Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 179 Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism Florian Fuchs Freie Universität Berlin Abstract: This article compares two very different historical cases in which oral proverbs provided the essential linguistic material for literary writing: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s 1642 play The Seeing=Play of German Proverbs and Gottfried Keller’s 1856 novella cycle The People of Seldwyla . Harsdörffer’s use of the proverb as the crude but ‘original’ token of German vernacular that could help to construct German as a literary language from its spoken realist pieces returns in the crude formalism of Keller’s realist novellas. With subtle but constant allusions to the Baroque, Keller employs various proverbs as a scaffolding for his realist prose. As will be shown particularly for the novella Clothes Make the Man , these proverbs are responsible for rendering a realist modern world based on formulaic structures, while demonstrating at the same time that this realist world can, in consequence, be navigated by formulas alone. Keller’s use of the proverb as a foundation for realist diegesis hence echoes Harsdörffer’s attempt to ground German literature on the proverb� This implies that a decisive signature of the surface and the make-up of modern reality is its constant reliance on repeatable formulas� Keywords: proverb, novella, realism, Baroque, formula, Urszene, Keller, Harsdörffer This article approaches the nature of short forms from an early modern perspective and in a setting that is consciously counter-intuitive: How can citations of popular speech become poetic devices? How does the act of citation transform the popular and oral aspect of proverbs into the prosaic and poetical quality of realism? The first part will examine the German Baroque comedy The Seeing=Play of German Proverbs [ Das Schau=Spiel Teutscher Sprich=wörter ] that Georg Philipp Harsdörffer published in 1642 in volume two of his periodical collection Frauen- 180 Florian Fuchs zimmer-Gesprechsspiele � As the title of the Schauspiel suggests, the particular oddity of this comedy is that it is made almost exclusively from proverbs, and Harsdörffer even prefaces it with a short treatise on the nature of proverbs, “Of the Features, Distinction, and Translation of Proverbs” [Von der Sprichwörter Eigenschaften, Unterscheid und Dolmetschung]. I am particularly focusing on how Harsdörffer acquires the proverbs in this comedy through a strange and masked act of citation of popular speech, and my point will be to propose this forced citation of proverbs as an essentially necessary and at the same time impossible act, as another Urszene at the formal origin of modern German literature. Harsdörffer’s play presents the proverbs as a poetological but also violent order necessary during the constitution of a literary speech� The second part of this essay will revisit this primal scene in the 19th-century realism of Gottfried Keller. His The People of Seldwyla [ Die Leute von Seldwyla ] is heavily indebted to proverbs as initiators of realist narration. For Keller, proverbs try to encapsulate a pre-industrial, bygone world whose lifeworld becomes accessible again when the prose storyteller speaks beginning from and through proverbial speech� As a consequence, however, the mere claim that Keller has adapted proverbs by turning them into realist novellas would fall short. It will become clear that, in fact, Keller goes much further. Realist narration is for him a formulaic undertaking that must necessarily draw on existing linguistic formulas like proverbs to propel its own realism. Keller takes the proverb’s naturally missing original context, whose lack already Harsdörffer’s translations had drawn on, as an imperative for a narration that renders a realist world via proverbial formulas; a world in which, consequently, also only such kind of formulas suffice for the protagonists to proceed� In his brief introductory essay to the play, “Von der Sprichwörter Eigenschaften, Unterscheid und Dolmetschung,” Georg Philipp Harsdörffer explains that the Schauspiel is in fact his translation, or rather a rendering, of the Comédie des Proverbes , which was published anonymously in French in 1633 (Harsdörffer). He cautions that while he has tried his best, translating the Comédie des Proverbes is in fact an impossible undertaking because proverbs are among the most idiomatic expressions in any language� The goal of staying close to German proverbs forces him to come up with very inventive correspondences between proverbs and to use many German proverbs that do not have French equivalents. “With such liberty,” he declares, “everything else in this play had to be translated” [Mit solcher Befreyung hat alles andere in diesem Schauspiel übersetzet werden muessen] (Harsdörffer 323). For that matter, the Schauspiel ends up being no actual translation, but rather a German correlation to the formal idea that the French version puts forth: a comedy in which the