Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy, and the Body in the German Enlightenment

4 / Wieland’s Busted Tropes

4 / Wieland’s Busted Tropes Any account of the breast in German literature would have to begin with Christoph Martin Wieland. The texts of no other author are as frankly breast-obsessed as his. A generation older than Goethe, whose reputation eclipsed his,Wieland played a major role in adapting French rococo sensualism for German readers. Best known for his bildungsroman Die Geschichte des Agathon,1 Wieland never tired of inventing literary situations in which a woman’s breast is exposed and never failed to linger over them. These passages themselves become breasts in the text, seemingly gratuitous folds (remember the etymology of kolpos; see chap. 1) for the reader’s delectation. In Geschichte der Abderiten (History of the Abderites), a novel written around the time of Die Geschichte des Agathon, Wieland goes so far as to call his buxom Abderite singer Eukolpis, or “beautiful breast.” Singing the part of Andromeda in Euripides’ play of the same name, “Eukolpis, who was quite aware of where her magical powers lay, invented for herself a drapery, which, when worn, concealed none of her beautiful shape from her admirers.”2 We could say the same 104 thing about Wieland’s text: his magic consists in the invention of a language that gives the appearance of seductively materializing the breast. TakingWieland seriously, however, as this enterprise requires, entails certain risks. For one thing, Wieland has long languished in disfavor. As early as 1800, Romantic critics mockingly dismissed him. The aesthetic challenges he set himself, often associated with adapting complex schemes of rhyme and meter to a recalcitrant German language, have no currency. The trifling and repetitive prurience of his verse and prose are simultaneously oªensive and not oªensive enough, at least at first glance. Had he allowed his desire to run to libertine or Sadean extremes, hemightmoreeasilybesalvageable. Asitis,onecaneasilygaintheimpression of a fixation on the breast that is about as entertaining or edifying as the puerile fantasies of a schoolboy. I am not afraid to admit that I am slightly embarrassed by the task before me. But only slightly. By this chapter’s conclusion, I hope to have shown that appearances are deceiving—that, in fact, Wieland’s obsession with the breast allows us to investigate a number of crucial fantasies and to map out the German eighteenth-century discourse coordinates of the breast. A literature predicated on the breast is bound to diªer from a literature predicated on the phallus. Always with the caveat that whatever I may tease out of these many texts is necessarily situated within a patriarchal order, I nevertheless want to entertain the fantasy of an empowered breast, to allow the unruly breast to play out its signifying mischief. We will find in Wieland an irresistible inclination to the literal and the material, an allegiance to a metonymical order as opposed to a metaphorical one. In this he is not unlike Melanie Klein, about whom Mary Jacobus writes that returning to Klein “feels like eating one’s words.”3 Wieland’s literary universe is thoroughly Kleinian. It is inhabited by breasts doubling as people and things; the naming of Eukolpis already provides a foretaste of this fact, as does the tale of Biribinker, discussed in chapter 1. These are not adolescent fantasies of limited value; these are the deepseated fantasies of Kleinian infancy. By the same token,Wieland assumes a readership that hungers for the breast. According to the logic of substitution that underlies the production and reception of literature as breast, the plots of many of the novels and verse epics encompassing Wieland’s vast literary output turn on the quest for the breast as a per105 wieland’s busted tropes fect materialized instance—and not, as we shall see, in any metaphorical sense. Similarly, the reader’s desire is engaged in a double of this quest and likewise longs for the materialization of the breast in the text. Wieland will not be satisfied merely with conjuring up the image of the breast for visual delectation—he will find means to allow his readers to touch the breast. Wieland is a breast giver. The textual breasts he proªers his readers are his. There is occasional evidence of his uneasy awareness of this circumstance . If the breast can be touched, it stands to reason that the text likewise touches the reader. One indisputable sign of the interaction between text and body is the male reader’s erection while reading. In a letter to his...