple neuritis,” Medizinskioje Obozrenije (Medical Review) 31, 13 (1889). Translated by M.  Victor and P.  I. Yakovlev, “Korsakoff’s Psychic disorder in conjunction with periphrela neuritis,” Neurology 5 (1955): 394–406.

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bulletins of historical societies. The systematic enumerative work of the diaries is complemented by almost seventy extant notebooks, which Fontane used to record hiking routes, draft ground plans of buildings, sketch the facades of monuments, and collect invoices and receipts for household items. Fontane also chronicled his daily routines and current events in these journals.6 According to McGillen, Fontane’s “expansive network and the masses of material it generated” functioned as a “model of creativity” for the fastidious note taker and diary keeper.7 Yet Fontane’s own comments also point toward a more mundane and practical dimension of his personal filing system. As McGillen notes, Fontane was fully aware of the affinity between his remarkably diligent method of diary writing and the practice of bookkeeping, as he coined the humorous term “daybooking” (“tagebuchen”) to refer to his more enumerative than introspective notational habit.8 This is particularly true for the various alphanumeric lists in Fontane’s notebooks. Fontane used them to itemize, following a method McGillen has defined as “the rapid and unregulated enumeration” of “sums without detail.”9 Taken seriously, these lists shift our understanding of the “sense of stability” that has been ascribed to Fontane’s literary prose, and in particular to the topographically precise descriptions of specific locations.10 When Fontane was in the process of drafting the first eight chapters of On Tangled Paths in May 1884, he made a series of trips to places in the vicinity of Berlin that would provide key settings for the nascent novel on his desk. Fontane reportedly undertook these outings “in the interest of the novella” (“im Interesse der Novelle”) just as a scenic painter would go directly to nature in the attempt

 Fontane’s notebooks are held by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin—Preußischer Kulturbesitz.  Petra Spies (McGillen), “A Creative Machine: The Media History of Theodor Fontane’s Library Network and Reading Practices,” Germanic Review 87, 1 (2012): 72–90. 8  Theodor Fontane, Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, ed. Heinrich Detering and Gabriele Radecke (orig. ed. Gotthard Erler), 32 vols. to date (Berlin: Aufbau, 1994–), Vol. 10: “Gedichte. Einzelpublikationen. Gedichte in Prosatexten. Gedichte aus dem Nachlaß,” ed. Joachim Krueger and Anita Golz, 2nd rev. ed., (Berlin: Aufbau, 1995): 364. 9  Spies (McGillen), “A Creative Machine,” 16. 10  Randall Holt, “History as Trauma. The Absent Ground of Meaning in Irrungen, Wirrungen,” New Approaches to Theodor Fontane: Cultural Codes in Flux, ed. Marion Villmar-Doebeling (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), 101. As Holt continues, “As the social and political changes created by the rapid pace of modernization taking place in imperial Germany provoked a sense of confusion, literary realism resorted to the use of even greater preciseness of detail to evoke, if not stabilize, meaning.” (Ibid.) 6 7

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to capture the unique light and local color of a natural setting.11 Yet Fontane’s myriad excursions do more than just inform or inspire his work. For Fontane, close observation and meticulous record keeping may add to the realistic appeal of a text. According to his oft-cited programmatic statement on modern literature, the novel should not merely imitate life but capture it: “It seems to me that the task of the modern novel is to depict a life, a society, a circle of individuals that is an undistorted reflection of the life we are living.” [translation mine] (“Aufgabe des modernen Romans scheint mir zu sein, ein Leben, eine Gesellschaft, einen Kreis von Menschen zu schildern, der ein unverzerrtes Wiederspiel des Lebens ist, das wir führen.”)12 The statement validates the philosophical aesthetics of German Poetic Realism, defined by one commentator as an art form that constructs “a parallel reality which is of greater human significance than the world of common experience but nevertheless discloses the essential truth of that world.”13 Fontane’s poetic avowal is complicated by his use of italics to focus attention on the definite article “the” (“des”), which in this context functions as a true demonstrative: the emphasis on the definite article “the” rather than the noun “life” itself functions as an instance of deixis. As a true demonstrative, its content depends on the particular object or particular type of thing in the speaker’s visual field or context. It postulates a relationship not of imitation (mimesis) but of identity between the subject of Fontane’s writing and his lived reality. Fontane seems to suggest that it is not enough for the geographical, social, or historical material to be treated with adequate specificity so that it mimics and resembles reality. Beyond keeping slavishly to realistic detail, a realist text must be “this particular” life itself. In order to meet these heightened stakes of realist poetics, Fontane bases his novels’ settings on authentic locations he and his readers were familiar with. Hence the oft-invoked vividness of his descriptive prose is to be taken literally. The places and events Fontane depicts are literally alive in the sense that they correlate with the author’s and the readers’ (especially local, contemporary readers) experiential reality. They match up with 11  Diary entry of April 28—May 9, 1884. Theodor Fontane, “Tagebücher 1866–1882, 1884–1898,” Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, 215. [translation mine] 12  Theodor Fontane, “Paul Lindau: ‘Der Zug nach Westen,’” Josef Ettlinger (ed.), Aus dem Nachlass von Theodor Fontane (Berlin: F. Fontane, 1908), 269. 13  John Walker, “Two Realisms: German Literature and Philosophy,” Philosophy and German Literature, 1700–1990, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 123.

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distinct mental images and memories of existent locations. If Fontane draws upon his personal memories, reinforced by itemized lists of locations that have a direct reference to his surroundings, his literary writings in turn serve to revive and engage his readers’ memories, a process that cements the narrated world into a secondary, receptive actuality. The novel is thus founded on a twofold process of memory recuperation. Its anticipated reception and recognition by resident readers hints at the reciprocal relationship between memory and literature. At the heart of Fontane’s practice of “tagebuchen” is the idea that the work of the realist writer is less invention than retention, less stylistic skill than the methodical recollection of information already stored in long-term memory. “Tagebuchen” thus understood is more than Fontane’s peculiar habit. Beyond its evident logistic function, it is an underappreciated serious strategy that sustains his realist project. Fontane’s elaborate form of data processing is a strategic textual device that allows him to corroborate with empirical validation the particularized content of his fictional creations. Fontane’s familiarity with the topography and geography of Berlin and Brandenburg helps create the “authenticity” in local background and detail that makes his novels “realistic” in the sense of depicting the local landscape not just with the highest degree of verisimilitude, but as it actually exists and as it is known and remembered by others.14 The descriptions of locations in Fontane’s writings serve as guarantors of a kind of cognitive stability in an increasingly mobile and shifting world. They are part of a concentrated effort to preserve a sense of cohesive place and, more importantly, to interrogate the sense of reality and the conditions of possibility enabling us to mentally preserve a cohesive place. As a major representative of the tradition of Poetic Realism in Germany, Fontane knows of the fallacies of the realist paradigm. Despite the novel’s somewhat mundane genesis from notebooks, it is consistent with the poetological program of Fontane’s late realist style in that it represents reality without stipulating a straightforward, unproblematic relationship between writing, reading, and memory. Memory in On Tangled Paths is depicted as a process that is meaningful precisely because it is exposed to (and hardly succeeds in neutralizing) the vicissitudes of modernity. Its thematization in the novel forces us to grapple with the question of whether it is possible to cultivate forms of memory in and through fiction that 14  James N.  Bade, Fontane’s Landscapes (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2009), 11.

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might serve to overcome the contingencies of forgetting. This is true on a thematic level, as the characters of On Tangled Paths are so preoccupied with memory that they frequently converse about its signification but nevertheless fall victim to its alluring and destructive power. In that way, the theme of memory builds up the novel’s arc of suspense. But it also brings home the message of modernity’s mnemonic instability. That forgetting determines and marks the future course of events is already suggested in the protagonists’ first encounter, which predates the novel’s timeframe. As if haphazardly constructed, the plot is set off by the female protagonist Lene forgetting to steer her boat: “After a bit, though, we forgot to worry and just let ourselves drift along, bantering with people who passed by and splashed us.” (19) (“Zuletzt aber vergaßen wir’s wieder und ließen uns treiben und neckten uns mit denen, die vorbeikamen und uns mit Wasser bespritzten.”) (104) Lene’s obliviousness gives Botho a chance to rescue her, but this in turn sets in motion a plot that will fling her back into oblivion. Memory also underlies the structural organization of the novel as a whole. It is the organizing principle that connects the two parts of the story and conveys their deeper significance. The novel interrogates the question of how memory and literature, as mutually illuminating of the ideas that are circulating at the time, can help make sense of an ever-­ changing reality. But it also asks how mnemonic disorders may disrupt the regulatory and organizing function of literary form.15 In On Tangled Paths, the psychopathological underpinnings of memory loss activate and potentiate an epistemological quest for truth vis-à-vis—and derived from—life itself. In the novel, literature and neuroscience converge in the dawning realization that knowledge is iterative, contingent, and rapidly changing. Read as a commentary on the neuroscientific exploration of two complementary forms of amnesia, which was contemporaneous with the publication (but not writing) of Fontane’s novel, On Tangled Paths exposes and displaces the instabilities of the Second German Empire onto the impending findings of neurology.16 This is an age where novel medical insight comes in tandem with sweeping epistemological uncertainty. Given the contingent status of memory in a rapidly changing world, a properly 15  According to Randall Holt, the novel “self-destructs by reflecting on its own realist underpinnings.” Holt, “History as Trauma,” 99. 16  Fontane had drafted the first eight chapters of his novel in May 1884.

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“realist” text can no longer be written, even if the textual process is supported internally by a body of evidence that is compiled in lists of highly accurate referential materials. Such an accumulation of data may only further expose the gap between “realism and reality.”17

Amnesia It is well established that Fontane’s Zeitroman gives us contemporary life as refracted in a circle of average individuals.18 Like the majority of Fontane’s characters, Baron Botho von Rienäcker of On Tangled Paths is not a heroic figure by any standard. Yet the novel doesn’t judge Botho, even if he rejects his true love, the proletarian seamstress Lene Nimptsch, over his wealthy noble cousin, Käthe von Sellenthin. Botho is not portrayed as an opportunist, he is simply too weak to disregard class barriers and he genuinely believes that he has no choice but to conform to social norms. Ultimately, he is subject to the same conventions as his heartbroken working-class lover. While the novel shows the impact of societal forces on ordinary individuals, it nevertheless transfigures the harsh realities of the Berlin proletariat and refrains from exhibiting the deplorable conditions into which Lene is born.19 In On Tangled Paths, class hierarchy is the subject of criticism because it destroys fateful love, not because it subdues its proletarian underlings.

17  See Walter Silz, Realism and Reality, Studies in the German Novelle of Poetic Realism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954). 18  Paul Fleming writes that “in the conjunctive sense, modern art turns to non-exceptional life in order to transform it—without forsaking its commonness—thereby producing exemplary forms of mediocrity that both represent the non-exceptional and, insofar as they stand outside the group they represent, are something other than mediocre.” Paul Fleming, Exemplarity and Mediocrity. The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3. Zeitroman is a term applied to German novels that are primarily concerned with an author’s critical analysis of the age in which he lives. See Roger Hillman, Zeitroman: The Novel and Society in Germany, 1830–1900 (New York: P. Lang, 1983). 19   On Fontane’s notion of transfiguration (Verklärung) see Fontane, Schriften zur Literatur, ed. Hans-Heinrich Reuter (Berlin: Aufbau, 1960), 36. See also John B.  Lyon, who rightly points out that Botho’s view of factory workers in the novel suggests that he views them as “pristine nature” rather than evidence of “modernity and the metropolis.” John B.  Lyon, Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 162–163.

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On Tangled Paths exposes how Prussian society neglects the moral imperative to unite in love and how it ultimately forgets its victims. In so doing, it touches on a link between excessive alcohol consumption and Korsakoff’s syndrome, a neurological dysfunction best summarized in the title of Korsakoff’s first scientific paper on the subject, “The disturbance of psychic activity in alcoholic paralysis and its relation to the disturbance of the psychic sphere in multiple neuritis of non alcoholic origin.”20 Korsakoff explained the syndrome’s etiology as a result of alcohol-induced blood poisoning that led to neuritis, which in turn affected cerebral function and especially memory.21 Today, Korsakoff’s disease is defined as a neurological disorder caused by a lack of thiamine (vitamin B1) in the brain. Whereas the exact nosology of the disease has been disputed, its onset is distinctly associated with chronic alcohol abuse or severe malnutrition, or both. Korsakoff had a clear insight that the disease involves neuronal damage causing deficits in the brain regions that are part of the limbic system. Functionally, the limbic system is implicated in emotion and memory. In the following, Korsakoff’s disease will serve as an interpretive lens through which to read Fontane’s On Tangled Paths. The impetus for this reading is an implicit and as yet unexplained link in the novel between Lene’s and Botho’s separation and a set of memory deficits that are associated with alcoholism. It is no coincidence that Botho’s uncle, a conservative East Prussian Junker who embodies the societal pressure according to which Botho must leave Lene, appears to be an alcoholic. During a lunch conversation with his nephew Botho, scheduled for the sole purpose of reminding him of his long-standing obligation to marry a wealthy woman of his own class, Baron Kurt Anton von Osten orders (and presumably drinks) three bottles of wine and champagne. And whereas Lene’s foster family is shown as eating asparagus, a food known as an important source of thiamine, Botho and his three friends partake of a punch that contains seven bottles of wine, as the reader is informed, thereby mirroring his uncle’s excessive consumption of alcohol. The scene centers on a surprise

20  The eponymic term Korsakoff’s syndrome was introduced by the German psychiatrist Friedrich Jolly (1844–1904). Friedrich Jolly, “Über die psychischen Störungen bei Polyneuritis,” Charité-Annalen 22 (1897): 579–612. 21  See on this Douwe Draaisma, Geist auf Abwegen. Alzheimer, Parkinson und Co.—Von den Wegbereitern der Gehirnforschung und ihren Fällen (Berlin: Eichborn, 2008), 152.

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visit from Botho’s comrades who desire to meet and scrutinize Lene. It foreshadows and effectively inaugurates the end of the lovers’ doomed relationship. In the novel, alcohol consumption is thus associated with societal pressures of class and masculinity, as suggested in the following quote: “[Botho] was visibly on the merry side, coming straight from imbibing a May punch, the object of a wager at his club.” (23) (“[Botho] war sichtlich angeheitert, kam er doch von einer Maibowle, die Gegenstand einer Klubwette gewesen war.”) (108) In On Tangled Paths, drinking is coded as the underlying cause of a routine fulfillment of society’s inhumane decree. Its thematization complements the contentious question of alcohol abuse (“die Alkoholfrage”) as it emerged in Imperial Germany just when Fontane produced the first draft of his novel.22 But Botho’s excessive alcohol consumption is not framed as a problem of industrial efficiency and economic growth. Instead, it is presented as a moral problem, because it eliminates any social memory of his romantic affair and how it was forced to an end. In linking alcohol with forgetting, On Tangled Paths contributes to the scientific episteme of neurology, specifically, Korsakoff’s coeval research on the loss of episodic-autobiographic memory, which the novel both mirrors and qualifies by juxtaposing two complementary forms of forgetting. The latter are consistent with anterograde and retrograde amnesia, concepts introduced by Korsakoff in his groundbreaking investigation of memory disorders resulting from neuronal dysfunction. Korsakoff, who was convinced that all psychiatric or mental disorders could be reduced to neuronal activity, traced both forms of amnesia to the destruction of a neural association area (“appareil d’association”), which is responsible for storing and connecting a range of memories that the brain can then access over and over again. (Note that his theory intelligently anticipates today’s widely accepted notion of “long-term potentiation,” by which neural

22  See Hasso Spode, “Entwicklung und Kultur der Suchtprävention und -hilfe im 20. Jahrhundert,” Aldo Legnaro, Drogenkonsum zwischen Repression und Kontrolle, ed. Burkhard Kastenbutt and Aldo Legnaro (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2018), 96. See also Hasso Spode, Die Macht der Trunkenheit: Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte des Alkohols in Deutschland (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 1993).

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pathways are connected to stored information, a process that results in “synaptic strengthening”—the basis of long-term memory.23) If this association area is damaged, memories, though still recordable, can no longer be accessed and retrieved. They become blind spots in a person’s biography. They persist in the form of delicate traces and may still influence the individual’s behavior but without ever reaching his or her consciousness. According to Korsakoff, older memories escape this problem because they are more deeply ingrained through multiple repeated associations. Much of Korsakoff’s research was focused on anterograde amnesia, the loss of the ability to encode new information into long-term memory and thereby create original episodic memories. Anterograde amnesia is sometimes incorrectly referred to as “short-term memory loss,” although nothing is wrong with the short-term memory itself, given that the patient’s ability to reason and carry on a conversation remains intact. In practice, this means that a patient with anterograde amnesia may have excellent memory of the years before the onset of the amnestic disorder but may remember little or nothing from the years since. Unable to assimilate new information and lay down recent memories, he will be doomed to live in the past. This is the case with Botho insofar as his nostalgic dwelling on the past coincides with an inability to fully adapt to his new life and engage in his marriage to Käthe. It is also true for the novel itself, which fails to absorb or develop the story of Botho’s budding relationship with Käthe and indeed self-referentially acknowledges this tension between established plot and alternative storylines. Although Botho has resigned himself to the familial and societal pressure and ended his premarital affair with Lene, he is still immersed in the “older romances, even from long ago” (115) (“alte, ganz alte Geschichten”) (184), as his young wife presciently complains. To Botho, life in his residence on Landgrafenstraße seems to be standing still. He (and the narrative itself) only comes to life when some “chance occurences” (114) (“Zufälligkeiten”) (183) bring back cherished and “strikingly vivid” (Ibid.) memories, conjuring up in his mind the old times and the picture of Lene, which he has locked in the past. Botho is constantly tempted to relive episodes from their shared experiences, as memory triggers abound: “As all this washed over his mind 23  Korsakoff, “Etude médico-psychologique sur une forme des maladies de la memoire,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 28 (May 1889): 527. See T.V. Bliss and G.L. Collingridge, “A synaptic model of memory: Long-term potentiation in the hippocampus,” Nature 361 (1993): 31–39.

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he suddenly recalled the day when . . .” (143) (“Alles das ging in ihm um und mit einem Male stand auch der Tag wieder vor ihm . . .”) (207) While Botho’s experience could also be explained without recourse to alcoholism, it corresponds in important particulars to Korsakoff’s double representation (Doppelvorstellung), a condition in which a patient relives an experience that actually happened in exactly that way.24 A more serious neurological condition is also suggested by his considerable burden of suffering (Leidensdruck), as Botho loathes the pain that is tied to his memories: “Why keep these dead things, which only unsettle me and will cost me my little bit of happiness and my domestic peace?” (153) (“Was sollen mir diese toten Dinge, die mir nur Unruhe stiften?”) (214) But Botho also acknowledges that a piece of him has died along with their relationship: “Why revive and refresh what is dead and must remain so?” (154) (“Wozu beleben und auffrischen was tot ist und tot bleiben muss?”) (215) In an impulse that seems more physical than premeditated, Botho seeks to destroy these memories by burning up the material reminders of his affair, Lene’s letters and a bouquet of dried flowers. But his hopes of freeing himself from the past are shattered as he watches the letters going up in flames, realizing that with the keepsakes reduced to ashes, he “yet still [remains] bound” (154) [translation modified] (“Alles Asche. Und doch gebunden”) (215). Botho is unable to exorcise the past and face the future as his sense of self is frozen and has stopped evolving. In the second part of the novel, he thus discovers that it is impossible to shed his episodic memories. When he picks up the stack of letters and weighs it in his hands, he anticipates what it will feel like (light and compact), because it carries personal significance. The semantic memory of the weight of her letters is linked to the episodic memory of reading them. When he touches the bundle, the “feeling of sweet pain” (154) (“Gefühl eines süßen Schmerzes”) (Ibid.) literally goes through Botho’s hands, making him abruptly aware of the feelings he has stored for Lene. At the same time, the past experiences associated with the affective context of his love affair come back to his conscious mind, emotions central enough to give the novel its title and provide its trenchant motto: “So much joy, so much sorrow. Errors, entanglements. An oft-told tale.” (153) [translation modified] (“Viel

24  Sergeij S.  Korsakoff, “Erinnerungstäuschungen (Pseudoreminiscenzen) bei polyneuritischer Psychose,” Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, 47 (1891), 390. Hereafter cited in the text.

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Freud, viel Leid. Irrungen, Wirrungen. Das alte Lied.”) (215) The “errors and entanglements” refer to the failures and complications of memory. As if obeying a hidden logic of matrimonial reciprocity, Botho’s amnestic symptoms are complemented by his wife Käthe’s, who is also the virtual opposite of her predecessor Lene. If Lene is stuck in her memories, Käthe is severed from them, and while Lene’s amnestic strategy is cast as evidence of her strength of character and moral integrity, Käthe’s condition is presented as a sign of her immaturity. There is a lack of depth and history in Käthe that bothers Botho, who can’t stop comparing his present wife to his former lover: “Lene, with her simplicity, truthfulness and lack of empty talk, often came to his mind” (114) (“Lene mit ihrer Einfachheit, Wahrheit und Unredensartlichkeit stand ihm öfters vor der Seele” (183) It is not just that Käthe is ignorant of “historical associations” (170) (“historische Erinnerungen”) (229), she also seems severed from her own history. Her language attests to her lack of interest in continuance—be that through consistent and substantial interactions with others or through human procreation: “No readiness, let alone yearning for a family of her own had yet awoke in her…” (114) (“Der Sinn für Familie, geschweige die Sehnsucht danach, war ihr noch nicht aufgegangen . . .”) (183). The only domain in which Käthe excels is, sadly, “the art of aimless but winsome chatter” (123) (“die Kunst des gefälligen Nichtssagens”) (190). Irritated by her superficial conversation and flippant behavior, Botho finds fault with his wife’s ostensible inability to engage in any serious form of self-reflection or genuine action. Käthe’s frivolous chatter cannot be attributed to social class or a deeply gendered educational system alone. Read against the backdrop of nineteenth-­century neuroscientific knowledge, it embodies and elucidates retrograde amnesia, a frequent side effect of anterograde amnesia according to Korsakoff. Defined as a deficit in retrieving already learned information, retrograde amnesia causes memories created prior to the syndrome’s onset (through trauma or injury) to be lost. Note the similarities between Korsakoff’s case study of a patient with retrograde amnesia and Botho’s characterization of Käthe: But when he was interrupted, he would forget what he had just talked about and was ready to repeat his entire speech; he forgot the ideas that had just passed his mind and as a result often retold the same stories, the same sentences, as if he was putting forth something entirely new. Sometimes it was striking to notice how much his sentences seemed stereotypical; the same

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feeling brought a cliché to his mind that he would pronounce in a manner suggesting that it had occurred to him in this very instant, like a new invention of his mind that he has never before thought of. [translation mine] (Mais si l’on coupait le fil de son discours, il oubliait ce dont il venait de parler et était prêt à répéter toutes ses paroles; il oubliait les idées qui venaient de passer dans sa tête et c’est pourquoi il redisait souvent les mêmes histoires, les mêmes phrases comme s’il émettait quelque chose de nouveau. On était parfois frappé de voir combien ses phrases paraissaient stéréotypées; la même impression évoquait en lui un cliché qu’il prononçait du même ton que s’il l’avait trouvée au même instant, comme un nouveau produit de sa pensée qu’il n’avait pas encore eu à l’esprit.)25

The problem with Käthe is not just that she is not grounded in her memories and that her conversation is nothing but idle chatter. In Botho’s view, she is barred from authentic experience and lacks episodic memory: “Käthe through and through. What a flair she has for gossip … But there is something missing. It’s all so glib, just an echo of society talk.” (136) (“Ganz Käthe. Welch Talent für Plauderei! … Aber es fehlt etwas. Es ist alles so angeflogen, so bloßes Gesellschaftsecho.” (201)26 Käthe’s inability to recount her life and her (for Botho) maddening habit of echoing what she hears from others aligns Käthe with retrograde amnesia, a condition that often results in trifling conversation with little insight and minimal content. In terms of the narrative, Käthe is constructed as a character that is severed from her past, as her life story is not deemed important enough to be narrated. The reader is not privy to any concrete information about Käthe’s history and aside from the text of a rather superficial letter she writes to Botho, her feelings and thoughts remain inscrutable. This mirrors Käthe’s inability to retrieve past events from her long-term memory and share them with her interlocutors. Blurring the lines between fictional and scientific writing, the narrative however comments on Käthe’s symptomatology through the text’s implicit performative potential. Her empty chatter stages the very amnesia it problematizes, serving as a  Korsakoff, “Etude médico-psychologique,” 503.  The father of Effi Briest in the novel of the same name speaks a similarly clichéd language, feebly repeating the widely recognized expression “that is a big subject” (“das ist ein weites Feld”) in various (often unfortunate) contexts. Ironically, Briest’s expression is itself an apt metaphor for the vagueness, indeterminacy, and ultimately emptiness of his own formulaic language. Theodor Fontane, Sämtliche Werke (Nymphenburger Ausgabe), Vol. 7: “Effi Briest.” 25 26

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representation of her hollowed-out existence. This is consistent with Käthe’s role as a marginal character whose only narrative function is to provide a foil for the female protagonist’s admirable depth of experience. Although Botho clearly resents Käthe, he begins to resemble her in the course of the narrative. While he keeps Lene’s letters stored in a “miniature colonnaded temple” (“Säulentempelchen”), a sign of great reverence if not adulation, he eventually comes to identify them—and by extention his relationship with Lene—as an “error” (“Irrung”). Or is it just the memory of the relationship that he no longer trusts? Does he burn the letters because they expose him to memories that are both treacherous and seductive? At the end of the novel, Botho’s distancing is complete, as when he refers to his affair as an “oft-told tale” (“altes Lied”), a sensational story that has been repeated so often that it is no longer challenged even though nobody can remember where it first emerged. The cherished memories of his “old romance” are reduced to a rumor (“Munkeln”), repressed by Botho but spread, in the novel’s final scene, by members of Käthe’s community. Cultural amnesia has displaced their shared past within an immediate present that explodes the narrative framing of the novel. Botho’s and Lene’s amnesia thus figures as a metaphor for an underlying social degeneration, a culture of amnesia that is enacted on their bodies through a process of linguistic supplementation. Rather than conveying what others have described as Fontane’s admiration for Lene’s and Botho’s ability to remember, the novel issues a critical commentary on the social conditions of forgetting and the forgetting of social conditions.27 If the first part of On Tangled Paths seems to nostalgically gesture toward some idealized past where memories were cherished even if they were painful or threatening, the second part recognizes amnesia as a trope of modernity, as it illustrates how society erases remembrance of the past and forgets the knowledge of where things come from and where people belong, thereby losing a sense of history and community. The novel thereby offers an indictment of a destructive form of memory that is founded upon acts of forgetting.

27  Frances M. Subiotto, “The Use of Memory in Fontane’s Irrungen, Wirrungen,” Formen realistischer Erzählkunst. Festschrift for Charlotte Jolles, ed. Jörg Thunecke (Nottingham: Sherwood Press Agencies, 1979), 487.

