“A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism Dorothea von Mücke Columbia University Abstract: This essay examines how “A Village Romeo and Juliet” (1856), Keller’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy to nineteenth-century rural Switzerland, makes use of a multilayered fabric of images and comparisons� Plot elements, names, and analogies at the level of narration borrow from a wide range of cultures — including the classical tradition, the Bible, Arabic poetry, Jewish mysticism, and Pietism — in order to affirm a this-worldly vision of paradise and the universality of the longing for a loving home� To the extent that Keller’s prose fiction engages its readers in a process of switching between being absorbed by a tragic love story and being engaged in decoding a network of images and literary allusions, between a “transparent” representation and an “opaque” text, Keller’s style invites a dialogue with Jacques Rancière’s approach to realism, which situates the political dimension of realism in a fundamental reorganization of the order of perception and the senses� Keywords: Gottfried Keller, Jacques Rancière, realism, politics, aesthetics How can works of art and literature affect our understanding of reality and how we live reality? 1 This concern is key to Gottfried Keller’s literary oeuvre� It informs not only his stylistic, generic, and formal choices and his subject matter, but also his relationship to the work of his contemporaries, the writers of mid-nineteenth-century realism� Scholarly discussions have primarily sought Keller’s understanding of realism in his reviews of fellow Swiss writer Jeremias Gotthelf’s novels and in his correspondence with Hermann Theodor Hettner, 2 while the self-reflexive dimension of his work has received less attention� In this article, however, I will base my argument about Keller’s realism primarily on his “A Village Romeo and Juliet�” I hope to show how Keller’s fiction offers 450 Dorothea von Mücke ways of reflecting on realism in the arts, by the manner in which it challenges and trains the reader’s attention and focus� One of the best-known novellas in the German language, Keller’s “A Village Romeo and Juliet” can be read as more than an engaging story of young love� Like so many of Keller’s narrative fictions it can also be read as a text about the role and function of literature� This aspect comes into view when we lend our attention to the wide spectrum of rhetorical devices requiring special decoding efforts on the part of the reader� Passages that foreground the rhetorical and semiotic features of Keller’s novella as a verbal construct, descriptions interspersed with comparisons evoking or quoting other texts, for instance, trouble the homogeneity of Keller’s text as a piece of transparent fiction� Once this is noticed, readers cannot have continuous access to the story’s diegetic universe, as if they were witnessing a scene that could be part of the reality they inhabit� And it is in this disruption of the homogeneity of the fictional universe that we can locate Keller’s intervention in a common understanding of realism� For by suspending a model of the representation of a reality, that very same reality is no longer something given� Rather, it becomes something that is put together, made perceptible, authenticated, made sensuous, and endowed with meaning� In Keller’s fiction, we encounter this kind of reality as a set of signs, symbols, and data, which can be deciphered and decoded but also appropriated and transformed - for these signs belong to different registers and presuppose different cultural contexts� If a simplistic understanding of realism in art demands the accurate representation of reality, then Keller’s challenge consists in offering narrative fictions that undermine the exclusivity of a representational model of art� A quick glance at Jacques Rancière’s discussion of realist art might be useful in this context� Rancière, like Keller - albeit 150 years later -, seeks the pragmatic and political thrust of realism in its challenge to the exclusivity of the representational paradigm� According to Rancière, the point of realist art is not to offer a more accurate or more truthful representation of a specific historical reality but, rather, to put an end to the representational regime of art altogether� By that, Rancière means the end of all genre-related rules that, since Aristotle, have determined what could be represented in Western literature, and how it could be presented� Liberation from these poetic regulations would then not merely allow for the representation of lower-class people as the protagonists of a tragedy, for instance, but actually reach far beyond the mere expansion of subject matter, to affect “the distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 12-19)� By this, Rancière means the order of what can be perceived, how, and by whom� This new regime, which breaks with the regime of representation and, instead, attributes to the individual work of art the capacity to transform actual modes “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 451 of sensual perception, Rancière calls “the aesthetic regime” (Rancière 36-37)� In that sense, Rancière’s approach to realism can provide a conceptual horizon for considering Keller’s realism� Keller’s critical engagement with realism can be found in much of his work� In the Seldwyla cycle, to which “A Village Romeo and Juliet” belongs, each novella has a particular focus, derived from a specific popular or literary practice, speech genre, or form� For instance, “Mirror, the Kitten” invokes and transforms the genre of the fairy tale and “Clothes Make the Man” works with the proverbial saying in its title� In “A Village Romeo and Juliet,” Keller trains his critical lens on the literary practice of adaptation� The transfer of Shakespeare’s plot from Renaissance Verona to rural nineteenth-century Switzerland brings with it a new social and political dimension through the tale’s reference to a set of regulations concerning land ownership and citizenship� Moreover, Keller provides for the Romeo and Juliet plot a narrative about the origin of the lovers’ attraction in a childhood encounter on a piece of uncultivated land� The fact that this piece of land, situated between the fields of the two families and the site of the children’s first love, then becomes the source of the enmity between the two families has given rise to interpretations of Keller’s novella within a larger frame of original sin and the expulsion from paradise, i�e� a fall narrative� 3 In what follows I will show, however, that Keller invites such readings only to relativize and replace them with secular versions of paradise, drawing on a wide spectrum of spiritual traditions ranging from Jewish and Sufi mysticism to radical pietism� First, I will focus on the introductory narrative, the ending, and the various framing strategies employed by Keller� Then, I will analyze the novella’s inter-textual dimension, specifically the invocations of Genesis and the Song of Songs, and verbatim quotations from the poetry of Heinrich Heine and Abu Nuwas� Finally, I will turn to an analysis of the actual interaction of the two lovers� I hope to show how Keller’s Romeo and Juliet, in their love and friendship, discover and affirm the human capacity for play, fabulation, world-making, and the redistribution of the sensible - an important element of Keller’s philosophical anthropology and the key to his approach to realism� 4 When Keller adapts Shakespeare’s tragedy, he considerably expands its plot, adding a narrative of the origin and trajectory of the enmity dividing the families of the Romeo and Juliet characters� This added plotline follows the strife between two farmers over a piece of uncultivated land that leads, over the course of a decade, to the ruin of each� One farmer, the father of Sali, Keller’s Romeo character, ends up an innkeeper and dealer of stolen goods in a neighboring town; the other, the father of Vrenchen, the Juliet character, is taken to a lunatic 452 Dorothea von Mücke asylum when he does not recover his sanity after Sali strikes him on the head with a stone, defending Vrenchen against her father’s violent attack� In addition