characters speak Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 181 in proverbs. Contrary to the translation that Harsdörffer promises his readers, it is in fact the impossibility of translation that is the necessary ground of the work. This leads me to the very core of the problem that I am interested in here, namely the act of citing the vernacular as the forced grounding of a literary language� Harsdörffer was very invested in establishing German literary language, and during the 17th century took part in the so-called “Sprachgesellschaften” [language societies] movement that endeavored to install and cultivate High German as a truly national and poetical language (Campe)� Many of the publications from the members of his Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (1617-1680) tried to translate or even remake works from Latin, French, Italian or other established literary languages into German, a model that the Schauspiel attempts to follow� Generally, two categories of adaptation exist, as those works were either direct translations of a particular foreign author, or they were attempts to create new works based on already established genres� The Schauspiel and its purpose of creating a literary language solely based on proverbs, however, fits neither of those two categories, since its specific type of proverbial prose neither allows direct translation, nor provides a genre - the proverb - to be newly adapted to literary High German� Instead, the Schauspiel establishes a new literary language by turning the oral proverbs of the illiterate folk into a language for the literate reader. By definition, proverbs are not recorded in writing but only roam freely in lived speech and for that reason also cannot have authors or exist in a fixed, correct wording. For some time, collecting those folklorist oral proverbs had been the intent of humanist anthologies, such as Erasmus’s Adagia (1500-1533), yet their goal was not to acknowledge the synchronic wit and invention of the vernacular native speakers, but to establish diachronically the lost genealogies between those spoken proverbs and their Ancient origins. Harsdörffer is much more appreciative of the native speakers’ inventiveness, and in his introduction on the nature of the proverb directly addresses Erasmus� He asserts that the existence of around forty German variations of the commonplace “Erkenne dich selbst” [know thyself] shows that they were generated by German speakers within the German language and were therefore in no way derived from their supposed Greek and Latin ancestors “Gnothi seauton” or “Nosce te ipsum” (Erasmus 416—21). In this debate between humanism and vernacularism about the origins of proverbs, Harsdörffer effectively places his Schauspiel in favor of the intralingual polygenesis of idiomatic expressions. Before him, Julius Wilhelm Zincgref had already tried this by publishing the anthology Der Teutschen Scharpfsinnige kluge Spruech [ The German’s Ingenious Clever Sayings ] in 1626, which follows at least partly the synchronous model of citing contemporary sources , as op- 182 Florian Fuchs posed to Rudolf Agricola’s much earlier 1529 collection Drey hundert Gemeyner Sprichworter / der wir Deutschen uns gebrauchen / und doch nicht wissen woher sie kommen [ Three Hundred Common Proverbs / That We Germans Use / But Still Don’t Know From Where They Come ], which still follows humanism’s diachronic model. In his introduction, Harsdörffer’s view on the matter is clear when he declares: These proverbs and generally common phrases [Sprichwoerter und Landlauffige gemeine Reden] / are many according to place and vernacular [aller Orten nach jeder Mundart] / and multiply as well among the Spaniards / Italians / Frenchmen as they do daily among us Germans according to any quick consideration (Harsdörffer 314). The demonstrative intent of Harsdörffer’s Schauspiel , however, goes beyond this proverb controversy. Rather, the daily multiplication of German proverbs proves the genuineness and specificity of the German language and suggests further that a literary artwork could be compiled from proverbial language that would be in no direct lingual relation to other languages. In other words, Harsdörffer identifies the proverb as the authentic genre in which languages ‘naturally’ express themselves. Independent of translation, proverbs are an “Urform” of language, as one could put it. Besides being situated in a field of emerging early modern linguistic theory, the Schauspiel thus also serves the purpose of presenting an example of a literature that consists genuinely of the German vernacular. The proverb can acquire its status as “Urform” only after having undergone ‘literarization,’ that is, by a procedure that can disregard its original authorlessness and orality� This very procedure is the act of citation, which in the Schauspiel example becomes an act of positing the origin of literature at the exact place at which it cannot be posited. Citation is active underneath Harsdörffer’s work where it turns spoken, fluid