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Pseudo-reminiscences At first glance, Lene seems more successful in her effort to forget Botho. She intentionally forbids herself from remembering the bygone liaison, which suggests that she is not yet suffering from an unintentional state of amnesia. Lene decides to move to a different dwelling to escape the setting of her love and with it, her memories: “I can’t be a witness to it, mother. I have to get away from here.” (117) (“Ich kann es nicht sehen, Mutter, ich muss weg hier.”) (185) Lene may want to remember her love affair with Botho, that most meaningful era of her life, but she has committed to letting go of the past so that Botho can move on and undertake his responsibilities. Craving forgetfulness as a solace from suffering, she advises Botho to do the same and find happiness in his future life: “At this moment it’s hard, but everything will probably be forgotten or at least appear in a more positive light.” (103) (“Jetzt ist es schwer, aber es vergisst sich alles oder gewinnt wieder ein freundliches Gesicht. Und eines Tages bist du wieder glücklich und vielleicht ich auch.” (174) Lene on her part knows only too well the flavor and bitterness of these memories: “Otherwise Botho and the old times were generally not brought up, for the simple reason that whenever the talk turned to this particular topic Lene quickly broke it off or even left the room.” (119) [translation modified] (“Sonst geschah im allgemeinen weder Bothos noch der alten Zeiten Erwähnung, was einfach darin seinen Grund hatte, dass Lene, wenn die Plauderei speziell diesem Thema sich zuwandte, jedesmal rasch abbrach oder auch wohl aus dem Zimmer ging.” (187) As in the earlier citation from Fontane’s diary, the emphasis on the true demonstrative “this” is meant as a gesture to the real world. It insists on the tangible character of the noumenal reality depicted in the novel, highlighting and validating the pain associated with Lene’s memories of actual events in her previous life. It is important to note, however, that Lene has already begun to forget and annihilate memories of the “old times” as they are still unfolding in real time and in front of her: “Believe me, having you here now, having this time with you, that’s my happiness. I don’t worry what the future holds. One day I’ll find that you’ve flown away” (35) (“Glaube mir, dass ich dich habe, diese Stunde habe, das ist mein Glück. Was daraus wird, das kümmert mich nicht. Eines Tages bist du weggeflogen . . .”) (117) Unable to live in the moment the way the insouciant charmer Käthe does, Lene experiences even the present moment already as memory: “But fly away you will, I can see that very clearly. You’ll have to. They always say love

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blinds, but it also opens our eyes and makes us far-sighted.” (35) (“Aber wegfliegen wirst du, das seh ich klar und gewiss. Du wirst es müssen. Es heißt immer, die Liebe mache blind, aber sie macht auch hell und fernsichtig.” (117–118) In the first part of the novel, memory works to make the characters aware of what will ensue in the second. In  Frances M. Subiotto’s succinct formulation, “the first part is presented more in a manner of something that is over, than as an action taking place, unfolding before our eyes … They are remembering the future.”28 But the combination of “epic anticipation” and “melancholy in face of known outcome” is not the only way in which Lene’s mind responds to the breakup.29 Exceeding a naturalistic, psychological understanding of its female protagonist, the novel intimates that she is driven by uncontrolled impulses— something in Lene’s behavior is amiss. Not the least because her mantra, to forget everything, is contradicted by another assertion, which she makes almost simultaneously and with equal assurance and sincerity: “Memories mean so much—everything. I’ve got memories that will stay with me and no one can ever take away. And that makes me feel so much better.” (103) (“Erinnerung ist viel, ist alles. Und die hab ich nun und bleibt mir und kann mir nicht mehr genommen werden. Und ich fühle ordentlich, wie mir dabei leicht zumute wird.” (174) Paradoxically and contrary to Käthe, Lene’s lightness derives from the weight of memory. Knowing that she cannot be robbed of her memory of Botho the way she was robbed of Botho himself, Lene embraces a life imbued with past meanings, metaphorically invoked in her exclamation “Look how the mist is rising.” (104) (“Sieh nur, wie die Nebel steigen.)” (Ibid.) At the same time, however, she divests the moment from its actuality by moving awareness to a hypothesized future: “I have loved you with all my heart, that was my fate. … If I have to pay for it now I gladly will.” (Ibid.) (“Ich habe dich von Herzen liebgehabt, das war mein Schicksal … wenn ich nun dafür zahlen muss, so zahle ich gern.” (Ibid.) The profoundly ambivalent nature of memory that is at display in this passage, and the contradiction that ensues as Lene utters these contradictory statements, has not been sufficiently explained with psychological models for textual analysis. The novel references “forget-me-nots” (“Vergißmeinnicht) and “immortelles” (71) (“Immortellen”) (147), both

 Subiotto, “The Use of Memory,” 480.  Ibid., 479–480.

28 29

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flowers that signify remembrance. But these flowers are not the disguised symbolic expression of an unconscious desire to remember on the part of Lene. Instead, they articulate a traumatic break that she experiences, by drawing attention to a fracture in the symbolic construction of reality. For the therapeutic use of integrated memories that Lene seems to advocate with her assertion that “memory is everything,” is immediately negated by her insistence on forgetting. Given that it is of course impossible to intentionally forget painful memories, her resolve to forget creates a tension in the novel between the diverging forms of dissociative and volitional forgetting and a form of “intentional remembrance” that invokes Alois Riegl’s concept of “gewollter Erinnerungswert.”30 In the latter sense, memory embodies “a revival of what was good in the past as part of what is good in oneself,” as Subiotto claims. But memory in the novel is also fraught with challenges, as it delineates a poetics of abandonment, anachronism, and dissociation.31 The novel is about amnesia—not solely amnesia as in forgetting through a process of selective memory, as a psychoanalytic reading would have it, but amnesia as a symptom of different kinds of neuronal dysfunctions. Lene’s amnesia is heralded by a neuronal event that occurs just a few months after the lovers’ separation. Botho and Käthe have moved into their new apartment, located scarcely a 1000 feet from Lene’s house. One day, making her way down a neighboring street, Lene suddenly recognizes Botho walking toward her with his beautiful young wife on his arm. Lene quickly turns away from the sidewalk to avoid meeting the happily conversing couple. Although she manages to keep herself erect, Lene is about to lose consciousness. Her crisis is highly suggestive of a condition that often accompanies the onset of Korsakoff’s syndrome. Named after German psychiatrists and neuropathologist Carl Wernicke (1848–1905), Wernicke’s encephalopathy refers to the presence of neurological symptoms that are caused by lesions in the central nervous system. Like Korsakoff syndrome it occurs after exhaustion of B-vitamin reserves, in particular thiamine.32 30  Alois Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus: sein Wesen und seine Entstehung (Vienna: Vox von Braumülle, 1903), 38–40. 31  Ibid., 483. 32  Carl Wernicke, Lehrbuch der Gehirnkrankheiten für Ärzte und Studierende, 3 vols. (Kassel: Theodor Fischer, 1881), Vol. 2: 229–242. When Korsakoff syndrome and Wenicke’s encephalopathy occur simultaneously, the ensuing aggravated thiamine deficiency can cause Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome. See on this N. R. C. Leng and A. J. Parkin, “Double dissocia-

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The scene in question stages a multipronged medical crisis that invokes the classic triad of symptoms found in Wernicke’s encephalopathy. At first Lene experiences ataxia, a dysfunction of the parts of the nervous system that coordinate movement and balance. She “felt the thin iron grating tremble beneath her feet” (“sie fühlte das Zittern der dünnen Eisenplatte, darauf sie stand”) and as a result thinks “she would have to grasp [a brass rail] for support” (“es [war] ihr als ob sie, wie zu Beistand und Hilfe, nach dem Messingstab greifen müsse”). Lene barely manages “to hold herself upright” (“sie hielt sich aber aufrecht”). Her walk becomes slow and unsteady and she has trouble standing and getting around: “She was able to pick her way gingerly past the houses” (“Sie tappte sich vorsichtig an den Häusern hin”). As her crisis deepens, Lene experiences confusion, defined as a loss of orientation and linear thinking: …but soon she felt faint. And once she reached the next side-street leading off towards the canal she turned into and entered a front garden whose gate had been left open. With her last strength she dragged herself to a small flight of steps leading up to the veranda and the raised ground floor, close to passing out, sat down on one of them.” (“Aber bald war ihr doch, als ob ihr die Sinne schwänden, und kaum, daß sie die nächste nach dem Kanal hin abzweigende Querstraße erreicht hatte, so bog sie hier ein und trat in einen Vorgarten, dessen Gittertür offen stand. Nur mit Mühe noch schleppte sie sich bis an eine kleine zu Veranda und Hochparterre hinaufführende Freitreppe, wenige Stufen, und setzte sich, einer Ohnmacht nah, auf eine derselben.”)

Lene’s global confusion is so profound that she actually loses consciousness. Even when she regains it she is for a long time barely aware of her surroundings: “She saw and heard nothing of this, or at any rate was unaware of what was going on around her” (“Sie sah und hörte nichts oder war wenigstens ohne Bewußtsein dessen, was um sie her vorging.”) At this point, Lene’s ataxia and confusion are complemented by the third symptom of Wernicke’s encephalopathy, ophthalmoplegia, defined as a weakness or paralysis of the eye muscles. In ophthalmoplegia the eyes move around too quickly, the eye muscles become weakened or even paralysed, and diplopia (double vision) ensues. In a scene that invokes tion of function in the frontal components of the amnesic syndrome,” British Journal of Clinical Psychology 27 (1988), 359–362.

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autoscopy, which John Hughlings Jackson identified in 1888 as a form of mental diplopia, Lene comes back to consciousness and catches sight of a mysterious stranger who also functions as her metaphorical double33: When she came to again she saw an adolescent girl standing next to her holding a little spade with which she had dug a few small beds. The girl looked at her sympathetically, while with almost equal curiosity an old nanny was scrutinizing her from the veranda balustrade. It seemed that nobody was to home except the child and the nursemaid, and Lene, apologizing to them both got up and walked back to the gate. The girl gazed after her in sad wonderment, almost as if a premonition of life’s sorrows had just dawned in her childish heart. (111) [translation modified] Als sie wieder erwachte, sah sie, daß ein halbwachsenes Mädchen, ein Grabscheit in der Hand, mit dem sie kleine Beete gegraben hatte, neben ihr stand und sie teilnahmvoll anblickte, während, von der Verandabrüstung aus, eine alte Kindermuhme sie mit kaum geringerer Neugier musterte. Niemand war augenscheinlich zu Haus als das Kind und die Dienerin, und Lene dankte beiden und erhob sich und schritt wieder auf die Pforte zu. Das halbwachsene Mädchen aber sah ihr traurig verwundert nach, und es war fast, wie wenn in dem Kinderherzen eine erste Vorstellung von dem Leid des Lebens gedämmert hätte. (181)

Combined with a temporary shift in narrative point of view, Lene’s double vision indicates that she has a premonition, but one that is projected onto another person and, as it were, in hindsight. As a déjà vu that is both belated and based on a feeling of false familiarity, it exemplifies the concept of pseudo-reminiscences that is central to Korsakoff’s work on amnesia. Korsakoff first described it in the article “Erinnerungstäuschungen (Pseudoreminiscenzen) bei polyneuritischer Psychose,” published in German just three years after the publication of Fontane’s novel.34 The concept of pseudo-reminiscence refers to a disturbance in which patients confuse their recollections with either very recent memories or confabulated fantasies.35 Differentiating between two kinds of “false memories,” 33  John Hughlings Jackson, “On a particular variety of epilepsy (‘intellectual aura’), one case with symptoms of organization brain disease,” Brain 11.2 (1888), xx. 34  See n330. 35  For an outline of the relationship between confabulation behavior and Korsakoffs syndrome, see Roy P.  C. Kessels, et  al., “Confabulation Behavior and False Memories in Korsakoff’s Syndrome: Role of Source Memory and Executive Functioning,” Psychiatry and

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Korsakoff thus explains how “a random impression evokes the feeling that the individual in question has already once lived through, thought, said, etc. this exact situation. This appearance lasts a little while and when disappears as quickly as it arose.” [translation mine] (“tritt bei der Aufnahme irgendwelcher Eindrücke plötzlich die Empfindung auf, als hätte das betreffende Individuum bereits genau dieselbe Situation durchlebt, ebenso gedacht, gesprochen, u.s.w. Diese Erscheinung dauert einige Zeit und verschwindet dann ebenso schnell, als sie aufgetreten ist.) (390–391) One of Korsakoff‘s patients thus “forgot literally everything he heard in the same instant; but a year or two later some of that which had left his memory would begin to occasionally remerge in his memory” (“der buchstäblich Alles, was er hörte, sofort wieder vergaß; aber ein oder zwei Jahre später begann Manches von dem, was längst dem Gedächtnis entschwunden schien, wieder von Zeit zu Zeit in seinem Gedächtnis aufzutauchen” (394). Others confused old recollections with present impressions, or believed themselves to be in settings in which they were years ago and as a result, mistook persons who were around them now for people who were present at an earlier time. In all of these patients, pseudo-­reminiscences invoked a feeling of false familiarity, an experience known today as déjà vu. Read along the lines of Korsakoff’s concept of pseudo-reminiscences, the scene of Lene’s awakening implies that when she catches sight of the young girl, Lene confuses her own younger self with her counterpart and projects her own memories unto her opposite other. After all, the girl’s premonition “into life’s sorrows” echoes Lene’s real, lived and future experience, even if she registers this information as if it was entirely new to her (proxy). Unable to identify the source of her own spontaneous ideas, Lene interprets the external input (the sight of a girl who visibly pities her) as something that just “dawned on” a stranger. The credit for the girl’s “premonition” nevertheless belongs to Lene, who seems to be revisiting her own memories, literally and figuratively, through the eyes of a girl, recognizing them as strangely familiar. In other words, like Korsakoff’s amnesic patients, Lene could be said to misconstrue long-term memory, received information, and premonition. Fontane’s adaptation of the trope of the double casts doubt on the question whether the presence of the young girl may be confabulated and whether she (and her nanny) may have a material basis in reality. Korsakoff Clinical Neurosciences 62.2 (2008): 220–225. See also Armin Schnider, The Confabulating Mind: How the Brain Creates Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 12.

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himself suggested that pseudo-reminiscences can appear as illusions of memory, whereby there is no external stimulus from which they may have derived. In fact, these were the kinds of pseudo-reminiscences which interested Korsakoff the most. He thus described a patient who “conceives of an event that he has not really experienced but that had only come to his mind, as if it had really happened to him.” (“wobei irgendein Ereignis, das der Kranke nie erlebt hat, das demselben nur einfach in den Sinn gekommen ist, ihm in Wirklichkeit einmal stattgefunden zu haben scheint.” (391) As Korsakoff elaborates: In such cases the subjective feeling that is inherent to reminiscences is coupled with representations that can by no means be the object of reminiscences … If we analyze the pseudoreminiscences of this group we often find that they are based on a real memory, which in his conscious mind are connected with a false one … And thus pseudoreminiscences of polyneuritic neurosis are often, if not always, rooted in factual memories, and thus appear as illusions of memory. [translation mine] (In diesen Fällen gesellt sich das der Reminiscenz eigenthümlich subjektive Gefühl zu solchen Vorstellungen, welche gar nicht Gegenstand einer Reminiscenz sein können . . . Wenn wir die Pseudoreminscenzes dieser Gruppe analysiren, so finden wir häufig, dass ihnen irgend eine wirkliche Erinnerung zu Grunde liegt, welche im Bewusstsein in Verbindung mit trüglichen erscheint . . . (391) So wurzeln die Pseudoreminiscensen bei polyneuritischer Psychose sehr oft, wenn nicht immer, in factischen Erinnerungen, und erscheinen somit als Illusionen der Erinnerung.) (394)

The phenomenon of pseudo-reminiscences indicates a surprising likeness and almost an identity of past and present perceptions. Its presence in the novel is poignant because it foreshadows a young girl’s tragic fate, implying that Lene’s rejection and isolation was inevitable and will remain a common occurrence in future generations of working-class girls under capitalism and patriarchy. Poetically, it is significant because it lays bare the competing versions of reality at stake in the novel and in the world it portrays. And insofar as fiction refers to a past that may never have been, the inclusion of Lene’s pseudo-reminiscence is a metafictional signal that the protagonist herself understands. Speaking with Roman Jakobson’s distinction of five different modalities of realist writing, which he articulated in his essay “On Realism in Art” (1921), the episode fulfills the requirement

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E “of consistent motivation and realization of poetic devices.”36 Although Jakobson does not fully explicate this category, he does give an instructive example that relates directly to Lene’s predicament. In his analysis of realism, Jakobson defines the latter as the effect of a metafictional move, such as a “romantic” fantasy that is motivated by a character’s delirious state. The author can enhance the mimetic potential of the text by laying bare his “poetic devices,” as long as this move is internally motivated by a character’s (psychopathological) condition—in Jakobson’s example, typhoid delirium. Accordingly, Lene’s pseudo-reminiscence can be said to provide “consistent motivation” for her mnemonic dysfunctioning, which in turn establishes a caesura that fractures the text.37 An implied elision—between the instant in which Lene has not yet lost consciousness and the instant in which she comes back from being passed out—draws attention to realism’s break from reality. The elision signals a severance between Lene’s state of mind before her chance encounter with Botho and her state of mind when she resumes normal activities (she walks home). In cognitive terms, it is not that the reality of her separation from Botho has finally broken in, but rather that she breaks with the actuality of that reality. Poetologically, the narrated past has morphed into a time that never will have been. In that way, the scene is self-referentially emblematic of the way in which fiction constructs realities.

Condensation Conceding “the extreme relativity of the concept of realism,” Jakobson in his essay emphasizes the importance of distinguishing among a range of meanings latent in the term.38 Among the different strategies of making the prose seem more real “to the new generation,”.one is characteristic of the progressive realism of nineteenth-century prose authors such as Gogol, Tolstoj, and Dostoevskij in Russia, but arguably also Fontane in Germany. Jakobson lists it under D, “the condensation of the narrative by means of images based on contiguity, that is, avoidance of the normal designative term in favor of metonymy or synechdoche.” He goes on to explain that this condensation of “unessential detail … is realized either in spite of the plot or 36  Roman Jakobson, “On Realism in Art,” Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1987), 27. 37  Ibid., 26. 38  Ibid., 27.

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by eliminating the plot entirely.”39 But why invest so much value in seemingly gratuitous detail that has no bearing on the plot? Condensation based on contiguity occurs in an earlier passage of the novel’s second part. It features a series of disconnected and arbitrary images that resist memorization and thwart understanding. When Botho learns about the passing of Lene’s foster mother, Frau Nimptsch, he hires the driver of a horse-drawn carriage to take him to visit her grave at Jakobi cemetery. Botho’s view from the open carriage is constructed as a series of brief sequences, staged to foreground the vast array of homogeneous and unsifted images of a suburban landscape, where advertisements for roadside amusement parlors and vaudeville acts intermingle with funeral home signs evoking the theme of death: ‘Fräulein Rosella the Girl Prodigy–See Her Live’; ‘Gravestones at Unbeatable Prices’; ‘American Instant Photography’; ‘Russian Cockshy–Six Throws for Ten Pfennigs’; ‘Swedish Punch with Waffles’; ‘Figaro’s Finest Cut–or the World’s Best Hair Salon’; ‘Gravestones at Unbeatable Prices’; ‘Swiss Shooting Gallery: Aim it fast and aim it well, / Aim and score like Wilhelm Tell’. (147) Fräulein Rosella das Wundermädchen, lebend zu sehen; Grabkreuze zu billigsten Preisen; amerikanische Schnellphotographie; russisches Ballwerfen, sechs Wurf zu zehn Pfennig; schwedischer Punch mit Waffeln; Figaros schönste Gelegenheit oder erster Frisier-Salon der Welt; Grabkreuze zu billigsten Preisen; Schweizer Schießhalle: Schieße gut und schieße schnell / Schieß und triff wie Wilhelm Tell. (210)

The imagery of the cab ride mirrors the processes of memory formation and retrieval in that the sequence is not presented in clock time but constructed as a succession of fleeting impressions, stored in separate boxes as would be the instant photographs advertised on one of the signboards Botho encounters. Conveying the fragmentary nature of memory, these transient images must be strung together to retroactively curate a whole picture of the event. In that way, the images figure as the curious objects we use to produce memory. They mirror the fragmentary nature of Botho’s perception, the way in which he experiences his surroundings as a constructed reality that is made up of fictionalized snippets of a would-be world that is otherwise damaged or incomplete. Like Jakobson’s  Ibid., 25.

39

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“unessential detail,” these perceptions and memories are neither semantically encoded nor causally anchored in the plot and yet they result in a “realistic” inscription of Botho’s subjectivity. There is a parallel between Botho’s view from the cab and an earlier scene where he gazes at the nearby traffic, noting the similarity between his view and the impressions retrieved from “a camera obscura screen” (41) (“Camera-obscura-Glase”) (122). As a model for the nature of reality, the images projected by a camera obscura simulate reality so truthfully that the difference between the image and the material object it projects becomes blurred and virtually disappears. A photographic image from the camera obscura is an accurate but abstract and allegorical representation that needs to be carefully studied by the observer rather than being simply taken for reality.40 As in Plato’s allegory of the cave, where shadows are projected onto a two-dimensional wall to be contemplated, the camera obscura projects life in full color and movement onto a screen—but it is still a projection. As a “mirror of nature,” it is thus an allegory for the relationship between truth and illusion and as such it pertains to the novel’s exploration of the workings (and fallibility) of memory. Botho has not been to the cemetery in more than a year and the onslaught of images he takes in as he gazes out of his carriage are of an ephemeral and illusory quality, prompting the urgent question of what is perception and what is reality. As Botho stares out of his carriage window as if trapped in a temporal nowhere, he does not encode the contextual stimuli nor relate them to each other and so the oncoming information is not stored in his long-­ term memory. He is in a state of blissful oblivion. It is only when he sees a final inscription promoting “Broken Glass Bought and Sold” (148) (“Glasbruch-Ein- und –Verkauf”) (211) that he is jolted back into reality, the broken glass standing as a metaphor for both the fragility of (broken) dreams and the fragmentation of memory. His “enjoyment” (“Vergnügen”) turns into sharp stinging pain as “his fingertips tingled as if pierced by the fragments” of glass—or memory (“dabei war ihm in allen Fingerspitzen, als schnitten ihn die Scherben”). 40  As Jonathan Crary argues, the camera obscura in the eighteenth century thus served the purpose of philosophical reflection on the nature of perception and knowledge of our physical world. Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October 45 (Summer 1988): 3–35. Since the eighteenth century, the camera obscura has often been invoked as a metaphor for painting because it likewise stages “spaces that are microcosmic reductions of the world at large.” See Sean Silver, The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2015), 99.

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In the scene that directly follows Lene’s breakdown, Fontane gives a detailed sketch of the landscape through which Lene passes as she flees from her encounter with Botho. While the precise and detailed depiction attests to Fontane’s intimate knowledge of local topography, it also strongly suggestive of Lene’s affective state: Lene had now crossed the embankment and reached the canal, which she walked along, keeping to the foot of the slope where she could be sure of not meeting anyone. From time to time a spitz yelped on one of the barges, and as it was midday thin lines of smoke rose from the cabin of stovepipes. But she saw and heard nothing of this, or at any rate was unaware of what was going on around her; and it was not until she had got to the far gate of the Zoological Gardens, where the houses lining the canal came to an end and the big sluicegate with water foaming over it came into view, that she stopped and gasped for breath. “Ah, if only I could cry!” And she pressed her hand against her breast and heart. (111) (Lene war inzwischen, den Fahrdamm passierend, bis an den Kanal gekommen und ging jetzt unten an der Böschung entlang, wo sie sicher sein durfte, niemandem zu begegnen. Von den Kähnen her blaffte dann und wann ein Spitz, und ein dünner Rauch, weil Mittag war, stieg aus den kleinen Kajütenschornsteinen auf. Aber sie sah und hörte nichts oder war wenigstens ohne Bewußtsein dessen, was um sie her vorging, und erst als jenseits des Zoologischen die Häuser am Kanal hin aufhörten und die große Schleuse mit ihrem drüber wegschäumenden Wasser sichtbar wurde, blieb sie stehn und rang nach Luft. “Ach, wer weinen könnte.” Und sie drückte die Hand gegen Brust und Herz.)

The landscape Lene traverses is ripe with meaning, as it symbolically represents her mnemonic-affective predicament. Having lost her composure in public, the sensible and dutiful Lene is falling apart, as she is overwhelmed by the impending reality of a life without Botho. The sluice gate metaphor seems especially appropriate to convey this sense of a buildup of emotional pressure, with the image of an inflow (a flood of emotions or memories) so powerful that it can barely be contained. But still the floodgates remain in place and Lene’s overpowering memories locked in, her feelings repressed: “Ah, if only I could cry!” she sighs, laying her hand on her breast, unaware that it is her brain rather than her heart that is aching. Contrary to the characters who have no knowledge of the neurological basis of their feelings and behaviors, the novel locates the cause of their

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amnesia in the brain—the place that was the most difficult to examine because it was accessible only at autopsy.41 This instantiation of a science-­ informed poetics, which anticipates and uniquely shapes major insights of late-nineteenth-century neurology, overpowers the potentially healing aspects of remembrance and, with it, the heuristic value of a novel about memory. This is not to deny that the novel’s dialectical use of memory would allow the reader to investigate competing logics of remembering and forgetting to reach a new level of understanding of her own mnemonic repertoire.42 Understood as the foundation of not only our intellect but also our collective identity and even moral culture, memory thus explored would allow us to enter in dialogue about such questions as to whether our recollections can be integrally connected and whether they can help us make sense of a changing world. Such a credulous, affirmative approach is taken by Lene’s fiancé, Gideon Franke, an ingenuous fellow who reckons that Lene’s and Botho’s accounts of their past affair must be true simply because their respective versions match closely: “Yes, that’s what she told me too.” (140) (“Ja, so hat sie mir’s auch erzählt.”) (204) Yet while Lene and Botho are capable of realistically rendering a perceptual belief based on past experience, it is implied that they are unable to make new distinct memories, as when new information is mapped on top of their recollection of older, more cherished events. The scientifically accurate depiction of amnesia adds weight to Fontane’s indictment of Prussian society. In the novel, the stagnant temporality of memory entails a critique of the concept of progress in modernity as an age of impermanence. Whether or not the characters are aware of it, the novel stages the onset of Korsakoff’s syndrome as it converges with contingent narrative events. Fontane’s novel shows that a literary text can convey convincingly how the essence of neuroscientific concepts both mirror and qualify the aesthetic and intellectual assumptions of the literary text itself. In On Tangled Paths, this is mainly achieved through structural and narrative techniques, such as the bipartite construction of the novel or the manifold allusions to remembering and forgetting and how it operates and disrupts narrative progression. But the correlation between neuroscience and realist literature is also evident in the process of writing and editing on the part of the author. A common treatment for patients who have anterograde amnesia  See on this the discussion of brain ablation in the subsequent chapter.  Subiotto, “The Use of Memory,” 479.

41 42

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is keeping a diary, a mnemonic strategy that also helped Fontane to keep track of the projects on which he was working and retain an overview of relevant materials. By keeping detailed lists and inventories of a range of data, and by diligently annotating his notebooks and diaries, Fontane was able to record visual and verbal memory aids before the facts could leave working memory. This approach surely proved helpful for Fontane, whose somewhat compromised memory function and occasional confusion in the process of writing On Tangled Paths is attested by his own remarks.43 To understand the link between the process of writing and the novel as the end-product, it makes sense to revisit current paradigms of the realist debate in light of the strategies used by Fontane to, if not counteract, so at least problematize forgetting and amnesia—not his own amnesia, to be sure, but a more general, collective forgetfulness deeply embedded in the socioeconomic and historical context of Imperial Germany’s modernity.44 Fontane’s realist style thus understood provides a sharp contrast to accepted notions of realist literature whereby a person, thing, or situation can be represented directly and without the need for interrogating its mimetic semblance of reality or its coherence with mnemonic practices. As a prime example of Fontane’s late-realist style, On Tangled Paths marks the dawn of modernism, where literature’s optimistic confidence in representational language is called into question. It prefigures how figurative writing will be displaced by elaborately plotted case studies of neurologists like Korsakoff, who conveyed empirical reality through meticulous scientific observation. Fontane’s novel challenges how a neuroscientific paradigm that began with Korsakoff but extended well into the twentieth century came to be identified with Western conceptions of modernity. On Tangled Paths raises 43  Fontane states that the novel is “born from confusion” (“aus Konfusion geboren”) and that some details escaped his memory. Letter to Theodor Wolff, April 28, 1890, Theodor Fontane, Werke, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlicher Buchgesellschaft, 1979), Section IV, vol. 2: “Briefe. 1860–1878,” ed. Otto Drude et al.: 37–38. 44  In no way does the novel provide evidence for Fontane himself having Korsakoff’s syndrome. According to Horst Gravenkamp, who has treated Fontane’s psychomedical condition in a detailed study, Fontane suffered from what would today be termed endogenous depression, a mood disorder reflecting a chemical imbalance in the brain and not remotely related to the kind of neuronal dysfunction affecting a patient’s episodic-autobiographic memory, as described by Korsakoff. Horst Gravenkamp, Theodor Fontane als Patient (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), 85. And although we know that Fontane enjoyed his occasional glass of wine, absolutely no evidence suggests that he drank excessively.