to Keller’s account of the origin of the feud, there is also a new ending: whereas, in Shakespeare’s play, the death of the two protagonists results from unintended circumstances and misunderstandings, the lovers in Keller’s novella deliberately choose their death� This they do not only out of despair, because they cannot envisage a common future, but also as the culmination and conclusion to the celebration of their love and their longing for a new home� 5 The key to Keller’s adaptation lies in the way in which he relates the love story to the family feud� This relation is initiated in the novella’s expository narrative� One sunny September day, Manz and Marti, the two farmers, fathers of the future lovers, are plowing their fields alongside each other, separated only by a piece of uncultivated land� At noontime they are joined by their respective young children, who bring them lunch� During their break, the farmers chat about a certain vagrant called the “Black Fiddler�” Their conversation makes it clear that they deliberately refuse to attest to the Black Fiddler’s identity as grandson of the village trumpeter, which, if acknowledged, would give him access to home and property rights regarding the land between their fields� While the fathers resume their ploughing, the children spend the afternoon playing on that uncultivated parcel, forming a deep bond of trust� On that same fateful September day, the farmers conclude their plowing by each adding one furrow from the overgrown middle field to their own property� While neither calls attention to what the other is doing, the seeds of their enmity are sown� Eventually, when one of them obtains the middle field at a town auction and accuses the other of having altered and misappropriated his land, the farmers’ mutual dislike turns into outright hostility� Over the years, the men’s envy-fueled feud festers, and expensive litigation drives each into ruin� Both farmers ultimately lose their farms� By contrast, the children of the two feuding farmers reignite their friendship after a chance encounter and fall in love� In the final part of the novella, after the two families have lost everything, the young lovers set out on their own and, because they see no way of making a living, marrying, or settling into a home, decide to attend a parish festival and dance together for one night, before facing their final separation� At the end of that long last day, they find their way to a tavern for the homeless and outcast, “the little garden of paradise�” There they encounter the Black Fiddler, who leads them in a procession through the fields, from which they peel off alone towards the river, bed themselves on a hay barge, and, at daybreak, drown themselves� Keller’s two added plot lines about the fathers’ perdition and about the lovers, are thus linked by the figure of the Black Fiddler and the parcel of uncultivated land� “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 453 The focus on that uncultivated land as both the site of the children’s happy play and the object of the two farmers’ greed suggests a range of interpretive frames� A piece of wilderness populated only by two little humans recalls the narrative of the first couple’s sojourn and banishment from paradise in Genesis, for instance� And the detrimental effects of appropriating a parcel of land can be read in line with Rousseau’s account of the destructive effects of civilization, beginning with agriculture and private property� 6 In both cases, one might be tempted to adopt an interpretation of the whole tale that derives both the ruin of the families and the double suicide of their children from a transgression committed by the fathers, passed on to their offspring - an interpretation that ultimately relies on the Christian reading of Genesis 3� 7 Though many critics have taken up the fall narrative as a means of relating the plot of the fathers to that of the children, I will show how Keller’s text actually undermines readings that rely on the explanatory power of the fall narrative� In addition to suggesting these two meta-historical frames, the expository narration also introduces a specifically Swiss context in the two farmers’ conversation� The two men allude to the Heimatrecht (the rights associated with one’s family’s hometown) of the Black Fiddler, whose claims to his family’s land they also collude to prevent: “How on earth could we know he’s the grandson of the trumpeter? Though I might clearly recognize the old man in his dark face, as far as I’m concerned, I say: to err is human, and just a little shred of paper, a small piece of a baptismal certificate would be better for my conscience than ten sinful human faces�” “For sure! ” Marti said� “Though he might say it wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t baptized! But shall we make our baptismal font portable and carry it around in the woods? No way, it stands firmly in the church and instead it’s the bier that’s portable and hangs outside on the wall�” (DKV 73) 8 They suggest that the Black Fiddler would be justly entitled to his family’s land if his identity were authenticated by a baptismal certificate, though their conversation also reveals that they are aware of his identity and lineage, for his facial features tie him to his grandfather� Thus the narrative exposes how the two men scheme to exclude the Fiddler from his inheritance, mobilizing the institutional architecture and bureaucracy attached to the Christian sacrament of baptism to their ends� The expository narrative, then, as well as suggesting several interpretive frames - dealing with the accessibility of paradise, or private property and the decline of civilization -, also calls attention to acts of interpretation, appropriation, or misappropriation� Many readers have noticed the irony or “poetic justice” in the fact that the two farmers’ refusal of the Black Fiddler’s right to his family’s property provides 454 Dorothea von Mücke the catalyst for their own destruction, culminating in the loss of their homes and honorable standing in the community� This, however, does not mean that the children’s fate is to be considered strictly analogous to that of their fathers� A number of readings, however, construe exactly that, focusing in particular on the moment before the Black Fiddler leads the procession of revelers through the fields, when he invites the young couple to join his band in their free existence in the woods� 9 Vrenchen’s rejection of the fiddler’s invitation is read as evidence of the couple’s desperate clinging to “bourgeois values” in their desire for a home� 10 Such interpretations, which frame Vrenchen and Sali’s suicide in terms of a wrong-headed mystification of bourgeois domesticity do not consider how the two lovers’ relationship is portrayed in the novella: they disregard the narrative’s valorization of the children’s capacity for play, Vrenchen’s storytelling talent, and the lovers’ use of their imagination as a source of happiness, love, and world-making� Moreover, interpretations of “A Village Romeo and Juliet” construing the young lovers’ double suicide as a consequence of their desperate longing for a home tend towards moralizing their death� But this kind of reading is actually anticipated and rejected in the novella’s final paragraph’s treatment of the news coverage of the event: Two young people, the children of two dirt poor, ruined families, who lived in irreconcilable enmity, sought their death by drowning, after heartily dancing away the afternoon with each other and making merry at a parish festival� This event might very well be connected to a hay barge from that region, which landed in town without a crew� One may assume the young people took possession of the boat in order to celebrate their desperate and godforsaken wedding: yet another sign of the rampant loss of morality and wild excess [“Verwilderung”] of the passions� (DKV 144) Keller’s narrative introduces the news coverage as a distinct discourse in order to show that even presumably simple, straightforward news reports are not free of ideological or moralizing filters, which appear to have guided the selection of the incident and its narrative frame to begin with� Keller’s novella, by contrast, does not