Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 217 Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben Erica Weitzman Northwestern University Abstract: This article analyzes the implications of Gustav Freytag’s use of pathetic fallacy—the attribution of human emotions and characteristics to inanimate objects—in his bestselling 1855 novel Soll und Haben . Insofar as literary realism implicitly depends on an idea of the material world as something separate from, and subordinate to, human consciousness, Freytag’s sporadic use of pathetic fallacy and other forms of anthropomorphism in his novel would seem at first to be merely an unconscious poetic anachronism. As this article demonstrates, however, such tropes are in fact deployed by Freytag in a highly deliberate manner to affectively code and thus ban from the realist novel that which threatens its ontological premises. In particular, the proto-expressionistic use of pathetic fallacy in the appearances of Soll und Haben ’s major villain, the Jewish moneylender Veitel Itzig, serves to establish the sinisterness of a material world independent of human control, allowing Freytag to solidify the novel’s conservative worldview together with an aggressively anthropocentric poetics. Keywords: Pathetic fallacy, Realism, Anthropomorphism, Anthropocentrism, Thing studies, Evil “Für Erwachsene aber ist noch besonders zu sehn, wie das Geld sich vermehrt, anatomisch, nicht zur Belustigung nur: der Geschlechtsteil des Geldes, alles, das Ganze, der Vorgang -, das unterrichtet und macht fruchtbar …” Rainer Maria Rilke, Zehnte Duineser Elegie 218 Erica Weitzman I The British art critic and social thinker John Ruskin begins the chapter of his Modern Painters entitled “Of the Pathetic Fallacy” (published in 1856 as part of the book’s third volume) with the following pronouncement: “German dullness, and English affectation, have of late much multiplied among us the use of two of the most objectionable words that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians—namely, ‘Objective’ and ‘Subjective’” (362). What follows from this assertion is a scathing (if also somewhat tongue-in-cheek) attack on Kantian epistemology on empiricist grounds: not a little disingenuously, Ruskin mocks the notion—supposedly propagated by the German philosophers of the day—that positive claims about the world are now passé, that from now on one is permitted to make claims about the nature of things only insofar as they appear to subjective human perception. “Hence,” Ruskin suggests, I would say to those philosophers [who propagate such an idea]: If, instead of using the sonorous phrase, “It is objectively so,” you will use the plain old phrase, “It is so,” and if instead of the sonorous phrase, “It is subjectively so,” you will say, in plain old English, “It does so,” or “It seems to me,” you will, on the whole, be more intelligible to your fellow-creatures; and besides, if you find that a thing which generally “does so” to other people […], does not so to you, […] you will not fall into the impertinence of saying, that the thing is not so, or did not so, but you will say simply (what you will be all the better for speedily finding out), that something is the matter with you. (363) This humorously pragmatic critique of Kantian epistemology—or perhaps more accurately, its Schopenhauerian elaboration 1 —is, however, only a prelude to Ruskin’s true concern: namely, the practical critique of the use of anthropomorphic description in literature, for which Ruskin will coin the term, now long entered into common usage, “pathetic fallacy.” Despite the strongly negative connotations evoked by the second word of this term, its implications, for Ruskin, are in fact modest: it is, he notes, simply untrue that skies weep, or flowers smile, or hills are alive. The use of such figures in poetry is thus no more than the product of a “morbid and inaccurate” imagination, the expedient of poets “too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them” (Ruskin 365). And yet, Ruskin is only playing at positivist naïveté here: he knows perfectly well that the use of the so-called pathetic fallacy has at least a certain artistic and psychological legitimacy, that its anthropomorphism is there not to accurately describe the world, but to express metaphorically the heightened emotional state of the speaker (all the way to states of prophetic inspiration), and Ruskin’s objection is ultimately not so much to pathetic fallacy as such than to its inflationary, automatic, and mannered use in the poets of his own Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 219 and the preceding generations: the “English affectation” already evoked in his opening salvo. Certainly, neither Kant nor his followers ever meant to suggest that the fact of the non-access to objective knowledge should be taken to imply that the world only exists for the subject, much less that the inanimate natural world pulses with human passions and life. But, though anthropomorphic description of non-human things has existed probably almost as long as literature itself, it is perhaps no coincidence that it should be Ruskin—or at least, someone of Ruskin’s era—who first draws attention to it and names it, even in the weak sense, a “fallacy.” The German “dullness” that provides Ruskin with the point of entry for his literary-critical polemic has a different career in Germany proper than in Victorian England, of course; but also there, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, there arose a similar wish to be done with both philosophical speculation and romantic enthusiasm and to move on—or back—to the principles of good old-fashioned storytelling, adapted to the needs of contemporary life. In the words of Otto Ludwig, the first to popularize the term “poetischer Realismus”: “[U]nser poetisches Ideal ist […] nicht mehr Predigen von unseren Idealen, Reflexionen darüber, sondern Vertiefung derselben in das handelnde Leben, concrete Darstellung derselben” (351-52). Such a poetic ideal would seem to preclude the use of pathetic fallacy from the outset, which confuses “the difference between the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us; and the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy; false appearances […] entirely unconnected with any real power or character in the object and only imputed to it by us” (Ruskin 363). As this article will show, however, not only does poetic realism’s program of “concrete Darstellung” not exclude pathetic fallacy (nor other, similarly anthropomorphic tropes) in its presentation of the material world; such tropes may also be used—albeit with great care—as both a way of endowing this world with human meaning and of managing the ontological hierarchies that such an endowment of meaning implicitly requires. What is of essence here, then, is the degree of rhetorical and affective control that realism’s use of pathetic fallacy, even more than that of poetry, demands. For, Ruskin’s appeal to a commonsensical psychological understanding of the trope notwithstanding, pathetic fallacy always dangles before realism’s representation of the material world precisely that which this representation must repress or, indeed, abject in order for it to be sustainable in the first place, thus marking—in the context of a realist poetics at least—its use and its elimination alike as charged from the very beginning� 220 Erica Weitzman II Ludwig’s above-cited description of a literature of “das handelnde Leben” could easily apply to—and is, as likely as not, in mind of—Gustav Freytag’s bestselling novel Soll und Haben . Published in 1855 (just one year before Ruskin’s essay), Freytag’s novel famously combines the basic structure of the Bildungsroman with a tendentious paean to private enterprise, German expansionism, and solid bourgeois values� Centering on the young Anton Wohlfahrt’s modest (but nevertheless danger-fraught) rise from son of the petit bourgeoisie to head of an established trading house, Soll und Haben appears to keep poetic realism’s dual promise in exemplary fashion: first, to seek out meet subjects for literature in the actual and the everyday, and second, to present these subjects both naturally and dynamically while at the same time avoiding all extraneous musing, formal experimentation, and ideological distortion. By now, of course, it has become clear that this promise is one that was not and could not have been kept: “‘Die Ehrfurcht vor den Dingen, wie sie an sich sind’ [from Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer ] stellt nur die Kehrseite einer unaufhörlichen Arbeit am Zeichenmaterial der Sprache dar, eine sprachpuristische und stilistisch radikale Reflexion auf den Zeichenstatus einer Welt, die jenseits der Sprachordnungen nicht zu haben ist” (Schneider and Hunfeld 12). Such a counterintuitive worrying of the semiotic (for which Stifter’s realism indeed presents the extreme case) can perhaps be understood as one form of that philosophical sleight of hand by which the elimination of subjective distortion in realism is accomplished: namely, the refocusing of narrative attention on the descriptive surface of human experience, a refocusing which efficiently forecloses questions about the nature and the quality of the “objective” world, insofar as the “object” becomes no more and no less than the actions and manifest emotions of the subject himor herself. Thus does epistemological doubt cede to pragmatic psychologism, enabling the portrayal of “eine ganze, geschlossene [Welt], die alle ihre Bedingungen, alle ihre Folgen in sich selbst hat” (Ludwig 264). 