sayings that belong to nobody into a prose written by named authors that can generate a completely new literary language� This act of citation has therefore a number of implications: (1) It eliminates the dialects of the spoken language in order to generate a neutral Early High German wording; (2) it turns the low art of folklore into a literary high art; (3) it provides the authorless commonplace with an author, and finally; (4) we can observe here the making of the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole , that is, the act of citation forces a spoken parole under the regime of a written langue � Today we would say in retrospect that all proverbs appearing in literature are by definition cited from the vernacular “Volksmund.” However, at a time when the rebirth of a vernacular language in its written form and for literary purposes is intended, citation is the necessary procedure to purge this genuinely German “Urform” of speech from its unwanted, undocumentable, and uncontrollable Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 183 conditions of orality, folklore, and hearsay. This procedure is hence located at the early modern threshold between epistemic “Litteratur” and poetic “Literatur,” within the larger transformation of mathesis and poesis as Andreas Kilcher has defined it (Kilcher). Unsurprisingly, the specific case of the Schauspiel therefore keeps the act of citation below its surface, which points to the more legal, policing, and even violent aspect of citations that I am interested in here. The complex function that citation has as the hidden ground of Harsdörffer’s play is reminiscent of the physical, forceful act of citation that is at the root of the force of law� While the analogy between the policing of citizens and the policing of language is historically far more complicated than can be developed in this article, the analogy is necessary to understand how in Harsdöffer’s case the act of citation has spilled over from the legal act of citing human subjects under the law to the lingual act of citing oral speech into a literary text. Harsdörffer cites the oral proverbs of the people to bring them under the rule of literature, that is, transform them from their natural state to the legal state of the written word. Like their citizen equivalents, the proverbs are naturally anarchic and stateless, which makes them the perfect matter whose transformation into written, scripturally fixed subjects can initiate the constitution of a new law of a written language� In line with this forceful nature of citation as the hidden ground of literary prose whose radically new print-based mediality had just fully emerged, Harsdörffer’s introduction to the play ends by calling on the readers for further help in installing the rule of the law of literature� He asks them to police German speakers for any still uncited, unwritten proverbs: Finally / the German reader may not receive the play idly [müssig], but consider and contemplate during all action and acts how the proverbs that were hastily shuffled together could be multiplied, improved, and comprehended so that similar projects in the future may be made into works with ample perfection. (Harsdörffer 324) In this regard, the Schauspiel is in fact an exercise to arrest further proverbs, that is, a training ground for furthering the identification and transcription of genuine German sayings and expressions into written format� By requesting and demonstrating how a German literary language must be not only semiotically but also idiomatically developed, the play is a means of enlisting readers to serve as observers of their own use of idiomatic German� It posits the act of citation as the birth of literature while at the same time forcing its readers to discipline their own oral language, that is, to self-discipline, and to follow the rule of the law of literature when using proverbs, whether in written or in spoken format� 184 Florian Fuchs But it would be highly desired from every German heart / that such aphorisms [Lehrspruech] would still today be diligently watched [beobachtet] by everyone / and brought to paper / like we find many of their kind / even of minor subjects / noted down among the Greeks and Romans. (Harsdörffer 316) Harsdörffer’s play is obviously left as a bare montage of proverbs, whose Baroque textual crudeness is apparently meant as a subversive plea to the reader to join in improving the stylistics of German� A truly painful dialogue example reads as follows: Philippin : Fire! Fire! The thieves are here! Just wait you nightbirds, we will make you get a move on: Help / help you honest neighbors! The right natural thieves are stealing our virgin / help / help because there is still time! Allägre : Money / or blood! Philippin : Oh! I’m doomed to die / if you cut me out of life. Allägre : Ha / ha / you scream like a tooth puller / quiet / or I will make you quiet. Florinda : Alas help / help / you kind folk / or I will be carried away like a relic� Lidia : Stolen water is Malvasier. Now