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important questions from a humanistic perspective about the ethical implications of social progress and tradition in light of neuroscience’s advances in understanding the brain as a mnemonic system. By modeling how we organize and value our collective memories, the novel illustrates that literature is uniquely able to critique the scientific theories that it both illustrates and predicts.

CHAPTER 7

Allegory, Modernity, Learning to See: Cytoarchitectonics in Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910) brilliantly condenses the experience of the modern subject in crisis who eludes the desire for stable meaning and closure. The novel is a fictional diary based on Rilke’s long stays in Paris beginning in 1902. His alter ego, a fictional  Danish poet named Malte Laurids Brigge, is intent on teaching himself how to see the world. To test his sense of vocation against the city, he has rented a shabby rented room in a squalid neighborhood, where he lives in isolation and fear. In one passage, the novel’s eponymous narrator pauses on his wanderings through the urban landscape to look at a partly torn-down building1: Will people believe that there are houses like this? No, people will say I’m making it up. This time it is the truth, with nothing left out, and naturally nothing added either. Where would I get it from? People know I’m poor. People know. Houses? But to be precise, they were houses that were no longer there. Houses that had been torn down, from top to bottom. What was there were the other houses, the ones that had been next to them, tall adjoining houses. They were apparently at risk of falling down now that 1  Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke. Kommentierte Ausgabe in vier Bänden, 4 vol., ed. Manfred Engel et al. (Frankfurt a. M.: Insel, 1996), Vol. 3: “Prosa und Dramen,” 453–662. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Robert Vilain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Hereafter cited in the text.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_7

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everything had been removed from alongside, since a whole scaffold of long tarred poles had been rammed into place at an angle from the rubble-strewn ground to the exposed wall. I don’t know if I’ve already said that this is the wall I mean. But it was so to speak not the first wall of the houses that were still present (as one might have assumed) but the last wall of the houses that had been there. You could see the inside of them. On each storey you could see the walls of rooms with wallpaper still sticking to them, and here and there places where the floors and ceilings had been fixed. Beside the walls of these rooms there was a dirty white space the whole length of the wall and along it crept, in unspeakably disgusting, squashily wormlike, almost digesting motions, the open, rust-flecked channel for the toilet plumbing. There remained dusty grey traces of where the gas pipes for the lamps had been at the edges of the ceilings, and they bent in various places, quite unexpectedly, coming full circle and running into the painted wall and into a black hole that had been punched out pitilessly. The walls themselves were the most unforgettable part, however. The tenacious life of these rooms had refused to be stamped out. It was still there, it clung onto the nails that had been left in, it stood on the hand’s breadth of floorboards that remained, it had crept in amongst what still only hinted at corners, where there was still just a little inner life. One could see in the paintwork that it had changed gradually, year on year, from blue into mildewed green, green into grey, and yellow into an old, stagnant, putrefying white. But it lived on in the fresher parts, too, that had survived behind mirrors, pictures, and cupboards; it had traced and retraced their contours, and with the spiders and the dust had inhabited even those hidden places that were now exposed. It was in every tattered strip of paint, it was in the damp bubbles lifting the bottom edges of the wallpaper, it swayed in the tattered shreds, and the foul patches that had formed so long ago all exuded it. And from these once blue, green, and yellow walls, framed by the trusses of the partition walls now demolished, the air of these lives, the tough, languorous air that no wind had yet dispelled, bulged out at you. There lay the midday meals and the illnesses and the exhalations and year-after-year’s-worth of smoke and the sweat that oozes out from the armpits and makes your clothes thick, and stale breath from people’s mouths and the cheap-liquor smell of festering feet. There lay the acridity of urine and the reek of burnt soot and grey steam from potatoes and the heavy, slick stench of rancid lard. The sweet, lingering smell of neglected nursing babies was there, and the anxious smell of children going to school, and the mugginess of the beds of older boys. And lots had joined in from below, vapours emanating from the abyss of the streets, and more had trickled down from above with the rain that is never pure over cities. And more still had been brought in by the weak, domesticated house winds that always stayed in the same street, and there was a good deal more here

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whose origins were unknown. I said, didn’t I, that all the walls had been pulled down apart from a final one—? Well, this is the wall I’ve been talking about all along. People will say that I’d been standing in front of it for ages, but I swear I started to run as soon as I recognized it. That’s the really terrible thing, the fact that I recognized it. I recognize everything around here, and that’s why it enters into me so easily: It is at home in me. (27–29) (Wird man es glauben, dass es solche Häuser gibt? Nein, man wird sagen, ich fälsche. Diesmal ist es Wahrheit, nichts weggelassen, natürlich auch nichts hinzugetan. Woher sollte ich es nehmen? Man weiß, dass ich arm bin. Man weiß es. Häuser? Aber, um genau zu sein, es waren Häuser, die nicht mehr da waren. Häuser, die man abgebrochen hatte von oben bis unten. Was da war, das waren die anderen Häuser, die danebengestanden hatten, hohe Nachbarhäuser. Offenbar waren sie in Gefahr, umzufallen, seit man nebenan alles weggenommen hatte; denn ein ganzes Gerüst von langen, geteerten Mastbäumen war schräg zwischen den Grund des Schuttplatzes und die bloßgelegte Mauer gerammt. Ich weiß nicht, ob ich schon gesagt habe, dass ich diese Mauer meine. Aber es war sozusagen nicht die erste Mauer der vorhandenen Häuser (was man doch hätte annehmen müssen), sondern die letzte der früheren. Man sah ihre Innenseite. Man sah in den verschiedenen Stockwerken Zimmerwände, an denen noch die Tapeten klebten, da und dort den Ansatz des Fußbodens oder der Decke. Neben den Zimmerwänden blieb die ganze Mauer entlang noch ein schmutzigweißer Raum, und durch diesen kroch in unsäglich widerlichen, wurmweichen, gleichsam verdauenden Bewegungen die offene, rostfleckige Rinne der Abortröhre. Von den Wegen, die das Leuchtgas gegangen war, waren graue, staubige Spuren am Rande der Decken geblieben, und sie bogen da und dort, ganz unerwartet, rund um und kamen in die farbige Wand hineingelaufen und in ein Loch hinein, das schwarz und rücksichtslos ausgerissen war. Am unvergesslichsten aber waren die Wände selbst. Das zähe Leben dieser Zimmer hatte sich nicht zertreten lassen. Es war noch da, es hielt sich an den Nägeln, die geblieben waren, es stand auf dem handbreiten Rest der Fußböden, es war unter den Ansätzen der Ecken, wo es noch ein klein wenig Innenraum gab, zusammengekrochen. Man konnte sehen, dass es in der Farbe war, die es langsam, Jahr um Jahr, verwandelt hatte: Blau in schimmliges Grün, Grün in Grau und Gelb in ein altes, abgestandenes Weiß, das fault. Aber es war auch in den frischeren Stellen, die sich hinter Spiegeln, Bildern und Schränken erhalten hatten; denn es hatte ihre Umrisse gezogen und nachgezogen und war mit Spinnen und Staub auch auf diesen versteckten Plätzen gewesen, die jetzt bloßlagen. Es war in jedem Streifen, der ­abgeschunden war, es war in den feuchten Blasen am unteren Rande der Tapeten, es schwankte in den abgerissenen Fetzen, und aus den garstigen

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Flecken, die vor langer Zeit entstanden waren, schwitzte es aus. Und aus diesen blau, grün und gelb gewesenen Wänden, die eingerahmt waren von den Bruchbahnen der zerstörten Zwischenmauern, stand die Luft dieser Leben heraus, die zähe, träge, stockige Luft, die kein Wind noch zerstreut hatte. Da standen die Mittage und die Krankheiten und das Ausgeatmete und der jahrealte Rauch und der Schweiß, der unter den Schultern ausbricht und die Kleider schwer macht, und das Fade aus den Munden und der Fuselgeruch gärender Füße. Da stand das Scharfe vom Urin und das Brennen vom Ruß und grauer Kartoffeldunst und der schwere, glatte Gestank von alterndem Schmalze. Der süße, lange Geruch von vernachlässigten Säuglingen war da und der Angstgeruch der Kinder, die in die Schule gehen, und das Schwüle aus den Betten mannbarer Knaben. Und vieles hatte sich dazugesellt, was von unten gekommen war, aus dem Abgrund der Gasse, die verdunstete, und anderes war von oben herabgesickert mit dem Regen, der über den Städten nicht rein ist. Und manches hatten die schwachen, zahm gewordenen Hauswinde, die immer in derselben Straße bleiben, zugetragen, und es war noch vieles da, wovon man den Ursprung nicht wusste. Ich habe doch gesagt, dass man alle Mauern abgebrochen hatte bis auf die letzte –? Nun, von dieser Mauer spreche ich fortwährend. Man wird sagen, ich hätte lange davorgestanden; aber ich will einen Eid geben dafür, dass ich zu laufen begann, sobald ich die Mauer erkannt hatte. Denn das ist das Schreckliche, dass ich sie erkannt habe. Ich erkenne das alles hier, und darum geht es so ohne weiteres in mich ein: es ist zu Hause in mir.) (485–487)

Malte’s invocation of the eviscerated building, with its wallpaper peeling off the residual inside walls and the sickly smell of poverty seeping from its dilapidated rooms, captures the assaults of industrialized society on the modern city dweller. It reveals a life of isolation and hardship, barely worth living. In its desolate state, the building embodies both the physical dissolution of the individuals who formerly lived in it and the emotional suffering and psychic fragmentation of the modern subject more generally. But more than that, the image of the building with its remaining walls turned inside out to expose its insides reveals “the strange dialectic of inside and outside” at work throughout the novel.2 There is a pervasive feeling of horror that extends from the building’s bared interior to the sweeping dissolution of limits affecting the boundary not only between the body and things and the self and the other, but also between 2  Rolf J.  Goebel, “Yvan Goll’s Die Eurokokke: A Reading Through Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk,” From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form, ed. Sabine Wilke (London: Bloomsbury, 2012): 67.

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the animate and the inanimate. The ensuing sense of psychic and corporeal disunity certainly pertains to Malte who is confronted, as Rochelle Tobias writes, “with visions of his insides turned inside out, which perhaps accounts for the strange references to bodily fluids (pus, mucus, spit, urine, etc.) throughout the novel’s first half.”3 In the demolished building—just as in the modern subject—that which is to remain discreetly hidden is openly displayed. The narrative is “obsessively littered with descriptions of body parts … and of bodily sensations,” as Andreas Huyssen observes.4 Malte has strange visions of fragmented bodies, as when he sees a woman’s face that “remained stuck in her hand,” thus exposing “a raw head without face” (5) (“das Gesicht [blieb] in den zwei Händen … bloßen wunden Kopf ohne Gesicht”) (457–58), or “another hand suddenly to be coming out of the wall” (55) (“dass … mit einem Male aus der Wand eine andere Hand entgegenkam”) (520). This haunting imagery exhibits the devastating effects of modernity on the individual: it literalizes the loss of a stable identity and a cohesive sense of self. Taking up a life of their own, these body fragments reveal the instability of Malte’s bodily boundaries and ultimately his failure to develop a stable ego structure over the course of his childhood.5 Malte is both overflowing with excessive sensibility and dissociated from his surroundings and from reality, as when he writes: “I can’t give up sleeping with my window open. Electric trams hurtle through my room with their bells ringing. Automobiles drive over me. A door slams shut. Somewhere a pane of window glass shatters and falls, I can hear its large shards laughing, the smaller splinters giggling.” (3) (“Daß ich es nicht lassen kann, bei offenem Fenster zu schlafen. Elektrische Bahnen rasen läutend durch meine Stube. Automobile gehen über mich hin. Eine Tür fällt zu. Irgendwo klirrt eine Scheibe herunter, ich höre ihre großen Scherben lachen, die kleinen Splitter kichern.”) (455) There are multiple references in the novel to Malte’s experience of being permeable and his perception that there is neither a barrier keeping him in and others out nor a clear distinction between himself and the external world. With his limited sense of a 3  Rochelle Tobias, “Rilke’s Landscape of the Heart: On the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Modernism/modernity 20, 4 (2013): 669. 4  Andreas Huyssen, “Paris / Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Modernity and the Text: Revisions of German Modernism, ed. Andreas Huyssen and David Bathrick (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 118. 5  See Ibid., 117.

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differentiated self, he could be said to suffer from what Lacan diagnosed as the ordinary psychosis of modern society.6 In a Lacanian reading, Malte’s psychosis would not be a sign of his loss of reality. Rather it would indicate his heightened awareness of the phantasmagoric nature of reality itself, and reveal his insight that the real is too close for him to distance himself sufficiently from its grip.7 Malte is obsessed with death and he identifies in an unhealthy manner with the alienating experience of mass existence. He is also overly focused on the random and contiguous order of sense impressions and the reality that lurks behind the surface appearance of things. Yet Rilke’s semi-­ autobiographical novel offers neither a conclusive medical diagnosis of the protagonist’s psychological condition, nor a detailed commentary on the external circumstances that have caused his mental illness. The attention is instead directed toward an analysis of the material situations and discursive conditions by which an artist—Malte Laurids Brigge—can observe and record his inner life in relation to the external world—despite his alienated cultural position. Specifically, the novel attempts to capture the process by which Malte’s gaze allows the material and experiential poverty of modernity to become visible. This process is explicitly referred to in Malte’s mantra, repeated intermittently in the first part of the novel, according to which he must “learn to see” (“sehen lernen”). Judith Ryan has convincingly argued that Rilke’s notion of “learning to see” is “thoroughly empiricist” in that it is concerned with the premise of sensory perception through introspection.8 With its emphasis on Malte’s sensory perceptions and their role in anchoring (or not) his self in the body, the novel can be read as a commentary on the “introspective” method in psychology, pioneered by the German physician, physiologist, and philosopher Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) and continued throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century.9 Malte’s attempts to closely and painstakingly describe his mental experience of sensory events resemble Wundt’s “controlled self-observation” (kontrollierte Selbstbeobachtung), which infused his

6  Jacques Lacan, “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton & Company, 2002), 206. 7  Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 7. 8  Judith Ryan, The Vanishing Subject, 59. 9  Ibid.

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empirical research with a systematic and highly practiced form of self-examination.10 What has been overlooked in the existing scholarship is that Rilke’s novel not only represents the challenges inherent in empirical psychology. It also critically engages with the renewed anatomical orientation toward the study of the brain in the final decades of the nineteenth century, when several prominent figures revived Gall’s anatomical work from the early 1800s. Theodor Meynert (1833–1892) thus conducted the first histological studies and Bernhard von Gudden (1824–1886) and Paul Flechsig (1847–1929) further refined his methods. At the turn of the century and throughout the years during which Rilke conceived and published  the Notebooks, brain anatomy was further popularized through the pioneering work of German neurologists Oskar Vogt (1870–1959) and Cécile Vogt-­ Mugnier (1875–1962), who introduced the method of cytoarchitectonics to study the cellular composition of the cerebral tissues under the microscope. This chapter reads The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge allegorically as a commentary on the disciplinary shifts in the institutional and organizational structure of neuroscience at the turn of the twentieth century. Read in this way, Rilke’s novel conveys a critique of new scientific insights into the neuroanatomical basis of psychological phenomena. As it critically engages the fields of empirical psychology, neurology, and psychiatry, the novel however resists the equation of brain and personhood, a view grounded in both Wundt’s reductionism and new experimental techniques and technologies of brain ablation. More broadly, the novel reflects a skeptical attitude toward any psychological and neurological approach to understanding the nature of the human mind or soul, including Wundt’s empirical psychology, Charcot’s psychiatric legacy, and their critical counter-­trend in the field of experimental neuroanatomy. To reiterate the claim made in previous chapters, literature shapes new objects of knowledge through representation and aesthetic expression. In Rilke’s novel, experimental neuroanatomy thus emerges as more than a theme. It is an object of poetic knowledge. While the text does not explicitly refer to or quote from scientific sources, it produces knowledge about the pitfalls and potential misuses of neuroanatomy through the logic of poetics alone. In particular, it puts pressure on the ethics of neuroanatomy 10  See, for instance, Wilhelm Wundt, “Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung,” Philosophische Studien 1 (1888): 615–617.

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at a time when its mission intertwines with the budding eugenics movement, thematized in the novel through the marginalized and peripheral existence of “the outcasts” (“die Fortgeworfenen”). The Notebooks’ critique of these seemingly disposable lives, which foreshadow what Nazi jurists Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche would come to define as “life unworthy of life” (lebensunwertes Leben), is enacted through modernity’s quintessential aesthetic form of expression: the rhetorical mode of allegory.11

Scientizing Medicine For scholars working in the tradition of Paul de Man’s rhetorical analysis, Rilke’s place in literary modernism is defined by his use of allegory. In this seminal reading, de Man described Rilke’s literary technique as an ethical imperative to allegorical self-reference, whereby an “advanced level of reflexive self-knowledge” serves to expose the frailty and alienation of modern consciousness.12 This chapter argues that de Man’s reading of the allegorical mode in Rilke’s poetry can be extended to the Notebooks, and to Malte’s confrontation with the demolished building in particular. While there have been many allegorical readings of Rilke’s poetry in the terms suggested by de Man, Rilke’s novel has not received the same kind of rigorous critical attention, despite the fact that the depiction of the demolished building in particular adds an important dimension to Rilke’s use of allegory. Rather than confronting the outside world as an autonomous subject, Malte here sees himself confronted by an allegorical representation of his interiority. This results in a chiastic reversal of interiority and exteriority illustrating “the loss, the disappearance of the subject as subject.”13 The allegorical process thus follows a double movement: the building figures as a dark vision of Malte’s insides, conveying with shocking clarity how “the outside of things has become internalized.”14 At the same time, the allegory conveys a deeper connection between the poet/ writer and his text: the building figures as an image of Malte’s notebook 11  Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life: Its Measure and Form (Suzeteo Enterprises, 2012). 12  Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 24. 13  Ibid., 36. 14  Ibid. See also Lilian R. Furst, Through the Lens of the Reader: Explorations of European Narrative (New York: SUNY Press, 1991), 36.

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that itself takes the form of a dissociated, seemingly unstructured textual experiment.15 Scant scholarly attention has been paid to the depiction of the demolished building, which, under the scrutiny of Malte’s observing eye, operates like an allegory in the Benjaminian sense. Just like for Benjamin the glass facades of the Paris Arcades exposed images of capitalistic opulence and consumption that might otherwise remain concealed from historical consciousness, the building’s torn-down walls betray the degraded condition of man under the ruinous infrastructure of capitalism. In both cases, transparency unveils disintegration covered up by ideology, thereby destabilizing the boundaries between inside and out, between subjective dream-­ worlds and objective reality, to allow for a more profound understanding of the inescapability of modernity and the false and illusory nature of capitalist progress—there simply is no retreat from the intoxicating chaos of the streets of Paris. But contrary to the consumerist temples of Benjamin’s arcades, Rilke’s demolished working-class dwellings are literally stripped of their interiors, and they were never plush to begin with. Upon viewing the austere building, Malte stands frozen, even just for a fraction of time, to contemplate. He is shocked to the depth of his being as he recognizes the allegory, and himself in it, and breaks into a run as soon as he recognizes its meaning.16 As an allegory, the image of the building exposes a truth that is fragmentary, enigmatic, and impossible to communicate. And so Malte keeps anticipating the disbelief of his readers: “No, people will say I am making it up.” (“Nein, man wird sagen, ich fälsche.”) He suddenly becomes aware not only of the lack and poverty that define his very existence, but also of his inability to attest to this lack. This speaks to Benjamin’s insight that the allegorical mode of seeing is a destructive form of seeing, as it requires the subject to acknowledge that signification is

15  In a letter to Manon zu Solms-Laubach from 11 April, 1910, Rilke refers to The Notebooks as “disordered papers.” Rilke, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton, 2 vols. (New York: Norton, 1945–1948), Vol. 1: 364. 16  Malte’s response obeys the logic of allegory. It makes visible and at the same time disrupts “the flux of images with which the city of Paris forever disguises its essential nullity,” as Kevin Newmark observes in a commentary on Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne.” Kevin Newmark, “Who needs Poetry? Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Modernity of ‘Le Cygne,’” Comparative Literature 63, 3 (2011): 276.

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only available in the form of a sudden intuition that is, like the essence of modernity itself, transitory and fleeting.17 The central allegory of a torn-down building that registers and preserves the impoverishment of the modern experience brings to light a Benjaminian manner of perception (Anschauungsweise). This term denotes an allegorical mode of seeing that transforms things into signs that, in the absence of legible meaning, cannot be deciphered. And yet they take control of the subject who invests them with significance.18 As Malte s observes: “I am learning how to see. I don’t know what the reason is, but everything enters into me more deeply and no longer stops at the point where it used to come to an end. I have an inner self that I knew nothing about. Now everything goes into it.” (4) (“Ich lerne sehen. Ich weiß nicht, woran es liegt, es geht alles tiefer in mich ein und bleibt nicht an der Stelle stehen, wo es sonst immer zu Ende war. Ich habe ein Inneres, von dem ich nicht wußte. Alles geht jetzt dorthin. Ich weiß nicht, was dort geschieht.”) (456) Malte’s allegorical mode of seeing stands in stark contrast with the exacting scientific gaze of the clinicians he goes to see at the Salpêtrière, just as his Aufzeichnungen (jottings, records, sketches) nowhere resemble the notes taken by such medical experts. As a matter of fact, Malte’s allegorical gaze starts precisely where these scientists’ methodologies of accurate recording and classifying of medical symptoms leave off. It cultivates uncertainty and ambiguity as its goal. By contrast, the doctors at the Salpêtrière presume their medical object to be fixed and immutable as they look at Malte “with the superior expert curiosity that they have been taught to display” (34) (“mit jener überlegenen, fachlichen Neugier, die sie gelernt hatten”) (494). In the nineteenth-century regime of psychiatry, the body was considered knowable and readable. Clinical science could  Peter Osborne, Walter Benjamin: Modernity (London: Taylor & Francis, 2005), 57. As Newmark observes, allegory “simply and directly reveal[s] the poverty ‘hidden’ in all the dream images of capitalistic opulence without betraying that poverty in the bargain, thus subjecting it to the very same illusions of historical knowledge and progress that are supposed to be ‘exposed’ by the text in the first place.” Newmark, “Who needs Poetry?,” 273. 18  Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique 22, Special Issue on Modernism (1981): 112. See on this also Huyssen who notes that “Malte does not see holistically. Rather he perceives in fragments.” Huyssen, “Paris / Childhood,” 118. See Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974): Vol. I. 3, 1151. 17

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solve its mysteries through close observation. Indeed, the notion of “learning to see” had been a key element in the training of psychiatrists ever since the German physician Friedrich Nasse (1778–1851) emphasized the need to provide students with the “opportunity to see and to observe exactly and repeatedly.”19 As Eric J. Engstrom notes, “of all the qualities that good psychiatric researchers [working in the nineteenth century] necessarily possessed, none were thought more important than their visual faculties.”20 “Look and listen attentively,” Swiss neurologist Otto Binswanger (1881–1966) thus demanded of his students at Jena University, just as the German physician and pathologist Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) insisted on the need to “learn to see microscopically,” indicating that seeing microscopically was something that had to be learned. A more holistic approach was recommended by Carl Friedrich Flemming (1799–1880) who called for an “incisive gaze” (“durchdringender Blick”) that “unconsciously separates essential from inessential [symptoms] and that easily and assuredly penetrates to the core of the things without the need for exhaustive research.”21 Recounting Malte’s visit to the hospital, the nineteenth entry of  the Notebooks offers a scathing critique of the primacy of the visual in neurology and psychiatry. Malte is treated by practitioners who neglect the underlying spiritual roots of a patient’s disease in their concern for its apparent physiological causes. As they stare and stare and sternly inquire into Malte’s sleeping habits (but nothing else), they fail to see that his problem is not that he sleeps badly, but that any sleep, regardless of its quality, provides but a temporary reprieve from his cognitive ailment: his allegorical gaze reaches too broadly and too deeply. By contrast, his doctors are “unconcerned” (34) (“gleichgültig”) (493), “distracted” (“zerstreut”), and “short-sighted” (“kurzsichtig”) (494), as Rilke writes not

19  Friedrich Nasse, “Über das Bedürfnis, daß mit der Vorbereitung zu dem ärztlichen Berufe auch jedesmal die zu dem ärztlichen Geschäft bei physischen Kranken verbunden sei, und über die günstige Gelegenheit zu dieser Vorberetitung,” Zeitschrift für psychische Ärzte 2 (1819): 344. Quoted after Eric J. Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany: A History of Psychiatric Practice (Ithaka: Cornell University Press, 2003), 121. 20  Ibid. 21   Carl Friedrich Flemming, Pathologie und Therapie der Psychosen (Berlin: August Hirschwald, 1859), 281. Quoted after Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry, 121.

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without a hint of irony.22 Just as his initial referring doctor “didn’t understand [Malte]. Not a bit” (32) (“Der Arzt hat mich nicht verstanden. Nichts”) (492), the experts at the clinic put Malte off with a vague promise to get back to him. Malte eventually leaves the premises with neither a diagnosis nor a treatment, let alone a cure. It is not clear from the novel specifically what kinds of health-care professionals Malte consults during his visit at the Salpêtrière. However, Malte does mention that the purpose of his visit is to experiment with “electric shock treatment” (32) (“mit dem Elektrisieren”) (492), a technique that was in wide use at the Salpêtrière after Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) developed its Laboratoire d’électrothérapie (electrotherapeutic laboratory).23 When Rilke first went to Paris in 1902 and also during later visits in 1905–6 and 1907, Pierre Janet (1859–1947) was the principal physician and director of the renowned Laboratoire de psychologie de la Clinique (clinical psychology laboratory), which he had inherited from his mentor Charcot in 1890.24 During his tenure, Janet continued to be a major exponent of Charcot’s teachings, which included hypnosis and electroshock therapy, even if Janet repeatedly stressed that the essence of his therapeutic practice was the use of language rather than hypnosis, as he hoped to change the consciousness of his patients through the power of words. Of course, there is no mention of such a proverbial talking cure in Malte’s account of his hospital visit. Yet Malte’s symptoms, which include phobias, obsessions, compulsions, and excessive anxiety, correspond to those listed in the definition of psychasthenia, a psychological disorder historically associated primarily with the work of Janet.25 In Rilke’s account, the doctors’ materialist approach lags behind more innovative (and progressive) treatments of the time, such as the ethically and holistically oriented collaborative therapy propagated by Janet. The 22  Otto Binswanger, “Die Lehraufgaben der psychiatrischen Klinik: Rede gehalten beim Antritte der ordentlichen Professur in der Universitatsaula zu Jena,” Klinisches Jahrbuch 4 (1892): 49. Quoted after Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry, 121. 23  Hansgeorg Schmidt-Bergmann, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 277. 24  See Dianne F. Sadoff, Sciences of the Flesh: Representing Body and Subject in Psychoanalysis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 110. 25  Pierre Janet and F.  Raymond, Les Obsessions et la Psychasthenie. Fragments des Leçons Cliniques du Mardi sur les Etats Neurasthéniques, Les Aboulies, les Sentiments d’Incomplitude, les Agitations et les Angoisses Diffuses, les Algies, les Phobies, les Delires du Contact, les Tics, les Manies Mentales, les Folies du Doute, les Idées Obsédantes, les Impulsions, leur Pathogénie et Leur Traitement (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1903).