2 But if programmatic realism thereby represented a certain radicalization of the Kantian Copernican turn—in the sense of taking it for granted—it also categorically rejected those extremes of both subjectivism and materialism to which the Copernican turn had in previous eras given rise. 3 In its stead, realism propagated “Eine Welt, die in der Mitte steht zwischen der objektiven Wahrheit in den Dingen und dem Gesetze, das unser Geist hineinzulegen gedrungen ist” (Ludwig 102). Ludwig’s posited ontological order is the complement to Freytag’s and Julian Schmidt’s co-written statement of intent upon taking over the editorship of the influential literary and political journal Die Grenzboten , in which they declare literature to have “nur noch in so weit Berechtigung, als sie sich in Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 221 das Leben versenkt, sich warm und ohne Vorbehalt ihm hingibt” (2). “Leben,” here, means first of all that literature should treat life as it is—turning away from the presumed romantic predilection for fantasy and extreme situations to contemplate the quieter emotions of the normal and the everyday. But this assumption of “Leben” as, precisely, everyday life—cut to man’s measure on the evidence of the senses—naturally also implies a particular worldview and a particular epistemology. Against the Schopenhauerian excesses of Ruskin’s “German dullness,” Freytag and Schmidt’s statement presupposes an understanding of “life” that trusts in the surface of things as they appear: to human consciousness, to be sure, but neither out of it nor, worse, autonomous from it� For Schmidt and Freytag, both the “materialist” literature of the Vormärz period and the Romanticism that precedes it are equally objectionable as literary and epistemological paradigms: the latter insofar as it allegedly renounces its responsibility to reality in favor of fantasy and personal vision, the former insofar as it grants a kind of vital spiritual agency to the merely material, thereby not just blurring Kantian categories, but dragging spirit itself through the mud of the mundane (see Thormann, esp. 52). Again, at the time of its publication, Soll und Haben was—and can still be— considered the preeminent expression of the counter-tendency to these developments, marrying a largely dialogical, scenic narrative form to a story whose moral lies in the virtue and responsibility of a stable German middle class. 4 In both its form and the explicit statements of some of its characters, the novel rejects speculation and projection—in the financial as well as the poetical sense of the terms—in favor of a concentration on the quotidian and the here-and-now, “die kleine Verzauberung im Detail, die Welt und Gesellschaft, wie sie sind” (Achinger, Gespaltene Moderne 298). And yet this perfect marriage of the aesthetic and the ideological is not only dependent on the exclusion of perceptional relativism that literature’s humanist “immersion” in “life” is to obviate; as I will argue, it is also dependent on its staging of this exclusion within the diegetic world of the novel itself—a staging that Freytag accomplishes, in part, through a selective and strategic use of the trope of pathetic fallacy. For, more effective than a mere avoidance of the pathetic fallacy—which, like all repressed things, always risks a return in force—is the attaching of the trope to particular characters and situations, coding it with specific negative affects in order to keep both it and its epistemological implications within bounds. 5 In this way, the potential life of matter (as well as of the materiality of life) is kept resolutely on the side of strangeness and malignity, in an anthropomorphizing poetics that paradoxically underwrites what Jane Bennett has called “the narcissism of humans in charge of the world” (xvi)—a genuinely “fatal” poetics (see Bennett 98-99) that brings the world to uncanny life in order to better reestablish human dominance over it in appearance and in fact. 6 222 Erica Weitzman III Several readers of Soll und Haben have already pointed out the way in which the novel mobilizes a new aesthetics of the material, an aesthetics in which things are not merely described—e.g., as part of a practice of milieu-establishing detail realism—but, far more significantly, elevated to a special status to the extent that they represent and embody human values, practices, and meaning. Thus everyday objects become “Chiffren personaler Relationen und damit tendenziell zu affekttragenden Stabilisatoren des sozialen Gefüges” (Schneider 109). For Freytag, as for realist authors in general, this endowing of objects with human significance is accomplished above all through these objects’ inscription within a narrative framework. This refers first, of course, to the narrative framework of the plot of the novel itself, which depicts the novel’s various characters as they move through and interact with the material world around them. Second, however, and what is perhaps unique to Soll und Haben , it refers to the intra-novelistic narrative of manufacture, production, and trade, an unending nexus of global exchange that charges individual objects—in a way indeed not dissimilar to the Marxian commodity fetish (see Hnilica 113-20)—with the whole of their history from production to consumption. 7 In both cases, the narrative framework “kontextualisiert das Profane und sakralisiert bzw. ästhetisiert es damit” (Schneider 110). Narrative connectivity constitutes the practical core of realist literature’s proverbial operation of “Verklärung,” which allows the up to that point seemingly opposed terms “realist” and “literature” to coexist at all by metonymically binding the myriad of everyday phenomena together within a greater whole. 8 Freytag not only thematizes this constant embeddedness of the material world in its human context; he also makes it integral to his literary aesthetic. There is little of ekphrasis or description for description’s sake in Soll und Haben , still less of that kind of unmotivated detail that constitutes the proverbial “reality effect” of the classical realist text. 9 Rather, more often than not, the thingly details of Soll und Haben possess a subtle but nevertheless intrinsic allegorical value, in which the specificity of the details themselves is also the source of their larger, even transcendent significance. This moderate allegory, to coin a term, is established from the novel’s very first sentence: “Ostrau ist eine kleine Kreisstadt unweit der Oder, bis nach Polen hinein berühmt durch ihr Gymnasium und süße Pfefferkuchen, welche dort noch mit einer Fülle von unverfälschtem Honig gebacken werden” ( Soll und Haben 5). Here, what might at first seem to be a straightforward panorama of local color is, on further examination, nothing of the sort. Rather, it is no less than a preview in miniature of the novel’s central themes and concerns: Bildung , bourgeois comfort, good old-fashioned values, material plenty, uprightness and honesty (the contrast be- Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 223 tween the Ostrauer bakers’ “unverfälschtem Honig” and the future counterfeiting skills of the novel’s Jewish villain Veitel Itzig is crying), eastward expansion, not to forget German culinary know-how and cultural superiority—Freytag’s opening contains it all. In fact, such moderate allegory, and the use of lyrical language in general, occurs most often at the beginning or end of a chapter, where Freytag, exceptionally, steps out in full raconteur mode and allows himself a rare moment of magniloquence. “Nie hatten die Blumen so reichlich geblüht und nie die Vögel so lustig gesungen als in diesem Sommer auf dem Gut des Freiherrn” (204), begins one chapter devoted to the daily amusements on the estate of the Freiherr von Rothsattel; “Glücklich der Fuß, welcher über weite Fläche des eigenen Grundes schreitet” (400), begins another chapter with an extended eulogy on aristocratic property holding and (what must go together with it) agricultural production. That both of these poetic flights occur in the context of the novel’s descriptions of the aristocratic milieu is itself perhaps no accident; as Eicher and others have pointed out, Freytag’s depictions of the landed gentry are tinged with imagery and language borrowed from Romanticism and its sometime models, the fairytale and the medieval romance. 