Material Worlds-Novelistic Matters of the Nineteenth Century 183 Material Worlds-Novelistic Matters of the Nineteenth Century Arne Höcker, Franziska Schweiger, Lauren Shizuko Stone University of Colorado Boulder When Goethe’s famous hero, Wilhelm Meister, sits down to write a detailed account of his travels, he observes “daß er von Empfindungen und Gedanken, von manchen Erfahrungen des Herzens und Geistes sprechen und erzählen konnte, nur nicht von äußeren Gegenständen, denen er, wie er nun merkte, nicht die mindeste Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt hatte” (Goethe, WML 300). Ever since Goethe’s Lehrjahre , the novel has been invested in the anthropological project that we associate with the Enlightenment period and the notion of Bildung � Culminating in the infamous Bekenntnisse einer Schönen Seele , Goethe’s novel points to its origin in pietistic introspection, a space which can hardly be any further removed from the material world. On the contrary, Wilhelm’s proclamations simultaneously invite critical reflection: Can his rejection of bourgeois society and trade be understood as emancipation from the constraints of materiality? Or does an existence in the margins of society only bring back the suppressed power of money with even more force? Is there a purely immaterial form of life? While the Lehrjahre is often understood as an emphatic realization of the program of Bildung as subject formation, in the much later continuation of the novelistic project, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821), Goethe tests out the limits of psychological storytelling by taking a more experimental and self-reflexive stance. The establishing of a distinct separation between the world of things and the human world has often been attributed to the anthropological turn in the eighteenth century, and it largely defined philosophical discourse on the threshold of modernity. It has been essential in the formation of what Nietzsche called the sovereign individual, who acquired the unique right to make promises and the honorable virtue of responsibility that guaranteed the stability of the modern political and social order. The novel’s involvement in this modernist project has been widely acknowledged and discussed with respect to its theoretical founda- 184 Arne Höcker, Franziska Schweiger, Lauren Shizuko Stone tions, anthropological implications, and institutional requirements. As a stabilizing program for the representation of individual life within the boundaries of civilization, the novel form has claimed the status of a poetological institution: On the flipside of Bildung , the form of the modern novel provides the institutional framework that guarantees absolute freedom from material constraints� In recent years, these conceptions of modernity have become increasingly questionable; its anthropocentric focus and its attempt to stabilize the dichotomies between man and nature, subject and object, system and environment, politics and science—in short, between ontological and epistemological questions—are under the suspicion of having caused the dilemmas that we are used to attributing to either side of the modern world. Even our critical theoretical models, including those that appear to be postmodern, seem to accept the division between nature and culture and thus remain in the framework of a history of modernity� Most prominently, the French sociologist, Bruno Latour, has contested this general divide and, considering current pressing problems such as climate change and the necessity of a political ecology, has suggested a symmetrical anthropology that breaks down those ontological boundaries that have generally governed the production of meaning. According to Latour, we need to give up our preferred distinctions and rewrite our story in such a way that acknowledges that we have “never been modern.” Doing so, he suggests, will make a vast proliferation of hybrids visible: a network in which humans and things are irrevocably intertwined, and which has been hidden beneath our “modern” thinking with its scientifically sanctioned structure. Likewise, in Vibrant Matter , Jane Bennett picks up on Latour’s actor-network theory to shape the idea of a vital materiality that can lift the quarantine of matter and life and will make visible the lively powers of material formation. It is against the backdrop of these recent debates, which advocate for a fundamental revision of the relationship between humanity and materiality, thingness and realism, subjects and objects, that we are approaching the nineteenth-century German novel and its purported investment and prioritization of the autonomy of the human experience over those “external objects,” which until recently had, as Wilhelm Meister suggests, garnered “no attention�” With its anthropocentric perspective, the focus on the interior history of man (as Christian Friedrich von Blanckenburg put it in the first theory of the novel from 1774), and the formal orientation of the novel toward the contingency of life (Georg Lukács), the genre seems to have essentially contributed to the modern project of separation. But one does not need to be a particularly close reader of German novels to discover a material sphere beneath the layer of psychological narrative� As Kirk Wetters’ and Andrea Krauss’ contributions in this Material Worlds-Novelistic Matters of the Nineteenth Century 185 special issue can attest, this pertains not only to German Realism with its long descriptions of common objects, and thus its emphasis on the things in everyday life, but also to a fascination with natural objects and geological matter (earths, minerals, stones, etc.) as early as around 1800. From Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (Erica Weitzman) to Adalbert Stifter’s Nachsommer (Franziska Schweiger)—and one could add Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks —the nineteenth-century novel shows an affinity for non-human materiality. Focusing on the relation between humans and things and the creation and exploration of what we call “Material Worlds,” the articles in this issue seek to contribute to a more complex understanding of nineteenth-century German storytelling. The contributions offer readings of the novelistic form in relation to