away / away the birds are gutted / let’s make a bolt for it. (Harsdörffer 289) [ Philippin : Feurio! Feurio! Die Dieb sind da! wartet nur ihr Nachtvögel wir wollen euch Füß machen: Helfft / helfft ihr ehrlichen Nachbarn! Die rechten natürlichen Dieb stehlen unser Jungfrau / helfft / helfft weil es noch Zeit ist! Allägre : Geld / oder Blut! Philippin : O! Ich bin des Todts / wenn ihr mich umb das Leben bringt. Allägre : Ha / ha / du schreist wie ein Zahnbrecher / schweig / oder ich will dich schweigen machen� Florinda : Ach helfft / helfft / ihr lieben Leut / oder man trägt mich darvon wie ein Heilthumb� Lidia : Gestolen Wasser ist Malvasier. Nun fort / fort die Vögel sind außgenommen / last uns aus dem Staub machen.] It seems that here, the Baroque consciously chooses the proverb as a point of contact for high and low styles of language, making the proverb into the site of a ‘work on language’ not exclusive to educated poets. Whereas the development to refine vernacular German took off and succeeded, the proverb thus becomes a merely temporary vessel that will be left behind after 1700, sinking again into the ‘low’ regions of unrefined speech, where Kant will later find it as “language of the rabble [Sprache des Pöbels].” (Kant 327). Considering this other Urszene of literature that I have proposed here, a number of questions arise. Which epistemological, stylistic, and poetological consequences may have resulted from it? Are its aftereffects still detectable to us? Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 185 Just as Gustave Flaubert was doubtful of the proverb’s easy dismissal - after all, his Bouvard et Pecuchet project is a result of what he called The Dictionary of Received Ideas [ Dictionnaire des idées reçues ], a digest of people’s mindless parroting - so another realist writer, Gottfried Keller, recognized the Baroque’s formal appraisal of the proverb and the immediate connections it provides to a divergent multitude of styles, social strata, and genres. Keller’s intuition about ‘high’ and ‘low’ levels of prose led him to understand why proverb and literature became separated in the Baroque, namely because the requirements for a prose that combined high and low styles were not yet met� The goal of his realism was to change this� One thus has to assume that many of his novellas in The People of Seldwyla [ Die Leute von Seldwyla ] are based on proverbs, because Keller recognized, like Harsdörffer, that focusing on the proverb form would take him back to the common center of literary speech� Throughout his work, Keller’s Baroque appears; his novella cycle Das Sinngedicht is based largely on epigrams of Friedrich von Logau, and a whole passage of Der Grüne Heinrich is dedicated to the works of the Baroque mystic and poet Angelus Silesius, to name just two examples ( Werke 2: 849—52). Walter Benjamin, right after finishing his book on the ontology of the allegorical Baroque style, also points directly to the crucial relation between Keller and 17th-century literature. In his essay on Keller, Benjamin observes that “[Keller] often puts the words together with a baroque defiance [mit barockem Trotz], just as a coat of arms joins up halves of things” (Benjamin 59). However, this ‘Baroquism’ is not limited to Keller’s imagery, Benjamin argues, but the structure of Keller’s prose actually rests on the way content and form relate to each other in the Baroque. The quality of Keller’s style is to conjoin images while not losing a sense for structure, a feature Benjamin characterizes by explaining “[Keller’s] style of writing [Schreibart] has something heraldic about it” (Benjamin 59). The methods of Keller’s style can be so allegorical, heraldic, or rich in representing the world, thus Benjamin’s implication here, because Keller has trained them on the Baroque’s attempts to combine high and low, common and uncommon structures of literature. Like Flaubert, but more consciously so, Keller recognizes the proverb as a testing ground to develop new prose and genres, which are structurally based on the practical reality of language among the people� The form of proverbs promises realism, more than knowledge of the world does. The foremost example of Keller’s Baroque “Schreibart” is undoubtedly his novella cycle The People of Seldwyla , which not only originates from his study of Baroque literature of the 1850s, but the setting of which, the fictional city of Seldwyla, is itself a Baroque anachronism: “a small city [which] is still stuck in the same old circular wall like three hundred years ago, and hence continues to be the same hamlet” ( Werke 4: 11)� Three of the novellas are explicitly based 186 Florian Fuchs on proverbs� Spiegel, the Cat [ Spiegel, das Kätzchen ], to take just one, plainly explains its own origin from the Seldwylian proverb “He bought the fat off the cat” [Er hat der Katze den Schmer abgekauft] ( Werke 4: 240)� The short introduction transforms what could have been an etiology or an ethnological account into an ongoing dialectical dependency between