use the narration of specific incidents to illustrate a preset moral� So far, I have characterized Keller’s novella as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy and explored its invitation of various interpretive frames, from the biblical to the local-historical, all in the expository narrative� Now, I will turn to one passage from the same exposition, which explicitly alerts us to the novella’s inter-textual network and the interplay of the representational and semiotic dimensions of the text: “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 455 Each plowing farmer could very well see what the other one was doing, but neither one of them called attention to this, and they would disappear from each other’s sight, as each constellation would pass the other diving down behind this round world� This is how the shuttles of fate pass each other, “and what he is weaving no weaver knows�” (DKV 77) The fate of the two men and their families is evoked by the image of two constellations passing each other, and the farmers behind their plows thus recall Shakespeare’s epithet for Romeo and Juliet as the “star-crossed lovers�” Also, as the men begin misappropriating the uncultivated piece of land, their actions harbor grave consequences of which they are not aware� In addition to the Shakespeare reference, by way of the image of weaving, a traditional image for the production of a verbal work of art, this passage also evokes a complex poetological dimension� In fact, all three images, the one of the two plowing farmers, the one of the ordered motion of the constellations, and the one of weaving, invoke a model of artistic form and design resulting from regular, coordinated movements through time and space, which project a sense of order and meaning� But the reference to weaving also complicates the issue, by raising the question of who is inside the loom’s frame, and who is outside it� Only in the case of a handloom would the weaver know the full design of the fabric being produced; though, even then, he or she might not be in control of the finished fabric� In the nineteenth century, as spinning technologies greatly expanded, Keller’s contemporary George Eliot, for instance, provided an intricate, haunting description in her eponymous novella of how Silas Marner becomes entirely engulfed in the machinery of the loom he works� 11 Thus, the image of shuttles inside the loom might be a reference to the inevitable results of the greedy, self-deceptive course of action taken by the two farmers, linking them to the rapidly expanding industrialization of the textile industry, which had reached far into the countryside by the mid-nineteenth century� Even in ancient tradition, the weaver at the loom could stand for the artisan figure, who, in contrast to a divine weaver, might not have full view or control of her or his work or fate� 12 Moreover, the same passage cited above calls attention to itself as a text composed of borrowed fragments: “This is how the shuttles of fate pass each other, ‘and what he is weaving no weaver knows�’” Some readers might know the source of this quote, Heinrich Heine’s Romanzero (1850), a tribute both to Byron’s Hebrew Melodies (1813) and to Jehuda Ben Halevy, the tenth-century Sephardic poet from Toledo, whose corpus of poems was discovered in the early nineteenth century and published in 1838� But even readers entirely unfamiliar with Heine are able to perceive the diacritical signs marking the line 456 Dorothea von Mücke as a citation, which call attention to the phrase as an utterance, attributable to an individual, distinct work� Heine connoisseurs will recognize the quote as borrowed from the poem “Jehuda Ben Halevy,” which contrasts two attitudes towards exile� The first is characterized by simmering bitterness and the thirst for revenge, as expressed in Psalm 137, which is quoted throughout Heine’s poem� 13 But then there is Heine’s cheery “Pegasus,” encouraged by the exemplary Jewish poet-scholar Ben Halevy, who, living in exile in Spain, took to “Judaizing the troubadour’s cult of devotion … by replacing its idealized woman with a divinely chosen holy land” (Halkin 126)� Ben Halevy’s poetry, inspired by Sufi mysticism, expresses his guiding passion: the journey to Jerusalem� In Heine’s poem, the image of the loom and the unknowing weaver, which connects the quotation of Psalm 137 to the Pegasus image, marks the transition between an attitude of resentment, having lost one’s home and homeland (by the rivers of Babylon, not willing to take up the harp), and an attitude of hope and energy, derived from the exercise of imagination, for which Jehuda Ben Halevy provides a shining example: someone who does not simply simmer with resentment, but who takes action, adapting the available poetic vernacular to his dream of Jerusalem� And what can be gained from this excursion into one of the intertextual dimensions of Keller’s novella? First, this reference makes the case that the longing for a home cannot be reduced to an oppressive “bourgeois domesticity” but, rather, must be considered in its wider significance: spanning centuries, peoples, religions, and cultures, ranging across a wide spectrum of symbolic registers, from the trivial to the mystical, encompassing cultural hybrids and utopian constructs� But then, closer consideration of the Heine reference also yields an additional perspective on the novella� Heine’s portrait of Jehuda Ben Halevy highlights the possibility of relating differently to the wounds of expulsion and exile, of seizing symbolic agency as a way of freeing oneself from resentment� The quotation of “Jehuda Ben Halevy” emphasizes that Vrenchen and Sali’s yearning for home, when they have lost all else, can be compared with a situation that has afflicted many people who have lost their home or homeland through violent conflict, captivity, or exile� It is ultimately this perspective, too, which sheds light on the figure of the Black Fiddler, advising against romanticizing his life in the woods as a valid alternative existence� Note, for instance, that when the Black Fiddler confronts Sali and Vrenchen about the deprivation of his rights, he laments that he was not only prevented from claiming the piece of land as his rightful property, but also from having the means to emigrate and find a new home by selling it� Another element of the novella’s intertextuality is its references to Genesis and the Song of Songs, which begin in the detailed narrative of the play of the two “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 457 farmers’ children� This narrative, embedded in the expository account of that sunny September day, is crucial for a full understanding of the text’s biblical allusions and Keller’s engagement with them� While their fathers plow, the fiveyear-old Vrenchen and seven-year-old Sali wander, hand in hand, through the wilderness of the uncultivated field, then sit while Vrenchen dresses and adorns her one-legged doll in weeds and a bright red poppy and props it upright in a bush� Sali, becoming bored, dislodges the doll with a stone and, as Vrenchen tries to give it new clothes, throws it high in the air� When he notices that the doll is losing its filling through a tear in the leg, he shakes the doll’s leg and drops the toy before Vrenchen, who throws herself over it and wraps it in her apron� When the girl takes the doll out of her apron and, discovering its emptied leg, begins to cry vehemently, Sali appears to be unmoved� Finally, as she wailed uncontrollably, the wrongdoer felt a bit bad and stood anxiously and remorsefully before the aggrieved girl� When she noticed this, she suddenly stopped and hit him a few times with the doll, and he pretended that it hurt him and yelled “ouch! ” so naturally that she was satisfied and could now together with him continue the work of destruction and dissection� They drilled many a hole into the doll’s martyred body [“Marterleib”] and let all the millet flow out, which they carefully collected into a heap on a flat stone, stirred, and attentively observed� (DKV 74) Many interpretations of this scene focus on the fact that the children then proceed to examine the doll’s head and, finding it empty, fill it with grass and a live fly� The children