Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 411 Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” Robert E� Mottram Whitman College Abstract: Putting Adalbert Stifter, the poetic realist author widely known for his “gentle law,” into dialogue with the acutely abstract works of the avant-garde is to encounter elements of his prose that are not based on mimetic principles of representation but are rather performative effects. Stifter’s subsumption of narrative progression to prolonged descriptions of landscapes, atmospheric conditions, and domestic interiors does not simply represent but rather generates the affective dimensions of a textual body. Part of what Fredric Jameson discusses as the emergence of the bourgeois body around 1840, in which affect stands opposite allegorical narrative, Stifter’s idiosyncratic style nevertheless braids affect with meaningful horizons. The imbrication of bodily affectivity and allegorical meaning in Stifter confronts theories of realism predicated on phenomenalist epistemologies, according to which matter can be delimited and described, with a more elusive materiality that turns every attempt to reduce objects to their bare existence into an uncanny reanimation of significance. Accordingly, Stifter’s “Kalkstein” is not limited to exploring the local landscapes of Upper Austria; it also foregrounds the intensities of the body that are as dynamic and hermeneutically uncertain as the most abstract avant-gardist compositions� Keywords: Stifter, realism, avant-garde, affect, materiality, allegory, atmosphere With an eye toward the increasing rationalization of the nineteenth-century novel, Franco Moretti distills one of the central paradoxes of literary realism: “[T]he more radical and clear-sighted its aesthetic achievement - the more unlivable the world it depicts” (89). Attention to detail and descriptive accuracy came at the expense of the larger significance of those details and descriptions. 412 Robert E� Mottram Two of the most recent and significant works on German realism to appear in English straddle the fault line of this paradox. Eric Downing’s The Chain of Things illuminates the Stimmung that, generated by metonymic and anthropomorphic connections between human subjects and physical objects, makes of the world of realism a palpably meaningful, and therefore livable, whole. Erica Weitzman’s At the Limit of the Obscene , on the other hand, attunes itself to the ever-looming fear with which realism could not live: that the “stony face” of reality would actually be reached, that mere matter would escape the meaningful bonds between subject and object “in defiance of all affective mediation” (6). An English critic’s 1848 review of Stifter’s Abdias as “a highly finished doorway leading into vacant space” (Swales and Swales 47), in addition to restating Moretti’s paradox, bears witness to Stifter’s ability to position the embodied reader throughout his literary work. 1 The review does not only bemoan a preponderance of details lacking an overall coherency; it also registers an affective quality: the experience of vacancy� Although Stimmung originally connoted harmony and the sort of meaningful interconnectedness that forms the basis of Downing’s study, post-World War I avant-gardists would find in their rejection of the sensuous order a characteristically apathetic atmosphere (Gumbrecht 10). Continuous with the avant-garde, the programmatic emergence of what Benjamin called “moot space” in Stifter thus escapes the coherency of the realist world as well as adds an affective dimension to the appearance of “matter as mere thereness” that, following Weitzman, literary realism went to great lengths to integrate into a coherent totality (Weitzman 15). 2 If it can indeed be claimed, as did Rosen and Zerner, that nineteenth-century eyes viewed realism as “an avant-garde movement” (179), it is on the strength of its investment in the “disappearance of the subject” - a progressive renunciation of classical rhetoric and allegorical meaning part and parcel of realist ideology: “an acceptance of visual reality, of that which was given immediately to the eye - and a faith that this reality could be transcribed without falsification into art and still speak for itself ” (177). The genealogy of this ocular immediacy reaches at least as far back as Kant, who in the Critique of Judgment predicates the sublime gaze on the absence of teleological and conceptual coordinates� Instead of viewing “the starry heavens” above as a purposeful relationship between suns and worlds “von vernünftigen Wesen bewohnt” and the ocean as the source of vapors “welche die Luft mit Wolken zum Behuf der Länder beschwängern,” one must rather, if the vision is to be sublime, view it “just as one sees it […] like the poets do, as merely what is given to the eye” (“bloß, wie man ihn sieht […] wie die Dichter es tun, nach dem, was der Augenschein zeigt”) (196). Kant invites us to conceive of a gaze shorn of the attunement and metonymic connections that enable meaningful commerce between subjects and objects, but one that is also Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 413 irreducible to the mere matter that haunts realism from within. Paul de Man, in his difficult reading of this passage, calls it a “material vision” and emphasizes that such “materiality” implies no intervention on the part of consciousness (82); that materiality is, therefore, neither a return to empiricism - to objects in their empirical verifiability - nor is it a sensation, nor even symbolic. It is “the moment when the infinite is frozen into the materiality of stone, when no pathos, anxiety, or sympathy is conceivable; it is, indeed, the moment of a-pathos, or apathy, as the complete loss of the symbolic” (127). Materiality in this sense bears little relation to Eva Geulen’s account of Stifter’s “paradoxical goal”: “to write in such a way as to make stones speak - and to make them speak as if they spoke for themselves” (“Tales of a Collector” 590). Whereas the latter achieves an impersonal quality through the (technological) effacement of discursive technique, the former attempts to isolate the moment prior to the sign’s phenomenalization in the speaking subject, whether that be a stone or anything else. Viewing the sky “bloß, wie man ihn sieht, als ein weites Gewölbe, was alles befasst” or the calm ocean “als einen klaren Wasserspiegel, der bloß vom Himmel begrenzt ist” (Kant 196), is not to compare the sky to a building or the ocean to a mirror. Such materiality is rather the arbitrary demand for language, the imposition of figure, beyond intention, conceptualization, or anthropomorphism. 