Foreign Correspondence: News from Germany

196 FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE: NEWS FROM GERMANY By Werner Bies (University of Trier) In the English departments of contemporary Austrian, Swiss, and German universities, Joseph Conrad remains one of the most appreciated , widely read, and vividly discussed novelists of the transitional age. Friedrich Baldinger's Vom Faktum zur Fiktion. Eine historische und literarische Untersuchung von Henry James' "The Princess of Casamassima" und Joseph Conrads "Under Western Eyes" (Bern: Francke, Ι98Γ) approaches two novels with a revolutionary plot from a historical point of view, examines various events, characters (for example, Conrad's political agent Razumov), and places (for example, the Geneva of Under Western Eyes), and relates them to corresponding historical facts upon which the authors drew in creating their fictions. In doing so, Baldinger argues that there is no clear division between fact and fiction in either novel. He is perhaps a bit too intent on stressing the factual aspects of the authors' works (see especially p. 42), but nevertheless interesting insight is gained into one aspect of Conrad's narrative method when he argues that Conrad deliberately "places doubts in the reader's mind as to the trustworthiness of the written word, so leaving him uncertain as to what is fact or fiction in the novel" (p. 173). By contrast, Werner Senn's Conrad's Narrative Voice : Stylistic Aspects of his Fiction (Bern: Francke-] 1980) focuses not on matters exterior to the novel and not on fact, but on Conrad's language and style and on the element of uncertainty in his work. He characterizes various aspects of Conrad's style: for example, the adjectival style and the adjectival series; the "negative" adjectives (such as "impenetrable," "invisible," "inscrutable"); the vocabulary of negation, privation, incertitude, doubt, absence, and futility; and the language of conjecture, estrangement, and distancing (the "as if" locution, the modalizations by "seem" and "appear," etc.). He sees all this as a kind of network, "a largescale texture with a single . . . narrative strategy, by which Conrad manipulates the reader in such ways as to induce in him an imaginative sympathy with the characters while still keeping him at the distance necessary for a critical judgement" (p. 12). In Senn's view, Conrad's sense of ambivalence, indeterminacy, uncertainty and even unreality are so dominant a feature of the author's prose that at times "man's own uncertainty about what is real threatens to become the basic reality of his fictional world" (p. 175). Norbert Kohl's Oscar Wilde. Das literarische Werk zwischen Provokation und Anpassung (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1980), perhaps the best study mentioned in this report (in any case, with its 703 pages certainly the bulkiest), analyzes all of Wilde's works from the juvenile poem "Charmides" to the late "Ballad of Reading Gaol" and gives ample space to the essays and prose writings often neglected by Wilde research, such as "The Soul of Man under Socialism." Kohl considers the decadence of erotic sensibility in Salomé and 197 "The Sphinx," examines the conflicts between "public" and "private" life in Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband, and assesses the tension between egoism and solidarity in the fairy tales; he defines Wilde as an "adjusted rebel" (see especially p. 508), a Janus figure looking backwards to Victorian and late Romantic traditions and themes (the "good women" and "fallen women" of the nineteenth century) while looking forward to the major experiences and tenets of the Modern Age (the crisis of identity, the autonomy of art, the sceptical view of verbal communication). In Ernst Th. Sehrt's Humor und Historie in Kiplings Puck-Geschichten (Gö'ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 197^T the emphasis is on the importance of humor and comedy (in its various forms) for the historical tales in Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill (I906) and Rewards and Fairies (I910); the author compares Kipling's tales with historical novels, boys' and children's histories, and the so-called "comic histories" (such as Thackeray's Miss Tickletoby and Gilbert Abbot à Beckett's Comic History of England). Also concerned with children's literature is Dieter Petzold's Das englische Kunstmärchen im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, Ι98ΙΉ a readable study which places...