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conduct of Malte’s doctors exemplifies the scientification of medicine, a paradigm that arose in the course of the nineteenth century in Germany and was subsequently adopted by Janet and his followers in France.26 The former famously promoted the notion that a patient’s personal experience had to be converted and subsumed into universal rules of action that could be conventionalized.27 With their impersonal and seemingly mechanical question about his sleeping habits, as well as their automatized gestures, Malte’s doctors represent a more standardized medical practice that contrasts not only with Janet, but also with other leading neurologists of the time, including Charcot, who was known for his more effusive, theatrical style, and the School of Nancy led by Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919) and Ambroise Auguste Liébeault (1823–1904), who claimed to relieve suffering through the power of suggestions and personal relationships (rapports).28 The way in which Malte’s doctors fail to see him is remarkably consistent with, and expressive of, Malte’s own suspension of identity and his absorption into the anonymity of the urban masses.

Autopsy of the Soul Malte’s brief encounter with the medical profession highlights the conflict that split views of the human psyche at the time. In his own assessment of his illness, Malte subscribes to an understanding of psychology predating the moment when, in the late 1800s, it became an academic and clinical discipline that was strictly medical and therefore pathology-oriented. In Malte’s view, a study of his inner mental life ought to explore his deepest self or essence, rather than being confined to an empiricist survey of scientifically measurable, physiological parameters. When he suggests that his illness “has no specific features of its own, it adopts the features of the person it takes hold of” (37) (“Diese Krankheit hat keine bestimmten Eigenheiten, sie nimmt die Eigenheiten dessen an, den sie ergreift.”) (498), he also rejects the idea that he might be suffering from unconscious conflicts that would be intrinsic to his unique experience. What makes 26  See Dimiter Ginev and Asarja Polikarov, “The Scientification of Methodology of Science,” Zeitschrift für allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie/Journal for General Philosophy of Science 19, 1 (1988): 18–27. See also W. F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 27  Christian Dunker, The Constitution of the Psychoanalytic Clinic: A History of Its Structure and Power (London: Karnac, 2011), xvi. 28  Ibid.

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Malte sick is not an unconscious “other” in the sense of a Lacanian Autre en moi (“Other who is within me”), but something too frightening and magnificent to be articulated and brought to light through psychoanalysis, namely, the “most secret depths” (“heimlichste Tiefen”) of his proper soul.29 Positing an opaque, essential humanness at the center of his disease, Malte resists a purely somatic interpretation of his illness. At the same time, he takes an ironic, anti-psychosomatic stance when he claims that “you die the death that goes with the disease that you have (because since we now are familiar with all diseases, we also know that their various fatal closures belong to the disease and not to the person; there is in a way nothing for the ill to do themselves” (6). (“Man stirbt den Tod, der zu der Krankheit gehört, die man hat [denn seit man alle Krankheiten kennt, weiß man auch, dass die verschiedenen letalen Abschlüsse zu den Krankheiten gehören und nicht zu den Menschen; und der Kranke hat sozusagen nichts zu tun.]”) (459) Mocking the psychosomatic trend in modern medicine, led by the Hungarian physician Franz Gabriel Alexander (1892–1964) and the German internist Gustav von Bergmann (1878–1955), Malte dismisses the relationships among social, psychological, and behavioral factors on bodily processes and the quality of life of humans and animals. Rather than focusing on the links between soma and psyche, he directs the reader’s attention to the complicated kinds of interdependences between the soma and the anima.30 And yet, Malte’s illness and the medical attention he receives illustrate key aspects of the clash between neuroanatomy and experimental psychology that took place at the turn of the century. This clash was a consequence of the shift toward neurology in the scientific research of the 1870s and 1880s. During this period, psychiatrists in the German-speaking world increasingly reoriented themselves toward neuroanatomic work, which was circumscribed in ever more narrowly defined cerebral regions and functional constituents. Drawing on many of the new scientific methods and research techniques, such as cytoarchitectonic studies and experimental degeneration methods, psychiatrists supplied evidence backing up localization theories and solidifying the reputation of their profession as medical science. New findings were flanked by the legacy of Griesinger’s  Rilke, “Wert des Monologs,” Dramaturgische Blätter 1, 38 (1898): 295.  See Olaf Meyer, Leib-Seele-Problem und Medizin: ein Beitrag anhand des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2005), 51–52. 29 30

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maxim that “all mental illnesses are cerebral illnesses” (in the sense that they can be wholly comprehended in terms of cerebral processes, that is, as illnesses of the nerves and brain) and the detailed anatomic studies of the brain by prominent figures like Meynert, von Gudden, and Flechsig.31 So pervasive was the influence of neuropathology and cerebral anatomy that one observer was moved to note that many prominent psychiatrists virtually ignored their own discipline in the attempt to create the neuroanatomical basis for understanding normal and pathologically altered states of psychic life. The new dominance of neurological research was epitomized in Flechsig’s 1894 inaugural lecture as rector of the University of Leipzig, entitled “Brain and Soul” (“Gehirn und Seele”).32 In this lecture, Flechsig subsumed the latter to the former, arguing that the soul was a mere function or epiphenomenon of material, biophysical processes. As he states: “More than ever am I convinced that the brain as an organ fully and completely covers all appearances of the soul, and that we are capable of developing its conditions with the same precision with which we develop all other natural appearances available to our cognition.” [translation mine] (“Mehr als je habe ich die Überzeugung, dass das Gehirn als Organ voll und ganz die Seelenerscheinungen deckt und dass wir im Stande sind, die Bedingungen derselben mit gleicher Schärfe zu entwickeln, wie die alles anderen unserem Erkennen zugänglichen Naturgeschehens.”)33 In the same year, the Swiss psychiatrist Auguste-Henri Forel (1848–1931) used neuron theory and advanced psychophysiology to demonstrate that “the living brain and the soul are one and the same.”34 Turning almost completely against every form of metaphysical thinking, Forel attempted to integrate his monistic worldview in a framework that was based entirely on the natural sciences. And in France, Janet noted a similar trend, stating that his psychiatric training revealed “the unstable compromise between

31  Shorter, A History of Psychiatry, 76. See Wilhelm Griesinger, Die Pathologie und Therapie der psychischen Krankheiten, für Ärzte und Studierende (Stuttgart: Krabbe, 1845). 32  Paul Flechsig, Gehirn und Seele. Rede, gehalten am 31. October 1894  in der Universitätskirche zu Leipzig (Leipzig: Verlag von Veit & Comp, 1896). 33  Flechsig, Gehirn und Seele, 8. 34  Auguste Forel, “Zum Begriff des Monismus,” Der Monismus 3 (1908): 10–14. Quoted after Bernhard Kuechenhoff, “The Psychiatrist Auguste Forel and his Attitude to Eugenics,” History of Psychiatry 19, 2 (2008): 218.

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incompatible tendencies, a strong taste for the natural sciences and for religious or even mystical feelings.”35 Thus, as the “century of science” draws to a close, medicine relates subjective experience to the brain in an effort to understand the mind from the inside, as a function of cerebral activity.36 Neuroscientists are increasingly dismissive of the idea of a soul as “something essentially other” (“etwas wesentlich Anderes”).37 In response, dissenting voices become audible, perhaps most famously that of Daniel Paul Schreber who accused his psychiatrist Flechsig of committing “soul murder” while treating him for dementia praecox (“premature dementia” or “precocious madness”).38 Schreber’s prominent case epitomizes the public outcry over the medical-materialist paradigm. It also provides a context for the Notebooks, in which Malte openly flouts the authority of the medical profession and the scientific community. That being said, the force of Malte’s accusation is best understood in the terms of the anti-psychiatry movement that emerged in the late 1890s in Europe denouncing the abuse of patients. The novel reinstates the binarism between the biological-­ physiological and the metaphysical realms, which psychiatrists working in the field of psychopathology and neuroanatomy had been challenging since the second half of the nineteenth century.39 This is not to deny that the novel observes the interdependence between, accelerated nerve activity and decreased degrees of conscious experience. However, the text does not revel in the scientific details of anatomical dissections and the narrator 35  David B.  Baker, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology: Global Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 236. 36  Robert D.  Purrington, Physics in the Nineteenth Century (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1997), 1. 37  Flechsig, Gehirn und Seele, 10. 38  Eric L.  Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 78. 39  This is not to contest Kittler’s contention that Rilke’s novel could be renamed Memoirs of my Simulation of Nervous Illness (Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkrankheitssimulanten), as it is replete with references to the intensification of the nervous life (Steigerung des Nervenlebens), which Georg Simmel had identified as a key response to the overwhelming negative stimulation of the city. The novel provides an acute diagnosis of the effects of city life on the modern subject’s neurological state. Yet it resists the development in the medical sciences according to which “everyday language had been replaced by nerve language,” as Kittler contends. Friedrich A.  Kittler, The Truth of the Technological World. Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, with an afterword by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 65.

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resists making himself a mouthpiece of the latest methodological discoveries. The famous passage describing a Parisian ticqueur does not directly reference the medical literature on Tourette’s syndrome, even if it accurately depicts the syndrome first described by French physician and neurologist Gilles de la Tourette (1857–1904) in 1885.40 The passage is a masterfully written, lyrical and poignant vignette that dallies with the reader’s expectation of both medical knowledge and poetic meaning.41 But, as Friedrich Kittler has pointed out, what is important in this passage is not the medically accurate portrayal of a ticqueur by Rilke, but the simulation of his gestures and tics by Malte: as he follows him down the street, Malte experiences “something real,” as Kittler writes, something which neither empathy nor hermeneutics could reach.42 To add one more element to Kittler’s discussion, even the sphere of institutionalized medicine, personified by the clinical gaze, would be unable to penetrate the mystery of the man’s nervous and neuropsychiatric disorder. The novel contends that the artist, and only the artist, knows about the kind of madness that is unheeded by clinical experts and ignored by specialized knowledge, regardless of its disciplinary affiliation. It is the madness that bears the mark of what Eric Santner terms the somatic sublime, “push[ing] against the boundaries of the skin and threaten[ing] the integrity of personhood.”43 Set against the backdrop of neuroanatomical revisions of psychiatry, Malte’s commentary converges with a new voice that inserted itself around 1900. Convinced that “all psychological phenomena must originate in the brain and have some anatomical substrate,” the German husband and wife 40   Gilles de la Tourette, “Etude sur une Affection nerveuse charactérisée par de l’Incoordination motrice accompagnée de l’Echolalie et de la Coprolalie,” Archives de Neurologie 9 (1885): 19–42; 158–200. The eponym “Tourette syndrome” was bestowed by Jean-Martin Charcot on behalf of his resident physician. The passage has also been interpreted as a form of Veitstanz, see most recently Wesley Lim, “Bridging Gesture, Gesticulation, and Early Modern Dance: Rilke’s Veitstänzer in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Dance Chronicle 39, 3 (2016): 279–298. 41  See the following article, authored by medical experts and written from a medical perspective, on the representation of motor tic disorder in Rilke’s novel: “Rilke’s description of a Parisian tiqueur is both accurate and informative. We are unaware of any previous mention of this in the medical literature.” A. E. Cavanna, et al., “The ‘imprisoned illness:’ Motor tic disorder in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Movement Disorder 25, 12 (2010): 1973–1992. 42  Kittler, Discourse Networks, 329. 43  Eric Santner, The Royal Remains. The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 239.

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team Oskar and Cécile Vogt (1870–1959) effectively leveled the playing field between brain physiologists and psychologists.44 In a much-noted 1897 review of his mentor Flechsig’s work, Oskar Vogt wrote that “to each intellectual element, emotional elements are linked,” while “the appearance of the emotional elements is accompanied by subcortical alterations in innervation.”45 The Vogts advanced a line of thinking that foregrounds individual physiognomy following (and escalating) the tradition of Gall’s phrenology. In their view, a person’s cerebral cortex could in principle provide their characterological and indeed moral profile. This kind of scientific reductionism is even more obvious in a 1912 publication, where Vogt programmatically argues that the entire cultural and social development of humankind could be traced back to the formation and function of the brain.46 In this context, Rilke’s Notebooks emerge as a forceful counterpart to the neuroanatomical research at the turn of the century. Not only does the novel resist the equation of brain and personhood that is articulated with a new level of vehemence in the work of the Vogts, it also offers an implicit critique of the experimental work on which this theoretical understanding rested. Many of the advances in nineteenth-century neuroscience were made possible by the surgical removal of brain tissue during vivisection of live animals with the goal of determining what abilities would be affected. Pierre Flourens (1794–1867), who is widely considered the founder of experimental brain science, significantly refined traditional techniques of ablation. In 1822, he reported that he had reached new levels of precision in the procedure by exposing the cerebral hemisphere and removing parts of it through successive slicing.47 Around the same time, French physician Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796–1881) began using human autopsy examinations to locate brain areas responsible for speech disorder. Inasmuch as their instruments allowed them to do so, neuroscientists cut up their deceased patients’ brains in thousands of microscopic slices, moving through successively deeper layers in search of scientific clues. At a time 44  Igor Klatzo, Cécile and Oskar Vogt: The Visionaries of Modern Neuroscience (New York: Springer, 2002), 2. 45   Oskar Vogt, “Flechsig’s Associationscentrenlehre, ihre Anhänger und Gegner,” Zeitschrift für Hypnotismus 5 (1897): 357–358. 46  Oskar Vogt, “Bedeutung, Ziele und Wege der Hirnforschung,” Nord und Süd 36 (1912): 313. 47   Quoted after Clarke and Jacyna, Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts, 258.

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when microscopy was still unsatisfactory, von Gudden developed a specialized microtome for sectioning the human brain, which his then assistant Forel subsequently improved to obtain entire human brain sections at about 55μm in thickness. Given the power of laboratory instruments and increasingly sophisticated skills in brain ablation, the systematic inspection and manipulation of human brains became not only possible but also scientifically imperative. However, the institutional availability of specimens was not always a given. Brain ablation depended upon the acquisition of jurisdiction over patient bodies and corpses. In the late nineteenth century, hospitals in Prussia and other German states increased in size and scope, and the number of available specimens grew exponentially, making corpses more accessible to anatomists and pathologists, especially those working in larger cities. Finally, as Engstrom points out, “access to corpses was eased by the fact that doctors required no explicit consent from patients or relatives before conducting an autopsy.”48 The Notebooks voice an implicit critique of the biopolitical management of corpses and the malpractice of human autopsy through the recurring image of “outcasts” (“die Fortgeworfenen”), members of the underclass who seem to emerge from the lowest depths far beneath society, the Paris underground. These haunting, liminal figures spill into the streets, where they lurk and linger, not unlike Malte himself. When Malte first sets his gaze upon the outcasts he immediately intuits that they occupy the realm between life and death. These broken, marionette-like creatures prefigure their own future role as the next cadaver to be autopsied by a team of eager physicians.49 Malte’s description literalizes their status as autopsy material to be expended and subsequently discarded. Highlighting the body part that contains the key component of the cerebral autopsy, his account metonymically refers to the outcasts as “Schalen,” intimating their function as skull-caps (“Gehirnschalen”): “They are scraps, the [skull-]caps of people who have been spat out by fate [translation modified].” (23) (“Es sind Abfälle, Schalen von Menschen, die das Schicksal ausgespien hat.”) (481) It is hardly a surprise that the outcasts are crowding the Salpêtrière upon Malte’s first hospital visit. Their presence  Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany, 95.  Eric Santner, “Überlegungen zum Somatisch Erhabenen,” Präsenz: Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie 1 (2009): 34–45, and E. Santner, On Creaturely Life (Chicago: Chicago University Pess, 2006), xvii. 48 49

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prefigures their future function as an object of serial sectioning: “And there were many bandages. Bandages that covered the whole of people’s heads, layer after layer, so that there was only an eye visible, which was no longer part of a person.” (33) (“Und viele Verbände gab es. Verbände, die den ganzen Kopf Schicht um Schicht umzogen, bis nur noch ein einziges Auge da war, das niemandem mehr gehörte.”) (493) The imagery of extensive “layers” concentrating around “people’s heads” to expose a single dissected body part (in this case, an eye) foreshadows the successive cerebral ablations to be conducted by the Salpêtrière’s doctors. It also refers back to the term Schale, which is etymologically linked to the verb schälen (to pare, to shell).

Brain Ablation The idea of sectional ablation is most clearly conveyed in the almost obscene imagery of the partially demolished Parisian tenement building. Not only is the structure of urban tenement housing in itself reminiscent of the organization of the brain, as both are built of discrete but interacting functional units—Zellen (“cells”)—that provide an intrinsic order for the complex interplay or various activities. More importantly, the process of tearing down a building, albeit infinitely less delicate and precise, nevertheless resembles the successive and gradual slicing of all superior, posterior, and anterior layers—or walls—of the brain during microscopic ablation. As Malte explains, layers of walls enclosing inner spaces “had been removed from alongside” the remaining structure. His description echoes neurosurgical accounts describing the laminar organization of brain tissue, of the cerebral cortex in particular, which are likewise arranged in multiple layers. Looking at “the last wall of the houses that had been there,” Malte can’t help but notice the demolished building’s sickly, molding, and putrefied inner sides. His vision implies that he is referring to organic matter rather than inert building materials. Is the building a living organism? Does its now-defunct toilet plumbing, which “crept in unspeakably disgusting, squashily wormlike, almost digesting motions,” convey its creaturely nature? Malte’s language again resonates with the accounts of neuroanatomists describing the cortex as a tangled, tortuous, and winding structure and it especially echoes a term first used by German anatomist Johann Friedrich Meckel (1781–1833) for a small section of the cerebellum, termed the cerebellar vermis after its worm-shaped appearance

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(vermis is Latin for “worm”).50 What the demolition exposes is, above all, the almost cartilaginous and fibrous quality of the building’s material substance. An episode in Hermann Conradi’s novel Adam Man (Adam Mensch, 1889), which may have inspired Rilke’s passage, also highlights the winding, nerve-like, and fibrous attributes of a demolished building.51 Moreover, Rilke’s torn-down tenement is permeated by manifold tubes and ducts (“Rinnen” and “Röhren”), the grain, as it were, that make up the labyrinth of its quasi-cerebral fiber construction: “ [T]hey bent in various places, quite unexpectedly, coming full circle and running into the painted wall and into a black hole that had been punched out pitilessly.” It is in the latter quote that the novel most clearly converges with the work of contemporary neuroscientists and especially with the collaborative effort between the Vogts and their colleague, the German neurologist Korbinian Brodmann (1868–1918). During the period when Rilke composed The Notebooks, the Vogts and Brodmann pioneered the creation of myelo- and cyto-architectonic maps using the Nissl method of staining cross sections of the cortex in human and nonhuman primate brains. Working in the Vogts’ prestigious neurobiological laboratory in Berlin, Brodmann used light microscopes to reveal the position of neuronal cell bodies. This method allowed him to produce detailed structural and architectonic maps of the exact distribution, density, and size of nerve cells in the cerebral cortex of different species. Identifying the precise arrangement of cells in clusters and columns, Brodmann’s illustrations are quasi-­ architectural drawings parcellating the cerebral cortex into six cellular layers, from outside (pial surface) to inside (white matter) (Fig. 7.1).52 One of Brodmann’s illustrations of an opossum brain thus features a round, black circle representing the commissura anterior, a bundle of nerve fibers playing a key role in pain and pain sensation (Fig. 7.2). Note 50  The cerebellar vermis receives information from the spinal cord about the sense of touch and proprioception. See Johann Friedrich Meckel, Handbuch der menschlichen Anatomie, 3 vols. (Berlin and Halle: Buchhandlung des hallischen Waisenhauses, 1817), Vol. 3: “Besondere Anatomie,” 468. 51   “Einen wüsten Schutthaufen gab’s, grauschwarz nahm sich’s in der falben Monddämmerung aus, Balkenköpfe ragten as dem massiven Wirrwarr mit den stumpfen Grenzen ihrer plumpen Formen heraus, verschiedene, wie geschundene Mauerreste standen herum, herabfaserndes Rohrwerk lugte aus seiner verwinkelten Hausecke.” Hermann Conradi, Adam Mensch (Leipzig: Friedrich, 1889), 415. 52  Korbinian Brodmann, Vergleichende Lokalisationslehre der Großhirnrinde in ihren Prinzipien dargestellt auf Grund des Zellenbaues (Leipzig: Barth, 1909). English translation by L. J. Grey, Brodmann’s Localization in the Cerebral Cortex (London: Smith Gordon, 1994).

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Fig. 7.1  Korbinian Brodmann (left) working at the Oscar Vogt Institute, Berlin. Photograph. Korbinian-Brodmann-Museum Hohenfels

that Malte’s account of the torn-down building references “a black hole that had been punched out pitilessly,” as if suggesting that the building could experience pain, and that the source center of this pain was indeed localizable. (A century after Gall first disseminated his “craniological” theories, the medical establishment had come full circle to again value anatomically based localization—even if the latter certainly did not remain unchallenged.) In addition to relaying sharp and acute pain, the newly discovered commissura anterior links the two temporal lobes of the cerebral hemispheres across the midline, just as the two separate parts of Rilke’s novel converge, as Tobias has argued, in a caesura that represents the heart of the novel.53 This caesura (“cutting”) is both the place and the non-place of pain and suffering, it figures as the origin of the subject’s

 Tobias, “Rilke’s Landscape of the Heart,” 2.

53

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Fig. 7.2  Korbinian Brodmann, Medial Surface of the Right Hemisphere [possibly from a Flying Fox (Pterobus Edwardsi)], Drawing. Korbinian-Brodmann-Museum Hohenfels

self-­destructive impulses while also holding the possibility of disruption, a promise of defying death.54 The urban landscape depicted in the novel provides Malte with constant opportunity to reflect on his own mortality and suffering, including the terrors of electroshock therapy and the threat of psychosis, seizures, 54  Tobias writes: “The first half of the Notebooks is significant in that it traces Malte’s efforts to keep death at bay and to remain standing upright in the face of forces larger than himself, even if they come from his interior. But only in the second half does he learn the pleasure of falling.” Ibid., 668. This speaks to Ulrich Fülleborn’s claim that the novel entails a reflection on the ontological constitution of the human being. Ulrich Fülleborn, “Form und Sinn der Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge: Rilkes Prosabuch und der moderne Roman,” Deutsche Romantheorien: Beiträge du einer historischen Poetik des Romans in Deutschland, ed. Reinhold Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1968), 256. See also Käthe Hamburger, who characterized Malte as a “phenomenologist of suffering.” Käte Hamburger, “Die phänomenologische Struktur der Dichtung Rilkes,” Jahrbuch für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 10 (1965): 217–234.

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and bodily disunity in relation to the discovery of cerebral lesions (as argued above, lesions can be both a cause for and a result of anatomical intervention). Hence, the novel stands as a kind of parable of the clash within the field of neuroscience between experimental psychology, psychiatry, and neuroanatomy. Held up against these scientific frontiers is a uniquely Rilkean vision, a spirituality-infused art of the soul that transcends such overly narrow—disciplinary and existential—confines. Elsewhere, Rilke coined the oxymoronic portmanteau Weltinnenraum der Seele (an “inner-world space” of the soul) to denote a state/space of absolute inwardness, where the boundaries between self and world, and the body and things, are at once preserved and suspended.55 Needless to say, this space is hardly accessible to the mundane, non-transcendental subject, but it persists as a possibility. To quote de Man once again: “Rilke’s work dares to affirm and promise, as few others do, a form of existential salvation that would take place in and by means of poetry.”56 At the same time, the novel can be read as a disturbing real-world premonition against a new age of biopolitical surveillance and health management and even against the eugenics ideology for which the Vogts’ scientific efforts were to become an important catalyst. It is crucial in this context that during their tenure at the preeminent scientific and research organization in Germany, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research (present-­ day Max Planck Society), the Vogts made concrete suggestions for the eugenic “improvement” of the populace, for instance through the breeding of one-sidedly gifted “leaders by nature” (Führernaturen) and the “selective enhancement” (Höherzüchtung) of the human brain. As Josef Reindl reports, they also made a case for the eradication of “beings of lesser worth” (unwertigem Leben).57 Together with their colleagues Timoféeff-Ressovsky and Julius Hallervorder, the Vogts conveniently seized the “opportunities” arising from National Socialism by dissecting

 Beda Allemann, Zeit und Figur beim späten Rilke (Stuttgart: Neske, 1961), 279.  De Man, Allegories, 23. 57  During their tenure at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Brain Research, the Vogts made concrete suggestions for eugenic “improvement” of the populace, for instance through the breeding of one-sidedly gifted “leaders by nature” (Führernaturen) and the “selective enhancement” (Höherzüchtung) of the human brain. They also made a case for the eradication of “beings of lesser worth” (unwertigem Leben). Cécile Vogt and Oskar Vogt, “Hirnforschung und Genetik,” Journal für Psychologie Neurologie 39 (1929): 438. 55 56

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hundreds of brains of “euthanasia” victims—the “Fortgeworfenen” of the Third Reich.58 As a novel about seeing, The Notebooks appear quite focused on the “outcasts,” who receive a significant amount of emphatic attention but who are also the object of Malte’s inquisitive gaze, which has displaced the spiritual exercise of poetic contemplation. As a destitute artist stranded in a foreign city, Malte is cast as both surveyor and surveyed, as a subject who apprehends and interprets that which has (so far) escaped the new form of governance, and as an object of knowledge within a complex health dispositif.59 That is to say, Malte’s gaze locates “the outcasts”—those who have been tossed out or cast away by society—as the ultimate target of an epistemological field associated with the eugenics movement. But his gaze is also projected back onto himself, reminding Malte that he inadvertently embodies the social problems and medical challenges his notebooks bring to the fore (however elusively). It is not clear from Malte’s notes whether the outcasts are real or a projection of his own inner reality, but there is little doubt to his mind that the government exerts ever greater control over ever more private aspects of his life. As he states at the beginning of the very episode that allegorizes the analogy between the outcasts, the demolished building, and the poet—himself: “They know I’m poor. They know.” [translation modified] (“Man weiß, dass ich arm bin. Man weiß es.”) Malte is acutely aware that the government utilizes the spectacular medical and scientific advances of the time to eliminate social problems such as poverty and illness, either through social reform or through the (racist and pseudo-scientific) practice of eugenics, which became an integral part of biopolitical welfare and population management in the course of the first decades of the twentieth century.60 Malte’s gaze perceives and reveals buildings that “were no longer there.” These public fixtures are demolished—“torn down, from top to bottom”—just as the outcasts are disposed of (literally, “thrown away”) 58  Josef Reindl, “Believers in an Age of Heresy? Oskar Vogt, Nikolai Timoféeff-Ressovsky and Julius Hallervorden at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research,” Science in the Third Reich, ed. Margit Szællæsi-Janze Oxford /New York: Berg Publishers 2001), 211–242. 59  Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977), Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings by Michel Foucault, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194–228. 60  See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 148–150. Already Gall had put his research in the service of “the perfectibility of the human race.” Gall, On the Functions of the Brain, 90.

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via regulatory or eugenic practice because they are believed to pose a threat to the long-term progress of humanity. Sharing the same ontological status as the pathologized bodies of the outcasts, the old, dilapidated buildings are made to disappear because they embody the specter of degeneration, but once disappeared, who will testify, or even believe, that they ever existed? When Malte asks, “Will people believe that there are houses like this? No, people will say I’m making it up . . . ,” he is also contemplating the question of whether his own death would be noticed, let alone leave a mark. Malte quickly posits realistic storytelling as a way to counter the obliviating force of biopolitical population management: “This time it is the truth, with nothing left out, and naturally nothing added either.” It is doubtful whether the singular presence of one “timelessly tragic poet” (84) (“zeitlos tragischer Dichter”) (512) could have any kind of impact or transformative effect for society. “I’m sitting here in my little room,” Malte notes pithily in the thirteenth note, “I, Brigge, who has reached the age of twenty-eight and about whom no one knows anything. I sit here and am nothing.” (13) (“Ich sitze hier in meiner kleinen Stube, ich, Brigge, der achtundzwanzig Jahre alt geworden ist und von dem niemand weiß. Ich sitze hier und bin nichts.”) (468) The fragility of Malte’s situation is blatant, not the least because he might be removed from his modest dwelling at any moment, forced to join the outcasts on the streets and thus made as obsolete as the decrepit building he is (still) inhabiting. A glaring injustice for certain, the demolition of urban dwellings endangers Malte’s precarious existence. But it also jeopardizes society as a whole. As Malte keenly observes, “[the tall adjoining houses] were apparently at risk of falling down now that everything had been removed from alongside, since a whole scaffold of long tarred poles had been rammed into place at an angle from the rubble-strewn ground to the exposed wall.” In an ironic twist, the absence of one demolished building threatens the structural integrity of its adjacent buildings, just as the ambiguous, ghostly “presence” of a number of outcasts arguably jeopardizes the coherence of society—they certainly seem to instigate Malte’s emotional and mental decline. Dare we read this as an admonition to spare the poet, for the sake of society, blessed and gifted beyond his underachieving performance in life?