3 A radical disappearance of the subject rather than the mere effect thereof, materiality theorizes a precarious rejection of the sensuous in its isolation of an undecidable moment always on the way toward language and affective response. 4 Whether or not the “essence of Stifter’s undertaking” is indeed “to embed human experience in the continuity of non-individual processes” (Swales and Swales 45), certain moments in Stifter escape this continuity in favor of what some decades ago J.P. Stern identified as Stifter’s interest in “the bare lineaments of existence” (100). At these moments a will to abstraction manifests itself, one running through the Kantian sublime via Stifter to the high modernists, whose experiments in disembodiment foregrounded the artistic medium� If Stifter’s inclusion in this genealogy appears unlikely, his place in it may most effectively be challenged by his radicalization of it� For Stifter’s achievement is not only to invert the realist ideology that predicates embodiment - the appearance of the phenomenality of the world in representation - on the technological effacement of technique, and to show rather how phenomenal objects, including the body, escape embodiment in representation - and this at precisely those points when every effort is being made to abstract from all other interests save the bare thing. Stifter radicalizes such efforts at disembodiment by bringing to the fore not just the sheer medium - the letter, for instance - but rather a more volatile materiality, a more uncertain affect, which keep Stifter’s spaces from being merely 414 Robert E� Mottram vacant or moot and which confront the phenomenalist ideology of realism with the contingencies of references that threaten it from within. Stifter’s “Kalkstein” - published in 1853 as part of his Bunte Steine - has as its structuring principle the narrative frame, part of a nineteenth-century preoccupation with encasement recognized emphatically by Walter Benjamin: “What didn’t the nineteenth century invent some sort of casing for! Pocket watches, slippers, egg cups, thermometers, playing cards - and, in lieu of cases, there were jackets, carpets, wrappers, and covers” ( The Arcades Project 220—21). “Kalkstein” encases the secret of a country parson’s fine white linens in a threefold system of first-person narratives: the priest recounts his formative years to a land surveyor, whose own report of his encounters with the priest, as well as of the limestone landscape he has been charged with measuring, has been passed on to “a friend” of the frame narrator. In a discussion of Moltke’s Binoculars by the realist painter Adolph Menzel, depicting a pair of binoculars as well as its case in exacting detail and from multiple angles, T.J. Clark asks a propos the nineteenth century’s fascination with cases “whether this was because the object was felt to need protection from the general whirl of exchange, or whether it was thought to be so wonderful in its own right that a separate small world should be provided for it, like a shell or calyx” (2). This could very well describe Stifter’s literary output, whose debt to the insular world of the idyll is commonplace. 5 The framing device of “Kalkstein,” its story received “at second or third hand,” is part and parcel of a narratological strategy, which sought to shelter its contents from the contingencies, the “whirl,” of history like a case protecting an object (Ragg-Kirkby 139). That the framing device of “Kalkstein” contextualizes, in addition to the linens, the safekeeping of three copies of the priest’s final will and testament, each bearing three seals, accords with what Swales and Swales see as a stress point in Stifter’s “idyllic intention.” The “overprotectiveness” - “shell upon shell, wall upon wall, frame upon frame” - tends to mix “the measured and the menacing” rather than to fulfill the idyllic ideal (Swales and Swales 38). Likewise, J.P. Stern likens Stifter’s elaborate descriptions to an “edifice” meant to shelter his characters from calamity and whose “very weight and size” can be felt (Stern 103). In “Kalkstein,” this weighty architectonic also manifests itself in the detailed description of the priest’s ascetic refuge, one that is noteworthy in its stark opposition to the rationale Benjamin provides for the bourgeois subject’s infatuation with cases: namely, to “preserve the imprint of all contact” ( The Arcades Project 20)� In addition to contextualizing Stifter’s realism in terms of various historical forms of affective response, what is ultimately at stake in what follows are the moments that threaten to escape even the imposing edifice of Stifter’s insular world - details that drive the wedge of undecidability be- Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 415 tween the spheres of allegorical meaning and affective response, and for which the signifier “case” becomes a somewhat unexpected marker. When the priest offers to shelter a land surveyor from a pending storm for the night, the latter cannot help but take note of the oppressively bare walls, the uncoated table surrounded by similarly unfinished chairs, and the lone wooden bench in the entryway on which the elderly man sleeps with a hard leather Bible in the place of a supple pillow. The land surveyor, on the other hand, revels in the several woolen comforters and a fine white sheet provided to him for the night: “Ich […] konnte nicht umhin, die äußerste Feinheit des Linnens des Pfarrers sehr wohlthätig an meinem Körper zu empfinden” (Stifter 83). Some twenty years after the publication of Bunte Steine , Robert Vischer, one theorist of a broader aesthetics of empathy that gained traction throughout the nineteenth century, described as empathic projection “the unconscious need for a surrogate for our body-ego […]. I wrap myself within its [the phenomenon’s] contours as in a garment” (qtd. in Fried 37). Menzel’s drawing, Unmade Bed , finished within ten years of the publication of Bunte Steine , is a remarkable adherent to this aesthetic of embodiment� It portrays the folds, creases, and lush curvatures of sheets, comforters, and pillows on a bed in the absence of the human figure that has shaped it. It is not the body itself that is present in such works, but rather the bodily presence as it is felt in objects “that in one way or another are adjusted to the body or that bear the body’s traces” (Fried 41). If, following Benjamin, “[w] ohnen heißt Spuren hinterlassen” ( Illuminationen 178), then Menzel’s drawing is far from merely a realistic depiction of an unmade bed� It is rather a picture of ordinary life lived