Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator: Reckoning with Past and Present in German Literature by Katra A. Byram (review)

This ambitious and wide-ranging study has at its core the deceptively simple notion that in telling stories we frequently mount an effort at self-improvement. The “dynamic observer narrators” Katra A. Byram examines all seek a kind of healing, want to come to terms with a difficult past, and evince a desire for “moral progress” (27). In a series of virtuoso readings of canonical texts ranging from the nineteenth to the later twentieth centuries, she traces “narrators’ efforts to come to terms with the past by telling ‘good’ stories about their protagonists” (15), which are meant to reflect well on the narrator. It is a kind of self-fashioning by recourse to another’s story. Or, as Byram tersely puts it, these “benevolent narratives serve selfish ends” (224). Of the many achievements of this book, the first is surely the study’s openness to its own subject matter: Byram has not prejudged the matter by adopting a single theoretical approach that would produce a homogeneous (and predictable) rendering of all her narrators. On the contrary, she maintains a stance of critical sympathy, reading at once with and against her narrators. She poignantly acknowledges their “desire for a story that forges a comprehensible and acceptable connection between past and present,” while maintaining a rigorous attention to the possibility “that these stories are often self-deceptive, or ethically suspect, or simply inadequate to the task” (221–22).

Byram announces this theoretical capaciousness from the outset by drawing on thinkers as diverse as Charles Tayler, Paul Ricoeur, Adriana Cavarero, and Judith Butler – all of whom help ground the initial discussion of the ethics of selfhood, and the view of selfhood as fundamentally relational and rooted in narrative. In other words, well before discussing individual works, she casts her net widely, representing quite fairly, I think, both the “narrativist” (Ricoeur) and “antinarrativist” (Butler) point of view. Byram is a standard-bearer for neither camp; yet, in the end, by way of a deft reference to Annie Dillard, she does appear to subordinate the latter to the former, arguing that any antinarrativist position is itself a kind of narrative, albeit a more fractured and open-ended one.

Ethics and the Dynamic Observer Narrator is distinctive also in its expansive understanding of “coming to terms with the past.” This term, known in German as Vergangenheitsbewältigung, had long been reserved for a reckoning with the Nazi past and was deployed only much later – somewhat dubiously, to be sure – for facing the East German past. Not long ago, this commodious approach might have been deemed almost heretical, certainly controversial. It is a credit to Byram – but also a symptom of the times – that we can now see “mastering the past” as a transhistorical phenomenon. To be clear: her approach does not relativize the Holocaust but rather links it to other “difficult” pasts with which retrospective narrators need to come to terms in order to achieve a more positive view of themselves in the present.

In viewing what is common to narrative projects ranging from Friedrich Ludwig Textor and Theodor Storm to Günter Grass and W. G. Sebald, Byram sharpens our analytic awareness of individual narrative “reckonings.” The chapter on Grass is particularly illuminating. At times, Byram comes very close to equating Grass’s personal failure to confront his Nazi past with that of his narrator in Katz und Maus (158). What I find particularly refreshing is that she deploys her impressive narratological arsenal not merely to decouple the two (and thus to reaffirm the old, and frankly rather tired understanding that the author is not to be equated with the narrator), but rather to entertain two possibilities simultaneously. Intriguingly, she hypothesizes that the dynamic observer narrator tends to encourage readers to identify the narrator with the...