10 Such lyrical holdovers are precisely the mannerisms that Ruskin excoriates as the sign of a poet of the “second order.” Ruskin describes these poets as those “who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly” (366), though it would be perhaps more accurate to describe them as those who feel and think according to conventionalized notions of literature and affect, as Ruskin’s criticism of Alexander Pope’s florid translation of Homer’s Odyssey in contrast to his qualified praise of Coleridge’s language in Christabel makes clear. Pope’s flowery metaphors, when spoken by the practical-minded Ulysses, are in fact “not a pathetic fallacy at all, for they are put into the mouth of the wrong passion—a passion which never could possibly have spoken them […]. Therefore, we see that the spirit of truth must guide us in some sort, even in our enjoyment of fallacy. Coleridge’s fallacy has no discord in it, but Pope’s has set our teeth on edge” (365). 11 In the case of Soll und Haben , however, more essential than the poetic efficacy or inefficacy of its romantic flourishes and anthropomorphic tropes is the question that Christine Achinger poses: namely, “ als was solche vergangenen Mythen und Vorstellungen in die zeitgenössische Romanwelt integriert werden” ( Gespaltene Moderne 300)� As Achinger goes on to suggest, the incorporation of such language into Soll und Haben is to be taken neither as “true” pathetic fallacy (in the sense Ruskin attributes to Coleridge) nor as a fussy and contrived embellishment stemming from a misguided idea of what poetry ought to be (as Ruskin implicitly accuses Pope of possessing), but instead as a “bewußtes Spiel mit Traditionen als Traditionen,” a form of “Anspielung und Zitat” with primarily “hyperbolische und 224 Erica Weitzman metaphorische Funktion” ( Gespaltene Moderne 300). Though Achinger expresses her conclusions only circumspectly, this supposition of the ultimately citational and allusive character of the passages in question is thoroughly supported by the novel’s ultimate depiction of the hereditary upper classes as, in the main, a lovely anachronism: they are not bad, necessarily, but they remain stuck in an earlier era, for all their glamour finally unsuited to the new, hardworking, mobile, capitalist society growing up all around them (and thus, however, eminently suited—as the happy match of the heedless and charming Lenore von Rothsattel to the equally heedless and charming Fritz von Fink shows—to be the vanguard of eastward German colonialism, where their chivalric dash and feudalistic know-how will exactly come in handy). The point of Freytag’s “false” pathetic fallacies in these instances is thus at least in part precisely their falseness; whatever its fascination, a literature that still honestly believes in the affective life of things is as silly as the belief that in a rapidly modernizing Germany the model of the agricultural idyll could still be viable� It is in contrast to this pretty but ultimately outmoded form of poeticizing, then, that Freytag posits the (by now well-discussed) “Poesie des Geschäfts” ( Soll und Haben 327). As Alyssa Lonner has pointed out, this poetry—or rather, the proletarian and especially the bourgeois spheres with which it is clearly identified—also contains its anthropomorphizing and fairy-tale moments, most notably in those passages describing the plaster cat statuette belonging to Anton, which springs to life from time to time throughout the novel as a kind of extra-diegetic commentary on Anton’s life and adventures (see Lonner 120-31). “An einem Sonntagmorgen las Anton emsig in dem Letzten Mohikaner von Cooper,” begins one exemplary passage, “während vor dem Fenster die ersten Schneeflocken ihren Kriegstanz tanzten und sich vergeblich bemühten, in das Asyl der gelben Katze zu dringen” ( Soll und Haben 142). Here the allusion to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans all but states outright the literary conventionality of the passage’s anthropomorphizing: in a particularly modern twist on Ruskin’s idea of affective states, the trope is a direct result of Anton’s losing himself in American adventure novels, to the point that he envisions Cooper’s exotically bellicose Indians in the prosaic German snowflakes at his window. But beyond these self-consciously fantastical flourishes (which Lonner reads primarily as forms of intentional archaism intended to evoke a German historical rootedness), the true poetry in the “poetry of business” is that which brings the emotions of the workplace together with the aforementioned manifold narratives of merchandise and possessions, in “eine Poesie, die humanes Pathos hier abruft und nicht aus fiktiven Gegen- und Ersatzwelten” (Bräutigam 402): “Dem Handel […] eignet eine Poesie, die im Einzelnen das Ganze aufscheinen läßt, […] sympathisches Mitgefühl aktiviert, das Individu- Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 225 um an die Gattung knüpft, eine neue Vertrautheit in und mit der Welt stiftet” (Bräutigam 403). In this form of poetry, all material objects, insofar as they belong to the totality of the lived world, are potentially raised up in the light of “Verklärung”—at the same time that this material “Verklärung” thus reveals itself to be the late nineteenth century’s modern, pragmatic adaptation of romantic transcendence. Thus Irmtraud Hnilica, in an analysis of the unavowed filiation between Freytag’s novel and the romantic tradition, writes that, Indem Freytag die Magie der Ware bejaht, illustriert er Hartmut Böhmes Auffassung der Moderne, der davon ausgeht, dass Kultur auf Verzauberung angewiesen ist, es darum einen “ubiquitär zirkulierende[n] Fetischismus” gibt, ohne den auch gar nicht auszukommen sei. Durch die Vermittlungsarbeit der Dinge zwischen Subjekt und Welt, so lässt sich Freytags Darstellung verstehen, erfährt der Mensch eine Art “Beheimatetsein” - eine grundlegende Verbundenheit mit der Dingwelt, die auch die Verbindung zu anderen Menschen impliziert, die mit den Dingen ebenfalls in Kontakt stehen� (119) For an accurate assessment of Freytag’s aesthetics, however, this description of Soll und Haben ’s “Magie der Ware” must be met with an important qualification. Here it is the last part of the above passage that is decisive; for it is only insofar as things act as mediators between the individual and the world that they are properly enchanted—only insofar, that is, as they are handled by human beings, who, for all the auratic coruscation that objects may present, alone possess selfhood, agency, and consciousness, and, while it is one thing to insert into one’s novel anthropomorphic interludes about protecting spirits and talismanic statuettes, or to celebrate the particular enchantment of the commodity as the concentration of whole networks of human activity in material form, it is quite another to tacitly assume that the inanimate, material world actually bends to the moods of its human inhabitants—much less, could possess its own independent moods and affects. If, in the words of Barbara Johnson, “[p]ersonification and anthropomorphism endow the world with meaning centered around the representation of human being” (18), the broader, more slippery and above all, more self-naturalizing trope of pathetic fallacy complicates this process in its at least seeming reversal of the human-thing hierarchy, positing a “Dingwelt” that—unlike the pliant and homely world of manufactured goods—needs no human actors to quicken it to life. 12 In contrast, the anthropomorphic trope that points to itself as trope is sign for nothing so much as the consciousness of the narrator himself, who, like God, has the power to make things in his own image, but for whom, unlike God, this image is not actually identical with objective reality� 13 Such anthropomorphism, as “mere” figure of