palpably� Adolph Menzel, Unmade Bed , Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (SZ Menzel 319) 416 Robert E� Mottram The preparation of the land surveyor’s bedding in “Kalkstein,” on the other hand, is punctuated in terms so prosaic as to defy life itself: “Als Hülle für meinen Körper legte er mir eine dritte Wolldecke auf das Lager” (Stifter 81). This enigmatic sentence, printed in isolation, separates itself from the aesthetic of empathy in Menzel and Vischer through its evacuation of the spirit that transubstantiates the body qua matter into the embodiment of the “body-ego.” The distinctly reductive “Hülle für meinen Körper,” evoking a “case” ( Hülle ) besides merely a “cover” ( Hülle ) for the material body as opposed to the spiritual self, contrasts with the “dritte Wolldecke,” the extravagance of which is heightened by its numerical specificity. Simultaneously bare and excessive, it departs from the logic of decoding that links the novella’s programmatic preoccupation with secrecy to the detective-like concern with traces in Benjamin. 6 It is a detail of a different order than that of the contents of the priest’s final testament or of the provenance of his fine linens because it neither looks forward nor backward in search of a meaning. Rather, it gestures toward affect, part of what Fredric Jameson has identified as a history of the bourgeois body emerging in the 1840s (42—43). Affect is an aesthetics of the body, to be sure, but one much more broadly conceived than that theorized by Vischer and put into practice by Menzel - one more attuned to Stifter’s penchant for reducing existence to the barest of terms, but also one to which the idiosyncrasies of Stifter’s prose will present particular challenges. In Jameson, the body appears as a figure of reduction. He accounts for nineteenth-century literary realism in terms of a dialectic between the narrative impulse, or récit , and “the body’s present.” Whereas the former anchors the destiny of a character in an irrevocably past event and its negotiation in linear time, the latter - affect - is predicated on the “’reduction to the body’ inasmuch as the body is all that remains in any tendential reduction of experience to the present as such” (28). Opposed to “named emotions,” those feelings and passions that have ossified into nouns (29), affect is made up of the “more global waves of generalized sensations” that “the isolated body begins to know” (28). Strangely isolated from the bedding that gives it comfort, Stifter’s “Hülle für meinen Körper” thematizes the reduction to the body characteristic of affect while keeping the door cracked onto other potentially incommensurable possibilities. For to read “Hülle” as “case,” evoking a coffin and signifying the death in life characteristic of the priest’s asceticism, is to stumble into a realm anathema to affect, namely, allegory. 7 Not everything that deals with bodily affectivity is exemplary of affect in Jameson’s sense. In Balzac, he points out, “everything that looks like a physical sensation - a musty smell, a rancid taste, a greasy fabric - always means something, it is a sign or allegory of the moral or social status of a given character” Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 417 (33). Affect, on the other hand, “seems to have no context, but to float above experience without causes” (35). Jameson here echoes Flaubert, who in a letter to the poet Louise Colet, written while he was at work on Madame Bovary , predicates beauty on the withdrawal of style from context: What seems beautiful to me, what I would like to do, is a book about nothing, a book without any exterior tie, which would hold together on its own by the inner force of its style, just as the earth stays up without support, a book which would have almost no subject, or at least where the subject would be almost invisible, if that is possible. The most beautiful works are those with the least material; the closer the expression is to the thought, the more the word sticks to it and disappears, the more beautiful it is. (qtd. in Rosen and Zerner 160—61) 8 As Rosen and Zerner specify in their essay, “Realism and the Avant-Garde,” “subject” in this passage is “not the action or the scene represented: it is what the action or scene is about. ‘Subject’ is that which prolongs the thoughts of the spectator beyond the representation: [it is] the narrative significance, the moral, the meaning” (161). The avant-gardist impulse of realism lies rather in its asceticism, in its renunciation of “subject” in the asymptotic progression of aesthetic technique toward an ideal of technological effacement. 9 To invest in the disappearance of the subject in this sense is to further a romantic vein in the realist experiment - namely, the ideal of aesthetic autonomy, according to which every object is worthy of artistic treatment and artworks sustain themselves through their own intrinsic devices (162). It is also to illuminate a paradox of realism, cited by Rosen and Zerner: that “[p]recisely to the extent that the artist wanted to deal with the commonplace, style tended to develop into an all-important value” (160). Stifter is exemplary in this regard. His well-known preface to Bunte Steine is a protracted apology for a studied attenuation to the seemingly insignificant. Described therein is “the gentle law,” virtually Stifter’s synonym, whose most reproduced sentence traces the fault line between affect and subject: “Das Wehen der Luft das Rieseln des Wassers das Wachsen der Getreide” (and so forth) float in the absence of context, causality, or even punctuation. The sentence’s second half: “das prächtig einherziehende Gewitter, den Bliz, welcher Häuser spaltet, den Sturm, der die Brandung treibt” (10) - is an enumeration of causality and narrative: a cause and its effect. Stifter, of course, privileges the former since their patient study illuminates the “much higher laws” of which the latter are mere effects. That is to say, he subjects the would-be subjectless affect to a higher causality� 10 Stifter gives the example of lightning as but one manifestation of the much more imposing magnetic storm that stretches over the entire earth (9). Yet, despite its insistent bifurcation of the initially indeterminate affect (the 418 Robert E� Mottram flowing of air) and the locally causal subject (the lightning that splits houses), the effect of the gentle law is to intensify rather than stabilize its defining opposition. For although Stifter’s preoccupation with the seemingly contentless lends itself to a particularly rich affective potential, his works, read as they are under the sign of a “law” - however gentle it may be - tend to become allegories of the very project that underwrites their distance from the allegorical. As a framing device for Stifter’s frame stories, the gentle law also encases Stifter’s corpus, protecting it from unauthorized “subject.” It is not surprising that a realist text would shelter itself from contingency; that affect must as well is perhaps more so. For meaning can sneak into any case and under any cover - so much so that Jameson’s characterization of affect as a “reduction to the body” is put into question precisely when Stifter’s prose takes the greatest care to restrain itself to the barest terms possible: “Als Hülle für meinen Körper.” The referential status of Stifter’s phrasing is as dense as its wording is basic. Although written from the perspective of the land surveyor, it mimics the asceticism of which the priest is the symbol. Rather than being a mere description of the priest’s austere living quarters - the bare walls, the uncoated table, the wooden bench, and so forth - it is a literalization of the figure of asceticism. Since it does not simply signify asceticism and therefore cannot readily be assimilated to “a sign or allegory of the moral or social status of a given character” ( Jameson 33), it can gesture toward affect. However, since its reductive vocabulary cannot help but signify “coffin” as well as “cover,” for a body as opposed to a self, it threatens to contaminate affect as its potentially aberrant referential force cannot be completely covered over or rendered inanimate. Irreducible to its nudity, uncanny in its reanimation of significance, the phrase specifies affect not merely as a reduction, but rather as a case for the body: a protective shell against the randomness of signification - materiality � Materiality is neither the material of language or the letter, nor the matter of the object in the phenomenalization of the referent; it is rather the irreducible imbrication that entangles the presence of bodies (as well as cases and covers) in unforeseeable layers of meaning� If, following Eva Geulen, such a “still life still alive” - marking the moment when Stifter’s literary world “comes alive in images that were originally literalizations” (“Depicting Description” 274—75) - is part of Stifter’s systematic avoidance of metaphor, his treatment of the passing storm in “Kalkstein” frames an impulse toward indeterminacy with a figure irreducible to the metaphorical. The land surveyor and the ascetic country parson, who has invited him to take shelter for the night, sit at the table in absolute silence - as is the priest’s custom - and await the gathering force and recession of a storm. A textbook example of the gentle law spanning several pages, it also reflects a more general tendency Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 419 of realist texts: that of, following Franco Moretti, a background “conquering the foreground” (78). 11 The verb “conquer” is apt for a storm that, armed with the power of anthropomorphism, threatens to force its way inside: “Dasselbe schien nicht mehr lange ausbleiben zu wollen. Als der Pfarrer das Licht gebracht hatte, war die wenige Helle, die von draußen noch durch die Fenster herein gekommen war, verschwunden, die Fenster standen wie schwarze Tafeln da, und die völlige Nacht war hereingebrochen” (Stifter 76). The storm’s initial salvo expels all external illumination and isolates the windows in something less than a symbol and something more than their empirical facticity: their materiality� No longer a transparent frame of mimesis, the blackened windows undergo a reduction to their mere being and simultaneously become the proleptic emissaries of the non-mimetic� The windows, talismanic in their austerity, assume the posture that, following Adorno, the “radically darkened art” of the avant-garde will adopt in the face of an overwhelming social totality: that of “standing firm” (Adorno 40). The tradition of linear perspective, announced by Leon Battista Alberti’s definition of the painted image as an “open window” and reproduced in any representation that “denie[s] its own constructedness and present[s] itself as a natural record of the visual world” (Koepnick 8), holds its breath during this passage in Stifter. Its last exhale came in 1915 when Kazimir Malevich exhibited his Black Square , the fulfillment of what Adorno refers to as radical modernity’s “ideal of blackness” (39). Malevich’s Black Square is both more and less than a canvas covered in black paint. As brought to light by x-ray and ultraviolet ray examinations, it was painted over a more complex and colorful composition (Kudriavtseva 54). This reduction, akin to the dynamics of Stifter’s materiality, preserves the sense of the object as both “matter-of-factly material: a thing on the wall” while conveying a sense of “sheer surging, untrammeled possibility” (Schjeldahl 2). The description is that of Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The New Yorker , who continues by plotting the achievement following a dialectic of subject and affect. Malevich, he contends, “is monumental not for what he put into pictorial space but for what he took out: bodily experience” (2). Truly a subject disappeared, the ascetic Black Square finds its corollary in the austere priest, who sits unaffected - “ruhig und einfach” (Stifter 78) - through a storm whose proportions the land surveyor had rarely seen. With the final strike of thunder it was “als ob er das ganze Haus aus seinen Fugen heben, und niederstürzen wollte“ (78). Yet when the storm finally abates, the priest, monolithic in his immutability, stands and simply utters: “Es ist vorüber.” 