CHAPTER 8

Reading Gestures: Body Schema Disorder and Schizophrenia in Franz Kafka’s Prose

Kafka could understand things only in the form of a gestus, and this gestus which he did not understand constitutes the cloudy part of the parables. Kafka’s writings emanate from it. —Walter Benjamin

Many prose narratives by Franz Kafka animate and illuminate psychopathological models of the subject. This can sometimes conceal their equally consistent preoccupation with very physical, corporeal processes. Bodies communicate crucial information in Kafka, particularly when they slip over the line from human to insect/animal corporeality. A master at rendering bodily movements, Kafka often depicted human and animal figures, complete or in parts, as well as the actions and gestures they perform or fail to perform. In Kafka’s diaries, literary sketches of distorted bodies do similar representational work as his drawings; both convey a

An earlier version of this chapter was published as “Reading Gestures: Body Schema Disorder and Schizophrenia in Kafka’s Modernist Prose,” Modernism/ modernity 26.4 (2019): 829–48. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_8

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fragmented sense of self through physical gesture.1 His prose works draw much of their liveliness from slapstick humor based on dysfunctional bodies.2 There is much hilarity in moments such as when Gregor Samsa clumsily attempts to lift his vermin body out of bed—“he lunged forward with all his force, without caring, he had picked the wrong direction and slammed himself violently against the lower bedpost” (“als er schließlich, fast wild geworden, mit gesammelter Kraft, ohne Rücksicht sich vorwärtsstieß, hatte er die Richtung falsch gewählt, schlug an den unteren Bettpfosten heftig an”)—or when Karl Rossmann, the protagonist of The Man Who Disappeared (Der Verschollene, 1927), “laugh[ed] loudly” (“lachte dabei laut”) at his “unsuccessful attempt to swing himself onto [the stoker’s bed]” (“den ersten vergeblichen Versuch, sich [in das Bett des Heizers] hinüberzuschwingen”).3 Even in these lighter moments, Kafka’s prose gives literary substance to the emergent knowledge about postural, tactile, kinesthetic, and vestibular dysfunctions explored by neuroscientists of his time. This scientific knowledge is present in works ranging from Kafka’s early prose fragment Description of a Struggle (Beschreibung eines Kampfes, 1912) to several representative stories and the major novels.4 Taking up Walter Benjamin’s seminal insight, cited in the epigraph to this chapter, that the somatic manifestations in Kafka’s fictional characters are ultimately illegible even for the author himself, this chapter explains them through the lens of neuroscientific discoveries of Kafka’s era.5 It is certainly tempting to read 1  See Jan Ehrenwald, Anatomy of Genius: Split Brains and Global Minds (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1984), 156. 2  As a corrective to Theodor W. Adorno’s reading of Kafka’s Chaplinesque humor, Isolde Schiffermüller notes that Kafka’s concrete, real-life connection with the cinema and its culture of heightened gestural expressivity predates the silent movie era and the films of Charlie Chaplin. Isolde Schiffermüller, Franz Kafka’s Gesten (Tübingen: Francke, 2011), 31–32. 3  Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Bantam, 1972), 7. Franz Kafka, “Die Verwandlung,” Kritische Ausgabe, Drucke zu Lebzeiten II, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gert Koch and Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996), 113–200. Hereafter cited in the text. Franz Kafka, The Man Who Disappeared (America), trans. Ritchie Robertson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 6. Franz Kafka, Der Verschollene. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1983), 10. Hereafter cited in the text. 4  Franz Kafka, Description of a Struggle, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Schocken Books, 1958). Franz Kafka, “Beschreibung eines Kampfes,” Kritische Ausgabe, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001), 54–120. 5  See Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 808.

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the meaning of Kafka’s opaque gestures, as when Karl Rossmann “lower[s] his eyes before the stoker and slap[s] his trouser seams as a sign that all hope was gone” (16) (“senkte vor dem Heizer das Gesicht und schlug die Hände an die Hosennaht, zum Zeichen des Endes jeder Hoffnung”) (29). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari interpret Karl’s bent head as an “index of submission, the gesture of one who is judged.”6 Yet the succeeding gesture is not as readily legible. A Duden entry defines the act of “laying one’s hands on the trouser seam” (die Hände an die Hosennaht legen) as a part of a military drill or salute involving the precise positioning of the middle finger parallel to the outseam of the trouser leg.7 This interpretation is at odds with the decidedly nonmilitary context of the gesture (the chapter is set on a passenger steamship in New York Harbor) and the suggestion that it signifies Karl’s hopelessness, as if a single, elusive gesture like this could contain the full essence of Karl’s involuntary immigration to “America” and his failed attempt to escape a scandal resulting from his seduction by a maid. How to interpret Kafka’s gestures given that they oftentimes subvert conventional modes of representation and refuse symbolic meaning? The following reading will emphasize their neuroscientific dimension in order to open a new pathway to understanding Kafka’s bodies as bodies that can be mapped and made predictable through their failing sensory-motor processes, even if the latter are inflected by the symptoms of schizophrenia, which was then, and remains today, a poorly understood diagnosis, partly because of a lack of biological markers.8 Kafka’s troubled bodies are the site of an interplay between his modernist poetics and early-twentieth-­ century neuroscientific research into both schizophrenia, a term first introduced by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939) in a 1908 lecture, and body schema disorder, a neuropathological condition (also first described in 1908) that involves difficulties in identifying body parts or their relative relations to one another. What unites both conditions in Kafka’s writings is that they oftentimes fail to register with the subject, and even if they register, do so without offering etiological perspectives on the precise nature of these respective psycho- and neuropathological 6  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 61. 7  http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Hosennaht (February 14, 2018). 8  Joel Paris, The Intelligent Clinician’s Guide to the DSM-5 (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2015), 98.

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i­mpairments. This finds its historical correspondence in contemporary neuroscientists’ inability to fully understand sensory-motor deficiencies and their underlying schizophrenic tendencies. In essence, the symptoms of both impairments posed an epistemological challenge because they presented differently in different individuals. Both were understood in negative terms, as an absence of insight into one’s body and a sweeping lack of mental self-awareness. Schizophrenia in particular was deemed a form of psychopathology that was unknowable, unnarratable, and as a result representative of the modern experience of contingency. Yet Kafka’s stories present a way of narrating the unknowable experience of schizophrenia by effectively expanding the established modernist paradigms of alienation, loss, and contingency. In Kafka’s writings, schizophrenia manifests as a direct, visual and somatosensory experience that mirrors the works’ episodic and fragmentary structure. In other words, schizophrenia is not just abstractly conveyed through the works’ literary and textual devices. It is physically performed by the neurologically affected bodies of its fictional characters that make the condition visible and indeed narratable in the form of an embodied, corporeal experience. The condition of schizophrenia has long been confused with the concept of “split personality.” This misunderstanding goes back to Bleuler’s term, which literally translates as “split mind” but refers to a “splitting” of the patient’s mind not into multiple minds but from reality. Schizophrenia indicates a rift between irreconcilable thoughts and impulses and the ordinary demands of ordinary life. In Bleuler’s definition, the term denotes a “fragmentation of the thinking process and of behavioral response.”9 As Bleuler elaborates: “The patients speak completely disconnectedly, often in half-broken sentences. They are quite restless and constantly busy doing something, but their activities lack purpose and are not carried through to the end, even such simple actions as leaving a room. We see merely fragments of their behavior, as we do of their thinking.”10 Given their distorted and defective information processing, it is not a stretch to compare figures like Josef K. or Gregor Samsa to “people” with paranoid personality disorders who, as Bleuler noted, often resembled cases of

9  See Eugen Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or The Group of Schizophrenia, trans. Joseph Zinkin (New York: International Universities Press, 1950), 350. Eugen Bleuler, Dementia praecox, oder die Gruppe der Schizophrenien (Leizig: Deuticke, 1911). 10  Ibid., 224.

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schizophrenia.11 This is not to claim that Josef K. or Gregor (or Kafka) “have” schizophrenia, but to argue that these texts engage with the othering that these fictional characters’ physical manifestations produce.12 The medical category of body schema disorder has likewise undergone a number of historical transformations.13 Marginalized in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry, body schema disorder has not been codified as a psychiatric condition and has thus never attained the validity of a diagnosis listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM.14 The condition was first diagnosed by the Czech neurologist Arnold Pick (1851–1924) who was professor of neuropsychiatry and head of the psychiatric clinic at the German language campus of Charles University in Prague, where Kafka was enrolled as a law student between 1901 and 1906.15 Evidently, the parallels between Pick’s and Bleuler’s 11  “In paranoia the mechanism of the construction of the delusions is identical with that of schizophrenia; thus is may be possible that paranoia is an entirely chronic schizophrenia which is so mild that it could just about lead to delusional ideas.” Bleuler, Dementia Praecox, 281. 12  On Kafka’s “schizoid tendencies” see Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994). And in a more recent article, Aaron L. Mishara, a psychiatrist and psychologist venturing into the “historical period of [literary] modernism,” defined Kafka’s nocturnal writing spells as “hypnagogic hallucinations” that could elucidate the underlying cognitive and neural causes of “paranoid delusions of schizophrenia.” Aaron L.  Mishara, “Kafka, Paranoic Doubles and the Brain: Hypnagogic vs. Hyper-reflexive Models of Disrupted Self in Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Anomalous Conscious States,” Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 5 (2010), 13. 13  See Klaus Poeck and Bernt Orgass, “The Concept of the Body Schema: A Critical Review and Some Experimental Results,” Cortex 7 (1971): 254–277. 14  Body schema disorder cannot be cured through therapy, although perception of the body schema can be improved through extensive repetition of tasks. 15  It is unlikely that Kafka attended Pick’s lectures, since as a student, he was captivated by literary studies and art history, and his interest in the holistic health movement only ignited later, during his visit at Jungborn in 1912. See Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (New York: Harcourt, 2005), 86–90. When Pick first identified body schema disorder in 1908, Kafka had already accepted employment with the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. It is here that Kafka had his first actual encounters with psychiatric patients. As John Zilcosky notes, Kafka was tasked with raising funds for a hospital for the treatment of nervous disease in 1916, and wrote vivid descriptions of soldiers suffering from war neurosis whose care had been delegated to Kafka’s institute. John Zilcosky, “Kafka’s Poetics of Indeterminacy: On Trauma, Hysteria, and Simulation at the Fin de Siècle,” Monatshefte 113 (2011), 346. Given that he was conversant in psychoanalytic concepts and familiar with Freud’s writings, Kafka would have come across the works of

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neuroscientific discoveries and Kafka’s writings arise out of a shared intellectual milieu. They reveal significant points of convergence in a common cultural matrix that extends across groups of individuals and, in many cases, across nations and times. It bears mentioning that Kafka’s “blood-­ relative” Heinrich von Kleist anticipated a significant neuroscientific discovery in his short prose narrative from 1810, The Puppet Theatre (Über das Marionettentheater, 1810), which problematizes self-awareness, self-­ reflection, and its consequence, the loss of kinetic grace in humans.16 In a philosophical dialogue with the narrator, “Herr C” analyzes the postural functioning of a marionette in the following terms: Every movement, he said, had a centre of gravity; it sufficed if this, inside the figure, were controlled; the limbs, which were nothing but pendula, followed without further interference, mechanically, of their own accord. He added that this movement was a very simple one; that whenever the centre of gravity was moved in a straight line the limbs described a curve; and that often, if shaken by accident, the whole thing was brought into a kind of rhythmical activity similar to dancing.17 (Jede Bewegung, sagte er, hätte einen Schwerpunkt; es wäre genug, diesen, in dem Innern der Figur, zu regieren; die Glieder, welche nichts als Pendel wären, folgten, ohne irgend ein Zutun, auf eine mechanische Weise von selbst. Er setzte hinzu, daß diese Bewegung sehr einfach wäre; daß jedesmal, wenn der Schwerpunkt in einer graden Linie bewegt wird, die Glieder schon Kurven beschrieben; und daß oft, auf eine bloß zufällige Weise erschüttert, das Ganze schon in eine Art von rhythmische Bewegung käme, die dem Tanz ähnlich wäre.)

C’s description captures the complex interplay between bodily processes and mental faculties that would come to define the functioning of the “inertial sensor,” a sensory organ to be discovered a decade later, in 1820, Bleuler, who was an early proponent of Freud’s theories and a prominent member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. 16  Heinrich von Kleist, “Über das Marionettentheater,” Sämtliche Werke und Briefe 2, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Munich: DTV, 1984), 338–345. Heinrich von Kleist, “The Puppet Theatre,” Selected Writings, ed. and trans. David Constantine (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1997), 411–416. The term “blood relative” appears in a letter to Felice Bauer of September 2, 1913, Franz Kafka, Briefe. 1913–1914, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 275. 17  Kleist, “Über das Marionettentheater,” 342. Kleist, “The Puppet Theatre,” 411–412.

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by Czech physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje (1787–1869).18 Purkinje’s notion of an inertial sensor was an important step toward the protracted discovery of the vestibular system in the course of the next century. Today, the vestibular system is considered a key contributor to our sense of balance and to our spatial awareness, which complements the body schema by providing information  about movement, posture, and equilibrioception. Herr C’s mechanical-philosophical explanation of a common, albeit obscure “center of gravity,” which provides information about the movement and configuration of pendula-like limbs in relation to a pivot point (the head), identifies key characteristics of a vestibular organ, such as the one described by Purkinje in his work on the inertial sensor. The century separating Kleist’s critical approach to the Enlightenment ideals of Weimar classicism and Kafka’s idiosyncratic embodied modernism manifests as a shift from knowledge, albeit of a secret, unattainable system, to a preoccupation with this very system’s comic dysfunctionality. In Kleist’s marionettes, the vestibular system functions unobtrusively under normal circumstances, even if the marionettes’ graceful postures are of course not attainable by any human being. By contrast, in Kafka’s literary characters, the body schema is invaded by a pathological, schizophrenic component.

The Body Schema It would be hard to overstate the significance of Kafka’s “insight” that ego regressions are often accompanied by body schema alterations. Kafka’s writings know that patients with schizophrenia exhibit catatonic symptoms that may either have the same biological origin as body schema dysfunction or be mediated by it.19 The medical literature of Kafka’s time had yet to make the connection between these two neuropathological conditions, which manifested differently, as a sensory-motor deficiency and a mental disorder, respectively, yet were ostensibly related.20 Moreover, 18  Jay M. Goldberg, Victor J. Wilson, and Kathleen E. Cullen et al., “Historical Overview,” The Vestibular System. A Sixth Sense (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011): http:// global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195167085/pdf/Historic_Overview.pdf (February 14, 2018) 19  Ibid. 20  For a review of works describing distorted body experiences observed in schizophrenic patients (including works by Bleuler and Schilder), see Seymour Fisher, Body Experience in Fantasy and Behavior (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970), 545. The author, how-

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Kafka’s prose reveals the significant role of anosognosia for the etiology of both schizophrenia and body schema disorder. First described by Czech neurologist Gabriel Anton (1858–1933) in 1893 and by Pick in 1898, and subsequently termed anosognosia by Joseph Babinski in 1914, the condition refers to a lack of awareness of hemiplegia (paralysis on one vertical half of the body).21 Derived from the Greek α = without, νόσος = disease, γνώσις = knowledge, anosognosia denotes a lack of insight into or denial of one’s illness. It was originally considered a subcategory of body schema disorder, after the British neurologists Henry Head (1861–1940) and Gordon Holmes (1876–1965) proposed that damage to the body schema was responsible for the loss of awareness of a body part.22 Since its inception, the term anosognosia has however broadened in scope. Today it is considered a common symptom of both schizophrenia and body schema disorder.23 As a multifaceted neurological disease that connects schizophrenia and body schema disorder, anosognosia figures in Kafka’s writings as the defining condition of the modernist experience of alienation, fragmentation, and loss of self. The importance of Kafka’s modernist prose thus extends beyond its capacity to “provide data about the structure of the human self,” as Aaron L. Mishara has recognized.24 It is a valuable source of specialized medical knowledge about the shared symptomatology between schizophrenia and the lesser-known body schema disorder. Kafka’s work captures and foregrounds the insurmountable tension between desire and ever, claims to have “encountered considerable difficulty in his attempts to delineate empirically the nature of body schema distortions which occur in those who are seriously maladjusted” (545). See also Mishara, who notes that “patients with schizophrenia often complain about losing a sense of their bodies as material object, including the ability to attribute a sense of ownership to their thoughts and bodies.” Aaron L. Mishara, “Body self and its narrative representation in schizophrenia,” Body Image and Body Schema: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Body, ed. Helena De Preester and Veroniek Knockaert (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 2005), 130. 21  Joseph Babinski, “Contribution à l’ étude des troubles mentaux dans l’hémiplégie organique cérébrale (anosognosie)” (Contribution to the study of mental disorders in organic cerebral hemiplegia (anosognosia)), Revue Neurologique 37 (1914): 845–848. Quoted in Chris Code et  al., Andre Roch Lecours (eds.), Classic Cases in Neuropsychology II.  Brain Damage, Behaviour, and Cognition (2001), 177. 22  Henry Head and Gordon Holmes, “Sensory Disturbances from Cerebral Lesions,” Brain 34 (1911): 102–254. 23  See George P. Prigatano (ed.), The Study of Anosognosia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 24  Mishara, “Kafka, Paranoic Doubles and the Brain,” 3.

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nihilism, which is barely mediated by an obscure form of psychopathological denial. This denial epitomizes, but also exceeds, the skepticism and epistemic uncertainty that is characteristic of literary modernism and its underlying logic of psychological defense mechanisms. In Kafka’s prose a different, “anosognostic” kind of denial operates, undermining the reader’s quest for meaning, while at the same time thwarting the protagonists’ trajectories as they deny and minimize the actuality of their problems.25 There is a strong suggestion in Kafka’s works that Karl Rossman is indeed a hopeless case who will never “make it” in America, and K. “guilty” of the undisclosed charges he is accused of, and Gregor Samsa a giant bug who lets his family down by staying home from work, no matter how forcefully they keep repudiating this reality—the truth is constantly betrayed in their bodily actions and somatic malfunctions. Pick defined body schema disorder as a “disturbed orientation toward one’s own body” (“Störung der Orientierung am eigenen Körper”).26 Hence, the condition becomes noticeable only when the body schema is absent or compromised. When Karl “free[s] himself and [runs] diagonally across the room, even brushing against the officer’s chair” [emphasis added] (12) (“machte sich Karl los, lief quer durchs Zimmer, daß er sogar leicht an den Sessel des Offiziers streifte”) (21), he lacks—knowingly lacks— a degree of corporeal awareness as he negotiates the space. Just as with his botched attempt to jump into the Stoker’s bed, we might ascribe this clumsy move to Karl’s general awkwardness, itself a sign of his existential disorientation. Yet an ironic twist emerges from Karl’s assertion that “in this room one knew where one was” [emphasis added] (11) (“Ja, in diesem Zimmer wußte man, wo man war”) (20), uttered for the purpose of finding self-reassurance about his body in space. There is a subtle disjuncture between Karl’s looking out the office window, which allows him to acknowledge that they have arrived in the New York Harbor, and his inability to situate and know the location of his physical body therein. His disorientation exceeds the confusion of a passenger who gets lost on a large steamship or a greenhorn immigrant wandering the streets of Manhattan. Despite his knowing where he is in a broader, geographical sense, Karl is 25  As Sokel argues, Kafka’s allegorical prose “insists on a search for meaning, but … frustrates all attempts to deliver it. Craving for meaning and eternal denial of it is the statement allegory makes about the world.” Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self, 106. 26  Arnold Pick, Studien zur Hirnpathologie und Psychologie (Studies on Brain Pathology and Psychology) (Berlin: S. Karger, 1908), 1.

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unable to adequately gather and process enough sensory information about his body and its orientation within the concrete space it occupies to move safely around or climb into a piece of furniture. Karl lacks something more local and more specialized than geographical knowledge, a neurological function known as the proprioceptive sense. Proprioception is the unconscious registration of our own body’s limb position, which enables us to control our movement in pursuit of behavioral goals.27 It is based on what Head and Holmes described in 1911 as “our power to appreciate the position of a limb, or to estimate the weight of an object … based upon impulses which, even at the periphery, exist apart from those of touch and pressure called into simultaneous being by the same external stimulus.”28 Lacking an integrated neural representation of his body (the “body schema”) and the space around it (“peripersonal space”), Karl “was in general slow in his movements, for although he had long legs, they were too heavy” (10) (“Er war überhaupt langsam in seinen Bewegungen, denn wenn er auch lange Beine hatte, so waren sie doch zu schwer”) (18). This makes it difficult for him to effectively pilot his body to avoid and manipulate objects as such acts involve various automatic (but not reflexive) sensory processes that serve to gather internal information about the relative position of neighboring body parts so as to key it into the environment. While the body schema involves the body as a whole, body schema disturbance typically involves only one or a few body parts. Pick’s first patient frequently complained about having lost her nose, which she would desperately search for everywhere until finally claiming her examiner’s nose as her own possession.29 As a subpersonal, preconscious function, the body schema renders the experience of the self as one that is both bodily and, paradoxically, anonymous. Patients may feel that their bodies are no longer their own or that they no longer exist through their bodies as if they had lost all inner connectedness to it. Karl’s misplaced suitcase can be read as a figure of his fragmented and alienated body: “He wanted to inspect his suitcase and make an inventory of his things, for he could remember them only vaguely.” (67) (“Zunächst wollte er seinen Koffer  Shaun Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 6.  Head and Holmes, “Sensory Disturbances from Cerebral Lesions,” 108. The term “body schema” was established by Head and Holmes in 1911 to signify the mental concept formed by the individual of their own body. 29  Pick, Studien zur Hirnpathologie, 14. 27 28

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untersuchen, um einmal einen Überblick über seine Sachen zu bekommen, an die er sich schon nur undeutlich erinnerte.”) (130) Another example is Gregor Samsa who “[closed] his eyes so as not to have to see his squirming legs” (3) (“schloß die Augen, um die zappelnden Beine nicht sehen zu müssen”) (116) while pondering that “he would have needed hands and arms to lift himself up, but instead of that he had only his numerous little legs, which were in every different kind of perpetual motion and which, besides, he could not control.” (6) (“Er hätte Arme und Hände gebraucht, um sich aufzurichten; statt dessen aber hatte er nur die vielen Beinchen, die ununterbrochen in der verschiedensten Bewegung waren und die er überdies nicht beherrschen konnte.) (121) Of course, the irony of The Metamorphosis is that within the reality of the story, Gregor’s body schema is neatly intact. With just a slight adjustment of mental rather than motor response (essentially, he just needs to decide to “get the upper part of his body out of bed first”) (7) (“zuerst den Oberkörper aus dem Bett zu bekommen”) (122), Gregor “warily turn[s] his head toward the edge of the bed, [which] work[s] easily” (7) (“drehte vorsichtig den Kopf dem Bettrand zu. Dies gelang auch leicht”) (122). Then, to Gregor’s surprise and “in spite of its width and weight, the mass of his body finally followed, slowly, the movement of his head” (Ibid.) (“trotz ihrer Breite und Schwere folgte schließlich die Körpermasse langsam der Wendung des Kopfes”) (Ibid.). In the following pages, we come to witness Gregor’s swift transformation into an agile and active creature that navigates its room with almost blissful virtuosity: “He especially liked hanging from the ceiling; it was completely different from lying on the floor; one could breathe more freely; a faint swinging sensation went through the body; and in the almost absent-mindedness which Gregor felt up there, it could happen to his own surprise that he let go and plopped onto the floor” (30). (“Besonders oben auf der Decke hing er gern; es war ganz anders, als das Liegen auf dem Fußboden; man atmete freier; ein leichtes Schwingen ging durch den Körper, und in der fast glücklichen Zerstreutheit, in der sich Gregor dort oben befand, konnte es geschehen, daß er zu seiner eigenen Überraschung sich losließ und auf den Boden klatschte.”) (159) But even as Gregor has completely adapted to his new sense of proprioception, he continues to express surprise at, and even resistance to, inhabiting an insect body: “Was he an animal that music could move him so?” (M, 46) (“War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so ergriff? “) (185) he asks toward the end of the story. This and multiple other statements contradict the

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famous opening of The Metamorphosis with its “meticulous Pseudo-realist description” of Gregor’s transformation30: “When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” (3) (“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.”) (115) The reader is asked to accept the story’s fantastic premise even if it is undermined throughout the remainder of the story as Gregor struggles to maintain a human sense of self. In that way, Gregor’s innocuous remarks—“unfortunately it seemed that he had no real teeth”) (13) (“Es schien leider, daß er keine eigentlichen Zähne hatte”) (132–133)—suggest that his self-denial runs “deeper” than the psychological dynamics previously identified by numerous commentators.31 The indeterminacy of Gregor’s metamorphosis, which is not discursively treated in the story, is what makes the text significant for Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of “Becoming Animal” in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.32 They describe a movement in which the subject is folded into an unstable, nomadic, and anomalous mode of existence. It is a movement from body to flesh, where the body is a figure of unity and identity, while the flesh is marked by disarticulation and disfigurement. And yet “becoming animal” offers a form of freedom, as “there is no longer man or animal since each deterritorializes the other, in a conjunction of flux, in a continuum of reversible intensities.”33 Ultimately, it is never decided whether Gregor becomes an insect or stays human. In view of the deliberate “ontological fuzziness” of Kafka’s animal figures, they must be read allegorically and anthropocentrically—with a focus on bodies, not species.34

 Stanley Corngold in his introduction to Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, 63.  See Walter H. Sokel, “Beyond Self-Assertion: A Life of Reading Kafka,” A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, ed. James Rolleston (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 41. 32  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, foreword Réda Bensmaïa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 33  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 22. 34  Anniken Greve, “The Human Body and the Human Being in ‘Die Verwandlung,’” Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading, ed. Jakob Lothe et al. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 44. 30 31

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Animals From a neuropathological point of view, the discrepancy between the reader’s and Gregor’s perspectives allows for two explanations. The first is that Gregor suffers from anosognosia, a deficit of bodily self-awareness that can manifest in the form of asomatognosia, defined as the unawareness of possessing an extremity. In A Report to an Academy (Ein Bericht für eine Akademie, 1917) there is much ambiguity with regard to the actual existence of Rotpeter’s tail.35 At first, it seems naturally integrated into his body schema, as Rotpeter instinctively knows that a gap in his crate is “not by a long shot big enough to stick even [his] tail through” (79) (“aber diese Lücke reichte bei weitem nicht einmal zum Durchstecken des Schwanzes aus”) (303). Yet after this initial comment, he never again so much as mentions the rear end of his animal body. The omission of the tail, symbolized by a much-treasured scar “below the hip” (78) (“unterhalb der Hüfte”) (301), has prompted speculations about a possible Oedipal castration.36 But it also serves as the narrative sign of Rotpeter’s alleged “becoming human.” Tails are a basic differentiating feature between apes and monkeys, as they can be a hindrance to walking upright. Hence, the implied amputation of Rotpeter’s tail points toward a phylogenetic transformation, suggesting that he finds himself evolving into a humanoid. With his sense of self disintegrating, his body schema ceases to cohere. Rotpeter increasingly resembles Karl Rossmann, another asomatognostic subject who seems clueless about what the maid “was looking for … between his legs” [translation modified] (23) (“suchte … zwischen seinen Beinen”).37 Anosognosia can also present as anosodiaphoria, the misrecognition of a severe disease. This condition, whereby a patient treats his illness as a mere trifle, is exemplified by Gregor’s unflinching conviction that “today’s fantasy would gradually fade away” (6) (“wie sich seine heutigen 35  Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), 76–84. Franz Kafka, “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” Kritische Ausgabe, Drucke zu Lebzeiten II, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gert Koch and Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996), 299–313. Hereafter cited in the text. 36  Josef Vogl, Ort der Gewalt: Kafkas literarische Ethik (Zürich: Diaphanes, 2010), 127. 37  An explicit mention of the genitals would have been a breach of decorum in Kafka’s time. Given, however, that the scene is more than just evocative of rape, the contrast between Karl’s ignorance and the detailed description of the intercourse makes it possible to interpret his reaction as part of his aberrant self-perception.