novella and proverb: This proverb is also used elsewhere, but nowhere can it be heard as frequently as there [in Seldwyla], which might spring from the fact that an old legend [Sage] exists in the city about the origin and meaning of this proverb ( Werke 4: 240)� The telling of the “Sage” is the cause for the use of the proverb, and vice versa the use of the proverb causes the “Sage” to be narrated. According to Keller’s narrator, proverbs thus exist first and seem to originate from the experience of reality, but then etiological narratives such as Sagen [legends] become formed that help explain the circulation of the proverb, which speculatively imagine or explain the primal scene of the proverb’s invention and then, in turn, heighten the use and relevance of the proverb. From this perspective, short form narratives are speculative expansions and elaborations of existing phrases of oral speech whose origin explanations are inaccessible, for example because they have been forgotten. As a further consequence of this origin story proposed by Keller’s narrator, a proverb becomes citable when it is cut off from the anecdote of its historical origin, and hence demands a replacement story that is now necessarily fictive. However, this fictive story is bound to a residue of reality, the remainder of the scene in the lifeworld from which the original proverb stems, whose existence the etiological narrative has to assume, as diminished and unclear its traces may be in the proverb� This assumed residue thus propels a certain realism in the new fictive origin account of the proverb, one that the “Sage” that Keller evokes for the proverb “Er hat der Katze den Schmer abgekauft” carries forward, but that his own novella Spiegel, the Cat , effectively propels even further� Keller himself therefore explicitly links the realism of his own novellas back to an implicit historical realism originally contained in oral proverbs but necessarily forgotten over time. For Keller, 19th-century realism takes its realist drive from a forgotten realism encapsulated in orality that was lost during the programmatic move from orality to literacy and High German literature, respectively� What this statement about Spiegel, the Cat outlines is a direct morphological link between reality, proverbs, and realist short prose. The existence of proverbs, in other words, is the counterintuitive proof that reality is being experienced, and thus can be represented. However, this thesis that I have drawn from the novella’s narrator is obviously not reflective of Keller’s research into proverb theory but offers an unfounded projection. Rather, Keller takes the as- Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 187 sumed narratological symbiosis between proverb and legend as the necessary license for his own realist narration, perhaps even as an imperative: instances of speculatively historical but always already uprooted genres like the proverb will always look to reroot themselves in other contexts by generating realist fictions that speculate about its origins. Proverbial realism is only the logical consequence of the irreducible lack of a proverb’s origin. For developing this idea of a “proverbial realism,” that is, the idea of a realist prose fiction that is based on proverbs, and hence joins realism to the formulaic in a way the nature of which still needs to be determined, Keller’s novella Clothes Make the Man is the most important one� Clothes Make the Man , which carries its proverb like a device in its title, also appears in The People of Seldwyla , and offers two different ways of thinking about how the proverb instils realism into the novella� The novella’s plot is very simple and formulaic: The poor Seldwyla tailor Wenzel Strapinski accidentally arrives in the neighboring city of Goldach where he is mistaken for a prince because of his fine coat, a role he first ignores and then accepts with increasing success. This first half of the story is countered by the second, in which Strapinski’s true identity is revealed when the Seldwylians, having caught wind of their own humble townsman’s miraculous ascent to nobility in the neighboring city, arrive in Goldach just in time to join in the betrothal celebration for Strapinski and his Goldach bride� In an elaborately prepared canivalesque parade and dance, they perform the inversed meaning of the proverb “Clothes Make the Man.” In this act, the Seldwylians not only reveal that the tailor’s work of “people make clothes” is the condition for the costume effect of “clothes make people,” but also that the combination of these two abilities, tailoring and masquerading, make the story of Strapinski in Goldach possible. In the moralistic end of the novella, Nettchen, the bride of Strapinski, overcomes the shock of this revelation� She realizes that she did not fall for a simple tailor in prince’s clothes, but for the human in Strapinski, with whom she decides to start a family� One way the story can be conceived and has been interpreted is as a classic trickster story with