12 An early rehearsal of radically darkened art, Caspar David Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer (1810) is the antithesis of “Es ist vorüber.” A lone monk in dark robes stands on a narrow strip of land dwarfed by the clouds of a gathering storm 420 Robert E� Mottram that, looming over an equally narrow strip of sea, fills the vast majority of the oppressively bare canvas� Unprecedented in its emptiness, Mönch am Meer contradicted those conventions of linear and aerial perspective that conveyed an illusion of depth. Absent the diagonal continuity between foreground and background as well as the tapering viscosity of paint that allows the eye to travel unimpeded into the distance, Friedrich’s canvas confronts the viewer with a suffocating flatness (Koerner 142—43). Lacking any of the traditional repoussoirs - trees, columns, or other figures placed along the edges of the canvas that compel the eye into the center - Mönch am Meer presents the viewer with a boundless uniformity, to which many of Stifter’s literary landscapes are attuned (Calhoon 32). The land surveyor, at odds with the immeasurable by profession, remarks the uncultivated and monotonous character of the Steinkar region to which he is commissioned. He finds it to be “eine fürchterliche Gegend,” precisely because of its want of the characteristically sublime features of romantic iconography: “Nicht daß Wildnisse, Schlünde, Abgründe, Felsen und stürzende Wässer dort gewesen wären - das alles zieht mich eigentlich an - sondern es waren nur sehr viele kleine Hügel da, jeder Hügel bestand aus nacktem grauem Kalksteine” (Stifter 67). The intermittent patches of grass and the small river meandering between the gray and yellow of the stones and sand “bildeten die ganze Abwechslung und Erquickung in dieser Gegend” (67). Eva Geulen suggests that Stifter’s uniform landscapes express the “the emotional flatness and two-dimensionality” of characters devoid of “psychological motivations and other interpretive interventions” and that this is a function of the gentle law which, producing “a radical nondifferentiation between human actions and natural development […] demands of humans the behavioral characteristics of stones” (“Tales of a Collector” 589—90). The priest certainly exhibits an austerity commensurate with a landscape bereft of all but the minutest differentiations. Yet, his presence in the Steinkar (or, more particularly, his absence) has just as much to do with the affective dimension of Stifter’s barren landscapes existing alongside the tropological exchange allowing landscapes to take on the features of their inhabitants� Having gotten used to seeing the priest among the stones, the land surveyor, busily trying to make a recently imposed deadline, is struck by his absence: Daß mir bei diesen Arbeiten der Pfarrer in den Hintergrund trat, ist begreiflich. Allein da ich ihn einmal schon längere Zeit nicht im Steinkar sah, wurde ich unruhig. Ich war gewöhnt seine schwarze Gestalt in den Steinen zu sehen, von weitem sichtbar, weil er der einzige dunkle Punkt in der graulich dämmernden oder unter dem Strahle der hinabsinkenden Sonne röthlich beleuchteten Kalkflur war. (96) Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 421 The description of the priest acutely taking on “the behavioral characteristics of stones” echoes an earlier passage in which the land surveyor sees his “größere schwarze Gestalt” (82) standing waist-deep in the water - the aftermath of the flood after the harrowing storm - helping children avoid the deepest areas on their way to school. His presence not only saves the children from drowning; it saves the beholder from the nondifferentiation of the landscape. And conversely, that the land surveyor becomes anxious ( unruhig ) at the sight of the Steinkar is just as much a function of its boundless uniformity as of a worry about the priest’s health. Usually “von weitem sichtbar,” the priest’s dark figure in the otherwise empty literary topography is implicated in a transformation of the function of staffage in landscape painting. Friedrich’s Mönch am Meer is situated on the far side of a development according to which figures - whether human, animal, or mythological - that once held a privileged position in regard to the meaning of a landscape were subordinated to the landscape itself. Whereas according to the categories of classicist aesthetics the mere presence of a shepherd could determine if the painting was pastoral, Friedrich’s lone monk, like his counterpart in Stifter’s novella, is subject to rather than determinant of the landscape he so precariously inhabits (Koerner 245). Part of the disappearance of the subject that is integral to the realist project, the tendency of staffage to renounce its meaning-giving function is aligned with the more generalized dimension of affect in its opposition to named emotions. To feel anxiety, as does the land surveyor, is to not know what to feel in “eine[r] fürchterlich[en] Gegend” from which meaning has withdrawn. 13 However, if Stifter’s barren literary landscape belongs to a tendency toward abstraction from Friedrich to the high modernism of Rothko or Malevich, they do so only reluctantly. 14 Indeed, the narrative arc of “Kalkstein” is an anodyne to those moments that subject the human to an absolute wholly indifferent to it. “Kalkstein” plots a course from anxiety to significance - from the land surveyor’s ( Landvermesser ) apprehension toward the stony region he is tasked with measuring ( messen ), to the recognition of his presumptuousness ( Vermessenheit ) after being reassigned and called away from what he ultimately understands to be a beautiful and meaningful landscape� It is the paradigmatic narrative arc of Stifter’s project, since to learn to see as meaningful the initially repellent landscape is to see, and be affected by, the gentle law itself. 15 Whereas the priest, the teacher of the gentle law, exemplifies the radical stoicism and absolute subjection to meaning, according to which, following Begemann, any catastrophe is an acceptable if unfortunate moment in a purposeful order, and which imposes a “Standhalten, das mit nichts anderem begründet wird als der Faktizität des Faktischen” (313), the land surveyor is captive to impressions that still have 422 Robert E� Mottram the potential to escape the order of (an imposed) facticity. The gradualness of this lesson, the arc of this paradigm, allows Stifter to infuse the landscape with intermediary states, in which meaning - still uncertain, still a matter of mere Vermessenheit - yields to affect. One such passage, the description of the landscape the morning after the harrowing storm, is particularly rich in its intermingling of allegorical and affective registers: Der unermeßliche Regen der Nacht hatte die Kalksteinhügel glatt gewaschen, und sie standen weiß und glänzend unter dem Blau des Himmels und unter den Strahlen der Sonne da. Wie sie hintereinander zurückwichen, wiesen sie in zarten Abstufungen ihre gebrochenen Glanzfarben in Grau, Gelblich, Rötlich, Rosenfarbig, und dazwischen lagen die länglichen nach rückwärts immer schöneren luftblauen Schatten. (Stifter 85) From whitewashed stones to their varied coloration, to the vanishing point of increasingly beautiful shadows, the landscape intimates the narrative development of “Kalkstein” as it charts its course from apprehension in the face of nondifferentiation to the integration of the landscape in a meaningful totality. Spatial distance promises temporal fulfillment in an allegory of Stifter’s project: “to tell of individuation as an inset