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Vorstellungen allmählich auflösen würden”) (121). Patients with anosognosia act as if there is nothing wrong with them and when confronted with their condition, make excuses and rationalize their impairment away. This kind of misrecognition is exemplified by Gregor’s otherwise irrational conclusion that “for the time being he would have to lie low and, by being patient and showing his family every possible consideration, help them bear the inconvenience which he simply had to cause them in his present condition.” (22) (“daß er sich vorläufig ruhig verhalten und durch Geduld und größte Rücksichtnahme der Familie die Unannehmlichkeiten erträglich machen müsse, die er ihr in seinem gegenwärtigen Zustand nun einmal zu verursachen gezwungen war.”) (145–146) As Babinski rightly suggested, anosognosia is often linked to patients with damage to the right cerebral hemisphere. It arises because the impairment is not communicated to the brain’s major language center, which is situated in the left. Note that Gregor expresses surprise that his body fails to function like it used to. The left hemisphere of his brain continues to adhere to an outdated body schema and rationalizes impairment away. And so, Gregor confabulates a schizophrenic text, insisting that he still inhabits a human body. The other way to read this condition through the lens of early-­ twentieth-­century neuropathology is to focus on Gregor’s self-experience (Selbsterfahrung) of his body. This is to argue that Gregor’s body schema is intact when (or very soon after) we encounter him at that first morning. The problem is not that he cannot get out of bed; after all, his explorations very quickly reach acrobatic heights. The problem is rather that he is unable to “form a clear picture” (7) (“keine rechte Vorstellung machen”) (121) of his body and imagine himself from the outside as one object among others, and by extension as himself. The story’s concern with Gregor’s inability to construe a psychic spatial image of himself correlates with the scientific discovery of the “body image,” a neuroscientific concept first defined by Austrian psychoanalyst Paul Schilder (1886–1940) in 1934. Already since the early 1920s, Schilder had thought about ways to extend the concept of body schema to our subjective mental knowledge of it, so as to capture both the somatic and the mental aspects of self-­ experience. Defined as the “picture of our own body, which we form in our mind,” Schilder conceived of the body image as a counter-concept to body schema, as it concerns not how we sense our body, but how we

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construe it as a mental representation of what we think we look like.38 In other words, the distinction between body image and body schema is that between our mental, psychological perception of our own body as we believe it might be experienced by others, and our unconscious, physiological performance of it, in turn based on our internal access to it through bodily sensations. Loosely based on the imago-concept borrowed from psychoanalytic theory, Schilder’s term is informed by Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, as it takes our capacity to “convert” libidinal energy into body parts as the basis of the development of a body image. Gregor’s denial of his insect appearance and his efforts to hide who he has become seem interpersonally motivated, and thus point toward a disturbance of his body image. When his family catches sight of him, the degree of his self-scrutiny increases, making him ever more preoccupied with imagined defects such as his “many legs, pitifully thin” (3) (“kläglich dünnen Beine”) (115). One might argue that as an animal, Gregor naturally lacks a psychology with desires and intentions, and that an insect would hardly have the world-centered frame of reference that accompanies a body image.39 Like other animal figures in Kafka’s prose, Gregor has the kinetic (motor) ability to touch, sing, eat, run, hide, and climb but lacks any conscious awareness of how he does it or how he gets there. It is precisely this quality that aligns him with Kafka’s human figures who ironically also rely on intuitive guessing and instinctual behaviors rather than deliberate acts. In Kafka, both animals and humans lack a hermeneutic horizon, a reliable, conscious frame of reference and sense of self. The final words “like a dog” (231) (“wie ein Hund”) (312), spoken by Josef K. in the moment of his execution to convey the human experience of death, betray the isolation

38  Paul Schilder, “Localization of Body Image,” Proceedings of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease 13, 5 (1934), 466; Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in Constructive Energies of the Psyche (London: K.  Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935), 11. See also Schilder, Das Körperschema. Ein Beitrag zur Lehre vom Bewusstsein des eigenen Körpers (Berlin: Springer, 1923). Pointing to the historical confusion of the terms body image and body schema, Shaun Gallagher traces both terms back to the work of Schilder, who used them interchangeably. See Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 19. 39  On the question of animal consciousness and self-awareness, see Donald R.  Griffin, Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

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of body and mind, self and other that is also intrinsic to Kafka’s schizophrenic animals. If the animals’ body image disorder and schizophrenic lack of self-­ awareness is more pronounced, it is not because they are animals but because they misconstrue themselves as humans. The narrator of Josefine, the Mouse Singer (Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse, 1924) performs an anthropomorphizing reading of a much-admired fellow rodent that paradoxically others her as a mouse.40 Providing a long-winded and contradictory account of the relationship between the artist and her audience, the narrator explains that whenever Josefine must sing to her people, she assumes a particular stance with “her neck extended as high as it would go” (97) (“mit dem gar nicht mehr höher dehnbaren Hals”) (355) and “her little head tilted back, mouth half open, eyes turned toward the heights” (98) (“mit zurückgelegtem Köpfchen, halboffenem Mund, der Höhe zugewandten Augen”) (356–357). His depiction evokes the paradoxical dual nature of Josefine as an ordinary mouse and an accomplished (human) performer. Is her movement the reflex action of a rodent on the lookout for predators or the posture of a vocal artist attempting to sing beyond her vocal break? Misconstruing Josefine’s posture as a sign of leadership, the narrator also lauds her attempts to give solace and provide a sense of community: “Whenever we get bad news [she] cranes her neck and strives to oversee her flock like the shepherd before the storm.” (99) (“Bei jeder schlechten Nachricht … erhebt [sie] sich und streckt den Hals und sucht den Überblick über ihre Herde wie der Hirt vor dem Gewitter.” (360) This human-centric perspective fails to recognize that Josefine’s posture is quite plausible for a small rodent seeking to warn her horde of impending danger. It also misapprehends Josefine’s “squeaking” (“pfeifen”) as extraordinary vocal artistry, if in reality it merely represents the ultrasonic vocalizations of mouse communication.41 The narrator’s anthropocentric misinterpretation of Josefine’s bodily gestures is exacerbated by the intricate narrative layering of the story, which results in a 40  Franz Kafka, “Josefine, The Singer or the Mouse People,” Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), 94–108. Franz Kafka, “Josefine, die Sängerin oder Das Volk der Mäuse,” Kritische Ausgabe, Drucke zu Lebzeiten II, ed. Wolf Kittler, HansGert Koch and Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996), 350–377. Hereafter cited in the text. 41  See on this Kári Driscoll, “An Unheard, Inhuman Language: Narrative Voice and the Question of the Animal in Kafka’s ‘Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse Folk,’” Humanities 6, 2 (2017).

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highly self-reflexive text that casts all matters of song, speech, and action as a social performance of sorts. This only serves to underscore the lack of self-reflexivity in the narrator, who casts his fellow mice as thinking and behaving like humans in some ways, but ultimately regards them as strange and as other.42 In a similar manner, the story Researches of a Dog (Forschungen eines Hundes, 1931) draws much of its humor from the discrepancies between an animal’s and a human’s self-perception.43 Told from the perspective of a dog who expounds on the cultural practices of his kind, the story concerns the nature and limits of knowledge. The voice of the first-person narrator is marked by the slightly pompous and self-righteous attitude of a human scientist. This dog is driven by his “peculiarities, which are as plain as day” (132) (“Sonderbarkeiten, die offen zutage liegen”) (424) that “tear [him] out of the circle of his kind” (133) (“aus dem Volkskreis zerrt”) (426). Despite his alleged scholarly objectivity, the narrator is clueless as to a dog’s natural interaction with human creatures. Unable to assume an external attitude to his bodily self, he is capable of performing an “honest jump” (143) (“einen ehrlichen Sprung”) (447) but lacks any awareness of how such a jump would be perceived by his human master, whom he is unable to actually see: Anyone who has remained even slightly open-minded about science—and there are, of course, very few of them, for the circles that science draws are becoming ever wider—will readily recognize, even when he does not attempt special observations, that the main part of our food found lying on the ground in such instance comes down from above; indeed, we catch most of it, each according to his dexterity and greed, even before it touches the ground. … I had greater success with another, admittedly slightly eccentric, experiment that caused something of a sensation. Reasoning from the usual method of snatching food from the air, I resolved not to let the food fall down, of course, but also not to catch it. To this end, whenever food came, I jumped up a little, but I made sure the jump fell short; but the food generally fell to the ground, dull and indifferent, and I threw myself on it ­furiously, 42  Andrea Baer, “Performative Emotion in Kafka and Freud,” Kafka’s Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings, ed. Marc Lucht and Donna Yarri (New York: Lexington Books, 2010), 139. 43  Franz Kafka, “Researches of a Dog,” Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), 132–161. Franz Kafka, “Forschungen eines Hundes,” Kritische Ausgabe, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II, ed. Jost Schillemeit (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2001), 423–482. Hereafter cited in the text.

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furious not only with hunger but also with disappointment. But in isolated cases something else did occur, something actually wonderful; the food did not fall but followed me through the air; the food pursued the hungry. (150–151; 52) (Wer sich nur ein wenig Unbefangenheit gegenüber der Wissenschaft bewahrt hat—und deren sind freilich wenige, denn die Kreise, welche die Wissenschaft zieht, werden immer größer—wird, auch wenn er gar nicht auf besondere Beobachtungen ausgeht, leicht erkennen, daß der Hauptteil der Nahrung, die dann auf der Erde liegt, von oben herabkommt, wir fangen ja je nach unserer Geschicklichkeit und Gier das meiste sogar ab, ehe es die Erde berührt … Ein anderes, allerdings etwas abseitiges Experiment glückte mir besser und machte einiges Aufsehen. Anschließend an das übliche Abfangen der Nahrung aus der Luft beschloß ich, die Nahrung zwar niederfallen zu lassen, sie aber auch nicht abzufangen. Zu diesem Zwecke machte ich immer, wenn die Nahrung kam, einen kleinen Luftsprung, der aber immer so berechnet war, daß er nicht ausreichte; meistens fiel sie dann doch stumpf-gleichgültig zu Boden und ich warf mich wütend auf sie, in der Wut nicht nur des Hungers, sondern auch der Enttäuschung. Aber in vereinzelten Fällen geschah doch etwas anderes, etwas eigentlich Wunderbares, die Speise fiel nicht, sondern folgte mir in der Luft, die Nahrung verfolgte den Hungrigen.) (461; 465)

The passage echoes the 1878 discovery by German physiologist Hermann Munk (1838–1912) of “soul blindness” (Seelenblindheit), a unique kind of psychic blindness that left a dog with a partially extirpated brain unable to recognize familiar objects (or even his master) but preserved his ability to see them. Like Kafka’s canine narrator, Munk’s dog was still able to snatch food from the air and avoid collision.44 One recent study even suggests that Munk’s psychic blindness might be considered an early example of anosognosia in non-primates, two decades before Babinski coined the term.45 There is a comical parallel between the dog’s literal inability to see humans and his figurative inability to see himself from an external (human) perspective. This rift between the experience of the self as subject and the self as object, between privileged inner access and perception of the body as a body for others, opens up a rift between the 44  Hermann Munk, Über die Funktionen der Großhirnrinde. Gesammelte Mittheilungen aus den Jahren 1877–1880 (On the Functions of the Cerebral Cortex: Collected Communications from the Years 1877–1880) (Berlin: August Hirschwald, 1890), 22. 45  Prigatano, The Study of Anosognosia, 7.

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speaker and his interlocutors, be that his fellow-dogs or his human audience. The narrator of the Researches of a Dog is pure body schema and untainted inner experience, as he lacks a body image or visual representation of himself. In their discussion of “becoming-animal” and its central tenet of selflessness, Deleuze and Guattari note that “the expressions of the solitary researcher tend toward the assemblage (agencement) of a collective enunciation of the canine species even if this collectivity is no longer or not yet given.”46 Indeed, the story’s conflict does not arise from the impossibility that an animal who is disconnected from the “collective assemblages of enunciation” should tell his own story.47 Rather, it unfolds through a series of implausibilities that result from his narrating his own body, which he does not know. The dog lacks a self-image and a sense of how he is perceived (and fed) by humans, as when he is amazed that “the food pursued the hungry,” if in reality it is he who follows the lure in his master’s hand (133). The story turns on the paradox that the dog cannot visualize his own body, even though his very body is patterned to perform and express itself for his human master. The discrepancy between our knowledge and understanding of the dog’s predicament and the limited information available to the dog himself is both funny and pathetic. But the denial of knowledge to an unsuspecting animal also produces an uncomfortable effect on the reader that is comparable to the “praecox-feeling,” a notion coined by Dutch psychiatrist Henricus Cornelius Rümke (1893–1967) to describe the unease experienced upon meeting a schizophrenic patient.48 Psychiatrists have found it hard to emphasize with schizophrenic patients because they lack attunement with the external world, just as Kafka’s readers perceive the dog as a profoundly alienated and alienating character unable to transcend his own perspective and mediate his experience of self in a coherent first-­ person voice. The dog perpetuates his fractured sense of self in a narrative where the telling and experiencing of his own story are dissociated. Note the similarity with Rotpeter, who makes it difficult for the reader to empathize with him, not because he is an ape, but because of the discrepancy between his “human words” (Ibid.) (“Menschenworte”) (Ibid.) and his “apish feelings” (“das affenmäßig Gefühlte”). He describes his inner  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 18.  Ibid. 48   Henricus Cornelius Rümke, “The Nuclear Symptom of Schizophrenia and the Praecoxfeeling” [1941], trans. J. Neeleman History of Psychiatry 1 (1990): 331–341. 46 47

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experience as one of “glumly sobbing, painfully searching for fleas, wearily licking a coconut, knocking my skull against the wall of the crate, sticking out my tongue whenever someone came near me.” (79) (“Dumpfes Schluchzen, schmerzhaftes Flöhesuchen, müdes Lecken einer Kokosnuß, Beklopfen der Kistenwand mit dem Schädel, Zungenblecken, wenn mir jemand nahekam.”) (303) The problem with Rotpeter’s report is that it is based on the false premise of a harmonious interplay between his body image (how he perceives and communicates his body) and body schema (how he experiences it), which the story itself debunks through Rotpeter’s oddly disjointed perspective. Ultimately, the questions of whether the ape merely denies the actual physical signs of his apishness and of whether his motor output is really altered through changes in his lifestyle, are never resolved, just as it remains uncertain whether such changes in his body schema and image would support Rotpeter’s claim to have transformed into a human.

Humans Contrary to Kafka’s animals, the human protagonists are often out of sync with their bodies. As they fall asleep in the wrong places, reject food, or disavow sensual pleasures, they nevertheless tend to be very conscious of their bodies’ visual representation. In the short story A Starvation Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler, 1922), the theatrical effect and visible impact of a starvation act, carried out by the eponymous protagonist, increases as the size of his body proportionately shrinks.49 The starvation artist is worried about a steep decline in appreciation of his craft. Unable to reconcile his internal selfhood with how he is perceived by his disinterested audience, he bemoans that it is impossible to communicate the intricacies of his bodily sensations. His audience will never “get” how food tastes or does not taste to him: “Try to relate the art of starving to someone! Those who have no feel for it can never be made to understand.” (93) (“Versuche, jemandem die Hungerkunst zu erklären! Wer es nicht fühlt, dem kann man es nicht begreiflich machen.”) (347) While he is addicted to his audience, his performance is an anti-spectacle both in the sense that he is best 49  Franz Kafka, “A Starvation Artist,” Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2007), 86–94. Franz Kafka, “Ein Hungerkünstler,” Kritische Ausgabe, Drucke zu Lebzeiten II, ed. Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gert Koch and Gerhard Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996), 333–349. Hereafter cited in the text.

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when he is not watched (“he succeeded effortlessly [when] no one counted the days”) (93) (“es gelang ihm ohne Mühe ganz so … aber niemand zählte die Tage”) (347) and in the sense that his starvation is a natural result of his lack of appetite. Given that the starving-artist “could not find the food [he] liked” (94) (“weil ich nicht die Speise finden konnte, die [ihm] schmeckt”) (349), his act of self-deprivation is hardly an artistic achievement. Contrary to the starving-artist, whose audience is tragically waning, other protagonists in Kafka’s works are framed and defined as the scrutable objects of an implicit surveillance apparatus. In the opening paragraph of The Trial (Der Prozeß, 1925), Josef K. is strangely unconcerned by the presence of a peering neighbor: Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. His landlady, Frau Grubach, had a cook who brought him breakfast each day around eight, but this time she didn’t appear. That had never happened before. K. waited a bit longer, watching from his pillow the old woman who lived across the way, who was peering at him with a curiosity quite unusual for her … (Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet. Die Köchin der Frau Grubach, seiner Zimmervermieterin, die ihm jeden Tag gegen acht Uhr früh das Frühstück brachte, kam diesmal nicht. Das war noch niemals geschehen. K. wartete noch ein Weilchen, sah von seinem Kopfkissen aus die alte Frau, die ihm gegenüber wohnte und die ihn mit einer an ihr ganz ungewöhnlichen Neugierde beobachtete … )50

A more expected reaction would have been to worry about his breakfast and to escape the inquisitive gaze of his neighbor. But K. does not seem affected by the material conditions of his captivity, such as the fact that “[one apple] was his entire breakfast” (10) ([ein Apfel] war … sein einziges Frühstück”) (16) and that “there was nowhere to sit in the entire room” (6) (“daß im ganzen Zimmer keine Sitzgelegenheit war”) (10), or that he “would have to wear a much worse [nightshirt] now” (Ibid.) (“daß er jetzt ein viel schlechteres Hemd werde anziehen müssen”) (Ibid.) 50  Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 3. Franz Kafka, Der Prozeß. Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 7. Hereafter cited in the text.

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and that the second guard’s belly “kept bumping against him” (7) (“immer wieder stieß der Bauch des zweiten Wächters … an ihn”) (11). He seems to perform his life at the expense of experiencing it from within, viewing himself and his physical body almost exclusively through a prism of external views held by others who are often anonymous strangers. So, while Josef K. is hungry enough to eventually ring for his landlady’s cook, he subsequently suppresses his hunger to focus on what he perceives of as more urgent matters, namely, the appearance he presents to his intruders: “[H]e was already lifting a coat from the chair and holding it up for a moment in both hands, as if submitting it to the judgment of the guards.” (11) (“[Er] hob aber schon einen Rock vom Stuhl und hielt ihn ein Weilchen mit beiden Händen, als unterbreite er ihn dem Urteil der Wächter.”) (18) His own body matters to K. almost exclusively as an exterior appearance perceived by others. The representation of K.’s self as unembodied or “uncoupled” from his own physical nature stands in tension with the novel’s concern with the body’s readability within a physiognomic, semiotic framework. K. is obsessed by the question of whether he is valued by others and it is clear that the answer to this question (and with it the outcome of his trial) hinges on a set of superficial traits that are linked to his physical appearance and bodily movements. As far as his legal predicament is concerned, K. is very active in the sense that he moves around a lot within the courts to seek out influential people, but not in the sense that he reflects on his (past) actions. In that way, his trial is itself a metaphor for the system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs he brings to his own body as if from the outside. Like the prisoner in the controlled space of the panopticon, K. has internalized the gaze of the other. The “someone” who “must have slandered” him may well be a projection refracting his own views back to him through a number of mirror image doubles. Accordingly, the first chapter stages an exchange of glances between K. and two alter egos, a character named Willem who is reading a book, arguably a mise en abyme of Kafka’s novel, and another character named Franz, ostensibly a reference to its author.51 From the first pages of The Trial, the text establishes K. as a composite character who is made up of external views and disconnected from his body.

51  See Stanley Corngold, “Medial Allusions at the Outset of ‘Der Prozeß,’ or res in media,” A Companion to the Work of Franz Kafka, 154.

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Kafka’s prose indicates that a disturbed interplay between body schema and body image is often an indication of schizophrenia. His approach to figural narration, a high-modernist narrative mode developed and refined by Kafka during his breakthrough period, neatly conveys the sense of schizophrenic alienation and fragmentation that is at the heart of K.’s self-­ perception.52 Eliminating the omniscient, auctorial narrator, Kafka embeds the narrator in the story but refuses him the authority and identity of a first-person voice. While the narrator’s perspective is so closely connected to that of the protagonist that the former becomes invisible, the reader does not actually grasp much of either’s feelings or thoughts. What we learn is given to us in enigmatic gestures and ambiguous dialogue, seldom through direct access or unequivocal facts. As a result, the inner life of the third-person narrator/protagonist remains alien to us, just as the other characters to whose thoughts and feelings we are likewise not privy remain a puzzle.53 The incomplete, fragmented perspective of The Trial’s figural third-­ person narrator corresponds to the conjectural and individuated perspective of its protagonist who, for lack of the autobiographical information necessary to develop a proper self-image and identity, is also unable to respond to the demands of the external world. As Harold Bloom notes, K. “possibly cannot realize his own self: it is internally exiled.”54 It is but a small step from the novel’s depiction of K.’s incoherent response to his arrest to what Bleuler defined as a broader fragmentation of the schizophrenic’s thinking process. K.’s rather frantic and purposeless pursuit of his trial is a marker of schizophrenia understood as the exiling of all meaning—from the novel and from one exemplary individual. At the end of the Trial, the fragmentation of K.’s behavioral response finally begins to bleed into his proprioceptive awareness, again anticipating the discovery of a correlation between body schema disorder and schizophrenia in the field of neuropathology. Upon their arrival at the quarry, K.’s executioners experience great difficulty in propping him up: “The men sat K. down on the ground, propped him up against the stone, and laid his head down on it. In spite of all their efforts, and in spite of the cooperation K. gave them, 52  Franz Karl Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 186. 53  Sokel, The Myth of Power and the Self, 117. 54  Harold Bloom, “Introduction,” Franz Kafka, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005), 1.

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his posture was still quite forced and implausible.” (230) (“Die Herren setzten K. auf die Erde nieder, lehnten ihn an den Stein und betteten seinen Kopf obenauf. Trotz aller Anstrengung, die sie sich gaben, und trotz allem Entgegenkommen, das ihnen K. bewies, blieb seine Haltung eine sehr gezwungene und unglaubwürdige.”) (311) Lacking a body schema, an internal representation of his body, K. is unable to actively integrate his posture and position in the environment. He slumps like a puppet with severed strings: “One of the men asked the other to let him work on positioning K. on his own for a while but that didn’t improve things either. Finally, they left K. in a position that wasn’t even the best of those they had already tried.” (Ibid.) (“Der eine Herr bat daher den anderen, ihm für ein Weilchen das Hinlegen K.s allein zu überlassen, aber auch dadurch wurde es nicht besser. Schließlich ließen sie K. in einer Lage, die nicht einmal die beste von den bereits erreichten Lagen war.”) (Ibid.) The schizophrenic tendency toward fragmentation that is so pronounced in The Trial’s protagonist is replicated within the text by the distinctly fragmentary nature of its architectural structures where each part—a passageway, a court building, or a country road—functions as a disjointed fragment that is superimposed upon a labyrinthine whole.55 Like K., who is scattered and loses interest quickly, the surviving unfinished manuscript of The Trial seems itself unable to keep track of its internal spatial arrangement. When Max Brod prepared the novel for publication after Kafka’s death, he arranged the disordered manuscript into what he believed to be the most cohesive sequence of chapters.56 But it is also true for Kafka’s work as a whole, which does not offer a reliable sense of unity, yet is bound together, as Deleuze and Guattari write, by a rhizomatic quality: “This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The Castle has many entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known. The hotel in America has innumerable main doors and side doors that innumerable guards watch over; it even has entrances and exits without doors.”57 As a commentary on interpretation, the notion of the literary work as rhizome suggests that readers have to choose their own openings 55   See Carrie L.  Asman, “The Language of Defamiliarization: Benjamin’s Kafka,” Approaches to Teaching Kafka’s Short Fiction, ed. Richard T.  Gray (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1995), 76–83. 56  See Max Brod’s postscript to Franz Kafka, The Trial (New York NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 334. See also Carolin Duttlinger, The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 123. 57  Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 3.

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and passages through the oeuvre und thus engage in an experimental exercise that will change depending on which entrance is chosen. Minor literature conceives of reading as an experimental exercise that will change depending on which entrance is chosen. But if we consider the text as a body, and Deleuze and Guattari’s description of Kafka’s oeuvre as another way to conceptualize the link between schizophrenia and body schema disorder in it, another reading suggests itself. Just as patients with schizophrenia and body schema disorder have a specific impairment in the ability to actively represent and maintain contextual information about their ego and body, respectively, the reader of Kafka’s oeuvre may feel unable to determine the internal spatial arrangement of its textual fragments, architectural structures, and urban territories. In that sense, the quote suggests that Kafka’s prose epitomizes and at the same time overcomes the illegibility of the modernist, schizophrenic text in which individual parts stand in a dysfunctional relation to the whole, precisely by closing the door to the reader. This tendency toward fragmentation applies not only to inanimate structures in Kafka’s works, and sometimes the manuscripts themselves, but also to human body parts and their gestural movements. As suggested before, Kafka often presents specific gestures and poses that remain illegible because they are isolated and estranged from context and dialogue. Noting the “obsessive attention to details of gestures” in Kafka’s early dramatic fragments, Martin Puchner has convincingly argued that “in none of these excessive details can we hope to find additional information about motivation, character, or stage action. [They undermine] the traditional function of the stage direction.”58 If Kafka pays analytical attention to the performing body (and, it bears mentioning, he kept an inventory of such gestures in his diary), he does so not to supplement verbal explanation but to complicate it. For these gestures often subvert the very meaning they purport to establish. To quote Puchner: “Kafka does not seek to translate gestures back into language but contends himself with registering their effects and also their limits.”59 While this assertion is correct, this chapter reads Kafka’s play with gestures less as a commentary on the modernist trope of “language without meaning” than as an articulation, a precise representation, as it were, of bodily alienation that is rooted in body 58  Martin Puchner, “Kafka’s Antitheatrical Gestures,” The Germanic Review 78, 3 (2003): 177–193, 179. 59  Ibid., 186–187.

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schema disorder and closely connected to schizophrenia.60 Gestures in Kafka aren’t representative of a fin-de-siècle nostalgia for authentic meaning, as if the latter could be recovered by way of bodily expression, nor are they merely an “irreducible residual phenomenon … of language as such,” as Werner Hamacher argues.61 Instead the gestures are closer to what Isolde Schiffermüller describes in reference to Clemens-Carl Härle’s reading of Kafka as “the trace of a language that was written with the body.”62 Their opaqueness signifies not regression or closure but an opening up toward a new kind of language, one that begins to assert itself and was increasingly recognized in the medical profession and among neuroscientists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Reading the physical and psychopathological meaning of gestures in Kafka’s work shifts our focus from the discipline of epistemology and the tradition of language skepticism to the domain of neuropathology.