speech, is thus divested of its descriptive power, transferred to the realm of pure ideality (or psycholo- 226 Erica Weitzman gy) and to rhetoric in the weak sense of the term, and in this way—bracketing out metaphysical skepticism and metaphysical faith alike—secures a literature whose world, its knowability, and its interest is guided by human beings alone. IV Thus, if for Ruskin the pathetic fallacy is a poetic defect and slightly risible category error, the result mainly of an overrefined intellect or an overwrought and neurasthenic disposition, for Freytag, the pathetic fallacy is a real representation, so to speak, of a danger that is no less than existential in character. In a critical essay of Freytag’s, “Ein Dank für Charles Dickens” (published in the Spring 1870 issue of Die Grenzboten ), Freytag praises Dickens for his representation of reality, defending it from charges of artificiality or exaggeration, of realism as “die Daguerrotype der Wirklichkeit.” “Was [Dickens] uns gibt,” argues Freytag, “das mag in allen Einzelheiten ganz anders erscheinen, als es in Wirklichkeit aussieht. In der Hauptsache hat doch er, und nur er die höchste Wahrheit gefunden, welche dem Menschen darzustellen verstattet ist. Er hat die ungeheuere, furchtbare, unverständliche Welt ins Menschliche umgedeutet nach den Bedürfnissen eines edlen und sehnsuchtsvollen Gemüthes” (484). 14 Freytag’s main point here is of course merely the longstanding one of artistic truth versus factual documentation, updated to account for the new potential elision of the two in a literature tasked with being “realistic.” But the profound anxiety that underlies Freytag’s claims should also not be ignored: outside of fiction, the real world is “ungeheuer, furchtbar, unverständlich.” It is not human, but must be made so through authorial selection and mediation, by translating the objective chaos of existence into subjective, anthropocentric terms. While there should be no relapse into a form of writing that privileges literariness or rhetorical texture (and this is perhaps what is primarily at stake in the charges of “subjectivity” and “idealism”) over the transfer of narrative information, the material world must not be allowed to remain on the other side of its human use and percievedness. For this does not merely lead, bad enough, to a soulless empiricism; thus loosed from their human context—and from human dominion—objects threaten to take on a life of their own, reinstating (in what is itself of course an anthropomorphic projection) an uncanny, alien subjectivity within the material world itself� Yet Freytag’s strategy for eliminating such uncanny, alien subjectivity is not just one of avoidance, but of the transformation of its horror, as it were, into a dramatic element in its own right. It has become a commonplace of Soll und Haben scholarship to describe its Jewish characters in general—and its indisputable villain, the Yiddish-accented parvenu, usurer, and, eventually, murderer Veitel Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 227 Itzig, in particular—as allegorical bearers of the vulgarly materialist (read: naturalist) aesthetics bluntly rejected by the advocates of programmatic realism. 15 But to uphold such an allegorical pattern in regard to Soll und Haben ’s character distribution is also in some sense to replicate the crudeness of Die Grenzboten ’s own aesthetic ideology (if rejecting its political one): for all Soll und Haben ’s patent schematicness, there is actually something more—and something different—in play in the novel than such a neat correspondence would allow. For example, while the business practices as well as verbal utterances of Veitel Itzig undeniably bespeak a loveless and coldly acquisitive relation to the world, it is striking to note that the passages devoted to his narrative, even more than the novel’s aforementioned depictions of its aristocratic milieu, are overwhelmingly marked by both long passages of sensuous, painterly description and a strongly figurative language. Of course, the first reason for the prominence of such extended descriptive passages is elegant in its obviousness: Veitel is a schemer, and schemers scheme alone. Unlike the novel’s other characters, who are constantly in commerce with one another (in both senses of the word), Veitel’s machinations take place in a solitude of exposition. But I would like to suggest another reason for Freytag’s attaching of such descriptive and figurative passages in Soll und Haben to its primary antagonist: that it provides him with a way to control, to contain, and finally, to banish from the realist novel both the materialism and the spiritualization of the material that continually trouble it, to get rid of the “ungeheure, furchtbare, unverständliche Welt”—and everything it implies—once and for all. One does not have to be an especially careful reader of Soll und Haben to notice that the character of Veitel Itzig does not exactly receive a positive treatment in the novel. Far more, even, than the novel’s other Jewish characters (who are nevertheless all also in one way or another incompatible with good German society 16 ), Veitel is a pure villain out of melodrama: a back-alley Shylock lacking both the latter’s eloquence and dignity, physically as well as morally ugly, ignorant of any attitude beyond servility, guile, and the abject bitterness of the inherently unlovable. However, Veitel’s crimes go even beyond his status as intriguer and bearer of stereotypically anti-Semitic traits to touch on the very meaning of meaning and representation itself. Anna H. Helm has observed the implicit contrast between Veitel’s falsification of legal documents and the semantic economy required by the realist novel: “Instead of ascribing to a ‘realist’ sign-system, Veitel creates his own abstract and arbitrary order through manipulating the writing world,” thus “break[ing] the uncomplicated connection between text and reality” (62) in a way that also maps onto both the suspect status of paper money and that proverbial violation of equivalence constituted by usury (see Helm 62-63 and 68). However, such a violation of representative 228 Erica Weitzman equivalence—of the identity of being and seeming—is not restricted in Freytag’s novel to the world of finance; it also manifests itself in the subliminal collusion between Soll und Haben ’s villain and the natural world itself. Just as the existence of certain magic documents causes money to disappear and reappear in unlikely places, Veitel’s mere presence inverts the very order of things, impelling them to reveal their uncanny—their vital —underside. For Veitel is in fact much more than just an ordinary swindler and arriviste , more even than the destroyer of stabile meaning and signs upon which the realist novel depends; he is a kind of Erdgeist , a force of nature, who, like Freytag’s Dickensian model Uriah Heep before him, 17 exerts a repulsed fascination and a not entirely latent erotic hold over both his potential victims and the world around him. Even his speech evinces “mehr Kehlkopf als höhere Grammatik” ( Soll und Haben 103): fetishistically parceled into its organs, the physical body reasserts its power over the very humanity which it was supposed to have served, degrading even language itself to its crude somatic origins. For this reason, even if certain aspects of Veitel’s portrayal mark him as a thoroughly modern character, it would be mistaken to consider him as a simple personification of a new calculating soullessness; far more correct is to say that Veitel embodies the potentially fatal sympathy that exists between the dehumanizing extremes of the present and the not-quite-extirpated traces of an ancient animistic past. Of course, given that Soll und Haben is not just a paradigmatic novel of German bourgeois realism, but also the paradigmatic novel of bourgeois mercantilism, everyone in the novel moves in what is very much a material world. And yet Veitel Itzig evinces a particular kind of complicity with things that makes him unique—and uniquely uncanny—in Freytag’s universe. Indeed, this complicity with things—and the taboo that is this complicity’s compliment—even characterizes Veitel’s very entrance in the life of the novel’s hero, Anton Wohlfahrt, back in their school days. As the narrative recounts in flashback, Anton first makes his acquaintance with Veitel: Namentlich einmal in einer düsteren Schulszene, in welcher ein Knackwürstchen benutzt wurde, um verzweifelte Empfindung in Itzig hervorzurufen, [als] Anton so wacker für Itzig plädiert [hatte], daß er selbst ein Loch im Kopfe