story within the massive frame narration of this earth, to imbed human experience in the continuity of non-individuated processes” (Swales and Swales 45). Although affect, following Jameson, stands opposite a narrative or allegorical impulse - one that can easily enlist description as a mere sign of a character’s social status (in Balzac, for example) or, in the present context, of the gentle law - it is also predicated on a certain “continuity of non-individuated processes” and must therefore have recourse to its own “massive frame” - a protective shell against allegorical contamination. Yet Stifter’s texts, in their attenuation to the gradations ( Abstufungen ) that transcend the horizon of the individual, generate affect despite their tendency to become allegories of the gentle law. The “refracted shimmering shades” of the limestone (“ihre gebrochenen Glanzfarben”) blur individual tones into yellow ish , red dish , and ros y -colored impressions in accordance with a chromatic logic in which “an absolute heterogeneity of the elements is translated into some new kind of homogeneity in which a new kind of phenomenological continuum is asserted” ( Jameson 41). In his discussion of chromaticism, Jameson cites Wagner and the Impressionists, who, in the musical and visual sphere respectively, used slippages in tonal and mimetic conventions to register intensities rather than entities� 16 Stifter’s inclusion in their ranks is a factor of the dissonance between the changing intensities of the Steinkar and the continually intimated promise of beauty on the horizon� Indeed, the land surveyor’s chromatic impressions of the “Morgenschauspiel” culminate in relations more consistent with traditional Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 423 tonality: “Die große Wasserfläche glänzte unter den Strahlen der Sonne, sie machte zu dem Grün der Wiese und dem Grau der Steine den dritten stimmenden und schimmernden Klang, und der Steg stand abenteuerlich wie eine dunkle Linie über dem silbernen Spiegel” (86). A veritable triad ( Dreiklang ) with impressionistic overtones, the shimmering water, meadow, and stones compose a synesthetic harmony that is more coerced than natural� Its beauty is visible “[a]llein, wenn man von dem Schaden absieht, den die Überschwemmung durch Anführung von Sand auf der Wiese verursacht haben mochte” (86). Harmony is a factor of suppression rather than recognition. Overlooking the damage by the storm is coupled with a more subtle suppression of chromatic relations, their nuanced shades now dampened to a monotone gray. Allegorizing the imposition of a purposeful order, Stifter’s musical interlude lays bare the mechanism underwriting the fulfillment of the gentle law: an abstract vision that simply refrains ( absehen ) from seeing outliers� 17 Yet, despite the passage’s allegorical potential (if not intention), it is hard to overlook its investment in affectivity, blending as it does sensory inputs in a glittering and shimmering abstraction� Materiality consists in the flicker between affect and allegory; its critical potential lies in its consistent capacity to show that any “dark line” between allegory and affect is a bridge more “adventurous” than stable. The nuances of Stifter’s protracted descriptions have not kept him from becoming known as “the most boring German-language writer” (Geulen, “Tales of a Collector” 587). Indeed, his prose frequently provokes the tired ire of his readers who, reacting to his suppression of the narrative impulse, complain that nothing happens. However, it is precisely this suppression that animates the nothing that happens into the happening of nothing� 18 Gernot Böhme has theorized as “atmosphere” such a minimal occurrence between the proclivity of things to step outside of their objective confines and the body in its felt presence. 19 Atmosphere is “[k]ein Objekt, kein Subjekt, nichts und doch nicht nichts” (66). The relationship between the “ecstasy of things” - their ability to suffuse a space with a virtual presence - and the body’s “participation” in that “articulated presence” is what is at stake in Stifter’s description of the atmospheric conditions before the onset of the storm: 20 Eines Tages war in den Steinen eine besondere Hize. Die Sonne hatte zwar den ganzen Tag nicht ausgeschienen, aber dennoch hatte sie den matten Schleier, der den ganzen Himmel bedeckte, so weit durchdrungen, daß man ihr blasses Bild immer sehen konnte, daß um alle Gegenstände des Steinlandes ein wesenloses Licht lag, dem kein Schatten beigegeben war, und daß die Blätter der wenigen Gewächse, die zu sehen waren, herabhingen; denn obgleich kaum ein halbes Sonnenlicht durch die 424 Robert E� Mottram Nebelschichte der Kuppel drang, war doch eine Hize, als wären drei Tropensonnen an heiterem Himmel und brennten alle drei nieder. (72—73) Devoid of the chromatic synesthesia perceivable in the wake of the storm, this claustrophobic noontide panic, with its “wesenloses Licht,” aligns itself with Adorno’s remark that “Blaß und fahl ist das Licht über seiner [Stifters] reifen Prosa, als wäre sie allergisch gegen das Glück der Farbe” (346). Adorno is referring to the increasing austerity of Stifter’s works; to the overprotectiveness that through the “Ausschluß des Störenden und Ungebärdigen” transforms a conservative ideological intention to comfort into a more avant-gardist refusal to console (346). Eric Downing has similarly periodized Stifter by setting his mature “project of mastered stability” against the sense of “inevitable temporality and uncontrol” that in the earlier Studien “frustrates the effort after a stable, uniform, equivalent representation” ( Double Exposures 279). The “wesenloses Licht” of the sweltering day, in which not so much as a shadow is allowed to give contour to the stones, is the figure of an equivalent representation that is unruly precisely by dint of its suppression of masterable distinctions and devices of orientation� Although positioned along a narrative trajectory leading from anxiety to significance, it evinces a curious recalcitrance to positionality. Everywhere and nowhere, the light, seemingly “without any exterior tie” - to evoke Flaubert - drapes itself evenly across the stony landscape, thereby neutralizing all differentiating contours as well as obscuring its source. “Kein Objekt, kein Subjekt,” and emphatically “nicht nichts,” the “wesenloses Licht” is that of atmosphere as such: “die leere, charakterlose Hülle seiner Anwesenheit” (Böhme 26). Böhme credits avant-gardists with a decisive gesture toward the understanding of atmosphere. When artists like Marcel Duchamp tried to destroy