admire this “talking head” with awe, as if it were a “wise prophet,” then bury it, without releasing the insect� These readings tend to find some version of original sin in this scene, locating the children’s transgression in their “cruel” treatment of the doll and their live burial of the fly, but, in so doing, they entirely disregard the dimension of make-belief and play� 14 They also ignore the narrator’s hyperbolic, melodramatic word choices (such as the doll’s “martyred body”), which indicate an ironical stance towards a simple, moralizing reading of the children’s activities� In reality, the narrator emphasizes not just the exaggerated affects expressed by the children but also their histrionic aspect� The boy enacts a drama of anxiety and remorse before the girl, pretending to be hurt by her punishment, allowing her to have her desired retribution� This scene is, first and foremost, a scene of playacting and of theater� For this to become possible, the older, stronger, more mature boy must realize and accept the limitations and needs of the younger girl and use this insight not to take advantage of her but, rather, to mollify her, by acknowledging her hurt and allowing her to feel vindicated� Instead of mortal sin, requiring redemption - the Christian understanding of Genesis 3 and its fall narrative (shared neither by Judaism nor Islam) - we read a perfectly secular, humanist alternative: 458 Dorothea von Mücke two little humans are capable of overcoming their aggressive impulses through playacting� The other person is respected as an individual, equal partner, with her specific needs and limitations� This does not only call for imagination and empathy but also the ability to differentiate between, on the one hand, the raw expression of feelings and, on the other hand, the symbolic value of these expressions - the way in which their articulation is perceived, can be modulated, and is interpreted� It is this capacity for playacting that provides for the two children the medium of their trusting recognition and interaction, and a fundamental source of happiness� They forget the doll and take to tenderly counting and miscounting each other’s teeth, then end the day peacefully asleep, one on top of the other� Clearly, the narrative of this playful encounter between the children speaks against a framing of the novella in terms of a fall narrative� This is supplemented by a second biblical allusion: when the children reencounter each other years later, the happiness they find in their reconnection and attraction is portrayed and intensified by allusions to the Song of Songs, the erotic poetry legendarily composed by the wise and wealthy King Solomon, namesake of the novella’s protagonist “Sali” (the shortened form of the German “Salomon”)� 15 But whereas Christian readings of the Song of Songs tend to construe its erotic imagery in an allegorical or mystical fashion, Keller’s novella makes use of this biblical allusion to do precisely the opposite, to hallow Sali’s mundane experience of falling in love with Vrenchen: He still had a feeling as if he were not only unspeakably rich, but also as if he had learned something useful, and as if he knew infinitely many beautiful and good things, now that he had a clear and distinct knowledge of what he had seen yesterday� All of that knowledge had come to him as from the heavens, and he continued on in a happy state of amazement about it, though it also seemed to him as if he had always known and recognized what now filled him with such sweetness� For there is nothing like the wealth and mystery of the bliss that comes to a human being in such a clear and distinct form, baptized by a little preacher and endowed with a proper name of its own - a name that does not sound like any other name� (DKV 96-97) Of course, there is a bit of irony in the narrator’s concluding phrase, which sums up Sali’s mystification: his beloved is for him unequalled, the most special being in the world, to the point that even her common Swiss name appears utterly unique� The irony lies, too, in the fact that the uniqueness of his beloved has nothing to do with her being baptized, but is, instead, the effect of their loving recognition� Moreover, the reference to Vrenchen’s baptism by a “little preacher” recalls the novella’s opening narrative, when the two scheming farmers remark that the Black Fiddler’s identity could not be confirmed unless he “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 459 produced a certificate of his baptism� Further, in addition to this intra-textual reference, there is an important comment on Christian doctrine, according to which baptism addresses man’s fallen state and allows for the possibility of redemption in life thereafter� The loving recognition of Vrenchen by Sali with its allusions to the Song of Songs in Keller’s novella becomes a this-worldly alternative to baptism and divine redemption, and yet a further rejection of the Christian narrative of the fall as an interpretation of Genesis 3� After their reconnection, the two lovers are irresistibly drawn together� They decide to meet on the uncultivated piece of land, where they are suddenly confronted by the Black Fiddler, who reminds them of their fathers’ wrongdoings� They then build a love nest for themselves in a ripe wheat field, where, upon their exit from their hiding spot, they are discovered by Marti, Vrenchen’s father, who violently tries to drag Vrenchen away, pulling her by her hair� Sali comes to her defense and knocks Marti unconscious with a stone� Marti recovers his physical health, but not his memory or his wits and eventually is sent to a lunatic asylum, leaving Vrenchen to sell the decrepit farmhouse and provide for herself� It is then - without homes, skills, or employment, and guarding the knowledge of what brought about Marti’s insanity - that the two lovers realize they cannot imagine a shared future� But they also cannot envision themselves in separate futures and decide, therefore, to spend one final day as a couple, dressed in their finest, dancing� Sali collects Vrenchen at her house, where she is awaiting the arrival of an older woman, who is to pick up her bedstead, the last piece of her furniture to be sold� When the buyer arrives and sees Vrenchen and her lover in their Sunday finery, she remarks how Vrenchen is “decked out like a princess” and comments that, considering the fate of their parents, their own does not bode well� Vrenchen counters that their outlook has changed since Sali won 100,000 florins in the lottery, and that they will be married in three weeks� At first, the old woman is stunned by the sum and calls Vrenchen a liar, but Vrenchen continues spinning her yarn, detailing their wonderful prospects and newfound wealth� She not only provides rich details, but assigns an increasingly fleshed-out role to her interlocutor, casting her as an experienced, good country woman, a trusted friend and confidante, who will come to share the fruit of her land with Vrenchen, the fine lady of the town, who, in turn, will share with her fine foods and delicate fabrics and finery� Though Vrenchen’s interlocutor is initially skeptical and calls her a liar, she is quickly charmed by Vrenchen’s imagination and willingly participates in her vision, where she can inhabit a different persona: 460 Dorothea von Mücke “Aye, all has changed and turned out well,” Vrenchen replied with a smile, friendly and forthcoming, almost condescending, even� “Look, Sali is my bridegroom! ” “Your groom! So you say! ” “Indeed, and he is a wealthy gentleman, he’s won a hundred thousand florins in the lottery! Just imagine that, woman! ” [The old woman] jumped up, clapped her hands with astonishment and cried: “A hun - a hundred thousand florins! ” “A hundred thousand florins,” Vrenchen assured her earnestly� “My Lord! But this isn’t true, you’re lying, child! ” “Believe what you will! ” “But if it’s true and you’re going to marry him, what do you want to do with all that money? Do you really want to become a fine lady? ” “Of course, and in three weeks we’ll have our wedding! ” “Go away, you’re an ugly liar! ” “He has already bought the most beautiful house, with a huge garden and vineyard; you’ll have to look us up once we’ve established