davontrug, während seine Gegner weinend und blutrünstig hinter die Kirche rannten und selbst die Knackwurst aufaßen. Seit diesem Tage hatte Itzig eine gewisse Anhänglichkeit an Anton gezeigt, welche er dadurch bewies, daß er sich bei schweren Aufgaben von seinem Beschützer helfen ließ und gelegentlich ein Stück von Antons Buttersemmel zu erobern wußte. (18) 18 The “verzweifelte Empfindungen” that the threat of eating treyf evokes in the young Veitel is not far from the affects of disgust that his own figure will later Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 229 evoke in good Christian society: the taboo—confirming Julia Kristeva’s insight about the uncanny reflexivity of the abject—rebounds metaphorically on its observer� 19 However, not only does Veitel’s disgust reciprocally signal his own disgustingness (much in the sense of the children’s taunt, “it takes one to know one”), it also grants the innocent piece of ground pork a sinister power that the reasonable German omnivores—bullies and rescuer alike—know that it does not, in fact, possess. In an essay on Ruskin’s phobic avoidance of pathetic fallacy in his autobiography (which, like Veitel’s orthorexia, calls up more problems than it solves), J. Hillis Miller notes the ultimately religious underpinnings of pathetic fallacy (or, here, more specifically, prosopopoeia): “Without the support of religious faith, prosopopoeia […] becomes […] nothing more nor less than a figure both inevitable and in error whereby language ascribes a name, a face, and a voice to what does not, in fact, have them” (177). In Ruskin, as Miller goes on to show, this religious underpinning of pathetic fallacy exists in complex tension with his own professed loss of religious faith; in the case of Veitel Itzig, however, things are even more complicated—for the religion he belongs to (even if Freytag presents it, again, more as race than as doctrine) is a false, unredeemed religion, a religion without transcendence. If, according to Miller, “only God has the right to give personality or to take it away” (177), then the obstinately non-incarnated God of Judaism, paradoxically fixated on the letter and the flesh, grants personality to things only halfway: the object remains stuck in its fetishistic or magical state, lacking the true transubstantiation into the life of spirit. In her description of Soll und Haben ’s ideological triangulation between nobility, German bourgeoisie, and the Jewish (under)world, Achinger describes the “Jewish” relation to things (the scare quotes are also hers) as one of an “übergroße […] Nüchternheit, die alle Dinge ihres Glanzes entkleidet und sie auf ihren materiellen Wert reduziert” (69): Statt mit dem Ausweichen in die träumerische, rückwärtsgewandte Weltsicht des Adels haben wir es hier mit einem tätigen Sicheinlassen auf die Wirklichkeit zu tun. Und der ‘jüdischen’ Weltwahrnehmung, die Zusammenhänge auflöst, vom Besonderen abstrahiert, für die die sinnlichen, materiellen Qualität der Dinge unwesentlich werden, die nur egoistische Profitinteressen gelten läßt und so Fragmentierung, Sinnentleerung und Antagonismus produziert, steht die nichtjüdisch-bürgerliche Wahrnehmung von Menschen und Dingen als sinnlich-konkrete Glieder eines organischen Zusammenhangs gegenüber. (Achinger, “Prosa der Verhältnisse” 70) Where Anton experiences , writes Achinger, Veitel merely calculates ; where Anton envisions a world with its innumerable interpersonal interconnections, Veitel sees only the impersonal abstract figures of his balance sheets. (One might express this by saying that Veitel’s understanding of “Soll” and “Haben” reduces 230 Erica Weitzman the terms to their literal financial definitions, whereas Anton also understands their ethical and emotional connotations.) Thus is the true poetry, not only of trade, but of realism as a whole so to speak foreclosed. But, again, this description of Veitel’s worldview as one of the cold pragmatism of the bottom line, however basically true, also ignores something essential for the consideration of the relationship between Soll und Haben ’s literary realization and its fundamental ontological premises. Namely, it ignores the fact that behind Veitel’s disdain for the human worth of goods and commodities (to say nothing of his distain for people themselves) hides a pre-modern idea of the life of things independent from human beings entirely. This return of the repressed pre-modern in Soll und Haben has occasionally been noticed, but has rarely been discussed in detail. 20 Ulrich Kittstein, for one, draws attention to the conclusion of the first conversation between Veitel and Anton towards the beginning of Soll und Haben , in which Veitel expresses his faith in the power of a “Wissenschaft, [die] steht auf Papieren geschrieben,” whose possession has the power to turn its owner into “ein mächtiger Mann” ( Soll und Haben 20). But even this implied black magic of scholarly texts has a still blacker and more occult provenance, as the lines of dialogue that precede Veitel’s remark make clear: “Es gibt ein Rezept, durch das man kann zwingen einen jeden, von dem man etwas will, auch wenn er nicht will.” “Muß man ihm einen Trank eingeben,” fragte Anton mit Verachtung, “oder ein Zauberkraut? ” “Tausendgüldenkraut heißt das Kraut, womit man vieles kann machen in der Welt,” erwiderte Veitel […].“ Wer das Geheimnis hat, wird ein großer Mann wie der Rothschild, wenn er lange genug am Leben bleibt.” “Wenn er nicht vorher festgesetzt wird,” warf Anton ein. “Nichts eingesteckt! ” antwortete Veitel. “Wenn ich nach der Stadt gehe zu lernen, so gehe ich zu suchen die Wissenschaft, sie steht auf Papieren geschrieben. Wer die Papiere finden kann, der wird ein mächtiger Mann; ich will suchen diese Papiere, bis ich sie finde.” (20) Such beliefs, observes Kittstein laconically, “wecken zunächst Assoziationen an magisch-alchemistische Praktiken, doch sie erfüllen sich im Fortgang des Romans in höchst moderner Form” (72). But the above passage not only makes it obvious that to speak of mere “associations” with magical-alchemical practices here is a gross understatement; it also makes plain that it is not the difference from, but precisely the affinity between these medieval magical practices and Veitel Itzig’s dark financial arts that is at issue—and that this affinity, furthermore, is no less than the specter haunting the field of “modern” finance as a whole, whose exorcism alone secures the latter’s legitimacy and above-the-board sta- Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 231 tus. The point here, however, is not that Veitel is actually not properly materialist enough ; the point is rather that this materialism is not quite materialism: insofar as human perception cannot actually rest with the object “as such,” the very material of materialism is always already uncanny, always in excess of itself—a fact that is demonstrated exemplarily by the apparently autonomous proliferation of money in Veitel’s financial dealings (a motif reflected, in turn, in the lines from Rilke cited in the epigraph to the present article). Therefore the autonomy of the inorganic must be placed on the side of evil, so as to clearly differentiate the trade in goods—that Handel that signifies (according to Grimms’ Wörterbuch ) “im allgemeinsten sinne, was mit den händen betrieben und ausgerichtet wird, daher arbeit, verrichtung schlechtweg”—from those ultramodern, immaterial-material financial dealings that seem nevertheless to revitalize all the thaumaturgic possibilities of a more primitive age: to differentiate the human “Vertiefung […] in das handelnde Leben” (Ludwig 351-52) from the Handeln of things suddenly animated to life� V In the same way that Veitel is thus surrounded by things that he simultaneously manipulates (or shuns) and seems to merge with, he is also perpetually characterized by his surroundings in a way that almost no other character in the novel is (with the possible and telling exceptions of the sensitive and sickly Jewish autodidact Bernhard Ehrenthal and the only slightly less doomed Freiherr von Rothsattel). “Veitel Itzig […] hatte eine merkwürdige Vorliebe für krumme Seitengassen und schmale Trottoirs” ( Soll und Haben 34), the novel relates as Veitel makes his way through one; when he stops, it is at “ein unheimlicher Aufenthalt für jedes Geschöpf außer für Maler, Katzen oder arme Teufel” (48)— but Veitel is right at home. Characterization through environment is of course a common enough device of realist literature, as Erich Auerbach has shown, for example, in his classic analysis of the passage of Madame Vauquer’s