what Benjamin called the aura of artworks by suspending the difference between art and life, they lent everyday objects the dignity of the aura rather than wrenching art out of its “heiligen Hallen.” What the avant-garde thereby accomplished was to show that the “Mehr” that makes an artwork an artwork is irreducible to its “objectified characteristics” ( gegenständlichen Eigenschaften ) (Böhme 26). The inability to reduce artworks to the sum of their parts is akin to the process of description, which does not try to specify an object - as would a definition - as much as facilitate its “emergence” ( Hervortreten ): “Wenn man sagt die Sonne , dann heißt das soviel wie die Sonne tritt auf, die Sonne ist da” (244). Böhme’s example is both provocative in its recasting of the philosophical symbol for the Idea as well as fortuitous for the Stifter passage in question insomuch as Stifter’s sun cannot help but summon - that is to say, requisition as an allegorical potential - the metaphysical desideratum of a truth waiting to be revealed alongside its affective, atmospheric dimension. That affect (in this case, the “ecstasy” or Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 425 virtual presence of things) and allegory (the promise that the uninviting ground of the Steinkar will eventually be illumined and transfigured by the gentle law) can coincide is a factor of what Böhme calls, with no small amount of irony, “the ground” of atmosphere: “Die Individualität der so benannten Dinge [things described in their emergence as opposed to defined in their facticity or “Was-Sein”] gründet deshalb auch nicht in der Spezifizität ihres Hervortretens, sondern in der Dunkelheit und Unerschöpflichkeit des Grundes, aus dem sie hervortreten” (245). Having been displaced from the definitional logic that would delimit their facticity, individual objects - now as much so genannt as so benannt - are also untethered from any specificity that a definition would lend to their emergence. What is here troped as “ground” is neither the object nor the body, but rather the “darkness and inexhaustibility” somewhere (or nowhere) between the ecstasy of things and the body in its felt presence. It is a randomness of signification that enables the articulation and disarticulation of things as much as their ecstasy, an inexhaustible but ultimately asemic capacity - “ein wesenloses Licht” - that specifies objects, including the body, as always on the way toward language. It is the strength of Stifter’s realism to sustain such a light and to gather in its illumination - however insubstantial ( wesenlos ) - the mirage of three suns: the body in its felt presence, the allegorical, and the unforeseen significative potential hovering around matter� When cases bear as many traces as they protect against; when the disappearance of the subject is both the condition of affect as well as its vanishing point; when Stifter’s gentle law and other framing devices have the ability to sanction the allegorical as well as to summon the body; when the reduction to bodies - animate and inanimate - is simultaneously an amplification of their significative potential; when reduction itself is therefore uncannily irreducible; when affect, allegory, and the materiality that allows them to intermingle are at hand; then one can be said to approach if not the thing or representation itself then certainly the case - in all its materiality - of the avant-garde in Stifter� Notes 1 Swales and Swales propose this review of Abdias as “the very nerve-centre of Stifter’s work” (47). 2 Geulen quotes Benjamin in her “Tales of a Collector”: “Benjamin describes dialogue in Stifter as ‘ostentatious’ because it is ‘only the exhibition of emotions and thoughts in moot space’” (590). 3 On Kant’s material vision and materiality in de Man, see Wang’s Romantic Sobriety (119—23) and Redfield’s The Politics of Aesthetics (78—79; 104—07). 426 Robert E� Mottram The following quotes are particularly suggestive for my reading of materiality: “Materiality is in fact the very imposition of figure, an action whose radical arbitrariness blunts the realization of figural representation as simple, intentional meaning” (Wang 131); “What is lost is the possibility of establishing an internal necessity for the patterns of relations that allows signs to function as signs” (Redfield 106). Redfield also draws from Judith Butler, who in Gender Trouble describes the contested site of the body in terms of materiality: “We might want to claim that what persists within these contested domains is the ‘materiality’ of the body. But perhaps we will have fulfilled the same function, and opened up some others, if we claim that what persists here is a demand in and for language , a ‘that which’ which prompts, occasions, say, within the domain of science, calls to be explained, described, diagnosed, altered or within the cultural fabric of lived experience, fed exercised, mobilized, put to sleep, a site of enactments and passions of various kinds” (Redfield 79). 4 Downing is very close to such an understanding of materiality when he writes of Stimmung that “key to its preconceptual nature is also the essential impulse to move from the merely sensed to the grasped: there is almost by definition something premonitory about Stimmung , something awaiting expression, understanding, and affective response” ( The Chain of Things 41)� 5 The most prominent voice identifying Stifter, and poetic realism more generally, with the idyll is Erich Auerbach, whose slight view of German-speaking writers in the wake of Goethe is based on the narrowness of their attempts to treat everyday reality seriously: ”Until toward the end of the nineteenth century the most important works which undertook to treat contemporary social subjects seriously at all remained in the genres of semi-fantasy or of idyll or at least in the narrow realm of the local” (452—53). 6 Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the literary form of the novella from the tale as follows: “The novella has a fundamental relationship to secrecy (not with a secret matter or object to be discovered, but with the form of the secret, which remains impenetrable), whereas the tale has a relation to discovery (the form of discovery, independent of what can be discovered)” (193). 