Schizophrenia When in the first chapter of The Trial, K. makes “a gesture as if he were tearing himself loose from the two men, who were, however, standing some distance from him” (5) (“machte eine Bewegung, als reiße er sich von den zwei Männern los, die aber weit von ihm entfernt standen”) (9), his bizarre action must be understood as the expression of a unique neuropathological condition that embodies and reflects broader aspects of modernity. After all, such farcically disconnected gestures are not restricted to the protagonist. In a similar vein, the inspector “had pressed his hand firmly down on the table and seemed to be comparing the length of his fingers” while “the two guards were sitting on a chest draped with an embroidered coverlet, rubbing their knees. The three young men had placed their hands on their hips and were gazing around aimlessly.” (16) (“hatte eine Hand fest auf den Tisch gedrückt und schien die Finger ihrer Länge nach zu vergleichen. Die zwei Wächter saßen auf einem mit einer Schmuckdecke verhüllten Koffer und rieben ihre Knie. Die drei jungen Leute hatten die Hände in die Hüften gelegt und sahen ziellos herum.”)  Ibid., 191.  Werner Hamacher, “Die Geste im Namen. Benjamin und Kafka,” Entferntes Verstehen. Studien zur Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 319. 62  Isolde Schiffermüller, Franz Kafkas Gesten: Studien zur Entstellung der menschlichen Sprache (Tübingen: Francke, 2011), 38. 60 61

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(24) No character seems safe from the deficiencies of spatial orientation and kinesthetic-proprioceptive integrity that mark the onset of body schema disorder. In Kafka’s writings, gestures are mobilized to such great effect that they at once illustrate complex perceptive-motor-cognitive deficits that would otherwise evade our attention, and at the same time uncover the neuropathological basis of the epistemological crisis of modernity. In other words, psychopathological distortions expose the gap between our perception and conception of reality and that of the (schizophrenic) other, revealing a view of reality as not just subjective or intersubjective, but as psychotic and delusional. Depicting schizophrenia by way of gestures and hence in the most literal and as it were visual terms, Kafka’s prose gravitates around scientific problems without consciously attempting to actually tackle them. Kafka’s writings are prototypical modernist narratives in that they thwart interpretation and undermine our tendency to make automatic assumptions about the mental states and behaviors of others. As narratives that all too often simply do not add up, they bear a resemblance to schizophrenic associations, which likewise manifest a sense of acute self-reflexivity and self-­ referentiality. And to the degree that they defy comprehension and classification, they are analogous to schizophrenia, a disease that is inaccessible and strange even to psychiatrists. Indeed, schizophrenia is often considered as psychiatry’s quintessential “other,” a limit case of human existence. Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) thus defined it as “a gulf which defies description.”63 As such, schizophrenia has its equivalent in modernism, which is often proclaimed as being elusive, opaque, and incomprehensible. Given the perplexing variety of possible schizophrenic and schizoid symptoms, schizophrenia corroborates the modernist logic by which meaningful experience is resisted and the reader left without the requisite hermeneutic clues.

63  Karl Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (Berlin: Springer, 1946). Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J.  Hoenig and Marian W.  Hamilton (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 449. Bleuler notes that the symptoms of schizophrenia “exist in varying degrees and shadings on the entire scale from pathological to normal.” Bleuler, Dementia Praecox, 13. In view of their “fluctuating character … it is not to be expected that we shall be able to demonstrate each and every symptom”; further, “The emergence of an idea without any connection with a previous train of thought, or without any external stimulus, is … so foreign to normal psychology that one is obliged to look even in the patient’s seemingly most far-fetched ideas” (22).

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Kafka’s earliest preserved piece, the short story Description of a Struggle (written between 1903–1907), is a prime example of a virtually impenetrable modernist text that straddles the borders between dream and reality—and between a set of obscure characters who meet under bizarre circumstances, travel invented landscapes, and pray in a strangely violent manner. For Sass, the work presents “the most vivid evocation of the schizophrenic experience not only in Kafka but in all of Western literature,” as it “contains nearly every feature of modernism, including derealization, dehumanization (disappearance of active self), giddy perspectivism or relativism, and detachment.”64 Sass’ description of the piece accurately captures its stratified narrative structure and the somewhat off-putting progression through a series of unstable (projected) narratorial points of view resulting in the doubtful, refracted consciousness that came to epitomize modernism’s frail subjectivity. To Sass, the complex narrative form compels the reader to undergo “something closely akin to the experience” of the figural narrators, as reading this text is a struggle itself.65 As he concludes: “‘Description of a Struggle’ seems almost to give us the experience of schizophrenia itself: it is an extremely raw and direct, at times almost unbearable presentation of … central schizoid themes.”66 But if schizophrenia is in fact the disease of the “other”—too heterogeneous to be pinned down and too alien and restricted for an outsider to grasp—then any suggestion of a narrative providing us access to such a schizophrenic experience through the simple act of reading is bound to be a contradiction. There is, in Sass’s account, a certain slippage between the text’s (thematic or formal) representation of schizophrenia and the reader’s immersion into an experience or state that this representation supposedly evokes. Of course, the alternative argument—that modernism and schizophrenia’s kinship is based on precisely their refusal of logic, expressing a more resigned attitude according to which neither one can be penetrated intellectually or emphatically—truncates any effort at arriving at a more nuanced understanding of either paradigm and thus leads to an interpretive cul-de-sac. This brings us back to the importance of an interdisciplinary, science-­ oriented exploration of the links between bodily gestures and schizophrenia in Kafka’s prose, as they promise to elucidate core questions about the  Sass, Madness and Modernism, 318.  Ibid., 321. 66  Ibid., 318. 64 65

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modernist narrative. It is not just that associations by schizophrenics that, according to Bleuler “normal individuals will regard as incorrect, bizarre, and utterly unpredictable,” find their echo in modernist texts, with their habitual tendency to stage the epistemological impossibility of telling a coherent or truthful story.67 Beyond mirroring this tendency, Kafka’s prose actively engages the ways in which bodily actions, poses, and gestures are readable as signs of specific neurological deficits—body schema and body image disorder—thereby offering a new formulation of the complex meanings of a schizophrenic text. In that way, Kafka’s writings foreshadow the primacy of the body, which represents, in the words of Ian McGilchrist, “the necessary context for all human experience.”68 As outward physical manifestations of neurological damage, gestures in Kafka belie the claim that schizophrenia is incommensurable and as such representative of the modernist experience. Instead, they shift our focus to the concrete manifestations of a very real aspect of modernity: the way in which the body becomes the playing field upon which the emerging field of neuroscience and the humanities will increasingly pursue their interests.

 Bleuler, Dementia Praecox, 9.  McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, 118.

67 68



Afterword

This study recognizes literature as a distinct and unique site of knowledge production. It has made the case that in the course of the long nineteenth century, German narrative prose literature pioneered, critiqued, mediated, and popularized emerging neuroscientific knowledge about the functioning (and malfunctioning) of the human brain, while also serving as a testing ground for articulating, transforming, and relativizing this kind of specialized knowledge. The first two chapters focused on the period around 1800, when the boundaries between the sciences and the humanities and their respective representational modes were far more fluid than they are today. Early disciplinary knowledge about the human brain as it emerged from research conducted by prominent figures like Soemmering, Gall, and Esquirol, was put in dialogue with polemical, philosophical, and literary discourses, such as Romantic literary works by Klingemann and Jean Paul, as well as philosophical writings by Nicolai and Kant. This comparative analysis shed light on literature’s relative boundlessness and permeability to other discourses, as well as its capacity to self-reflect and assimilate by means of literary form and poetic innovation. The latter process became implicitly tied to the notion that knowledge is contingent on intellectual and cultural forces and their historical circumstances, such as social institutions, academic hierarchies, social milieus, and the sciences’ commitment to a long history

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5

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of practical experience. Thus, while the sciences lay claim to the sovereign role of method, rationality, and objectivity, literature is rightfully considered a reservoir of knowledge, albeit of a knowledge that permanently renews itself and thus also undergoes a constant process of re-­legitimization. Literature, in other words, propels the continual formal reorganization of our epistemic traditions. The second part of this study traced the arc of creative and experimental connections between a few exemplary works of Poetic Realism and the emerging discipline of neuroscience in the German-speaking world and beyond. By making explicit the shared representational strategies of literary realism and scientific inquiry, these three chapters revealed some of the cultural meanings embedded in the emergent discipline of neuroscience as well as the scientific principles underlying nineteenth-century prose literature. The chapters made a case for literature’s status as not just a storage medium but as a participant in the production and application of knowledge. This is because as neuroscientific knowledge is represented in these literary texts, conceptual metaphors, generic strategies, and other textual features continue to shape how this knowledge is constructed and, in the process, transforms its meanings and significance. Hence, the broader claim in this section is that literature does far more than fulfill an explanatory role with regard to scientific discourse: it exercises a critical, corrective, and indeed formative function. The final part of this study focused on the neuroscientific knowledge of prose works by Rilke and Kafka that exemplify modernism’s vexed relationship to the notion of subjectivity. The readings in these chapters allowed us to appreciate how modernism stages unknowable experiences to embrace fragmentation and to foreground the alienation resulting from a fractured sense of self. This led to the conclusion that modernist prose literature embodies neuroscientific knowledge about human brain function “negatively,” as knowledge that does not readily reveal itself but persists in the breaks, the lacunas, in the form of allegorical traces in the narrative—in a partially demolished facade or a cryptic gesture. Figuring as the unknowable, the non-knowledge within the realm of specialized knowledge, concepts like schizophrenia or the “outcasts” served as crucial reminders that the poetics of knowledge is neither simply a method nor a body of knowledge, but a complex practice that can only approximate the

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shifting relationships between scientific, institutional, and literary/textual epistemes.1 One final question concerns the possible contribution of literary theory to formulating “new, imaginative answers” to current challenges in the neurosciences, as Ottmar Ette writes: “The question about knowledge in and through literature is also a question about the social, political, and cultural relevance this knowledge may have for today’s differently organized information and (also) knowledge societies. What does literature want? What can it do?”2 Evidently, this question falls outside the purview of this study, which is not devoted to analyzing the latest developments in the field of neuroscience, but instead concerned itself with the historical interaction of literature and neuroscience in the long nineteenth century. Poetics of the Brain is not an argument for the conclusion that we should mine Poetic Realist novellas for insights into modern-day neuroscientific concepts. Neuroscience was in its infancy at the time when these novels and novellas were conceived and many of the scientific concepts that were at the center of the readings in this study have been significantly revised or invalidated since they were first articulated many decades ago. The argument about the deep intuitive connection between a scene drawn from Rilke’s Notebooks and Brodmann’s cyto-architectonic maps of the brain, for instance, can simply not be translated into the age of Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Even if the literary texts were often quite prescient with regard to neuroscientific knowledge, the latter is more often than not rendered obsolete by professional scientific progress and even in the cases where it has maintained its relevance, we certainly do not depend on literary texts from the nineteenth century to understand and organize such conventional knowledge. In other words, no matter how prescient literature is, its nonexpert knowledge about neuroscience has to a large part been superseded by technical progress and new, specialized findings. Thus, while it would have been nice to write a chapter on the German Bildungsroman as a genre that performs and anticipates the concept of neuroplasticity, such a study would run the danger of pressing the vast and formidable fields of German literary fiction and neuroscience into anachronistic arguments of historical influence. 1  On the notion of “Nicht-Wissen,” see Harald Neumann, “Exemplarische Lektüren,” Literatur und Wissen, ed. Roland Borgards et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013), 300. 2  Ottmar Ette, Writing-between-Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures-without-afixed-Abode (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), xxi.

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Yet it is tempting to think about the implications of present-day scientific concepts—most notably, neuroplasticity—for local historical perspectives and long-standing literary-historical questions, such as the debate on the formal features and generic conventions of the Bildungsroman. When Roy Pascal first attested to the German Bildungsroman a “lack of plasticity,” he referred to the broad definition of plasticity in the sense of “the quality of being easily shaped or molded.”3 And Martin Swales reevaluation of the genre likewise used the term in its general meaning, reflecting on the “lack of plasticity in its treatment of personal development.”4 As a genre that famously deals with a person’s formative years and gradual spiritual education, the Bildungsroman is curiously resistant to the project of adapting and resolving social and moral conflicts by way of its eponymous personal growth and subject formation. As Swales argues, this is because the German Bildungsroman lacks “a middle ground which produces the specific plasticity of social and moral conflict.”5 Instead, its protagonist figures as an “organism” that is reluctant to change and unable to fully adapt to its “environment” and differences between its various “habitats,” to stay with the terminology of evolutionary biology. Swales argues that within the German intellectual tradition, we frequently find that reality is either so inherently inimical to Geist as to be not worth a second thought, or that it is transformed as the palpable, outward realization of Geist. Either way, the postulation of a significant realm within which man may come to fulfillment is dependent upon metaphysical (inward) rather than social (outward) validation. Up to a point, of course, the Bildungsroman partakes of this (questionable) tradition of inwardness. But in my view, the characteristic tension of Nacheinander and Nebeneinander means that the genre does go some way toward exploring Krieger’s “middle ground.”6

It is fascinating to consider how Swales’ argument would be altered and enriched if the concept of plasticity were to be understood in its specialized neuroscientific meaning, namely, as neuroplasticity—a term referring to the brain’s ability to change throughout life and reorganize itself by 3  Roy Pascal, The German Novel: Studies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), quoted after Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), ix. 4  Ibid. 5  Ibid., 156. 6  Ibid.

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forming new neuronal connections. Rather than emerging from a middle ground, and from a dialectic of human engagement with social reality, the neuroscientific conception of plasticity conceives of human brain function as a process of selfsculpting and transdifferentiation. It encourages us to do away with such dichotomies as inwardness and outwardness, metaphysical principles and social validation, mental operations and objective reality—all dichotomies that make sense in reference to a traditional conception of the Hegelian subject but not in the context of modern-day neuroscience. If we thus abandon the analogy of plasticity and think of Bildung in terms of neuroplasticity, we can appreciate the Bildungsroman for its capacity to both “receive . . . and give form,” as Catherine Malabou writes, and bring about “alteration in structure or function [through] development, experience, or injury.”7 Defined along the lines of Malabou’s conception of neuroplasticity, the Bildungsroman comes into view as a genre that self-referentially stages its own modes of knowledge production through a process “that corresponds well to the possibility of fashioning by memory, to the capacity to shape a history,” even if it occurs largely on the basis of the individual mnemonic.8 As Malabou writes: “The functional plasticity of the brain deconstructs its function as the central organ and generates the image of a fluid process, somehow present everywhere and nowhere, which places the outside and the inside in contact by developing an internal principle of cooperation, assistance, and repair, and an external principle of adaptation and evolution.”9 The structural affinity between neuroplasticity and the form of the Bildungsroman serves to underscore the cooperative processes by which a poetics of knowledge thinks about, and thinks through, how aesthetic regimes convert and validate knowledge linked to notions of selfhood and interiority.

 Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Marc Jeannerod, Trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 5. 8  Ibid., 6. 9  Ibid., 35. 7

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Index1

A Absolute music, 72, 73, 83–89 Adam Man (Conradi), 177 Adorno, Theodor W., 184n2 Affect, music and, 72–73, 87–88, 99 Affect theory, 72–73 Alcoholism and excessive alcohol consumption Korsakoff’s syndrome and, 136 memory loss and, 14, 17, 130 in On Tangled Paths, 137 Alexia, 78 Allegorical gaze and allegorical mode of seeing, 18, 166–168 Allegory, 4, 17–18, 163–168, 181, 214 Allegory of the cave, 152 Alter ego, 64, 64n35, 82, 92, 157, 204 American Psychiatric Association (DSM–5), 53n11

Amerika (Kafka), 183–185, 190–192, 194 Amnesia anterograde and retrograde, 17, 130, 138, 140, 154 Korsakoff on, 147–149 On Tangled Paths on, 134–142, 145, 147 pseudo-reminiscences and, 147–149 Amusia aphasia and, 16, 73, 80 Knoblauch on, 74 The Poor Musician and, 73, 83, 89 Anamnesis, x Anima, soma and, 18, 170 Animals brains of, 42, 43, 174, 177–179 Kafka and, 193–202 Animal spirits, 26 Anosodiaphoria, 195 Anosognosia, 189–191, 195–196, 200

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Boos, The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5

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246 

INDEX

Anschauung (intuition), 33, 166 Anterograde and retrograde amnesia, 17, 130, 138, 140, 154 Anthropology, 82, 91, 97 Anti-psychiatry movement, 172 Anton, Gabriel, 190 Anton Reiser (Moritz), 41 Aphasia amusia and, 16, 73, 80 asymbolia and, 79 music alexia and, 78 Apperception, 33, 33n22, 34 Aristotle, 27n14, 32 Art, theory and, 5 Asomatognosia, 195 Asymbolia, 78, 79 Ataxia, 146 Auditory center, for tone, 74, 75, 77, 78, 95 Autobiography (Grillparzer), 89 Autopsy, 18, 174–176 Autopsy of the soul, 169–176 Autoscopic hallucinations, 64–67, 69, 147 B Babinski, Joseph, 190, 196, 200 Balzac, Honoré de, 94 Benjamin, Walter, 165–166, 184–185 Bergmann, Gustav von, 170 Bernheim, Hippolyte, 169 Bernstein, J. M., 34 Bernstein, Susan, 78–80 Bildungsroman, vii, 2, 215–217 Binding, Karl, 163–164 Binswanger, Otto, 166–167 Biopolitics, 18, 175, 180–182 Blake, William, 121 Bleuler, Eugen, 185–188, 205, 211 Bloom, Harold, 205 Bodily movement, 18

Body fictional imagination and, 3 fragmentation of, 161 gestures, 183, 210 hallucinations and, 54–55 Kafka on, 18, 183, 185–186, 201–204, 206–208, 210–211 mind/body dualism, 8, 23, 26–28 nineteenth century psychiatry on, 166 psychosomatic illness and, 170 schizophrenia and, 185–186, 196 soul and, 26–30 Body image, body schema and, 195–197, 204 Body image disorder, 18, 198, 211 Body schema disorder, x, 187n14, 187n15 body image disorder and, 18, 211 Kafka and, 14–15, 18, 189–194, 196, 205–208, 211 Pick on, 14–15, 187, 187n15, 191–193 psychiatry on, 187 schizophrenia and, 18, 185–187, 189–191, 205–206 vestibular system and, 188–189 Botho von Rienäcker in On Tangled Paths (fictional character), 135–145, 151–154 Bouillaud, Jean-Baptiste, 174 Brain, 79 anatomy and physiology, 10, 37, 162–163 animal, 174, 176–177 animal versus human, 42–44 in autopsy, 174–176 dissections, by Gall, 55 dissections, neuroscience and, 23, 174 during reading process, 6 in German literature, 2–4

 INDEX 

as mnemonic system, 156 morphology, 24, 25 neuroscience and, 7, 8, 10 personhood and, 163, 172–175 scientific reductionism on, 174 soul and, 171 soul and, Soemmering on, 27, 28 subjectivity and, 172 Brain ablation, 4, 18, 163, 175–182 “Brain and Soul” lecture, by Flechsig, 171 Brain localization, 15, 25, 43 Brain, mind and Gall on, 37–39 medicine and science on, 172 neuroscience on, 2, 3, 7, 8, 32 philosophy on, 32 Brain pathology, 8–10 Brain physiology, 174 Brain research, 12 Cartesianism in, 26, 27 on cerebral anatomy, 24 neurology and, 7 neuroscience and, 8 The Nightwatches by Bonaventura and, 21 soul and, 38 Brain tissue, 24 Brain ventricles, 26–29, 35 Broca, Paul, 9, 30, 95 Broca’s area, 75, 95 Brod, Max, 206–207 Brodmann, Korbinian, 177–179 Broismont, Brierre de, 48 C Camera obscura, 152 Capitalism, 107, 149, 165 Cartesianism, 26, 27 Cartesian mind/body dualism, 8, 25–28

247

Case histories, of hallucinations, 57–62 Case studies, 19 of aphasia, 81 of hallucinations, 49–50 novellas and, 60, 67 Poetic Realism and, 93 Cerebellar vermis, 176 Cerebral activity, mind as function of, 172 Cerebral anatomy, 24, 170–172 Cerebral cortex, 9, 30, 37, 51, 75, 174, 177 Cerebral dysfunction, 11 Cerebral hemispheres, 9, 95–99, 174, 178 Cerebral localization, 10, 79, 95 Cerebral physiology, 26 Cerebral processes, mental illnesses and, 171 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 80, 168–169 Clinical neuroscience, 10 Cognition connectionist conceptions of, 46 etiology of, 32 in Kafka’s prose, 6 Kreuzgang and, 33, 34 music, 73, 80 music and language, 73 Cognitive literary studies, 5–7 Cognitive poetics, 5n8, 6 Cognitive processes, of reading, 5–6 Cognitive science, literary studies and, 5–7 Collector’s mania (Sammelsucht), viii–ix Commissura anterior, 177–179 Compulsions, 106–110, 114–116, 120, 123 Compulsive action (Zwangshandlung), 115–116 Condensation, 150–156

248 

INDEX

Confusion, as Wernicke’s encephalopathy symptom, 146 Conradi, Hermann, 177 Consciousness Gall on, 23, 25, 43 Kant on, 33 literature and, 22 losing, 146, 150 Contributions to the Advancement of Mental Therapeutics (Reil and Hoffbauer), 2 Corpses, brains of, 175–176 Craniology, 9, 15, 23, 24n5, 25, 37–46, 55 Cytoarchitectonics, 163, 170, 177 D Dax, Marc, 95n48 “Daybooking”(“tagebuchen”), 131, 133 de Man, Paul, 164, 180 Déjà vu, 148 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 185, 193–194, 201, 206, 207 Delirium, 60, 62, 108, 150 Delusion hallucination and, 15, 59 illusion and, 30 intrusive thoughts and, 115–116 obsessive idea and, 124–125 OCD and, 124 as Wahnidee, 116 Dementia praecox, 172 Descartes, René, 26, 27, 32 Description of a Struggle (Kafka), 184, 210 Determinism, 8 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 53n11, 187 Diplopia, 146, 147

Discourse on Method (Descartes), 27 “On Disorders of the Musical Capacity from Cerebral Disease” (Knoblauch), 76 Dispositive, 181 Doppelgänger, 36, 63–70 Doppelvorstellung (double representation), 139 Double figure of, 15, 50, 62–70 Foucault on, 69–70 hallucinations and, 49, 65, 69 literary, 67–70 in On Tangled Paths, 148 the unthought and, 69–70 See also Doppelgänger Double representation (Doppelvorstellung), 139 Double vision, 146, 147 Downing, Eric, 103–104 DSM, see Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Dualism, 8, 25–28, 50 E Edgren, J. G., 74n7 Effi Briest (Fontane), 6 Ego-dystononic impulses, 106 Ego, in Idealist notions of subjectivity, 65 Ego regressions, 14–15 Electroshock therapy, 18, 168, 179 Empirical psychology, 163 Empiricism, 57–58, 162, 169 Emptiness, obsessive collecting as filling, ix–x Engstrom, Eric J., 167, 175 Enlightenment ideals, Weimar classicism and, 189 philosophy and science in, 50 psychological novel, 2

 INDEX 

Episodic memories, 139, 141 Episteme Foucauldian, 12, 50, 69 of neurology, 137 Epistemological uncertainty, 30, 61, 134 Erotic pedophilia (Päderastie), 125 Esquirol, Jean-Étienne, 15, 16 on hallucinations, 49, 53–57, 67 on monomania, 108 Etiology of hallucination, 49, 56, 59 of hoarding disorder, ix of human cognition, 32 of Korsakoff’s syndrome, 14, 136 of multiple personality disorder, 36 of music alexia and aphasia, 78 of OCD, 123 of paramusie and paragraphie, 73 of schizophrenia and body schema disorder, 189–190 of tone-deafness, 76 Eugenics movement, 181 “Euthanasia,” 181 Experimental neuroanatomy, 163 Experimental psychology, 18, 170, 180 Experimental psychopathology, 17, 104 F Facino Cane (Balzac), 94 False memories, 147–149 Fantasy, 15, 31, 48n4, 62, 63, 116 pedophilic, in A Village Romeo and Juliet, 113, 124 pseudo-reminiscences and, 147 reality, A Village Romeo and Juliet and, 111–112, 122, 126, 127 sexual, 124–125 Féré, Charles, 64

249

Ferriar, John, 48 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 30–32, 51, 64–65 Figure of the double, 15, 49, 62–70 Finger, Ellis, 34 Finkelnburg, Carl Maria, 78–80 Flechsig, Paul, 163, 170–174 Flemming, Carl Friedrich, 167 Flourens, Pierre, 79, 174 Fontane, Theodor, x, 2, 4–6, 16, 122, 135 Korsakoff and, 155 memory and, 130, 133, 155 mnemonic practices of, 130, 155, 156 Poetic Realism of, 129, 132, 133 See also On Tangled Paths (Fontane) Forel, Auguste-Henri, 171, 175 Forgetting, 4, 17, 130, 137, 142–145, 154, 155 Foucauldian episteme, 12, 50, 69 Foucault, Michel, 12–13, 69–70 Fragmentation, 152, 160–162, 186, 190, 205–208, 214 Frankfurt School, 104 Franz II (emperor), 37 Free will, 8 Freud, Sigmund, ix, 104, 113, 125–126, 126n53, 197 Fritsch, Gustav, 9 Frohschammer, Jakob, 125n51 Fromm, Erich, ix Frye, Northrop, 121 Fundamental forces of the soul (Grundkräfte der Seele), 40 G Gall, Franz Joseph on animal and human brains, 42 on brain anatomy, 37, 163 on brain and mind, 38, 42–44

250 

INDEX

Gall, Franz Joseph (cont.) brain dissections by, 55 on brain localization, 43 on brain morphology, 24, 25 on consciousness, 23, 25, 44 craniology of, 9, 15, 23, 37–46, 55 in history of neuroscience, 8, 24, 38, 39 Kreuzgang and, 37, 38 materialism of, 23, 37 on memory and perception, 44, 45 on mind, 25 on musical organ, in brain, 79 neuroanatomy of, 38, 42 The Nightwatches by Bonaventura on, 14–15, 22, 23, 37–39, 42–44, 46 phrenology of, 174 on senses, 43, 44 on skulls, 38, 39 on soul, 40 on verticalism, 43 Galvani, Luigi, 9 Gauchet, Marcel, 54 German Bildungsroman, 215–216 German idealism, 23 German realism, 2, 116 Gesner, J. A. P., 80n15 Gestures, of Kafka’s characters, 18, 183–185, 207–210 Gilbert, Pamela K., 92–94 Gillespie, Gerard, 34 Gmelin, Eberhard, 36 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 48, 97 Gowers, William, 80 Grasset, Joseph, 80 Gregor Samsa, in The Metamorphosis (fictional character), 183–184, 186, 191–197 Griesinger, Wilhelm, 9, 10, 16, 108–110, 170

Grillparzer, Franz, 3–5, 72–73, 82–83, 89–90 See also The Poor Musician (Grillparzer) Grübelsucht (obsessional brooding), 108–110 Grundkräfte der Seele (fundamental forces of the soul), 40 Guattari, Félix, 185, 193–194, 201, 206, 207 Gudden, Bernhard von, 163, 171, 175 H Haller, Albrecht von, 24 Hallucinations autoscopic, 64–67, 69, 147 body and, 54–55 case histories, 57–62 case studies, 49–50 delusion and, 15, 59 Doppelgänger and, 63–66 doubles and, 49, 65, 69 DSM-5 on, 53n11 Esquirol on, 49, 53–63, 67 etiology of, 49, 56, 59 etymology of term, 56–57 fiction and, 56, 58, 62–63 illusions vs., 53 imagination and, 15–16 knowledge and, 57–58 Müller, J., on, 48–49 nervous system and, 54–56 neuroscience on, 50, 56, 69 Nicolai on, 48–49, 52–56, 67 nosology of, 59 perceptions and, 53, 53n11 phantasms and, 49–58 pseudo-hallucinations, 49 psychiatry and, 50, 59, 62 psychopathic, 68

