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Certainties Unsettled
As the Enlightenment dawned, an epistemology in which knowledge could be gained through touch was increasingly marginalized and associated with the Middle Ages, now supposedly „an age when people groped about blindly.”1 The „Dark Ages“ were to be vanquished by a culture of light – as Foucault reminds us, one of the „great mythical experiences on which the philosophy of the eighteenth century had wished to base its beginning“ was the topos of „the man born blind restored to light.”2 The roots of this topos go back, of course, to Descartes. Foucault elaborates:
For Descartes and Malebranche, to see was to perceive (even in the most concrete types of experience, such as Descartes’s practice of anatomy, or Malebranche’s microscopic observations); but, without stripping perception of its sensitive body, it was a matter of rendering it transparent for the exercise of the mind: light, anterior to every gaze, was the element of ideality – the unassignable place of origin where things were adequate to their essence – and the form by which things reached it through the geometry of bodies; according to them, the act of seeing, having attained perfection, was absorbed back into the unbending, unending figure of light.3
As Foucault points out, though, a concept of perception through sight that takes place in a light both anterior and exterior to the observer is replaced already towards the end of the 18th century by a concept that locates the power to see truth no longer in the light that previously surrounded objects of perception but rather in the gaze of the observer:
At the end of the eighteenth century, however, seeing consists in leaving to experience its greatest corporal opacity; the solidity, the obscurity, the density of things closed in upon themselves, have powers of truth that they owe not to light, but to the slowness of the gaze that passes over them, around them, and gradually into them, bringing them nothing more than its own light. The residence of truth in the dark centre of things is linked, paradoxically, to this sovereign power of the empirical gaze that turns their darkness into light.4
If we read the rise of an epistemology of sight with Foucault, we must remind ourselves that such an epistemology is neither homogenous in itself, nor did it remain stable over time.5 Moreover, the distance associated with an epistemology of sight did not simply replace the proximity associated with an epistemology of touch. Rather, as Constance Classen reminds us, cultural practices associated with touch and sight coexisted far into the 19th century:
There can be no straightforward narrative of a decline in the cultural importance of touch accompanied by a corresponding rise in the cultural importance of sight. The sensory patterns of history are too complex. Older tactile practices long coexisted with the new emphasis on more disembodied modes of social interaction and religious practice.6
The European Enlightenment’s fraught terrain, marked by differing and shifting ways of finding and ascertaining truth, finds its Austrian manifestation in Grillparzer’s Vienna. Günter Schnitzler examines the tensions that prevail in Metternich’s Austria between the legacy of Joseph II. and Baroque Catholicism, between late-Enlightenment liberalism and conservatism:
Alle […] aufklärerischen und liberalen Tendenzen gehen […] eine im Grunde „unmögliche“ Verbindung mit dem geistigen und kulturellen Erbe der Donaumonarchie ein: die barock-katholische Welt bleibt in der Spätaufklarung Österreichs ebenso anwesend wie die Innerlichkeit und auch der Irrationalismus, der das direkte Eingreifen unbeherrschbarer Mächte möglich scheinen läßt; so werden noch die Wunder durch die Kirche nicht als Glaubensangelegenheiten, sondern auch in der Theorie und der Beweisbarkeit anerkannt. Das Barock-Gegenreformatorische erhält sich in gleicher Weise wie die religiöse und kulturelle Überlieferung bis hin zur habsburgnahen spanischen Welt, und zugleich rezipieren die Spätaufklärer der Grillparzer-Zeit die Texte von Leibniz, Wolff und vor allem von Kant.7
Grillparzer, an outspoken critic of Metternich8 and of the stifling effects his bureaucratic absolutism and censorship had on Austrian intellectual life, and an avid reader of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and particularly Kant, nevertheless saw limits to the benefits enlightened reason could bestow upon humankind. Günter Schnitzler outlines Grillparzer’s skepticism towards the Enlightenment:
Grillparzer [erhob] fortwährend […] Vorwürfe vornehmlich gegen eine Aufklärung, deren Rationalismus zudem mit einem Erkenntnis- und Zukunftsoptimismus gepaart ist. Der skeptisch-desillusionistischen Haltung des österreichischen Spätaufklärers steht dies doch recht fern: Grillparzer hegte im Bereich der Ethik erhebliche Zweifel an einer beständigen Entwicklung zum „besseren Menschen“, wie es vor allem in rationalistischen Systemen propagiert wurde; aber auch in der Erkenntnistheorie zweifelte er – trotz der intensiven Kantstudien – an einer angemessenen, theoretisch fundierten Möglichkeit, Erfahrungswirklichkeiten zu fassen […].9
Just as Grillparzer was critical of narratives of progress and felt dubious about the possibility of epistemological certainty, Das Kloster bei Sendomir reflects a world in which stability, insight, and human perfectibility are unobtainable. Set in 17th-century Poland, a country that in the 18th century would suffer three partitions at the hands of the Habsburg Empire, Prussia, and Russia, and in the city of Sandomierz, which, in Grillparzer’s lifetime, was ruled alternately by Austria and Russia, Grillparzer embeds his story in a topography whose stability, as Grillparzer’s readers know, exists on borrowed time10 and whose state will soon, beyond the frame of the story, be as fractured and torn as Vienna’s intellectual landscape in Metternich’s Austria. It is, then, on this fraught terrain that we encounter Grillparzer’s protagonist, an emotionally unstable monk who relates the story of the monastery’s origins and who turns out to be identical to the hero of the framed narrative he presents, the Graf Starschensky.