7 Benjamin’s notion of allegory involves a similar evacuation of spirit from matter, and his description of allegory as “the armature of modernity” ( The Writer of Modern Life 159) - or “protective shell” in John Lyon’s helpful elucidation (186) - resonates with Stifter’s interest in encasement as well as with his attempt to preserve existence in its barest elements. Allegory in Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 427 Jameson, on the other hand, refers to the multi-layered contexts embedded in a given text� 8 A similar argument is put forward in Der Nachsommer : “Only literature has almost no tangible material any more; its material is thought in the widest sense of the word; the word is not the material, it is only the bearer of the thought; as for example the air carries the sound to our ears. Literature is therefore the purest and highest of the art forms” (qtd. in Holub 70). 9 That the avant-gardist impulse of realism has little to do with its subject matter is evidenced by the fact that when arch-conservative critics sought to impugn Wagner’s operas, they did so by calling them “Realist” (Rosen and Zerner 179)� 10 Downing’s critical reading of the gentle law unpacks the logic whereby the natural world is made to appear as if subjectless: “The posited natural world seems not so much the noninscription of a subjectivity as the definite inscription of a would-be nonsubjectivity, which is then reflected back, as reality, to deny the nature of the subject from which it nevertheless originates” ( Double Exposures 39)� 11 This turn of phrase can ultimately be traced back to Flaubert, who in a letter to Jules Duplan apropos his novel Sentimental Education writes: “I’m having a lot of trouble linking my characters to the political events of 1848; I’m afraid the background will devour the foreground” (qtd. in Redfield, Phantom Formations 171)� 12 Marianne Schuller hears in the priest’s pronouncement an echo of Jesus on the cross - “Es ist vollendet” - and, based on her reading that storms in Stifter are part of larger ritualistic cycle of cleansing, argues that the priest’s words entail no small amount of blasphemy given that they propose as repetitive what should be closure and ultimate fulfillment (106—08). This reading is suggestive for my contextualization of Stifter in terms of modernism, for which particular artworks, following Adorno, can only aspire to negative fulfillment. 13 Terada insists, following de Man, that feeling be rigorously distinguished from epistemology in a fashion analogous to Jameson’s distinction between affect and named emotions: “If we have emotions because we can’t know what to believe (what texts and people are up to), as de Man suggests, then we have emotions even though we can’t know which emotions we ought to have. If we truly knew which emotions we should have, we would no longer feel like having any. We are in no danger of being emotionless, though […] since this ‘if ’ condition is never fulfilled” (Terada 89). 428 Robert E� Mottram 14 The classic study on Caspar David Friedrich as a precursor to high modernism is Robert Rosenblum’s Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko � 15 “In der fast vollkommenen Bescheidenheit des Priesters lernt dieser Landvermesser die letzten Spuren seiner eigenen Vermessenheit vertilgen; zugleich lernt er, die Geschichte seines Wohltäters zu erzählen. “Kalkstein” ist also nicht nur eine besondere Geschichte in dem Buch Bunte Steine , sondern auch die Geschichte vom Ursprung der Erzählsammlung, die Geschichte vom Unterricht, der lehrt, die Buntheit der Steine in der rechten Weise anzuschauen. Denn durch den hohen Priester lernt der zunächst vermessene Erzähler, in der auf den ersten Blick häßlichen Landschaft das ‘sanfte Gesetz zu erblicken’” (Fenves 100—01). 16 Elisabeth Strowick also understands Stifter’s realism in terms of intensities and gradations. See, for example, this remark on Bergkristall : “Was Stifters Text im Sich-Ausbreiten von Schall und Licht, im Sichtbarwerden der Farbe inszeniert, ist nicht Sichtbares oder Hörbares, sondern ein Sichtbar werden / Hörbar werden : Wahrnehmung als Ereignis/ Werden/ Intensität” (106). 17 And this notwithstanding his ostensible scientific method. In his preface to Bunte Steine , Stifter likens his project to a field researcher whose individual findings are insignificant until matched with those of the larger community of researchers. What for one researcher seems like anomalies in his compass readings reveal themselves to be signs of a larger magnetic storm stretching across the globe (10—11). Downing sees the magnetic storm as the site where Stifter’s distinction between large and small, the distinction on which the whole gentle law is based, begins to break down: “the general, world-maintaining forces turn out to be as violent as the individual ones; it is simply violence on another, more monstrous ( ungeheuer ) scale and on a less visible plane” ( Double Exposures 28)� Fleming also questions the scientific basis of the gentle law and reads it as a proscriptive moral imperative rather than a description of reality: “Ultimately, Stifter wants a metaphysical atemporal law that indeed determines the whole of human action […] but can only advocate for a moral imperative, a ‘moral law’ in the social sphere. That the gentle law is not a description of history but rather a veiled appeal […] is clear when one reads the ensuing declaration that entire nations can and do collapse as a result of a loss of measure - a danger that amounts to a pressing anxiety for Stifter” (153). 18 See Terada’s discussion of apatheia in de Man’s reading of Kant’s material vision: “feeling nothing is feeling nothing, a feeling like any other, not an anesthetic suppression” (86). Stifter’s Realism and the Avant-Garde: Affect and Materiality in “Kalkstein” 429 19 Jana Schuster calls atmosphere “the key to Stifter’s entire oeuvre” (50). Her claim that “[d]ie unstete Lichtregie der Atmosphäre verzeitlicht den Raum des Sehens, hebt die sichtbaren Dinge in den unsteten und ungewissen Modus aufscheinender Phänomene und verunsichert damit auch den Status des beobachtenden Subjekts - Sehen, Erkennen und Wissen treten auseinander” (36) is very much in line with the contingencies of reference vis-à-vis bodily affectivity that I have aimed to illuminate here. Likewise, her reference to “das Lichtmedium der Luft” as “die schiere Materialität des Er-Scheinens” accords with my usage of “materiality” as a referentially, hermeneutically, and phenomenologically uncertain terrain (60). 20 Under the heading “Ekstasen der Natur,” Böhme specifies that “[d]ie ästhetische Beziehung zur Natur besteht darin, sich auf die Physiognomie der Dinge einzulassen, sich von ihr etwas sagen zu lassen. Sinnliche Wahrnehmung heißt, an der artikulierten Präsenz der Dinge zu partizipieren” (257). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� Ästhetische Theorie . 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