ourselves, I’m counting on it! ” “Go away, you devilish little witch, you! ” “You’ll see how beautiful it is there! I’ll make you a wonderful coffee and serve you brioche with butter and honey! ” “O you little rascal! You’d better count on me coming! ” the woman called, her face full of craving and her mouth watering� (DKV 119-120) Step by step, Vrenchen invites the woman into her fiction of sensuous pleasures, shared happiness, and trust� The mention of the vineyard is a meta-textual cue for the reader, an allusion that Vrenchen is inviting the woman to share the bliss of the Song of Songs, in which the vineyard represents a place of sensual delight� It also recalls prior passages, where the narrator refers to Vrenchen’s dark skin and hair, marking her as Solomon’s beloved� 16 And indeed, the woman’s initial rejection of Vrenchen’s “lies” gives way to a willing suspension of disbelief, as she tests Vrenchen’s skill as a raconteuse, asking her if she can really imagine herself as a fine lady� Vrenchen takes up that very challenge when she responds with a luscious illustration of the generosity she would show as a hostess� The woman takes Vrenchen’s bait and ultimately enjoys her participation in the fiction, her epithets for Vrenchen changing from accusations to terms of endearment� The turning point in the woman’s attitude is her acknowledgement of Vrenchen’s charm, when she calls Vrenchen a “devilish little witch�” For the reader, this epithet echoes the term Sali chooses, earlier in the story, just after the Black Fiddler reminds the young couple of their fathers’ sin and they find themselves overcome by gloom� Vrenchen then reminds Sali of the Black Fiddler’s grotesquely large nose, making them both laugh, and prompting Sali to call her a witch, acknowledging the magical power with which she can draw him back into the full present, with laughter� For laughter, in Keller’s works, is an emphatically human capacity, a commitment to enjoy another’s company, to relinquish resentments and grudges� In this, it offers a decisive alternative to the model of forgiveness� 17 “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 461 Additionally, the epithet “witch” marks the young woman’s capacity to seize symbolic agency through the creation of a fictional counter-reality, to be shared by her audience or, as in the case of the Fiddler’s nose, which can alter the distribution of the sensible by way of a deictic gesture, isolating a deliberately overlooked detail and enlarging it to grotesque proportions� There is also symmetry in Vrenchen speech act, for the Fiddler’s nose was, to the children’s fathers, a deliberately unacknowledged facial feature marking him as the grandson of the village trumpeter� With Vrenchen’s remark, laughter over the same detail allows the two lovers to forget their fathers’ past and, instead, enjoy their physical attraction to each other� Vrenchen is depicted as a powerful raconteuse when she is leaving her wrecked, empty parental home and embarking on a journey, of which the sole purpose is to spend a full, happy day with her beloved� It seems significant that this threshold is marked by her willingness to fully engage in a fictional world she invents for herself and her audience� Her imagination of glossy domestic refinement and bourgeois luxury is not a retreat into an exclusive interiority of domestic bliss� On the contrary, it is open to the stranger; for it is not a fixed, homogenous realm of illusion but a work in progress, enjoyed through active exchange and dialogue� This is why the woman’s initial, derogatory remark is taken in a playful manner, as a challenge, which Vrenchen meets with a performance that radically reframes their speech situation and relationship� The passages isolated so far depict Sali and Vrenchen building their relationship through interaction, dialogue, and play, each respecting the other’s limits and limitations and letting the other inhabit shared imaginative spaces, as a way of being in each other’s presence� They first find this source of happiness as young children, playing on the piece of uncultivated land, then rediscover it as love, after their fathers have wrecked their homes and future prospects� Ultimately, their love intensifies and comes to hold the promise of an alternative form of happiness and home, and the narration of this is enhanced by the novella’s inter-textual engagement with the Song of Songs, which expands the imagery and imagination of the lovers’ happiness beyond a narrow vision of domestic bliss� If the text invokes imagery of bourgeois well-being, as in Vrenchen’s fiction, it does not suggest that the lovers desire the exclusivity of actually inhabiting a world of that nature, but, instead, stresses its role as a tall tale, to be shared with interlocutors� This treatment of the vision of domesticity occurs twice: once in Vrenchen’s fabulation, as she defangs the old woman’s envy, and again in the couple’s purchase of a gingerbread house at the parish festival� These episodes are set at thresholds demarcating a loss of home and the couple’s attempt at finding an alternative, their desire to be together and, at the same time, part of a larger 462 Dorothea von Mücke community - be it in the countryside of their birthplace, or the village community, grouped around the parish church� However, it is only the scenario of domestic bliss produced by Vrenchen’s fabulation that creates a community extending beyond the imagination of the two lovers: the couple’s attempt at becoming part of an actual community, at the parish festival, fails� The couple’s last, festive day coincides with the village parish fair, the Kirchweih, the annual commemoration of the consecration of the church, which, since the late Middle Ages, used to combine a religious service with an outdoor market, dancing, and merrymaking� In Keller’s narrative, we see how Vrenchen and Sali - in actuality, facing the threat of homelessness - attempt to integrate their private happiness as a couple with the local community� Milling about in the festival crowd, looking at the wares of market stands, they become absorbed by the sight of baked goods, embellished with decorations and sweet promises: Sali bought a large gingerbread house, painted with a pleasant, white coat of sugar icing and a green roof, garnished with two white doves and a chimney, out of which peeped a little cupid figurine like a chimney sweep� In the open windows there were chubby-cheeked people embracing, really kissing each other with their little red mouths, it seemed, where the separate streaks of icing had bled together� Black dots represented cheery little eyes� And on the rose red door of the house, one could read the verses: Enter into my house, o my beloved! But you must know: Inside, only kisses Are what we add up and count! The beloved said: “O my love, Nothing can deter me! I have considered everything: My happiness lives only in you! And if I really consider it, That is why I came! ” So then, come in with blessings, Enter and join the custom� (DKV 129) The narrative presents the couple’s engagement with this love poetry in two steps� First, for the reader, there is the above-quoted ekphrastic feast, in which the description of the gingerbread house fuses a semiotic and a representational model: the kisses are “made real” on the material level of the sign carrier, in the visual illusion elicited by the beholder’s impression of the red icing used for the “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 463 figures’ lips, which are joined together in a single dot� Then, there is the contrast between the narrator’s indulging enactment of perfect kitsch, in the description of this kind of popular artisanal work and, on the other hand, a piece of world literature, quoted on the rose-colored door of the gingerbread house: a poem by Abu Nuwas, the famous eighth-century Arabic poet whose Diwan had been translated into German and published by Alfred Kremer in 1855, and which is excerpted by Keller in his notebooks (DKV 692-693)� After this ekphrastic bravura the text shifts to a more traditional narrative of the lovers, as they joyously isolate, read, and apply the sayings painted on the sweets to their own feelings, probing and affirming