Framing Uncertainty
The epistemological uncertainty that marks Grillparzer’s text announces itself already in its subtitle: „Nach einer als wahr überlieferten Begebenheit.“ The formulation sidesteps a more direct statement – such as „Nach einer wahren Begebenheit” – an element typical of the novella genre, of course. Instead, the phrasing makes plain that the title’s implied narrator is not willing or able to vouch for the truth value of the text’s events. Rather, the responsibility for the truth – or lack thereof – of the events is delegated to the anonymous forces of Überlieferung.1
The subtitle gives way to a narrative that we will soon identify as the novella’s frame. A broad vision of the Sendomir province’s landscape narrows into a close-up description of „zwei Reiter“ approaching the eponymous monastery:
Die Kleidung der späten Gäste bezeichnete die Fremden. Breitgedrückte, befiederte Hüte, das Elenkoller vom dunklen Brustharnisch gedrückt, die straffanliegenden Unterkleider und hohen Stulpenstiefel erlaubten nicht, [die Reiter] für eingeborne Polen zu halten. Und so war es auch. Als Boten des deutschen Kaisers zogen sie, selbst Deutsche, an den Hof des kriegerischen Johann Sobiesky, und, vom Abend überrascht, suchten sie Nachtlager in dem vor ihnen liegenden Kloster. (SW 3: 119 [my italics])
Here, the representation of textiles in particular evokes affect through an emphasis on their haptic qualities. The narrative reflects on the nexus of vision, touch, and the textual construction of meaning. Having been prompted by Schreyvogel to turn his Sendomir sketch into a prose story, Grillparzer seems to probe the notion of Stoff in all of its senses – sujet, matter, substance, textile. Though the Bezeichnung the visual appearance of the textiles accomplishes in the passage above is one of exclusion and circumscription, the text here nevertheless invites the reader to imagine a tactile relationship with the characters in the text: terms like „gedrückt“ and „straffanliegend“ suggest intimacy as the textiles literally touch and press against the bodies of the characters. The visual assessment of the characters we are allowed to perform, along with the invitation to slip into their skin and imagine the feel of their clothes on their bodies, ultimately yields only negative insights, though: the „Reiter“ must be Fremde; and their appearance excludes the possibility that they could be „eingeborne Polen.“ Further insight can only be granted by a narrator who we thought was sharing all of his knowledge all along, but who instead apparently toyed with us and now asserts his omniscience belatedly with the pronouncement „Und so war es auch.”2
The epistemological uncertainty that pervades the narrative frame is evident as the two imperial messengers approach the monastery to ask for shelter for the night. A „Pförtner“ invites them in, but he states that the abbot will not be able to welcome them as evening prayers are already in progress. The narrator continues:
Die Angabe des etwas mißtrauisch blickenden Mannes ward durch den eintönigen Zusammenklang halb sprechend, halb singend erhobener Stimmen bekräftigt, die, aus dämpfender Ferne durch die hallenden Gewölbe sich hinwindend, den Chorgesang einer geistlichen Gemeine deutlich genug bezeichneten. (SW 3: 119 [my emphases])
It is the gatekeeper whose gaze is described as „mißtrauisch,“ but his attitude of mistrust curiously seems to be transferred both to the „Fremden“ themselves and to us as readers. The gatekeeper’s „Angabe” – possibly just a neutral statement – morphs under his mistrustful gaze into a mere claim that needs to be „bekräftigt.“ This Bekräftigung, though, is in turn weakened by the paradoxical auditory sensation of an „eintönige[r] Zusammenklang“ of voices that are „halb sprechend, halb singend” – hovering, as it were, between the realms of the prosaic and the poetic. To make matters worse, the voices are perceived only in a muffled manner, „aus dämpfender Ferne,“ and distorted through „hallende Gewölbe.“ All of these qualifiers result in a signification that is merely „deutlich genug,“ but not necessarily beyond doubt. The narrator seems to imply here that we as readers may have to settle for a truth value that is just about good enough – “deutlich genug” – and that ultimate knowledge, whether sought with touch, vision, or even hearing, remains obscured in a world in which our sensual perception is imperfect.