a moralistic point, resembling a modern version of an episode from a 16th-century “chapbook” or “Volksbuch” such as Ein kurtzweilig Lesen von Dil Ulenspiegel (1515), the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), or Das Lalebuch (1597). The wit of the trickster, however, is replaced by the dreamy passivity of Wenzel. He does not willingly decide to trick, but only recognizes the role imposed on him when it is too late to quit and playing along has become easier than ending the masquerade. This explanation of the story is quite valid and helpful, but it makes the fact that its whole construction is based on a single 188 Florian Fuchs proverb into a merely accidental, ornamental aspect. The other interpretation results from shifting the focus away from Strapinski’s unmasking to the proverb and its formal, initiative function for the story. In this second perspective, which will be developed here, the trickster aspect of the story becomes accidental and does not necessarily derive from the use of the proverb, but instead illustrates the power of the proverb� With regard to the content, the proverb Clothes Make the Man contains the first, trickster half of the novella, and its chiastic inversion - People Make Clothes - is the result of a simple logical operation that produces the moral prescribed in the second half of the story. By considering not just one, but two sides of this reversible proverb, the novella signals it is primarily interested in the capabilities of the proverb form as such and touches on the narrative meaning of this particular proverb only as a side effect of its investigation into proverbial formulas. Already from the title, the central role of the proverb is obvious, but its true function becomes clear because the whole structure of the novella is based on developing the proverb and its chiasm, interrupted by the carnivalesque scene of code switching at the center. As a consequence, when the novella is read this way, its unfolding of the proverb has an exemplary status. This proverb and this story are not so much its interest, but rather the potential arising from the relation of proverbs to realist narratives in general� While Spiegel, the Cat explains the set-up for this test and reverse engineers proverb from novella as proof of their realistic roots, Clothes Make the Man provides a paradigmatic outcome on the purely structural level of narration� The proverb is still visible here both as the problem provided - clothes and persons, appearance and essence, or even content and form - and as the structure - the story’s symmetrical unfolding announced by the proverb title� This control over structure rather than over content is very much opposed to Harsdörffer’s Baroque use of the proverb in his Schauspiel , or even in the context of his story anthology The Grand Scene of Dismal Murder-History [ Der Grosse Schau-Platz Jämerlicher Mord-geschichte ]. In Harsdörffer, the proverb provides opinions or common-sense knowledge, much like an endoxon , 1 but is not adapted and structurally mirrored in the work as a whole. Keller, in contrast, uses proverbs not as common-sense facts to attract participation of readers, but as a container of narrative form. His ‘baroque style of writing’ is therefore limited to the dense realist descriptions and images also found in Clothes Make the Man , which Benjamin called “put together with defiance.” This Baroque prose does not take over the structure of the whole novella but remains to inform the diegetic level. It is most vivid in the descriptions of Goldach, the town in which the role of the prince is imposed on Strapinski, in which every house is ornamented with allegorical figures, images, and sententiae , that is, short moralistic Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 189 phrases and expressions� Goldach appears like an architecture-based ekphrasis of a Baroque emblem book. With amazement, Strapinski sees “fine, solidly built houses, all adorned with stone or painted symbols [Sinnbilder] and supplied with names” ( Werke 4: 303; “Clothes” 166)� Content and form of these allegories are one, no matter how old or new they are; they strictly stay on the descriptive, intradiegetic level, not affecting the overall structure of the novella. Whatever a house’s allegorical sign and inscription states is reflected by its inhabitants and their form of life and profession� The novella lists the house names that Strapinski reads and describes what he observes in the following manner: National Prosperity (a neat little house in which, behind a canary cage covered entirely with cress, a friendly old woman with a peaked bonnet sat spinning yarn), the Constitution (below lived a cooper who zealously and noisily bound little pails and kegs with hoops, hammering incessantly). One house bore the gruesome name Death; a faded skeleton stretched from bottom to top between the windows� Here lived the justice of the peace. In the house Patience lived the clerk of debts, a starved picture of misery, since in this town no one owed