their truths and their resonance� While, oblivious to their surroundings, they engage in this private literary salon, they become a spectacle for the surrounding crowd, who notices the neatly turned-out couple, and recognizes in them the descendants of the two feuding families� When Sali and Vrenchen look up, a silent standoff ensues, due to hostility, hesitation, awkwardness, and the villagers’ utter inability to greet or welcome the two young people� Clearly, the Kirchweih cannot fulfill its promise for the lovers; there is no adequate cultural form or ritual allowing for their recognition and integration into the local community, nothing that can give them support in their search for a home and acknowledge them as members of that community� Sali and Vrenchen are thus driven to join the other social outcasts in their celebration at an inn, the Paradiesgärtlein, of which the curious name - “the little garden of paradise” - invokes a late-medieval painting and the title of a popular devotional book by Johann Arndt (1555-1621), whose writings were instrumental in the rise of Pietism� To an extent, this name for an inn outside the village, with its church and its Heimatrecht, invokes a purely spiritual, mystical paradise, a union with the divine that has no concrete home in any specific community� Of course, Keller’s choice of name is not without irony, and much has been said about the fusion of biblical and Dionysian imagery in the description of the inn, linking the figure of the Black Fiddler to a psychopomp, who, after performing a mock marriage, escorts the lovers to their nuptial deathbed (Kaiser 27-28, 34-35)� But little has been made of the odd description of the couple’s arrival at this “mystical site,” which the narrator offers just as the protagonists cross a significant threshold: The little Vrenchen, devotedly carrying her house of love, resembled the kind of saintly church patroness from old paintings, who carries in her hands a model of the cathedral or cloister that she has endowed, though nothing could come of the pious foundation that lay on Vrenchen’s mind� But when she heard the wild music wafting down from the top floor, she forgot her sorrows and wanted, in the end, nothing but 464 Dorothea von Mücke to dance with Sali� The two made their way through the many guests seated before the house, through the ragged people from Seldwyla in the living room, poor folk from all over on a cheap country outing, then went upstairs and began, immediately, to turn round and round in the waltz, the gaze of each locked on the other� Only when the waltz had ended did they look at their surroundings� Little Vrenchen had squashed and broken her house and just as she was about to be sad over this she noticed, to her even greater shock, the Black Fiddler in her proximity� (DKV 133) This gathering place for vagabonds and social outcasts, “the little garden of paradise,” seamlessly integrates the two lovers into the dance and celebration and, in that sense, provides the exact opposite of the parish festival� However, it too fails to fulfill the couple’s hope of having a home in a recognized unit of community, a hope that found its embodiment in the gingerbread house Sali bought for Vrenchen at the Kirchweih, which breaks during the dance� In light of this twofold rejection, the narrative seems to mark the couple’s double suicide as the outcome of their exclusion from all community� Still, many readings of Keller’s “A Village Romeo and Juliet” interpret the story’s ending as Sali and Vrenchen’s withdrawing into an extreme form of subjectivity and inwardness, a retreat into a quasi-mystical sense of love, and see this supported by references to the Song of Songs� I hope, however, to have demonstrated that the mystical aura of Vrenchen and Sali’s love exists less in their desire to withdraw from all this-worldly social engagement and more as a key element in the narrative’s densely textured set of literary references - ranging from the Song of Songs, to Heine’s “Jehuda Ben Halevy,” poetry from Abu Nuwas’s Diwan, and a reference to Johann Arndt’s Paradiesgärtlein -, textual passages that indicate the transformative power of love or, on the other hand, articulate a desire for home or future� In other words, the mystical aspect of these texts should be taken as designating the two lovers’ desire to build a new home for themselves, to find a common future and a dwelling radically different from the wrecked homes of their childhood, marked by their fathers’ blind self-righteousness, abusiveness, and violence� In that sense, the mystical element of their “new” home is to be found in its promise of hope and renewal, for, as we have observed, the lovers’ relationship is not built on the exclusion of others, nor does it deny or flee the material world, with its pleasures and physical comforts� For the reader, a germ of hope for an alternative to the two fathers’ nefariousness is already laid in the children’s play on the piece of uncultivated land� Instead of considering their play as a parallel to the work of their fathers, following a biblically inspired allegory of the fall, the narrative emphasizes the children’s happiness as stemming from their mutual engagement in forms of make-believe and from their capacity for imagination, which constitute the “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 465 novella’s humanistic core and offer a means of addressing conflict and loss, countering resentment and envy� Thus, grounded in trust and in their ability to acknowledge each other’s limitations, the children’s capacity for play provides the foundation for their love, which, coupled with inclusive imagination, is the source of being happy in the present� This emphatic, almost mystical bliss is decidedly this-worldly, even though, according to the invoked biblical references, one would think it reserved for a heavenly Jerusalem, an otherworldly paradise, or a mystical union with the divine� In this sense, the narrative of the two young children on the piece of uncultivated land introduces in Keller’s version of Romeo and Juliet an alternative philosophical anthropology, one that presents the human biped not as an animal capable only of sinning and knowing, but as an animal of a social, symbolic, and world-making capacity, capable of joyously being in the present� In conclusion, I would like to return to my observations about Keller’s textual model and the realist program embedded in the novella, which bills itself as an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play� How is this transfer of the tale to mid-nineteenth-century Switzerland to be understood as a realist adaptation of a classic? Clearly, it is not the equivalent to a report of an actual incident, such as would be provided by local newspapers� Instead, as we have seen, Keller’s text continually intertwines representational and semiotic dimensions, especially in the passages about the imagined “house of love,” the gingerbread house, the poetry on the baked goods, and Vrenchen and Sali’s arrival at the Paradiesgärtlein, all of which work as vivid narratives at a diegetic level but are also sprinkled with literary and art-historical references, quotations, and doses of narrative irony� 18 Keller’s text also makes ample use of the literary tradition of ekphrasis - in the comparison of the plowing farmers to constellations or weaving shuttles and in the descriptions of the gingerbread house, for instance - and through these ekphrastic passages, in particular, resists a representational reading, foregrounding a rich repertoire of signs and intertexts and invoking different contexts and registers, all in need of decoding� This brings us back to Rancière’s claim about realism’s political potential� According to Rancière, realist art is capable of disrupting the regime of representation and ushering in the “aesthetic regime�” Whereas under the representational regime a written text is an artifact accessible to its readers as if they were dealing with oral speech, the model object of the aesthetic regime is a textual passage that asserts itself as an opaque page of written signs requiring deciphering and allowing for a variety of combinatory options� By means of this model object, realist art, according