everyday objects, commodities and possessions, interior matter and architectural structures, tokens of love, and the tools and materiality of writing itself, to shed light on the ruffles and seams (Walter Benjamin) of an anthropocentric genre at the dawn of a new phenomenology. In addition to reinterpreting the novel as a form that problematizes subject-object hierarchies, the following articles treat the novel form as a narrative of objects. The essays collected here interpret a variety of prose narratives of the nineteenth century, each of which have traditionally been read as chiefly concerned with literature’s capacity for representing the world of human subjectivity in particular. These texts represent epochal and generic traditions such as the Bildungsroman and the epistolary novel, Poetic Realism, and Romanticism. The potential consequences of the literary priority of object life over human life ultimately range from the instability of authorship to the material basis of social relations. Though these articles overlap in multiple ways, they can be roughly divided into three “material worlds”: natural and artificial spaces; the aesthetics of economy, investment, and currency; and the materiality of writing. John Hamilton’s article “‘Kirschrot funkelnder Almadin’: The Petrification of Love, Knowledge and Memory in the Legend of Falun” explores the delicate position of the human body between matter and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, concrete entity and abstract essence in the afterlife of a literary fossil, the legend of Falun (1720). He examines the trajectory of the legend over the course of a century, and articulates how a phenomenology of the natural world threatens to undermine the definition of human life and lifelessness. With his close reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s version of the tale, Hamilton shows that it is the mortality of the human body itself that ultimately troubles such distinctions� In “Networking Matters: Literary Representations of Materiality in Stifter’s Nachsommer, ” Franziska Schweiger investigates both the natural and artificial worlds of things. In her reading of Stifter’s Realist Bildungsroman , she shows that the emphasis on materiality results in the representation of a complex 186 Arne Höcker, Franziska Schweiger, Lauren Shizuko Stone network of human and non-human actors in lieu of the hierarchical structures of a one-directional subject-object relationship. Schweiger argues that this reciprocity between seeming opposites ultimately has consequences for concepts of epistemology and language in Stifter’s Nachsommer � Opening the discussion of the second “material world” of investment, Erica Weitzman’s article “Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben ” also presents the novel’s treatment of materiality in relation to subject-object hierarchies. By examining the use of anthropomorphic descriptions in Freytag’s novel, Weitzman demonstrates how the language of the novel addresses questions of materiality in the realm of capitalism, economics, and trade. The conscious use and staged overcoming of “pathetic fallacy” in Freytag’s novel, Weitzman argues, reinforces problematic subject-object hierarchies, which, in times of the uncanny self-reproduction of money and the ghostly power of commodity fetishism, begin to totter. Kirk Wetters’ article, “Who Cares About Society? Sorge and Reification in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre ,” turns from the scene of material economy to the idea of allegorical investment. Wetters examines “affirmative reification” in his discussion of the potential and limits of a purely anthropocentric reading of Lehrjahre . Starting with Lukács’s understanding of the novel as an exemplary depiction of a “non-reified space,” Wetters shows how objects are located at the threshold between symbol and allegory. He unfolds an ambivalent concept of things that depicts social relations as simultaneously fluctuating and persistent. This ambivalence is refined in the figure of the Oheim and the issue of care in the novel and ultimately materializes in a flexible concept of society that moves far beyond Lukács’s projection. Finally, Andrea Krauss’ and Lauren Stone’s contributions offer a closer look at the act of writing and the representation of physical documents that accompany it. In “Schriftkörper und Humor. Zur Materialisierung des Erzählens in Jean Pauls Leben Fibels ,” Andrea Krauss addresses scenes of writing that shift from the spirit of the letter to the materiality of writing. Regarding Rüdiger Campe’s notion of the Schreibszene , Krauss connects the materiality of writing to its physical gesture—Fibel’s technique of Bastelei —to show that Jean Paul intertwines notions of authorship with craftsmanship. This, in turn, troubles Fichte’s rationale for copyright; authorship in Jean Paul thus comes to depend on the materiality of language and the Körperlichkeit of the act of writing� In her contribution, “Beilage zum Brief: On ‘Epistolarity’ and Materiality in Bettine von Arnim’s Die Günderode ” Lauren Stone argues that Arnim’s Briefroman is not an epistolary novel in the common Romantic sense (as it neither presents a conversation nor a subjective experience), but a return to materialism. In her discussion of Arnim’s techniques of citation, as well as the content Material Worlds-Novelistic Matters of the Nineteenth Century 187 of individual “letters” and “attachments” themselves, Stone shows that, like Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, Arnim’s Die Günderode insists on the aesthetic and epistemological priority of “Nature.” By looking at Arnim’s use of musical, natural, and scientific tropes, Stone argues that this particular epistolary form itself also serves as the ground for the production of both knowledge and literature. The novel therefore allows Arnim to propose a theory of knowledge that, surprisingly, is not based solely on interior subjective experience. Instead, Arnim employs the physicality of literary objects to produce a Romantic philosophical return to materialism� Works Cited Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Abt. I. Sämtliche Werke. Ed. Friedmar Apel. Vol. 8. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1994.