Zwischen unsicherem Wissen und sicherem Unwissen. Erzählte Wissensformation im realistischen Roman: Stifters „Der Nachsommer“ und Vischers „Auch Einer“ by Von Petra Mayer (review)

Petra Mayer’s monograph re-examines a relationship that continues to be strained today: the complicated tensions between the sciences and the humanities. Literature in particular is singled out in such debates and frequently called upon to anchor itself more securely to contemporary science and technology. Mayer challenges this notion of disunity by focusing her study on the symbiosis of science and literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the German-speaking world specifically. Though Mayer acknowledges the ways in which the two fields ought to have been incompatible, she devotes herself to those examples that illustrate instead the shared goal of an open and progressive worldview, one that is predicated on an exploration of the (at the time) fragmenting and uncertain human experience. Mayer’s examples include realist literature that adapts a scientific-like method—Stifter’s program of “forschen [ . . . ], beobachten [ . . . ], befragen” (102)—and scientific writing that uses a literary style to animate otherwise dry research.

The study is divided into three main sections. The first situates the reader within the historical context of Mayer’s time frame, with primary consideration given to the rapidly shifting scientific and literary-philosophical climate from the 1830s onward. The mania for science took off as a result of the unique institutionalization of science in German universities near the beginning of the nineteenth century. Research was no longer just a hobby for amateurs and aristocrats: it was a well-funded and legitimate profession, one that quickly grew and splintered into several sub-fields. Scientific knowledge was no longer the “stationäres System feststehender Wahrheiten” (26) that it used to be. Rather, the field was characterized by uncertainty and change. As her main counterpoint to the scientific realm, Mayer discusses idealist philosophy and its ‘identity crisis’ after Hegel’s death in 1831. The idealist model of an absolute and self-enclosed system is clearly shown to be at odds with the open-ended and limitless experience inherent in the prevailing scientific approach. The question that drives Mayer’s study is how these two simultaneous cultural shifts—the dizzying rise of science and the downfall of idealist philosophy—affect literature. Mayer attributes the split between idealist and realist literature to this paradigm shift of moving from a closed (synthesized) conception of knowledge and experience to one defined by openness. In the remaining two sections, Mayer provides close readings of two novels, Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (1857) and Vischer’s Auch Einer (1878), and in so doing attempts to answer the question of how literature continued to create orientation while also engaging with the ongoing reality of disorientation.

In the second section of her study, Mayer positions Stifter as a unique author, uncommonly poised to create fictional worlds that honor both the old and new forms of knowledge. Stifter’s education at the Kremsmünster Abbey prepared him in the natural sciences as well as in theology and philosophy, and as Mayer argues, his literary worlds reflect the same seamless integration. Mayer is particularly strong in her spatial analysis of Der Nachsommer, offering the image of concentric circles as a way to understand Heinrich’s movements throughout the novel. Concentric circles signal uncurbed expansion and progression outwards, yet the rings advance in a controlled and orderly manner. Though the movement is oriented outwards, towards growth and newness, the previous turns are not negated and continue to give order to the overall structure. A second motif that Mayer dissects very well is the appeal of geology, which is Heinrich’s chosen ideal science (he is an autodidact). As the study of the earth’s surface, geology is essentially the study of something that we conceive of as a whole. But the surface reveals its history as a long, gradual accumulation of countless geological events. Geology holds the state of the earth in its tension of becoming...