to Rancière, marks its departure from representational conventions - be it perspective in Renaissance painting, which 466 Dorothea von Mücke allows the beholder to look into an architectural space or landscape, or, in the case of the verbal arts, a unified realm of illusion in a piece of fiction� Keller’s novella offers passages that produce this effect of opacity by presenting a mixed semiotic universe of intertextual references and by disrupting the distinctions between the diegetic and extra-diegetic sphere� Thus, one might see a parallel between Rancière’s model and Keller’s novella but, based on my discussion of “A Village Romeo and Juliet,” one can also argue that Keller adds a decisive humanist note to Rancière’s redistribution of the sensible� In this respect we might just recall Vrenchen’s ability to lighten the dark memory of their fathers’ transgressions, when she reminds Sali of the Black Fiddler’s nose and makes him laugh at the sight of it� With her simple deictic gesture, she intervenes in and alters the distribution of the sensible� So too do Sali and Vrenchen’s various attempts at building a new home for their love - from their childhood play to the moments of joy on their last, festive day - highlight the couple’s symbolic agency and world-making capacity� In the end, one might conclude that Keller’s text disrupts the unified illusion of representational conventions by highlighting certain semiotic aspects of the text, though the latter never entirely replaces the former� And, to the extent that Keller emphasizes symbolic agency as a crucial element of world-making and community-building, much of his fiction can also be studied as a “realist” ethnography of common folks’ uses and transformations of the popular culture of his place and age, the very fabric of life and culture in the Swiss countryside of the mid-nineteenth century� Notes 1 I would like to thank Valentina Izmirlieva, Nicholas Hissong, and Niklas Straetker for thoughtful readings and helpful discussions� 2 See Der Briefwechsel zwischen Gottfried Keller und Hermann Hettner (1964) and Gottfried Keller über Jeremias Gotthelf (1978)� 3 See Gerhard Kaiser’s “Sündenfall, Paradies und himmlisches Jerusalem in Kellers Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe” (1971)� Although he refers to the fall in the title of his essay, Kaiser does not fully address the novella’s position vis-à-vis the Christian interpretation of Genesis 3� It does however seem to inform his argument about the fate of the idyll in realism: first, he observes that the farmers destroy the idyllic natural order by their encroachment on the middle field (Kaiser 25), then, as the narrative depicts the lovers turning away from all worldliness, readers witness how the function of the idyll in literature has changed� For Keller, the idyll no longer has a place in reality; it has lost the status it had in the literature of German classicism� In this “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 467 elegiac use of the idyll, Kaiser situates both Keller’s realism and Keller’s this-worldly religiosity (Kaiser 44-46)� 4 Moritz Baßler explains this kind of intertextuality in relation to the key features of poetic realism, which he calls “Entsagung” and “Verklärung�” He points out that poetic strategies of “Verklärung” with their goal of endowing a diegetically realistic narrative with a poetic charge of meaningfulness proceed primarily by way of suggesting relationships of similitude or equivalence, often by taking recourse to intertextual references including literary, biblical, and art historical references� By way of invoking those extra-diegetic interpretive codes the narratives provoke and maintain a desire for meaningful closure, which ultimately, however, is not to be satisfied� Instead, these narratives, according to Baßler, promote an ethics of renunciation (“Entsagung”), which is not only articulated at the diegetic level (where the protagonists have to keep on going with their lives without having the satisfaction of cashing in on their ideals) but also for the readers in terms of the suspension of closure� For none of the invoked meta-narrative codes of significance are ultimately univocally affirmed� He gives particular attention to Keller’s use of Shakespeare in his Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (Baßler 57-63)� 5 In the first printed version of Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe, in 1856, Keller had a rather long paragraph after the description of Sali’s blissful state of being in love with Vrenchen: “This is a good thing and in it we have the secret or the revelation of what makes life thrive, of what makes a family, and of what holds many families together� It is the spring bloom that generates the fruit of a good family; some plants need to flower two, three, even four times until they yield fruit� And then the wisdom of nature or the gods has arranged it thus - that to those in bloom it is always the last flower that appears to be the finest, that they think none has ever been so beautiful� And whether nature alone or the gods have made it thus, it is truly good and purposive� Yet many bloom just once, only to have this flower destroyed by storm, killed by frost, or drowned by heavy rains, never yielding fruit; many bloom in the wilderness, in a deserted swamp in isolation, and produce nothing but, from time to time, a bitter, stunted wooden fruit; for all good fruit grows in good company - one ear of wheat next to another, and grape hangs beside grape, a thousandfold� But they will always have been flowers, whether they yielded fruit or not, whether they withered seen or unseen, and each spring is beautiful, no matter what becomes of it” (DKV 694)� 6 According to Rousseau, it is through the introduction of agriculture and metallurgy that mankind loses its ideal state of equality and that mutual dependency and inequality become institutionalized (Rousseau 213)� 468 Dorothea von Mücke 7 As a counterpoint to Kaiser (1971), Menninghaus provides an interpretation of “A Village Romeo and Juliet” that builds on Walter Benjamin’s observations of Keller’s allusions to Homer and his productive reception of the understanding of guilt and fate in antiquity, bracketing Keller’s biblical references� Menninghaus examines the novella’s understanding of “Schuld” as a curse passed on over generations, observing how, at a compositional and plot level, Keller’s text uses repetition, parallels, and symmetry to invoke a mythical concept of fate� Keller, he claims, treats this mythical nexus of guilt in a critical fashion, showing how the ruling order makes use of it at the expense of the individual - be that the Black Fiddler or the two children -, which he calls the “mythische Verknechtung der Person im Schuldzusammenhang” (Meninnghaus 144)� 8 Hereafter, parenthetical references to Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe are to the text of the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag edition of Die Leute von Seldwyla (1989) and will be marked “(DKV page number)�” All translations are mine� 9 Uerlings sees in Keller’s novella an indictment of the fate of the itinerant population of Switzerland, which were forced into a sedentary lifestyle by the policies and legislation of the Swiss nation state, such as the Bundesgesetz die Heimatlosigkeit betreffend (1850) (Uerlings 158)� Friends with whom I have shared Keller’s novella have wondered if the figure of the Black Fiddler should be associated with the Jewish ghetto, and whether the narrator and Vrenchen drawing attention to his prominent nose are referencing anti-Semitic stereotypes� After having been entirely banished from Switzerland and blamed for the plague in the 15th century, however, Jews were again - from the seventeenth century on - allowed to live in two Swiss villages, Endingen and Lengnau, in the canton of Aargau� Given this context, it seems unlikely that the Black Fiddler would refer to a Jewish person whose property claims were denied, despite his parents having been established inhabitants of the village� For the image of the Fiddler and the historical association of the violin with Psalm 137, see Rajner 123-124� 10 Swales (1979) takes up the challenge of defending