pension in Balzac’s Père Goriot . “What confronts us,” writes Auerbach, “is the unity of a particular milieu, felt as a total concept of a demonic-organic nature and presented entirely by suggestive and sensory means” (472)� Auerbach attributes what he calls Balzac’s “atmospheric realism” (473) to a notion of milieu derived from the natural sciences as well as to the nineteenth century’s passion for historicist impressionism. Auerbach’s use of the word “demonic” in the above passage and elsewhere is clearly meant primarily in the Greek sense of the term: Madame Vauquer is the spirit of the place, her soul but the effluvium of the objects that surround her, at the same time as her presence animates these objects with an uncanny independent life. In the context of a post-animist and post-Cartesian 232 Erica Weitzman worldview, however, the other sense of demon as evil spirit is never far away: malignance inheres in the agency of things without human soul� 21 And while Auerbach may have chosen his example at random, it can be no accident that the passage he selects is precisely one in which the character’s “mixture of stupidity, slyness, and concealed vitality,” emanating from her environment, “gives the impression of something repulsively spectral” (Auerbach 472), in which the primary consequence of a character’s atmospheric “synthesizing” of her milieu is precisely to “[deepen] the impenetrability and baseness of her character which is constrained to work itself out” within it (473)� Auerbach’s “demonic” fusion of character with setting thus bespeaks more than just a quasi-sociological desire to capture the feel of the times; it also bespeaks realism’s uneasy negotiation between the world of things and the human beings who inhabit it, where the refusal on the part of certain characters to respect this negotiation grants them a baseness that moves beyond mere villainy into the realm of the diabolic� This, at any rate, is the case in Soll und Haben . As has already been argued, from the very first scenes with Veitel, Freytag establishes a pattern of pathetic fallacy that marks Veitel as something more and yet less than human: indeed, as in Balzac, a double pathetic fallacy, in which not only Veitel’s psychic state and ethical character are mirrored in the objects that surround him, but also in which the uncanniness and sinisterness of this anthropomorphization itself becomes the symbol of Veitel’s own suspect nature. In other words: outside of the citational and ironic usages noted above, anthropomorphization steps over the boundaries of what realism sanctions and renders it corrupt. As Paul de Man writes in regard to Baudelaire’s famously anthropomorphic-synesthetic sonnet “Correspondences”: “Anthropomorphism seems to be the illusionary resuscitation of the natural breath of language, frozen into stone by the semantic power of the trope. It is a figural affirmation that claims to overcome the deadly negative power invested in the figure” (247). Anthropomorphism, for de Man, breathes life back into the killing metaphor, that which turns world into mere language—but anthropomorphism is at the same time the very metaphor of this breathing back of life, as it were taking away with one hand what it has given with the other� With the transition from the (late) romantic rhetoric with which de Man is concerned to that of Realism, however, a somewhat different dynamic comes into play, insofar as the nostalgia for organic meaning and ecstatic communion between the human being and the natural world that Baudelaire’s poem, for example, epitomizes has now been replaced by an aesthetics in which meaning is an explicitly and, more important, exclusively human donation� Thus what is at stake in the realist novel is not even the success or (for de Man, inevitable) failure of the anthropomorphic trope, but rather the degree of conspicuousness in its use: the anthropomorphization or prosopopoeia that Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 233 does not call attention to itself, that appears as if it were natural , is the return of the romantic repressed in its most mystified version, and thus also a threat to the entire system of relations between humans and world upon which programmatic realism rests� Of course, as the preceding argument has shown, such threateningly inconspicuous anthropomorphization does show up in Soll und Haben , indeed on more than one occasion. However, these instances of rhetorical anachronicity should by no means be taken to be a kind of accidental lapse on Freytag’s part: a last perverse residue, so to speak, of difficultly relinquished romantic tendencies. Rather, the trope of anthropomorphization is strategically and as it were homeopathically deployed by Freytag, linking together animism, racial otherness, and ethical depravity in order to expel all three, all at once, from the modern novel’s purview. Towards the beginning of the novel, after the first fateful meeting with the Jewish tradesman Hirsch Ehrenthal, Veitel sits in a corner of the guesthouse where he is living, “mit seinem rastlosen Geiste rechnend und Geschäfte ausdenkend, wobei er zuweilen in lebhaftem Sinnen mit Händen und Beinen schlenkerte, bis die Dunkelheit der Nacht durch die Tür eindrang und die kleine Öllampe zu knistern anfing und Miene machte auszugehen” ( Soll und Haben 49). Here Veitel’s twitchy but silent physicality can barely be differentiated from the oil lamp’s poltergeist-like expressiveness; meanwhile, the “Eindringen” of the night’s darkness through the guesthouse door not only foreshadows Veitel’s own tenebrous invasion of genteel society, but also grants the amorphous night itself a threatening and inexorable, almost brute physical power. Freytag’s use of pathetic fallacy is even more pronounced in other scenes with Veitel, for example in the conclusion to the episode in which Veitel begins his tutelage with the lawyer Hippus, where Freytag urges his prose on to its most purple expression: Das Licht war erloschen, der kleine Herr hatte die neugefüllte Branntweinflasche geleert und war, ermüdet vom langen Sprechen, auf seinem Strohsack eingeschlafen, und noch immer saß Veitel auf dem Schemel. Heute dachte er nicht an seine Kunden, nicht an sein gezahltes Geld, sondern er schrieb Schuldscheine an die schwarzen Wände […]. Dann öffnete er die Tür zur hölzernen Galerie, lehnte sich auf das Geländer und sah durch das Dämmerlicht hinunter in das Wasser, welches wie ein riesiger Strom von Tinte vorbeiflutete. Und wieder schrieb er Schuldscheine in die schwarzen Schatten der gegenüberliegenden Häuser und schrieb Quittungen auf die dunkle Wasserfläche, bis sein müder Leib erschöpft zusammenbrach und er in einer Ecke einschlief, das heiße Haupt an die Holzwand gelehnt. Im kaltem Zuge fuhr der Nachtwind über das Wasser, und unten gurgelte die Flut klagend an den Holzpfählen 234 Erica Weitzman und Vorsprüngen der alten Häuser. Was er in die Schatten gezeichnet, das verrückte sich , und was er auf das Wasser geschrieben, das zerrann , und doch hatte seine Seele einen Schuldschein ausgestellt in dieser Nacht, der einst von ihm eingefordert werden sollte mit Zins und Zinseszins. Der Wind heulte, und der Sturm klagte, wilde Mahner an die Schuld, rächende Boten des Gerichts . (112, my emphasis) The “klagend[e] Flut” and the quasi-apostrophizing of natural phenomena as “wilde Mahner” and “rächende Boten” are almost so obvious as to not require comment, though it should be noted that, unlike other comparable personifications in Soll und Haben , all three are naturalized as either regular descriptors or casual appositives. Meanwhile, the “Heulen” of the wind is a prime example of the tendency of pathetic fallacy to catachresis (see Johnson 15)—the act of diffracted air pressure generating audible vibrations can only be named by this verb for the cry that accompanies wild grief—and the “Verrücken” and “Zerrinnen” of Veitel’s imaginary bonds, while ostensibly describing the water-like (and thus already metaphorical) swirling away of receipts and invoices drawn up in the mind, clearly also hint on a subliminal punning level at the madness and dashed hopes that these same receipts and invoices will bring in their wake. To these pathetic fallacies in this passage, Freytag also introduces an extreme agential ambiguity: through a pronominal anacoluthon, Hippus, the “kleine[r] Herr” who first teaches Veitel Itzig about the business of debt collection (and who will incidentally later become Veitel’s most tragic victim) turns, as if in cinematic dissolve, into Veitel himself; later in the passage, the same technique makes unclear