The passage quoted above can also point us to another one of Grillparzer’s poetological observations: „Der wesentliche Unterschied der Novelle vom Drama besteht darin, daß die Novelle eine gedachte Möglichkeit, das Drama aber eine gedachte Wirklichkeit ist.“ (SW 3: 292) As Katherine Arens puts it in her gloss on Grillparzer’s statement, the novella genre, then, „has probability rather than realism on its side.”3 In a literary space in which realism is not the coin of the realm, we have to settle for the possible and the probable – that which is „deutlich genug.“
From the „deutlich genug“ signification in the acoustic realm, the messengers now move into an architectural space that aims to signify through „absichtliche […] Genauigkeit“:
Die beiden Fremden traten in das angewiesene Gemach, welches, obgleich, wie das ganze Kloster, offenbar erst seit kurzem erbaut, doch altertümliche Spitzformen mit absichtlicher Genauigkeit nachahmte. (SW 3: 119 [my italics])
Paradoxically, the „absichtliche Genauigkeit“ of the stylistic imitation both conceals and reveals the artificiality and inauthenticity of the monastery’s architecture. Additionally, the faux-Gothic style points us back towards the Middle Ages and simultaneously forward, beyond the text’s diegetic era of the 17th century’s Ottoman wars, and towards the time of Grillparzer’s writing of the text and Romanticism’s Gothic revival.4 Beyond the fact that here we once again encounter an unstable temporality, the pseudo-Gothic monastery is, of course, a trope that signals to us that we are about to enter Schauerromantik terrain.
Gothic Intimacies
True to Schauerromantik conventions, the text soon introduces us to „eine seltsame Menschengestalt“ wrapped in „ein abgetragenes, an mehreren Stellen geflicktes Mönchskleid, das sonderbar genug gegen den derben, gedrungenen Körperbau abstach“ (SW 3: 120).1 The prolonged touch between body and clothing captured in the term „abgetragen“ draws us into a degree of intimacy with the monk from which we instinctively recoil. We experience relief from this discomfort through the distancing effect produced by the visual Abstechen of the robe from the „derben, gedrungenen Körperbau.“ The detailed description of the monk’s appearance ends with a passage focused on his gaze:
Das Auge, klösterlich gesenkt, hob sich nur selten; wenn es aber aufging, traf es wie ein Wetterschlag, so grauenhaft funkelten die schwarzen Sterne aus den aschfahlen Wangen, und man fühlte sich erleichtert, wenn die breiten Lider sie wieder bedeckten. (SW 3: 120)
The unsettling intensity of the monk’s gaze shields it from legibility, and the onlookers feel themselves repelled and distanced, much like observers of an eerie night sky, as they encounter the „schwarzen Sterne.“ At the same time, the emancipation from touch and thus from proximity to and physical intimacy with strangers that a modern epistemology of sight seemed to guarantee is also negated here. Rather, the distance of the gaze is replaced with a disquieting reintroduction of proximity via an eye that seems to touch those it encounters: „Die dunklen Augen des Mönchs hoben sich bei dieser Rede [des einen Fremden] und hafteten mit einer Art grimmigen Ausdruckes auf dem Sprechenden“ (SW 3: 121 [my italics]). The unsettling combination of vision and figurative touch, of distance and proximity in the monk’s gaze is accompanied by a touch that is out of proportion to the environment to which it relates. When the Fremden suggest that a „gottgeliebter Mann“ must have built the monastery, the monk responds with a „schmetterndes Hohngelächter,“ and „[d]ie Stuhllehne, auf die er sich gestützt hatte, brach krachend zusammen“ (SW 3: 121–122). Here, touch once again conveys affect, but rather because touch turns destructive, revealing the force of barely contained rage. The breaking of the chair, a structure used to support the human frame, also foreshadows the instability of the narrative scaffolding, i.e., of the frame that will support the monk’s story.
It bears mention that the communicative situation that prompts the monk’s telling of his story is not altogether typical of the way in which Binnenerzählungen within novellas are usually set up in the frame. Whereas it frequently is the desire of the characters in the frame to be distracted from their present situation that prompts the narration of the framed narrative, in the case of Grillparzer’s novella, the Fremden actually are perfectly content to talk amongst themselves. They are engrossed „im eifrigen Gespräch; vielleicht vom Zweck ihrer Reise, offenbar von Wichtigem“ (SW 3: 120). They are not at all eager to be transported away from their usual business or from the attention they pay to each other by a tale presented to them by another party. Rather, they resist going along with the reader’s generic expectation that they will welcome the company of another person who might be expected to distract them with a story, and it is rather „ungern“ that the Fremden „unterbrechen […]“ their conversation (SW 3: 120) as the monk enters unbidden to light a fire the visitors insist they don’t need. The monk, we might say, forces his way into the discursive space to open up the possibility of the telling of what will turn out to be his confessional tale. The dual impulse of aggression and servility that marks the monk’s entry into the text will continue to characterize his behavior throughout the novella.
