Monatshefte

The naïve reader assumes that "realism" refers to the ability of some medium—be it literature, photography, painting, etc.—to represent the world as it is. In other words, realism when it concerns a mode of representation claims both that the world is knowable and that humans can transfer their knowledge of the world to paper, film, or canvas. Christiane Arndt's Abschied von der Wirklichkeit seems to be designed to convince even the most ardent adherent of realist texts of the impossibility of that task. Furthermore, Arndt claims that realism's authors were, for sound theoretical as well as practical reasons, well aware of their limitations. Indeed, artists who mattered—Fontane, Stifter, Storm, and Keller—often structured their work to include a level of reflection on their inability to capture reality on the page. However, all was not lost, for by the end of her study, Arndt demonstrates that the aim of such authors was precisely "aus dieser Diskussion der Unmöglichkeit wiederum eine (paradoxe) Möglichkeit literarischer Darstellung zu gewinnen" (255).

None of these reflections are particularly new, but Arndt does bring substantial knowledge of literary theory to her undertaking; more important, and more interesting to the larger project of Cultural Studies, is the manner in which she links the problems of literary realism to other contemporary discourses. Specifically, Arndt uses photography, museums, and literary archives to discuss first, how practitioners in these media dealt with almost the same dilemmas as writers and second, how realist texts incorporated extra-literary problems of representation into their narrative strategies. Thus, rather than simply wondering about what and how to write, narrators struggled, in a kind of second-order level of reflection, with the difficulties posed by the pictures, papers, and other artifacts they encounter in the process of telling their stories.

The book's first chapter, subtitled "Der Abschied von der Referenz," deals with detective fiction and the difficulty experienced by storytellers as they try to turn a set of clues and inferences into a coherent, that is, a realistic narrative that both explains the crime and identifies the perpetrator. Arndt's main example is Fontane's 1885 novel Unterm Birnbaum, and her contention is, "daß die Kriminalerzählung einen unterschwelligen Zweifel an der Beweiskraft von Indizien offenlegt" (31–32). In part, Arndt claims that the issue is generic and not far removed from problems encountered by the authors and narrators of nonfiction: "Auswahl and Anordnung der Zeichen ist gelenkte Wahrnehmung, kein objektives Erfassen aller Komponenten der Wirklichkeit" (70). However, in the case of Fontane, the would-be detective is also undone by the accidental death of his chief suspect. Thus, since there can be no confrontation or confession, some doubt remains; but one wonders if that particular problem concerns detective fiction in general. Indeed, as great a novelist as Fontane was, he only ventured once into what would become not only a middlebrow genre but a category of literature that Germans seem much better at translating than writing. Venturing beyond high literature, particularly here, might have raised questions about Arndt's implicit assumption, namely, that realist literature exists chiefly to reflect on its own viability.

Arndt turns next to photography, specifically to the fashion for taking pictures of the recently deceased, and she uses Wilhelm Raabe's Der Lar (1889) as her literary referent since one of its main characters becomes a photographer. Among the issues that [End Page 121] Arndt raises are the artificial staging, i.e., narrating, of funeral photographs, the tension between memory and the newly possible photographic portrait, and the implicit denial of death or change in the unchanging image of the deceased. Raabe's character, who comes to photography after he is unable to make a living as a painter, also raises the question of the new medium's artistic value. In a further development Arndt links photography to science and concludes: "Die Möglichkeit des perfekten Sehens und dessen objektiver Wiedergabe, die sich zu eröffnen scheint, erweist sich als Abschied vom Sehen" (139).

Archives and museums prove, in Arndt's hands, no better able to represent reality than literature or photography. Their organization is necessarily narrative, which means that someone selects and imposes order on the material; nothing can ever be "wie es eigentlich gewesen sei," as Ranke put it in his attempt to claim realism for history. Whereas scientific or academic representations of the past often elide their narration through the pretext of objectivity, claiming to let the facts speak for themselves, realist fiction often glories in the narrator who claims to have found a trove of papers, a cache of letters, or a diary, which she or he then presents to the reader. In other words, literature is more honest than nonfiction about the problem of narration, but as Arndt argues in her final chapter, the narrators in these frame stories actually contain and attempt to hide so many difficulties that she titles the book's final chapter "Der Abschied vom Erzähler." Using Storm's Aquis submersus (1876) as an example, she cites its unnamed narrator's detective work to claim: "Der Rahmen wirkt auf diese Weise paradox, einerseits als Möglichkeit, Vergangenes wiederzuholen, andererseits als ständige Erinnerung an den nur künstlerischen (und damit nicht wirklichen) Charakter des Dargestellten" (221). Of course, if the moral of Storm's story concerns not only the possibilities of its being told but also the fleeting nature of fame and material possessions, as well as the precariousness of human happiness, then the fact that the supposed reality inside the fictional frame is itself a fiction need not concern us unduly. It would, however, be foolish to think that content trumps narration, and for anyone interested in seeing the larger issues, both within realist fiction and in relation to other late nineteenth-century discourses, Arndt's book would prove an excellent guide.