where Veitel ends and the night wind begins (“Im kaltem Zuge fuhr der Nachtwind […]. Was er in die Schatten gezeichnet […]”). Here, then, not only are object and subject, thing and human being allied: they are all but grammatically indistinguishable , evoking in the reader a queasy discombobulation that is the very opposite of realism’s promised indexical clarity. In contrast to the calm proprietary glow in which the objects of Anton Wohlfahrt’s world are bathed, Veitel’s object-world swarms with a life of its own, at the same time as he himself becomes a thing among things, as uncanny and unfeeling as they are. Such a dissolving of both ontological and grammatical categories betokens an alien, protean world antithetical in every way to the daylight world in which (in the concluding words of the good bookkeeper and future Frau Wohlfahrt Sabine Schröter) “Besitz und Wohlstand haben keinen Wert […] ohne die gesunde Kraft, welche das tote Metall in Leben schaffender Bewegung erhält” ( Soll und Haben 850), in which things’ force is given through the animating power of their human possessors alone. The above passages notwithstanding, however, such anthropomorphic lyricism still remains rare in Soll und Haben . Even in Veitel’s death scene—of which the “Schuldschein” episode is clearly also a foreshadowing—the use of evident Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 235 metaphor is negligible or indeed absent, despite the fact that the narration of Veitel’s flight from what his guilty imagination takes to be the ghost of the man whom he has recently murdered would seem, in its suggestion of paranormal states, to almost demand the use of figurative language. Instead, however, Freytag here derives maximum benefit from the use of what might be called covertly pathetic adjectives (similar to what I. A. Richards calls “projectile adjectives” 22 ), adjectives that have both a descriptive and a moral—or, to return to Ruskin, an objective and a subjective—valence: Als [Veitel] in die Nähe der Herberge kam, sah er einen dunklen Schatten vor der Tür. […] Der Unselige fuhr zurück und wieder näher heran, die Tür war frei. Er fuhr mit der Hand nach einem verborgenen Drücker und schlüpfte hinein. Aber hinter ihm hob sich wieder drohend der Schatten aus dem Dunkel eines vorspringenden Kellers, er glitt hinter ihm an die Tür und blieb dort regungslos stehen. […] Das Wasser staute sich an den alten Pfählen, den Treppen und den Vorsprüngen der Häuser und murmelte eintönig. […] Er klammerte sich an das schlüpfrige Holz der Pfähle , um nicht zu sinken. […] Mit einem Schrei fuhr der Verbrecher zurück, sein Fuß glitt von dem Wege herunter, er fiel bis an den Hals ins Wasser. So stand er im Strom, über ihm heulte der Wind , an seinem Ohr rauschte das Wasser immer wilder, immer drohender . […] Langsam löste sich die fremde Gestalt von dem Balken, es rauschte auf dem Wege, den er selbst gegangen war, das Gespenst trat ihm näher, wieder streckte sich die Hand nach ihm aus. Er sprang entsetzt weiter ab in den Strom. Noch ein Taumeln, ein lauter Schrei, der kurze Kampf eines Ertrinkenden, und alles war vorüber. Der Strom rollte dahin und führte den Körper des Leblosen mit sich. An dem Rand des Flusses wurde es lebendig, Pechfackeln glänzten am Ufer, Waffen und verhüllte Uniformen blinkten im Schein der Lichter. Der Zuruf suchender Menschen wurde gehört, und vom Fuß der Treppe watete ein Mann längs dem Ufer und rief hinauf: “Er ist fortgetrieben, bevor ich ihn erreichen konnte, morgen wird er am Wehr zu finden sein.” ( Soll und Haben 833-35, my emphasis) The “schlüpfrige Holz der Pfähle” that Veitel hangs onto in this scene for dear life is no doubt meant to be actually slippery from slime and water, but it cannot fail to also evoke Veitel’s own moral duplicitousness and veiled sexual creepiness, his ingratiating glibness and eager slide into vice, trickery, and crime. The shadow that “hob sich wieder drohend” (834) before Veitel does not really threaten, of course, but it is threatening insofar as it is threatening to Veitel, like the water that later, similarly, “rauschte […] immer wilder, immer drohender” (835). If such a deployment of affectand judgment-laden adjectives still remains within standard idiomatic usage, however—a form of erlebte Rede or an example of Ruskin’s “temperament […] of a mind and body […] borne away, or over-clouded, or over-dazzled by emotion” (365)—the subsequent transforma- 236 Erica Weitzman tion of this shadow and water into a human form that “rauschte auf dem Wege, den [Veitel] selbst gegangen war” (835) makes it clear that Veitel’s anthropomorphizing of his surroundings is more than just a regular pathetic fallacy as the subjective truth of his inner panic, but also possesses a magical power of animation over the material world itself. In other words, Veitel’s guilty conscience is not only reflected , psychologically, within the scenic description; his subjective description of inanimate objects actually catalyzes the action of the scene in which those objects appear. Thus does the dream logic of pathetic fallacy become self-fulfilling prophesy: Veitel has indeed discovered the “Rezept, durch das man kann zwingen einen jeden, von dem man etwas will, auch wenn er nicht will” ( Soll und Haben 20), but, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, discovers to his horror that its animating power is turned only against himself. 23 Veitel’s death by drowning is at once the complement to and culmination of his life by pathetic fallacy: the unstable element, upon which what is written is washed away, also finally covers over the head of Soll und Haben ’s sinister financial magus, who conjures money out of nothing and in whose presence the material, inanimate world, over which a realist and humanist epistemology has only recently established its dominance, threatens once again to come to life. With Veitel’s death, however, the pathetic fallacy also dies; where once the inanimate had taken on the characteristics of the human, now the human takes on the characteristics of the inanimate, this time for good. “[E]in Taumeln, ein lauter Schrei, der kurze Kampf eines Ertrinkenden” (835)—the penultimate sentence of the paragraph piles up an inventory of nouns with neither subject nor verb to describe the last gasp of thingly life. The first line of the next paragraph marks the dawn of the victorious new era: “An dem Rand des Flusses wurde es lebendig” (835)—first tentatively and metonymically, then definitely with the reintroduction of actual human voices and forms. Even the very last paragraph of Freytag’s novel, in which the evocation of “fleißigen Hausgeister” would at first seem to revive the rhetoric of pathetic fallacy, in fact registers its end: “Die poetischen Träume, welche der Knabe Anton in seinem Vaterhaus […] gehegt hat, sind ehrliche Träume gewesen” (851). 24 With Soll und Haben , Freytag exchanges the fevered nightmares of ontological speculation for the real and honest dreams of a modern, pragmatic, socially and morally edifying literature. The life that counts, human, German, productive life, requires the death of the uncanny life of things and matter, the transformation of its corpse into so much bloated flotsam. And Veitel Itzig must die, not merely because he is a Jew and a usurer with no proper role in the new bourgeois economy, but because he is—or rather is made to become—the avatar of the very epistemological uncertainty regarding the material world and the threat of its uncanny force that a realist literature must foreclose in order to be� Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 237 Notes 1 E.g. (taken, it should be said, out of context), “[Die Welt] ist schlechthin Vorstellung, und bedarf als solche des erkennenden Subjekts, als Trägers ihres Daseyns; ja, jene lange Zeitreihe selbst […] durch welche die Materie sich steigerte von Form zu Form, bis endlich das erste erkennende Thier ward, diese ganze Zeit selbst ist ja allein denkbar in der Identität eines Bewußtseyns, dessen Folge von Vorstellungen, dessen Form des Erkennens sie ist und außer der sie durchaus alle Bedeutung verliert und gar nichts ist” (Schopenhauer 64-65). 2 Again, however, only in a virtual or ideal sense. See, e.g., Strowick on the uncanny temporalization of perception and the “Einspeisung wahrgenommener Wirklichkeit in die Funktion der Mimikry” (97) in the realist prose of Theodor Storm� 3 Karl Gutzkow—while himself no friend of the programmatic realists—has the eponymous heroine of his philosophical novel Wally, die Zweiflerin put the situation succinctly: “Der Rationalismus hielt sich an die Unmöglichkeit, das Ding an sich zu erkennen; der Supernaturalismus an die Vermutungen, welche hinter dem Dinge an sich liegen könnten. Das Ding an sich war ebensosehr negativ wie mystisch positiv: das weite Chaos der Zweifel lag in ihm ebensogut wie das Chaos der Gefühle. […] Es war ein Streit um den Anfang eines Zirkels” (120). 