Erzählen von Unmâze: Narratologische Aspekte des Kontrollverlustes im Willeham Wolframs von Eschenbach by Saskia Gall (review)

This study, a revision of the author's 2016 dissertation, has a clear argument: episodes of extreme emotion and corresponding immoderate behavior (unmâze) in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Willehalm cannot be understood exclusively in terms of functionalism, whereby emotional display is seen as a performance serving some form of ritualized social communication. While the functionalist approach can account for some of the examples of unmâze in Willehalm, numerous others are devoid of a communicative purpose and result, the author contends, from a character's "loss of control" (Kontrollverlust). With "small-scale narratological analysis" (kleinteilige narratologische Textanalyse, p. 18) of such episodes, Gall purports to demonstrate how Willehalm, Rennewart, and Gyburg are all complex characters, revealing a "constitutive ambivalence" (konzeptionelle Ambivalenz, pp. 140, 267–270 passim). That is, they are characterized according to, as well as personally invested in, the courtly social norms (der höfische Gesellschaftsentwurf, p. 271) of corporeal and affective self-control (zuht) that hold sway in the narrative world while, at the same time, they repeatedly find themselves unable to fully uphold the norms in moments of stress, leading to loss of control in affective outbursts and breakdowns. This ambivalence, which Gall argues is Wolfram's invention, lends the characters a certain interiority and depth, indeed individuality, in comparison with the more type-oriented and coherent (as opposed to ambivalent) characterizations of the Old French source, Aliscans.

The introductory chapter (pp. 13–21) places Willehalm in the context of other (mostly romance) texts from around 1200, in which the exhortation to self-control and moderation is seen as obligatory in the narrative world (das mâze-Gebot, p. 15). The second chapter (pp. 23–62) seeks to define basic terminology of the study of emotion (Affekt, Emotion, Gefühl) and the terrain of a literary-theoretical approach against historical approaches, especially recent ones borrowing heavily from sociology and communications theory. This section is centered around a critique of the work of the German historian Gerd Althoff and its reception among medieval literary scholars. Gall notes weaknesses in an Althoffian interpretation, which considers every emotive display by a literary character, even seemingly spontaneous acts, to be a calculated element—a performance—within a ritual of public communication. Gall argues that such an approach is inadequate to literary texts, which, in contrast to historiographic sources, often represent acts of non-public communication and quotidian and unofficial occurrences, especially in areas apart from the court. Although Gall notes that Althoff concedes to poets the ability to manipulate the rules of the game, she finds his approach too limiting and undifferentiated for literary analysis. Its dominance in recent years has led, in her view, to literary scholars having a distorted view of the whole of a literary text ("[hat] . . . den Blick des Literaturwissenschaftlers auf das Textganze verstellt," p. 48).

The central chapters (pp. 67–266) offer detailed readings of moments when Willehalm, Rennewart, and Gyburg lose control of themselves and violate courtly norms. For Willehalm, such episodes are the physical and verbal attacks on his sister, the French queen, at the court of Menleun, as well as his weeping and fainting over the vanished Rennewart after the final battle. Rennewart's moments of loss of control are many (though not all) of his violent outbursts, most notably against the taunting squires in Menleun and the cooks in Menleun and Orange. His immoderate consumption of food and drink at the courtly feast in Orange, as well as the numerous times when he forgets his club, are also such moments, often characterized by the narrator as tumpheit (youthful inexperience). Gyburg, in Gall's interpretation, loses control of herself with her two tearful breakdowns at the festival in Orange—not, however, during her breakdown after exhorting the war council to show mercy to the defeated enemy.

Small-scale narratological...