anyone anything. (“Clothes” 166) Keller’s Baroque prose is most tangible in such realistic descriptions that in fact consist of allegories rendered into naturalistic objects. The Baroque relationship between form and content makes the essence of a thing correspond to its appearance, which consequently also dictates how a thing must be ornamented, inscribed, or represented. As a Seldwylian receptive to costumes and carnival, Strapinski should have the ability to perform and detect such allegorical play, but, on the contrary, he lets himself be misled and mistakes an allegorical symbol for a kind of reality: “[H]e thought he was in another world […] that he had fallen into a sort of moral utopia” (“Clothes” 167). As a logical consequence of misunderstanding this agreement between content and form, he applies it as a principle to his own becoming a Prince at the tavern “The Scale”: Thus he was inclined to believe that the remarkable reception he had been given was related to this correspondence - for example, the symbol of the scale [Sinnbild der Wage] under which he lived meant that here uneven destiny was weighed and balanced and that occasionally a traveling tailor was transformed into a count� (“Clothes” 167) In this false conclusion, Goldach’s model of understanding the world, in which content and form must correspond, falsely replaces that of Seldwyla, where content and form are not tied to each other� The latter capability is manifested in the Seldwylian custom of carnival where the structure of the world is inversed, which allows the Seldwylians also to use disguises in order to reveal Strapinski’s disguise to himself, of course without the Goldachers being able to notice the difference between disguise and reality. Here, the story presents two 190 Florian Fuchs modes of signification: the allegorical mode of literalization in Goldach and the structural, formalist approach of Seldwyla, which causes the inversion of the story and corresponds to the extradiegetic function of the proverb� To deduce content from form or the man from his clothes is tempting, but only as long as this deduction is not turned into a universal law and remains only a particular conclusion. On the extradiegetic level, these two modes of signification therefore return, namely in the style and the structure of the novella. The Goldach Baroque is what Keller’s ‘baroque style of writing’ tries to achieve: a realism in which descriptions immediately correspond to a world� The Seldwyla awareness of formalism, however, is what the novella wants the reader to keep in mind at the same time, namely that his own realism only exists during a finite period of time during which the application of a particular structural principle is temporarily forgotten� The argument of Clothes Make the Man is therefore not a particular one about content and form, but one about the universality of how structural containers can produce specific relations between content and form - with the proverb as the crucial example for demonstrating this relation� What this novella allows the reader to observe is how someone who is conscious of the fabrication of reality experiences forgetting this fabrication: a Seldwylian going to Goldach. Or rather, how a realist text allows us to see how modern realism is based on disguises and how it has evolved from the literalizations of allegories pursued in the Baroque. For this reason, it is misleading to consider Keller’s reliance on proverbs and other folkloristic genres to be “updated poetical folklore studies [Volkskunde],” as Klaus Jeziorkowski has argued with reference to André Jolles’ folkloristic and partly even “völkische,” i.e., “ethnic-nationalist” idea of “simple forms” ( Jeziorkowski)� The point of the novella is not to reinstall the proverb of Clothes Make the Man , nor any other proverb into the common sense and collective communication of his readers, but rather to show that they have a structural potential, which can become a formative principle for 19th-century realist narrative� 2 Contrary to the epistemological poetics of the Enlightenment period and Romanticism, knowledge is no longer the shaping principle for narration in Keller, whether it is folkloristic, scientific, or historical. Instead, Keller marks structural principles as the forming basis of a literature� His relation to the Baroque shows this twofold interest, namely that the allegorical, detailed richness of Baroque prose is a crucial feature for realism, but that this alone does not suffice to make a work of literature relevant for the practice of life. Prose that is truly effective for the reader must rather shape its realist richness according to a form like a proverb, or a novella, that is itself rooted in the practice of life. Keller takes realist richness and the mix of style from the Baroque “Schreibart,” Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 191 but also identifies the proverb, left dormant since the Baroque, as the structural principle with the potential to relate life and literature� While it