4 Such a moral is exemplified by the oft-cited maxim of Julian Schmidt’s that Freytag uses for his book’s epigraph: “Der Roman soll das deutsche Volk da suchen, wo es in seiner Tüchtigkeit zu finden ist, nämlich bei seiner Arbeit” ( Soll und Haben 4)� 5 As Berman writes, in reference to Soll und Haben : “The realist text is […] defined less by an absence of normality than by a perpetual reenactment of the punishment of deviant behavior in order to reassert the unquestionability of the normative law” (77)� Berman is more concerned with the novel’s engineering of social and ethical norms than with their aesthetic or ontological counterparts, but his observation remains no less valid for these aspects. 6 Bennett herself advocates for the reintroduction of anthropomorphization as a “[tactic] for cultivating an ability to discern the vitality of matter” (119). Whatever the viability of such a strategy, the differences between Bennett’s stated aims and the aims of Freytag’s practice of anthropomorphization should be clear� 7 And thus also, not incidentally, with the expanding nexus of colonial trade, with Germany—and metonymically T. O. Schröter’s firm, and thus also 238 Erica Weitzman Anton himself—as the “nerve center” of this economic empire (see Kopp 36-37). 8 Cf. Preisendanz 83: “Verklärung meint […] eine Schreibweise, die den Unterschied zwischen dem vom Leben gestellten Bilde und dem dichterischen Gebilde nicht verwischt, sondern verbürgt, eine Schreibweise, in der Darstellung mehr als Nachbildung oder Bestandsaufnahme, in der sie Grund und Ursprung einer Wirklichkeit ist.” 9 See Barthes, esp. 146-47. It is worth repeating here that for Barthes, the useless detail does not in fact serve to solidify the mimetic promises of realism, but ultimately tips over into pure signification and the refocusing of attention on the semantic surface of the literary text—and thus is indeed motivated or even allegorical, if now only on a meta-textual level. 10 See Eicher 72-75; also Grunert, who however focuses less on the novel’s rhetoric than on its “romantischen Grundvorstellungen von ‘Natur’ und ‘Freiheit’” as incarnated in the persons of Lenore and Fink, respectively (148)� 11 Fredric Jameson suggests that “what is poetically inauthentic in traditional ‘pathetic fallacy’ is not so much its illicit use of nature as its presupposition of named emotions as such, which reacts back on the former to endow it with those ‘meanings’ we found in Balzacian description, that is to say, a signifying system and no longer really a physical perception at all” (50). Jameson’s interest is in defending something like a “show don’t tell” of literary affect, in which pathetic fallacy, sliding illegitimately from perception to emotion, would clearly be on the side of the latter. Such an argument is certainly in line with Ruskin’s critique, though it ignores the larger question of why one would think to endow nature with emotions in the first place, beyond the mere aesthetic laziness that Jameson seems to think it is. 12 It is significant here, for example, that even the infamous “Gipskatze” fully reverts to an inanimate object in Anton’s absence. 13 See Culler 143: “If, as we tend to assume, post-enlightenment poetry seeks to overcome the alienation of subject from object, then apostrophe takes the crucial step of constituting the object as another subject with whom the poetic subject might hope to strike up a harmonious relationship. Apostrophe would figure this reconciliation of subject and object. But one must note that it figures this reconciliation as an act of will, as something to be accomplished poetically in the act of apostrophizing […]. Fancy deceives by not deceiving as effectively as it is said to.” Here we might simply add that for the explicitly anthropocentric poetics of realism, this dis illusionment of the apostrophe is something to be desired , not lamented. Base Matter: Pathetic Fallacy in Gustav Freytag’s “Soll und Haben” 239 14 Compare the more critical (unsigned) review of Dickens’s David Copperfield in Die Grenzboten ’s fall 1849 issue, in which Dickens is taken to task for his manneristic style: “[E]r liebt grelle Farben, weil er sich stets im Contrast bewegt, wie unsre Geigenspieler seltsame Sprünge” (487). 15 See Holub 198: “Anton’s worldview is that of the romantic idealist; Itzig’s that of the crude realist.” Similar interpretations reappear in Achinger 334-38, Kittstein 72-73 and 76-77, and Twellmann 384. 16 Freytag’s portrayals of the Jewish characters in Soll und Haben are more differentiated and more nuanced than is sometimes acknowledged; nevertheless, each one of these characters still fails, in different ways, to meet the criteria for admissibility into Freytag’s bourgeois utopia. The criticism of Soll und Haben ’s anti-Semitic representations begins already with Fontane’s review of the novel (see 305-06); for further discussions and analyses, see, among many others, Gelber, Gubser 187-238, and Kittstein 61-80. 17 For an extended (if critically naïve) typological comparison of Dickens’s and Freytag’s villains, see Freymond 39-46. 18 In the context of the novel’s reputation for anti-Semitism, it may incidentally be noted that this passage allows Freytag to have it both ways: Anton is shown to be, not merely no anti-Semite, but even a defender of his Jewish peer against anti-Semitic provocation; if Itzig turns out to be unworthy of such kindnesses, it is then not because of any preconceptions on Anton’s (or Freytag’s) part, but because he is truly, and not just purportedly, base. It should also be said that this is the only moment in the novel in which Veitel’s religious practices are mentioned at all: otherwise, his Jewishness is only relevant as sociocultural and racial identity� 19 “If abomination is the lining of my symbolic being, ‘I’ am therefore heterogeneous, pure and impure, and as such always potentially condemnable. […] The system of abominations sets in motion the persecuting machine in which I assume the place of the victim in order to justify the purification that will separate me from that place as it will from any other, from all others” (Kristeva 112). Significantly, Kristeva implies that it is the very rigidity of Levitical prohibition that leads to this reflexive structure. 20 Twellmann evokes this idea, as it were in passing, with his mention of the “unwirkliche Wertzeichen” that “[i]n den Häusern der Geldhändler […] spuken” (384). Lonner, meanwhile, addresses the topic of the uncanny in Freytag directly, but only in relation to Die verlorene Handschrift (134-36). 21 See Kreienbrock, 5-6 and passim; also Strowick on the “evil eye” (95-96). Kreienbrock further suggests that the anthropomorphic attribution of malevolence (or, milder, “malice”) to inanimate objects may in fact be a coping 240 Erica Weitzman mechanism, against the even more threatening possibility that accidents with objects could occur without motivation or reason (see 235-39). 22 Richards defines “projectile adjectives” as “words [such as beautiful, ugly, etc.] which really indicate not so much the nature of the object as the character of our feeling towards it” (220, see also 357-60). 23 Cf. Marx and Engels 6: “Die bürgerlichen Produktions- und Verkehrsverhältnisse, die bürgerlichen Eigentumsverhältnisse, die moderne bürgerliche Gesellschaft, die so gewaltige Produktions- und Verkehrsmittel hervorgezaubert hat, gleicht dem Hexenmeister, der die unterirdischen Gewalten nicht mehr zu beherrschen vermag, die er herauf beschwor.” 24 As Lonner comments: “the fantastical figure of the cat represents the orderly, rational world, and celebrates Anton’s defeat of his ‘Träume’ that take shape in the intoxicating draw of the aristocratic world” (127). Works Cited Achinger, Christine. Gespaltene Moderne: Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben . Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild . Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. —. “‘Prosa der Verhältnisse’ und Poesie der Ware: Versöhnte Moderne und Realismus in Soll und Haben �” 150 Jahre Soll und Haben . Studien zu Gustav Freytags kontroversem Roman. Ed. Florian Krobb. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005. 67-86. Auerbach, Erich. 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