Heterotopien im poetischen Realismus. Andere Räume, Andere Texte von Brahim Moussa (review)

Brahim Moussa’s monograph analyzes heterotopias in texts of Adalbert Stifter and Wilhelm Raabe, highlighting alternative spaces that disrupt poetic realist narrative. He offers insightful, theoretically informed readings, and situates his arguments with frequent references to contemporaries such as Freytag, Fontane, Storm, and Keller.

The introduction contextualizes Moussa’s approach within the recent spatial turn. Moussa asserts that space, particularly bourgeois interiority, is paradigmatic for realist texts. Realism establishes stable referential frames and excludes the ugly and the trivial. Yet such exclusion has two consequences: 1) interior spaces in poetic realism become museal—compensatory spaces of collection that exceed their referential function; and 2) exclusion of negative spaces confirms the presence of that which realism would deny. Such “other” spaces that function on the edge or outside of the bourgeois sphere are heterotopias.

Chapter One discusses heterotopias in relation to contemporary theorists of space, and to Foucault in particular. Moussa deftly surveys thinkers within the spatial turn, including Bachelard, Lotman, Harvey, Soja, and Lefebvre. Rejecting space as a static phenomenon, he seeks new, dynamic concepts of space. He distills two points from Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia: 1) a heterotopia is an “other” space that demarcates itself clearly from the primary, societal space; and 2) some spaces are “other” spaces in and of themselves and not only in relation to society (e.g., the cemetery). In sum: “Als Heterotopien werden jene Orte verstanden, die sich durch räumliche Desintegrationen, Krisenhaftigkeit und Kontrastierung einer Ordnung der Dinge auszeichnen” (52).

In Chapter Two, Moussa dismisses traditional studies of space in realism, for which space creates boundary distinctions. In contrast, he finds that Raabe’s and Stifter’s texts offer varieties of heterotopic spaces that transgress boundaries and contest the contiguous referential structure of realist narrative. For example, both Raabe’s and Stifter’s texts create confusing mixes of signifiers that resist metonymic or other structures of meaning. This results in tensions between the contiguous structure of the realist narrative and the alternative structures of heterotopic space.

Moussa analyzes Stifter’s narrative Der Hochwald in Chapter Three and finds a polar spatial model, a product of a narrative based on antagonisms (e.g., nature vs. society, romanticism vs. technology) that Stifter subverts. The mountain forest belongs to three parallel semiotic systems—natural beauty, the uncanny, and the mysterious—and the narrative shifts between these modes, finding each insufficient. The early chapters of the text attempt to create an ahistorical romantic space in nature, yet this space is undermined in the end, and the reader is led back to a realist, historical mode. Yet that mode proves inadequate to realist Verklärung. The heterotopia subverts both romantic and realist modes.

Chapter Four analyzes the “Rosenhaus” in Stifter’s novel Der Nachsommer as a heterotopia. Where traditional readings of the “Rosenhaus” see an idyllic or utopian space, Moussa finds only temporal stasis and spatiality. The “Rosenhaus” is a compensatory heterotopia (like libraries and museums), a space for collecting objects. Yet the narrative effort required to create this heterotopia produces a contradictory semantic field that turns the “Rosenhaus” into a space of force and violence, a heterotopia of contrast. “Das Rosenhaus führt [. . . ] gegenseitige Richtungen zusammen und konstruiert eine Heterotopie, die zugleich Sicherheit und Unheimlichkeit verkörpert” (125). In contrast to “Der Hochwald,” where the heterotopia in nature is disrupted by human intervention, the heterotopia here functions as a human artefact within nature, a reconciliatory gesture towards both the past and nature. Stifter’s heterotopias reject both social and historical order.

Wilhelm Raabe’s late novel Die Akten des Vogelsangs is the topic of Chapter Five. Moussa focuses on spaces that complicate realist writing such as the “Hintergebäude” in Berlin and the town of Vogelsang. The homodiegetic narrator portrays spaces that contest the historical and bourgeois world, and finds that there is no space separate from this conflict, no space for narrative “Verklärung.” New codes clash with old, without either dominating. Heterotopias become uncanny...