 INDEX 

psychopathology of, 50, 56 theories of, 15, 48–49 Hamacher, Werner, 208 Hanslick, Eduard, 72, 73, 83–85, 87–89 Head, Henry, 190, 192 Heeschen, Claus, 26n9, 26n10, 27 Hegel, G. W. F., 32, 217 Hemiplegia, 190 Hemisphere specialization theories, 96 Hemispheric asymmetry, Esquirol on monomania and, 108 Hemispheric lateralization, 4, 11, 16, 73 High modernism, 12 Historiography, of novel, 3 Hitzig, Eduard, 9 Hoarding, viii–xi, xn11 Hoche, Alfred, 163–164 Hoffbauer, Johann Christoph, 2 Hoffmann, E. T. A., x Holmes, Gordon, 190, 192 Holub, Robert C., 93, 111, 122–123 Hufeland, Hofrath, 52, 55 Humanities, science and, 13, 22, 210–211, 213–214 Huyssen, Andreas, 161 I Idealism of Fichte, 30–32 figure of the double and, 64 German, 23 on subjectivity, 65 transcendental, 27, 30, 32, 57 Images, perception and, 151–153 Imagination body and, 18 fantasy and, 15, 31, 48n4, 62–63 hallucination and, 15–16 of Kreuzgang, 32

251

music and, 97, 98 Incest, 111, 113–114, 123–124 Indian Summer (Stifter), vii–x Inertial sensor, 188–189 Introspection, 22, 162 Intrusive thoughts, 4, 103, 110, 115–116, 115n33 Intuition (Anschauung), 33, 99 J Jackson, John Hughlings, 80, 95n49, 147 Jacob, in The Poor Musician (fictional character), 71–73, 75–78, 81–99 Jakobson, Roman, 149–151 Janet, Pierre, 168–172 Jaspers, Karl, 209 Jean Paul, x, 5, 16, 49–50 on autoscopic hallucination, 65–66 on Doppelgänger, 63, 67 Self-Life-Description by, 65–67 Siebenkäs by, 49, 63–65 Titan by, 64–65 Jolly, Friedrich, 136n20 Josefine, the Mouse Singer (Kafka), 198–199 Josef K., in The Trial (fictional character), 186, 197, 203–206, 208 K Kafka (Deleuze and Guattari), 193–194 Kafka, Franz, x, 5–6, 11 animals and, 193–202 animals, humans and, 197–202 on anosodiaphoria, 195 anosognosia and, 189–191, 195–196, 200 on asomatognosia, 195

252 

INDEX

Kafka, Franz (cont.) Benjamin on, 183–184 on bodies, 18, 183–184, 200–204, 206–208, 210–211 body schema disorder and, 14–15, 18, 189–194, 196, 205–208, 211 Description of a Struggle by, 184, 210 on fragmentation, 186, 190, 205–208, 214 on gestures, 18, 183–185, 207–210 humans and, 197–208 Josefine, the Mouse Singer by, 198–199 The Man Who Disappeared by, 183–184 The Metamorphosis by, 183–186, 190–197 modernism of, 185–186, 207, 209, 210 Munk and, 200 Pick and, 187n15 A Report to an Academy by, 195 Researches of a Dog by, 199–201 schizophrenia and, 18, 185–187, 187n12, 189–191, 196, 198, 201, 205–207, 209–211 A Starvation Artist by, 202–203 The Trial by, 186, 190, 191, 197, 202–209 Kakfa, Franz Amerika by, 183–185, 190–191, 194 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 29, 30 on Anschauung, 33 on apperception, 33, 34 on consciousness, 33 formalism of, 51 Kreuzgang and, 32–34 on mind, 27, 32 noumenal world of, 34 Soemmering and, 27–30, 32, 35, 36

transcendental idealism of, 57 Karl Rossmann, in Amerika (fictional character), 183–185, 190–192, 195 Käthe von Sellenthin, in On Tangled Paths (fictional character), 135, 138, 140–145 Keller, Gottfried, x, 2, 4, 5, 16, 17, 123, 124 See also A Village Romeo and Juliet (Keller) Kennen, 96, 99 Kittler, Friedrich A., 172n39, 173 Kleist, Heinrich von, x, 68, 187–189 Klingemann, August, 5, 11, 23, 25, 26 See also The Nightwatches by Bonaventura (Klingemann) Knoblauch, August, 16, 73, 77–80 Knowledge articulated, 70 empiricism on, 57 hallucinations and, 57–58 idealist paradigm of, 30, 31 left hemisphere and, 97 literary, 7, 23, 70 literature and, 19, 213–215 medical, xi, 7, 111–112, 173, 190–191 medico-scientific, 5, 104 memory, literature and, 134 modularistic system of, 46 neuroscientific, 3, 5, 14, 16, 17, 73, 104, 110, 127, 140, 213–215 The Nightwatches by Bonaventura on, 32, 33 nineteenth century humanists on, 70 poetic, 163 realism and, 96–97 scientific, 12, 15–16, 19, 50, 59, 62, 184 self-knowledge, 65, 164 specialized, 172–173, 213, 214

 INDEX 

Korsakoff, Sergei Sergeievich, 14, 17, 136–140, 148, 149 on amnesia, 147–149 Fontane and, 155 On Tangled Paths and, 130 Korsakoff’s syndrome, 14, 136, 136n20, 140, 145, 154 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 16, 108–110, 114–115, 125 Kreuzgang, in The Nightwatches by Bonaventura (fictional character), 15, 30–38, 40, 41, 44, 46 L Lacan, Jacques, 162, 170 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 49 Language left hemisphere and, 95, 96 in neurology, 80 processing, 75 See also Music and language Lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”), 163–164 Leibgeber, in Siebenkäs (fictional character), 63–65 Leidensdruck, 107 Lene Nimptsch, in On Tangled Paths (fictional character), 135–140, 142–151, 153–154 Liébeault, Ambroise Auguste, 169 Life sciences, 32 “Life unworthy of life” (lebensunwertes Leben), 163–164 The Literary Absolute (Lacoue-­ Labarthe and Nancy), 49 Literary authors, 14, 92–94 Literary criticism, on Romanticism and the unconscious, 1 Literary knowledge, 7, 23, 70 Literary studies, cognitive, 5–7 Literature

253

autoscopic hallucination and, 65–67 consciousness and, 22 figure of the double in, 67–70 Fontane on modern, 132 knowledge and, 19, 213–215 memory, knowledge and, 17, 134 neuroscience and, 12–14, 16, 18 neuroscience and, double in, 50, 67–70 neuroscientific knowledge, 213–215 science and, 12–16, 62, 70, 213–214 self-reflexive, 66 universality of, 23 Localization brain, 15, 25, 43 cerebral, 10, 79, 95 of mental faculties and processes, 23 of soul, Descartes on, 26 of soul, in brain, Soemmering on, 26, 27 Localizationism, 26, 27, 42, 170 Loneliness, ix, x Long-and short-term memory loss, 4, 17, 130, 138 Long-term memory, 133, 138, 141, 148, 152 Long-term potentiation, 137 Luhmann, Niklas, 65 M Magazine for Empirical Psychology, 2 Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 215 Malabou, Catherine, 217 Malte Laurids Brigge, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (fictional character), 17–18, 157–182 Mania, 55 Manic behavior, viii

254 

INDEX

The Man Who Disappeared (Kafka), 183–185 Marti and Manz, in A Village Romeo and Juliet (fictional characters), 101–102, 105–108, 110–111, 113–114, 117–121 Material culture, vii–viii Materialism, 168–169 of Gall, 23, 37 German literature and, 10–12 medical, 172 mind and, 10 neuroscience and, 3, 8–10 psychopathology and, 9 on soul, The Nightwatches on, 33 Materialist theory, of hallucinations, 15 McGilchrist, Iain, 96–97, 210–211 Meckel, Johann Friedrich, 176 Medial Surface of the Right Hemisphere drawing, by Brodmann, 179 Medical knowledge, xi, 7, 111–112, 173, 190–191 Medical materialism, 172 Medicine, scientizing, 164–169 Medico-scientific discipline, neuroscience as, 14–15 Medico-scientific discourse, 127 Medico-scientific knowledge, 5, 104 Medico-scientific perspective, on the double, 68 Medico-scientific practices, 3, 17–18 Memoir on the Appearance of Specters or Phantoms occasioned by Disease, with Psychological Remarks (Nicolai), 47, 50–53 Memory disorders, neuronal dysfunction and, 137, 145 episodic, 138, 139, 141 False, 147–150 Fontane and, 130, 133, 155, 156 Gall on, 44, 45 literature, knowledge and, 17, 134

long-term, 133, 138, 141, 142, 148, 152 music, right hemisphere and, 95, 96 in On Tangled Paths, 17, 133, 134, 138–146, 149, 151–156 realism and, 135 recuperation, 130–135 selective, 145 Memory loss alcoholism and, 14, 17, 130 long-and short-term, 4, 17, 130, 138 neuroscience of, 17, 130 psychopathology of, 134 writing and, 130 See also Amnesia; Korsakoff’s syndrome Mental disorders, neuroscience on, 8–10 Mental illnesses, 50, 62, 104, 162, 171 The Metamorphosis (Kafka), 183–184, 186, 190, 193–197 Metaphors, in thing-poems, of Rilke, 6 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand, 1–2 Meynert, Theodor, 163, 171 Mind cerebral activity and, 172 Gall on, 24 Kant on, 27, 32 materialism and, 8 as metaphysical entity, 8 soul and, 32 See also Brain, mind and Mind/body dualism, 8, 23, 25 Mishara, Aaron L., 187n12, 190 Mnemonic disorders, 134, 150 Mnemonic faculties, 43 Mnemonic instability, 134 Mnemonic practices and strategies, 130, 155 Mnemonic system, brain as, 156 Modernism

 INDEX 

allegory in, 164 German, high, 12 of Kafka, 185–186, 189–190, 207, 209 neuroscientific knowledge and, 17, 214–215 On Tangled Paths and, 155 schizophrenia and, 209–211 subjectivity and, 214 Modernist poetics, 18, 185–186 Modernity, 107–108, 211 allegory and, 163–164, 166 amnesia as trope of, 142 epistemological crisis of, 209 figure of the double in, 69–70 Fontane on, 155 loss of self and identity in, 160–162 memory and, 17 in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 160–163 Modern subject, 157, 160–162, 172n39 Monomania, 16, 105–110 Moritz, Karl Philipp, x–xi, 41 Movement, central nervous system and, 35 MRI, see Magnetic resonance imaging Müller, Johannes, 48–49 Müller, Ralph, 6 Multiple personality disorder, 36 Munk, Hermann, 200 Music absolute, 72, 73, 84–89 aesthetics, in The Poor Musician, 82, 86–89 affect, emotion and, 72–73, 87, 99 amusia, 16, 73, 82, 89 cognition, 73, 80, 81 imagination and, 96, 98–99 left cerebral hemisphere and, 95 neurology and, 74, 78–81 processing, 16, 73–75, 80

255

pure instrumental, 83 right hemisphere, memory and, 95, 96 as sound and form, 83, 84, 89 Music alexia, 78 Music and language asymbolia and, 78–80 Bernstein, S., on, 79 cognition, 73 disorders, 78 hemispheric lateralization of, 16, 73 in The Poor Musician, 71–73, 75 N Nancy, Jean-Luc, 49 Nasse, Friedrich, 167 National Socialism, 180 Nervous system, 8, 10, 15, 35, 54–56, 146 Neural association area, 137 Neuritis, 136 Neuroanatomy, 4, 18, 23, 51 Broca and Wernicke on, 30 experimental, 163 experimental psychology and, 170 of Gall, 38, 42, 43 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge on, 174–175 psychiatry and, 170–173, 180 psychological phenomena and, 163 psychopathology and, 172 Neurology, 4, 154 brain research and, 7 episteme of, 137 Haller and, 24 of Korsakoff’s syndrome, 136 language in, 80 music and, 74, 78–80 On Tangled Paths on, 136 psychology and, 163 on seeing, 166–167

256 

INDEX

Neuronal dysfunction, memory disorders and, 137, 145 Neuron theory, 171 Neuropathology, 170–172, 185–186, 189, 195, 205, 207–209 Neuroplasticity, 215–217 Neuroscience absolute music and, 72 of amnesia, 136 on body image, 196 on body, modernity and, 211 brain and, 7–10 on brain and mind, 3, 7, 8, 32 on brain, as mnemonic system, 156 brain dissections and, 23, 174, 176 on brain localization, 25 brain research and, 8 on central nervous system, 8 clinical, 10 experimental psychology and, 18, 180 fiction, hallucination and, 56, 62–63 Gall in history of, 8, 24, 38, 39 German novels and, 1–4, 10–11, 14–15 on hallucination, 50, 56, 69 historical interaction with 19th century prose literature, 7 in literature and culture, 12–14, 16, 19, 22 literature and, double in, 50, 67–70 literature, knowledge and, 134 materialism and, 3, 8–10 as medico-scientific discipline, 14–15 of memory loss, 17, 130 on mental disorders, 8–10 on monomania, 108 on soul, 172 psychiatry, psychology and, 2 psychopathology and, 127 Romantic novel form and, 15, 26

Neuroscientific authors, x–xi Neuroscientific concepts, 8–10 Neuroscientific knowledge, 3, 5, 14, 73, 110, 127 literature and, 213–215 modernism and, 17, 214–215 Poetic Realism and, 16 of retrograde amnesia, 140 in A Village Romeo and Juliet, 103–104 Neuroscientific research, 14, 18, 185–186 Nicolai, Christoph Friedrich, 15 on hallucinations, 48–49, 52–56, 67 on knowledge and empirical observation, 57–58 on phantasms, 48, 50–54 Soemmering and, 47, 50–51 on soul, 51 The Nightwatches by Bonaventura (Klingemann), 3–4 Bonaventura in, 22 on brain localization, 25 characters of, 35, 39–41, 44 on craniology, 37–46 epistemological uncertainty in, 30 on Fichte, 30, 31 on Gall, 37–39, 42–44, 46 on Gall and Soemmering, 14–15, 22, 23 on Kant, 32–34 Kreuzgang in, 15, 22, 23, 44, 46 narrative structure and form of, 21, 44, 45 neuroanatomy in, 26 on organ of the soul, 26–36 perception and memory in, 44 Romanticism and, 21, 22, 45, 46 on Soemmering, 14–15, 22, 23, 30, 32, 35, 36 on soul, materialism and, 33 Nihilism, 21, 22, 30, 33, 36, 191

 INDEX 

Nissl method, 177 Normality, pathology and, 104 Nosology, 59, 62, 104, 136 Note-blindness, 16, 73, 75, 76, 89 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rilke), 4 on allegorical mode of seeing, 18, 165–167 allegory and, 163–166 anti-psychiatry movement and, 172 on autopsy, 175 on autopsy, of the soul, 169–176 on biopolitics, 18, 175, 180–182 on brain ablation, 176–182 on capitalism, 165 on commissura anterior, 177–179 experimental neuroanatomy and, 163 fragmentation in, 160–162 introspection in, 160–162 Malte in, 17–18, 157–172, 175–182 on modernity, 160–163 on modern subject, 157, 160–162, 172n39 on neuroanatomy, 173–176 on neuroscience, 173–175 on outcasts, 181–182 on Paris and urban landscape, 157–162 reality in, 160–163 on Salpêtrière Hospital, 18, 166, 168, 175–176 on scientizing medicine, 164–169 on seeing, in psychiatry and neurology, 166–167 Tourette’s syndrome and, 173 Novalis, 1 Novellas, 4 Doppelgänger in, 65 medical case studies and, 60, 67 Poetic Realist, 16, 17, 103, 111 Novelty, 96, 97

257

O Obsessional brooding (Grübelsucht), 108–110 Obsessions, 17, 104, 108–110, 118, 120, 123, 124 Obsessive collecting, viii–xi Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), 106, 110, 115–116 delusion and, 124, 127 etiology of, 123 in A Village Romeo and Juliet, 4, 106, 110–111, 115, 118, 121, 123–124, 127 Obsessive ideas, 17, 109–116, 124–125 Obsessive thought (Zwangvorstellung), 109, 115–116, 124, 125 OCD, see Obsessive compulsive disorder “On Realism in Art” (Jakobson), 149 On Tangled Paths (Fontane), 4, 14 alcoholism and excessive alcohol consumption in, 136, 137 on amnesia, 135–142, 145 Botho von Rienäcker in, 135–145, 151–156 on class hierarchy, 135 condensation in, 150–156 double in, 148–149 drafts of, Berlin and, 131, 134 on forgetting, 137, 142–145, 154, 155 Käthe von Sellenthin in, 135, 138, 140–145 Korsakoff and, 130 Korsakoff’s syndrome and, 136, 145, 154 Lene Nimptsch in, 135–140, 142–151, 153–154 memory in, 17, 133, 134, 138–145, 149, 151–156 memory recuperation and, 133

258 

INDEX

On Tangled Paths (Fontane) (cont.) pseudo-reminiscences in, 143–150 on psychopathology of memory loss, 134 realism in, 150 remembering in, 144, 145, 154 Wernicke’s encephalopathy in, 146 On the Musically Beautiful (Hanslick), 83 On the Organ of the Soul (Soemmering), 14, 22, 25, 27–30, 47 Ophthalmoplegia, 146 The Order of Things (Foucault), 69–70 Organ of the soul, 26–37 The Other, 70, 170, 209 P Päderastie (erotic pedophilia), 125 Paragraphie, 73, 74 Paramusie, 73 Paranoid personality disorders, 186, 187n12 Pathological hearing, 72, 87–88 Pedophilia, 113, 122–127 Perception allegorical mode of seeing, 166 Gall on, 43, 45 hallucination and, 53–54, 53n11 images and, 151–153 sensory, 49, 162 Personhood, 163, 172–175 Phantasms, 48, 50–58 Phrenology, 174 Pick, Arnold, 14–15, 187, 187n15, 189–190, 192 Pineal gland, 26 Pinel, Philippe, 58 Plato, 152 Poetic knowledge, 163 Poetic Realism, 214 case studies and, 93

Downing on, 103–104 experimentations of, 12 of Fontane, 129, 130, 132, 133 hallucination narratives in, 50 neuroscientific knowledge and, 16 novellas, 16, 17, 103, 111 novels, 1–2 A Village Romeo and Juliet and, 103–104, 111, 127 The Poor Musician (Grillparzer), 4, 16 absolute music and, 84–90 amusia and, 73–83, 89 autobiographical elements of, 89–90, 92 Balzac’s Facino Cane and, 94 cerebral hemispheres and, 95–99 Hanslick and, 83–85 Jacob in, 71–73, 75–78, 81–94, 96–99 Knoblauch and, 16, 75–78 on music aesthetics, 82, 86–89 on music and language, 71–73, 75, 81, 86 narrator and narration of, 81–83, 87, 90–99 realism and, 89–94 on tone-deafness and note-­ blindness, 74–77, 89 Popper, Karl, 56n20 Positivism, 57 Praecox-feeling, 201 Prichard, James Cowles, 55n18 Probst, Moritz, 75n7 Progressive universal poetry, 67 Proprioception, 192, 193, 205, 209 Proust, Adrien, 79 Pseudo-hallucination, 49 Pseudo-reminiscences, 143–150 Psychasthenia, 168 Psyche, 1, 169–170 Psychiatry, 163 anti-psychiatry movement, of late 1890s, 172 on body schema disorder, 187

 INDEX 

German systematic, 10 hallucinations and, 50, 59, 62 neuroanatomy and, 170–172, 174, 180 neuroscience and, 2, 23 Pinel’s case histories of patients, 58 on schizophrenia, 209 science and, 170–173 on seeing, 166–167 Psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis, ix, 68, 104, 123, 145 Psychology brain physiology and, 174 empirical, 163 experimental, 18, 170, 180 late nineteenth century, as pathology-oriented, 169–170 neuroscience and, 2 Psychopathic hallucination, 68 Psychopathological denial, 191 Psychopathology, viii, 8–10, 209 experimental, 17, 104 of hallucinations, 50, 56 of memory loss, 134 neuroanatomy and, 172 of schizophrenia, 186 of A Village Romeo and Juliet, 111–112, 118, 124, 125, 127 Psychophysiology, 171 Psychosexual development, Freud on, 197 Psychosis, 162 Psychosomatic illness, 170 The Puppet Theatre (Kleist), 187–188 Pure instrumental music, Hanslick on, 83 Purkinje, Jan Evangelista, 188–189 R Raabe, Wilhelm, x, 1–2 Rationalism, 15, 51, 99 Rationalist inductive theory, of hallucinations, 15

259

Reading, 5–6, 85–86 Realism, 71–73, 103–104, 122 German, 2, 116 Jakobson on, 149–151 knowledge and, 96–97 memory and, 134 in On Tangled Paths, 150, 155 The Poor Musician and, 89, 93n43, 94 science, fiction and, 93 See also Poetic Realism Reductionism, 163, 174 Reil, Johann Christian, 2 Remembering narrative, 34 in Nightwatches, process of, 45 in On Tangled Paths, 144, 145, 154 See also Memory Repetition, 104, 126 Repetition compulsion (Wiederholungszwang), 113 A Report to an Academy (Kafka), 195 Researches of a Dog (Kafka), 199–201 Retrograde and anterograde amnesia, 17, 130, 137, 140, 154 Richter, Jean Paul, see Jean Paul Riegl, Alois, 145 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 4–6, 17–18, 164 See also The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rilke) Ritter, J. W., 1 Roman Catholic Church, 37 Romanticism, 213 experimentations of, 12 The Nightwatches by Bonaventura and, 21, 22, 45, 46 progressive universal poetry and, 67 solipsism of, 2 on the unconscious, literary criticism on, 1 Romantic novel, 15, 26, 46 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 102 Rotpeter, in A Report to an Academy (fictional character), 195

260 

INDEX

Rümke, Henricus Cornelius, 201 Ryan, Judith, 162 S Salpêtrière Hospital, 18, 56, 58, 61, 166, 168, 175–176 Sammelsucht (collector’s mania), viii–ix Santner, Eric L., 173 Sass, Louis A., 210 Schelling, F. W. J., 1 Schilder, Paul, 196–197 Schizophrenia Bleuler on, 185–187, 205 body and, 185–187, 196 body schema disorder and, 18, 185–187, 189–191, 205–206 fragmentation and, 205–207 gesture and, 209 Kafka and, 18, 184–186, 187n12, 189–191, 196, 198, 201, 205–206, 208–211 modernism and, 209–211 psychiatry on, 209 psychopathology of, 186 Schlegel, Friedrich, 1, 21, 23, 46, 67 Schoppe, in Titan (fictional character), 64–65 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 172 Science fiction, realism and, 92–94 hallucinations and, 57–58, 61 humanities and, 13, 22, 210–211, 213–214 literature and, 11–16, 62, 70, 214–215 philosophy and, 50 psychiatry and, 170–173 See also Neuroscience

Science of Knowledge (Fichte), 30 Scientific knowledge, 12, 15–16, 19, 50, 59, 62, 184 Scientific reductionism, 174 Scientizing medicine, 164–169 Seelenblindheit (“soul blindness”), 200 Self duplicate, hallucination of, 64 fragmentation of, 190, 214 Malte on, 170, 179 in modernity, 160–162 in Poetic Realist novels, 1–2 as subject and object, 200 Self-destructive behaviors and impulses, 107, 177–179 Selfhood, 8, 65, 202, 217 Self-knowledge, 65, 164 Self-Life-Description (Jean Paul), 65–67 Self-positing I, 31, 32, 65 Self-reflexivity, 66, 67, 164, 199, 209 Senses, 43, 44, 57 Sensorium commune, 27, 36 Sensory-motor processes and deficiencies, 18, 185–186, 188 Sensory perceptions, 49, 162 Sexual fantasy, 124–125 Shakespeare, William, 102, 103, 117, 121, 124 Siebenkäs (Jean Paul), 49, 63–65 Simmel, Georg, 172n39 Singing, 73–75, 78–80 Skulls, Gall on, 25, 38, 39 See also Craniology Society for Neuroscience, 7 Soemmering, Samuel Thomas von on brain ventricles, 26–29, 35 on Gall’s brain morphology, 25 Kant and, 27, 29, 32, 34 Nicolai and, 47, 50–51

 INDEX 

The Nightwatches by Bonaventura on, 14, 21–23, 30, 32, 34, 35 On the Organ of the Soul by, 14, 22, 25, 27, 30, 47 on sensorium commune, 27 on soul, 9, 18, 23, 25–36, 51 Soma, anima and, 18, 170 Somatic sublime, 173 Soul autopsy of, 169–176 body and, 25–28 brain and, 26–28, 171 brain research and, 38 Gall on fundamental forces of, 40 Kant on, 23, 27 Kreuzgang and, 32, 33, 35, 36 localization of, 26, 27 mind and, 31 neuroscience on, 172 Nicolai on, 51 organ of, 26–36 pineal gland and, 26 psyche and, 1 Soemmering on, 9, 18, 23, 25–28, 35, 51 “Soul blindness” (Seelenblindheit), 200 Specialized knowledge, 172–173, 213, 214 Split personality, 186–187 Spurzheim, Johann Gaspar, 43 Stafford, Barbara, 13–14 Standardization, of medical practices, 169 A Starvation Artist (Kafka), 202–203 Stifter, Adalbert, vii–xi Stiles, Anne, 13n31 Storm, Theodor, x, 1–2

Stricker, Salomon, 115–116 Subjectivist philosophy, 65 Subjectivity, 8, 10–11, 32, 36, 46, 165, 166 brain and, 172 idealism on, 65 modernism and, 214 Superior temporal lobe, 95 Swain, Gladys, 54 Symmetry, 102–104, 108–110, 115–122, 124–125 T Taylor, Kathleen, 8 Theory of Mind (ToM), 5–6 Thing-poems, of Rilke, 6 Titan (Jean Paul), 64–65 Tobias, Rochelle, 160–162, 177–179, 179n54 ToM, see Theory of Mind Tone-deafness, 16, 73, 75, 76, 89 Tourette, Gilles de la, 173 Tourette’s syndrome, 173 Transcendental idealism, 27, 30, 32, 57 The Trial (Kafka) body in, 200–204 Brod preparing for publication, 206–207 fragmentation in, 204–207 gestures in, 208–209 Josef K. in, 186, 191, 197, 203–206, 208 schizophrenia and, 198, 201, 205–206 Troscianko, Emily, 6 Typhoid delirium, 150

261

262 

INDEX

U The unconscious, 1, 68 The unthought, 67–70 V Verticalism, 43, 44 Vestibular system, 188–189 A Village Romeo and Juliet (Keller), 16 compulsions in, 106–110, 114, 120, 123 incest in, 111, 113–114, 123–124 Marti and Manz in, 101–102, 105–108, 110–111, 113–114, 117–123 monomania in, 105–110 narrative structure of, 111, 119–121, 125 narrator of, 116, 118, 127 neuroscientific knowledge and, 104 obsessions in, 104, 108, 118, 120, 123, 124 obsessive ideas and thoughts in, 110–116, 124–125 OCD in, 4, 106, 110–112, 115, 118, 121, 123–124, 127 pedophilia in, 113, 122–127 as Poetic Realist novella, 103–104, 111, 127 psychopathology of, 103–104, 111, 118, 124, 125, 127 reality and fantasy in, 110–111, 122, 126–127 symmetry in, 103–104, 116–122, 124–125 teeth symbolism in, 111–113, 113n26

Vrenchen in, 116, 117 Vreni and Sali in, 112–113, 119–123 Virchow, Rudolf, 166–167 Vogt, Oskar, 10, 163, 173–175, 177, 180 Vogt-Mugnier, Cécile, 163, 173–175, 177, 180 Vrenchen, in A Village Romeo and Juliet (fictional character), 116, 117 Vreni and Sali, in A Village Romeo and Juliet (Keller) (fictional characters), 112–113, 119–123 W Wahnidee (delusion), 116 Wallaschek, Richard, 74n7 Webber, Andrew, 65 Wernicke, Carl, 30, 145, 146 Wernicke’s area, 75 Wernicke’s encephalopathy, 145, 146 Westphal, Carl, 16, 109, 116 Wiederholungszwang (repetition compulsion), 113 Wigan, Arthur L., 99 Wille, Ludwig, 114n29 Wissen, 99 Wundt, Wilhelm, 162–163 Z Zeitroman, of Fontane, 135 Zwangshandlung (compulsive action), 115–116 Zwangvorstellung (obsessive thought), 109, 115–116, 124, 125