The monk finally begins to relate the story of the monastery’s founding, and as mentioned above, only at the closing of the narrative frame at the end of the novella will it be revealed that Starschensky, the framed story’s protagonist, is not only the monastery’s founder, but also in fact the monk. As numerous scholars of Grillparzer’s text have observed, the fact that the monk chooses not to relate a first-person narrative but rather reports about himself in the third person affords him heightened interpretive powers over the story’s characters, in particular over Elga, his/Starschensky’s love interest and, later, his wife.2 The assumption of absolute interpretive power over Elga repeats on a symbolic level the monk’s/Starschensky’s bloody murder of Elga, whom Starschensky had suspected of adultery.3 The murder represents both the climax of the monk’s/Starschensky’s story, and the culmination of the epistemological crisis at the heart of Grillparzer’s text.
Framing and Transgression
The severity of this epistemological crisis is mirrored not just in the events recounted in the monk’s story and in its murderous climax, but also in the uncontainable nature of this crisis. It is not only the case that the frame for the monk’s story is itself shot through with markers of this crisis.1 What is more, this frame cannot hold the framed story in2 – the monk’s story cannot be sublated, and the frame repeatedly cracks.3 What Henry Remak has identified as „die klassische Funktion des Rahmens“ in the novella, namely to stabilize „[das] Einmalig-Unerhörte […] der berichteten Begebenheit“ and to keep in check „[das] Sprengende […] des Inhalts“ of the narrative,4 is precisely the kind of work that the frame in Grillparzer’s text refuses to do. Georg Simmel, in his 1902 essay on the aesthetic function of the frame in painting, observed that the „Grenzen“ of a work of art mark „jene[n] unbedingetn Abschluß, der die Gleichgültigkeit und Abwehr nach außen und den vereinheitlichenden Zusammenschluß [die Einheit aus Einzelheiten im Kunstwerk] nach innen in einem Akte ausübt.“ Simmel goes on to ascribe to the frame that is added to the work of art a function that both symbolizes and enhances its existing boundary:
Was der Rahmen dem Kunstwerk leistet, ist, daß er diese Doppelfunktion seiner Grenze symbolisiert und verstärkt. Er schließt alle Umgebung und also auch den Betrachter vom Kunstwerk aus und hilft dadurch, es in die Distanz zu stellen, in der allein es ästhetisch genießbar wird.5
The possibility of aesthetic distance is what Grillparzer’s monk denies both to the two travelers listening to him and to us as readers. Early on in the framed narrative, the monk characterizes Starschensky (i.e., himself) as someone who enjoys „ein über alles gehendes Behagen am Besitz seiner selbst“ and as an individual for whom „Abwesenheit von Unlust“ is „Lust“ (SW 3: 123).6 The monk/Starschensky then interrupts the narrative and turns to his listeners: „Habt Ihr noch Wein übrig? Gebt mir einen Becher! Der Graf [Starschensky] war so schlimm nicht.“ (SW 3: 123) A short time later, immediately after he describes the looks of Elga, his future wife, the monk/Starschensky turns to his listeners, who, as he had ascertained earlier, have no relations with women, and references his sexual excitement: „Nicht wahr, davon wißt Ihr nichts, Malteser? Ja, ja, bei dem alten Mönch rappelts einmal wieder! Laßt uns noch eins trinken!“ (SW 3: 124) Here, the cracks in the boundary that was supposed to separate the framed narrative from the frame narrative force both the intra-diegetic listeners and the extra-diegetic readers into an uncomfortable intimacy with an inebriated and sexually titillated monk.7
The dialectic of „Distanz und Einheit, Antithese gegen uns und Synthese in sich”8 that Georg Simmel believes is guaranteed by the aesthetic distance a frame can provide between an artwork and its beholder is impossible to achieve in Grillparzer’s text. „[J]ene inselhafte Stellung, deren das Kunstwerk der Außenwelt gegenüber bedarf“ can only be maintained by an intact frame:
Deshalb darf der Rahmen nirgends durch seine Konfiguration eine Lücke oder Brücke bieten, an der sozusagen die Welt hinein könnte oder an der es in die Welt hinaus könnte.9
Grillparzer’s text, through its cracked frame, undercuts any possibility of aesthetic distance between listener and storyteller, between reader and narrator; and a resolution, containment, and dialectical sublation of the epistemological crisis at the text’s heart is foreclosed.
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