Autotextuality in Wieland: The Presence of Oberon in Klelia und Sinibald

HERBERTROWLAND Autotextuality in Wieland: The Presence of Oberon in Klelia und Sinibald Over approximately the past ten years the postmodern revision of literature that originated in the 1960s has begun to have an impact on the work of Christoph Martin Wieland. With the prudence characteristic of Germanistik as a whole in this regard Wolfgang Preisendanz and Ellis Shookman have demonstrated the capacity of Julia Kristeva's notion of intertextuality to illuminate the nature and sense of certain works by the author.1 In the allusive weave of the verse epic Der neue Amadis Preisendanz discerns a manifestation of the (Bakhtinian) "Idee der Pluralität sprachlicher Welten," which corresponds to the "Idee einer Geselligkeit der Nationalkulturen" expressed in several of the essays.2 Shookman understands references to works by Euripides and Plato in Agathon, among other things, as authorial means of establishing the "textual identity" of the novel.3 If as yet modest in scope, the recent application of modernist theory to Wieland's work is anything but fortuitous. Few writers have cultivated intertextuality more consciously or more consistently than Wieland, and with good reason. Wieland's oeuvre has been criticized for its lack of that realism characteristic of his English coevals Fielding and Sterne.4 This alleged flaw has commonly been attributed to the absence in Germany of a cultural center and national identity comparable to those of contemporary England and France.5 Given the fragmentation of socio-political and cultural life in eighteenth-century Germany, the question of mode of discourse was indeed problematic: from which of the many variants of reality was one to proceed? Yet, the discourses of ancient Greece and Rome, of Renaissance and, in 134 Herbert Rowland part, even medieval Europe were understood by the educated across all internal barriers, and Wieland's command—and love—of these discourses were rivaled by few. By both necessity and inclination Wieland created a literary corpus in which texts of the most varied writers, times, and places interact in innumerable ways. Indeed, his notion of artistic originality is predicated on the re-orchestration of the voices of European literature.6 Wieland, if anyone, escapes "la morte de l'auteur" proclaimed by Roland Barthes and asserts himself as a highly self-conscious master arranger, more in the sense of T. S. Eliot's catalytic poet.7 In light of the role played by mtertextuality in Wieland's poetics and workshop aesthetics it is not surprising that his work also reveals the related, as yet unexplored phenomenon of flwtotextuality, "the intertextuality among texts by the same author."8 A case in point is Klelia und Sinibald, a verse narrative published in 1784. Characterized variously as "ein Produkt der Zersetzung" and "eine Art Abgesang," the work has received little scholarly attention, most of which has been unfavorable.9 While one need not take an author's opinion at face value, it is worth noting that Wieland himself attached particular value to the work. As late as 1796, for example, he referred to it as his "Lieblingsstück unter den kleinern," and while bedridden in 1809 he had his son-in-law, the philosopher Karl Leonhard Reinhold, read to him from it to cheer him.10 In the present context the work is of more than passing interest as yet another confluence of Western and even Oriental cultures from antiquity to Wieland's own day. Wieland himself felt it necessary to append nineteen annotations to the work, while the editors of the Hanser edition of the 1960s were compelled to devote some ten pages to notes.11 The tale is more interesting still for the allusive relationship it establishes with Oberon, Wieland's masterful verse epic of 1780. It is this relationship that I would like to pursue here. Before proceeding, however, it will be well to reflect for a moment on Shookman's characterization of "intertextuality" (and, by extension, related expressions) as "a current critical term murky even to those scholars who use it most trenchantly" (199). A glance at recent surveys of intertextual theory indeed discloses a wide variety of views, in part complementary, in part contradictory.12 While intended primarily to insure internal coherence in the present study, the...