Keller as a “realist” author against the potential diminution of being considered a mere “poetic realist” like some of his fellow German-language authors, whose works do not show the same penetrating analysis and critique of contemporary society as those of Balzac, Dickens, or Flaubert� He acknowledges that Keller’s Romeo und Julia is very carefully composed, with plenty of attention to aesthetic detail, but claims that this need not distract from the dense critical embedding of the two lovers’ fate in their surroundings and social setting� Swales argues that Keller takes great care in showing how the main char- “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 469 acters are full products or heightened examples of their very own society: the two farmers, in their misappropriation of the Black Fiddler’s field, for example, only do what most other members of their community would also have done, as the narrator points out� So too, the lovers cannot accept the Black Fiddler’s invitation to live in the wilderness because their sense of happiness is dependent on a bourgeois sense of order, neatness, and clean conscience, all of which has been conditioned by their surroundings� 11 This is how the act of weaving in Silas Marner is described: “He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection� Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life� Silas’s had satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort” (Eliot 16)� 12 See Iliad 3�125-128: “[Iris] came on Helen in the chamber; she was weaving a great web, / A red folding robe, and working into it the numerous struggles / Of Trojans, breakers of horses, and bronze-armoured Achaians, / Struggles that they endured for her sake at the hands of the war god” (Homer 103)� 13 Section II of “Jehuda Ben Halevy” begins with a quotation of Psalm 137: “By the streams of Babylon / Sat we down and wept, we hanged / Our sad harps upon the willows - ” (Heine 474-475)� The attitude of resentment is also evoked at the acoustic level - the songs of old Jewish men are associated with the sound of the simmering kettle on the stove of the severely sick and impoverished poet, Heinrich Heine, in his Paris exile: God be praised! the seething slowly In the pot evaporates, Then is mute� My spleen is soften’d, My west-eastern darksome spleen� And my Pegasus is neighing Once more gaily, and the nightmare Seems to shake with vigour off him, And his wise eyes thus are asking: Are we riding back to Spain, To the little Talmudist there, Who was such a first-rate poet, - To Jehuda ben Halevy? (Heine 475) 470 Dorothea von Mücke 14 Alexander Honold argues that the narrative of the children’s play depicts their “Verwilderung,” the same term - it is worth noting - that the novella attributes to the news reports’ condemnation of the lovers: “Verwilderung der Leidenschaften” (DKV 144)� This would align the expository narrative with the reports at the story’s end� See Honold 474-476� 15 Kaiser also traces Keller’s use of the mystical understanding of the Song of Songs (i�e� the reading of its erotic poetry as describing a return to paradise) in the love of Sali and Vrenchen� He emphasizes that this produces not only the profanation of the sacred but also the reverse: the sacralization of the profane� However, he also claims that Keller’s recourse to the Song of Songs emphasizes the extreme, exclusionary aspect of Sali and Vrenchen’s love and, on that observation, builds a central point of his understanding of Keller’s realism� 16 In the first chapter of the Song: “I am black and beautiful, / O daughters of Jerusalem, / like the tents of Kedar, / like the curtains of Solomon” (NRSV, Song 1�5)� The vineyard appears multiple times in the lines of the female speaker, representing the sexuality of the human body (Song 1�6) and, at the end of the poem, the theater of sensual gratification: “Come, my beloved [ …] let us go out early to the vineyards, / and see whether the vines have budded […] There I will give you my love” (Song 7�11-12)� 17 Laughter in that sense becomes a central element of the last novella of Die Leute von Seldwyla, Das verlorene Lachen, in which a couple’s estrangement shows itself in the wife’s sudden inability to smile� 18 In Holub’s analysis of nineteenth-century realism, Keller’s novella provides an example of his thesis: whereas, in principle, realist literature would not want to draw attention to itself as a literary construct, there are, nevertheless, an abundance of self-reflective passages in the literature often counted as German realism� Holub claims it is in those passages that we are alerted to the “weak” spot in the ideology of realism, with its normalizing attempts� In the case of Keller’s “A Village Romeo and Juliet,” we are alerted to the odd, ill-motivated ending, which can only be explained by the lovers’ inability to obtain social sanction of their love, a love that - according to Holub - is the expression of an intense incestuous desire (Holub 101-131)� “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and Gottfried Keller’s Realism 471 Works Cited Baßler, Moritz� Deutsche Erzählprosa 1850-1950: Eine Geschichte literarischer Verfahren� Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2015� Coogan, Michael D, Marc Z� Brettler, Carol A� Newsom, and Pheme Perkins�-The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version: with the Apocrypha: An Ecumenical Study Bible� Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010� Eliot, George� Silas Marner: The Weaver of Ravenloe� London: Penguin, 1996� Halkin, Hillel� Yehuda Halevi� New York: Schocken, 2010� Heine, Heinrich� The Poems of Heine� Transl� Edgar Alfred Bowring� London: George Bell and Sons, 1908� Web� 13 Aug� 2020� <https: / / www�gutenberg�org/ files/ 52882/ 52882-h/ 52882-h�htm>� Holub, Robert C� “The Desires of Realism: Repetition and Repression in Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe�” Reflections of Realism: Paradox, Norm, and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century German Prose� Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1991� 101-131� Homer� The Iliad of Homer� Trans� Richmond Lattimore� U of Chicago P, 1961� Honold, Alexander� “Vermittlung und Verwilderung� Gottfried Kellers Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe�” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 78 (2004): 459-481� Kaiser, Gerhard� “Sündenfall, Paradies und himmlisches Jerusalem in Kellers Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe�” Euphorion 65 (1971): 21-48� Keller, Gottfried, and Hermann Hettner� Der Briefwechsel zwischen Gottfried Keller und Hermann Hettner� Ed� Jürgen Jahn� Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1964� Keller, Gottfried� Gottfried Keller über Jeremias Gotthelf� Bern: Diogenes, 1978� —� Die Leute von Seldwyla. Gottfried Keller, Sämtliche Werke in sieben Bänden� Ed� Thomas Böning, Gerhard Kaiser, and Dominik Müller� Vol� 4� Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989� 69-144� Menninghaus, Winfried� “Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe: Eine Interpretation im Anschluß an Walter Benjamin�” Artistische Schrift: Studien zur Kompositionskunst Gottfried Kellers� Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982� 91-158� Rajner, Mirjam� “Chagall’s Fiddler�” Ars Judaica: The Bar-Ilan Journal of Jewish Art 1 (2005): 117-132� Rancière, Jacques� The Politics of Aesthetics� Transl� Gabriel Rockhill� London: Continuum, 2004� Rousseau, Jean-Jacques� Discours sur les sciences et les arts; Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes� Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1971� Swales, Martin� “Keller’s Realism: Some Observations on Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe�” Formen realistischen Erzählkunst: Festschrift für Charlotte Jolles� Ed� Jörg Thunecke and Eda Sagarra� Nottingham: Sherwood Press, 1979� 159-167� Uerlings, Herbert� “‘Diesen sind wir entflohen, aber wie entfliehen wir uns selbst? ’ ‘Zigeuner’, Heimat und Heimatlosigkeit in Kellers Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe�” Poetische Ordnungen: Zur Erzählprosa des Deutschen Realismus� Ed� Ulrich Kittstein and Stefani Kugler� Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007� 157-187