In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

4. ‘‘Superfluous Stones’’

4. ‘‘Superfluous Stones’’ if the hauptmann’s equation of nature with ‘‘superfluous stones’’ in the opening of Part One of the novel identifies the world of the novel as building material, from the ground up, the graveyard discussion that opens Part Two spells out the confluence between figural and architectonic relations enacted throughout the novel. The characters drawn into Wahlverwandtschaften have already parted when the second half of the novel begins, and the main actor to emerge with this turn of events, the narrator states, is the architect: In common life we often encounter that which in literature we attribute to the artistry of the poet, namely, that when main figures go away, or conceal themselves, or give themselves over to inactivity , a second, or third figure, until then hardly noticed, immediately takes their place, and, in that he exercises all his abilities in activity, he appears to us to be worthy of the same attention, and even praise. So, directly following the distancing of the Hauptmann and Eduard, the architect showed himself to be more significant every day, he upon whom the setting up and carrying out of so many undertakings alone depended . . . (VI:360)] The comparison that serves to reintroduce and bring forward the architect at once reintroduces and underscores the irony of the novel ’s discursive artifice.51 By implying its own identification with life, 51. Blessin and Gerhard Neumann view the complexly structured comparison of ‘‘common life’’ and ‘‘literature’’ at the opening of Part Two of the novel as indicative of deficiencies in the representational content of the second half of the narrative. Blessin attributes the emphasis on art and ‘‘poverty of action’’ throughout Part Two to ‘‘the historical movements of the age’’ (Die Romane 102 ‘‘superflous stones’’ ‡ 103 as compared with literature, even while identifying what we ‘‘attribute ’’ to literary artistry with what we ‘‘encounter’’ commonly in life, the narrative exchanges, beyond all basis for recognition, the characteristics of the two realms it appears all the while to separate, making the novel, as it starts again, no more securely identifiable with the concepts of either ‘‘literature’’ or ‘‘life’’ than a coin nimbly passed between opposing but otherwise identical hands. In this high stakes crisscrossing of concepts, this ‘‘artistic’’ or life-like doublecross , it is architecture that serves as the constant to be passed around. By designating as the new main actor of events the ‘‘architect’’ mentioned only tangentially as overseer of the lake project in Part One (‘‘und hier kam ein junger Architekt . . .’’ [VI:332]), the narrative makes the central activity of the first half of the novel into a character in Part Two, with the result that background or periphery and foreground or figure trade position and function. In personifying the ‘‘undertaking’’ of building as the indispensable agent of a plot for which building had previously (if without given reason) provided the ground or occasion, the first sentences of Part Two of the novel announce a transfer of architecture from the realm of action (of life like literature, in which the characters engage), to the realm of fiction (of life-like literature, in which an author brings forth action and names), back to the realm of action again. The figural bonds of Wahlverwandtschaften have been joined and separated, the mappings, pleasure-building, lake, and park constructions have all been completed, and, along with a formerly minor Goethes, p. 66), while Neumann interprets its opening sentence in particular as evidence of a narrator blocked by the ‘‘helplessness’’ into which the ‘‘main characters’’ had ‘‘fallen’’ by the end of Part One: ‘‘the awkward predicament of the narrator in relation to carrying out the narrative—now camouflaged as ‘artifice’—brings about a whole series of efforts at framing which openly serve to ‘focus’ action that is drifting apart’’ (see Neumann, ‘‘Wunderliche Nachbarskinder ’’ pp. 30–31). Neither Blessin nor Neumann notes the consistency with which art provides the context for action in the novel from the very beginning, nor perceives that the narrator aligns his story with ‘‘life’’ even as—by open use of the verbal artistry of simile—he here compares life with ‘‘artistry.’’ Both critics thus effectively demonstrate the maddening circularity of such a comparison when posed within an artificial, fictional context, further confus- 104 ‡ built time character, called the ‘‘architect,’’ a formerly extraneous activity having , however, everything to do with the...