is difficult to set aside the surface and the structure of realist prose by relating one to Keller’s Baroque prose and the other to Keller’s discovery of the proverb’s structure, there is another, more straightforward relation of Keller’s novellas and the proverb. On the intradiegetic level, the primary function of the proverb for the novella becomes even clearer� Parallel to using the proverb as a formative principle for the plot of the story, the novella has various moments in which Strapinski uses fixed expressions, proverbs, or other commonplaces to keep up his disguise as a prince and extend it from a mere masquerade to his true persona� This plays a growing role as Strapinski crosses from passively being misrecognized as prince to actively behaving according to this role. At first, only his appearance and his mute behavior are interpreted by his environment: “Without waiting for an answer, the landlord of the Scale rushed to the kitchen and cried: ‘[…] the young man can scarcely open his mouth from sheer nobility! ’” (“Clothes” 154; Werke 4: 288). Then, however, the story explicitly marks “his first deliberate lie [selbsttätige Lüge]” (155; 290), which is behavioral and still non-verbal, followed by “his second deliberate error [selbsttätigen Fehler], by obediently saying yes instead of no” (157; 291). While the first ambiguous action might be less binding and could still be explained retrospectively as an accident, words here mark the second and less ambiguous degree of compliance� Shortly after this active affirmation to the innkeeper, Strapinski also acknowledges to himself that he is becoming someone other than himself: “‘Things are now as they are,’ he said to himself ” (157; 292). One could say that following the earlier observations about the difference between Seldwyla and Goldach, Strapinski begins to literalize his own social role: What his form appears to be - a prince - now begins to take over his content� This initiates a more engaged process of filling the role projected on him. Strapinski not only avoids objections or obeys rules but plays along by actively using his social intuition and skills. Having served in the cavalry, he is able to steer the carriage “in a professional manner [in schulgerechter Haltung]” (160; 296), impressing his new Goldach acquaintances with his skills as a coachman when they invite him to join them for a ride to the councilor’s estate for a game of cards� 3 During the card game, they try to converse with him through the usual small talk of the bourgeoisie, “horses, hunting, and the like” (161; 297), and Strapinski is again able to keep up his role because he knows the common expressions, which this time consist of the fixed phrases, proverbs, and commonplaces: 192 Florian Fuchs Strapinski was perfectly at home in this area too; for he merely had to dig out the phrases [Redensarten] he had once heard around officers and the landed gentry, and which had pleased him uncommonly even then� He produced these phrases only sparingly, with a certain modesty and always with a melancholy smile, and thereby achieved an effect that was only the greater. Whenever two or three of the gentlemen got up and stepped aside, they said; “He’s a perfect squire! ” (161; 297) When he is asked to sing something in Polish, since he is a Polish prince, he even remembers a folk song from a short time he spent working in Poland, and begins to sing these words, however “without being aware of its meaning [ohne ihres Inhaltes bewußt zu sein]” (164; 300). This use of a foreign language is completely stripped of meaning. Neither Strapinski nor the Goldachers understand the words, but they still function for both sides as intended. By including this case of the full formal functionality of an actually meaningless language, Strapinski’s role-play has reached its fullest extent. The narrator effectively comments that he is now behaving “like a parrot” (164; 300)� Only by using proverbs, commonplaces, and fixed expressions as formal props can Strapinski’s ‘empty’ acting stay in accordance with his social environment� Despite being uninterested in or even unaware of the meaning and significance of these phrases and their micro-narratives, he knows how to use them strategically. For the Goldachers, the content of Strapinski’s verbal utterances is mostly irrelevant, ignored, or even inaccessible (in the case of the Polish song), but functions as long as it conforms to its respective setting. What allows Strapinski to slowly succeed with his masquerade in society is the strategic and formal function of these devices and his intuition about how to use them� Of course, this is typical behavior for a trickster figure, but as argued earlier, the novella quality lies in being based on a proverb while showing how proverbs help a trickster� Keller’s texts are only two of many cases for the realist recognition of these structural and pragmatic aspects of proverbs� 4 Yet it wasn’t until the 1970s that theoretical research concluded that proverbs can be considered narrative structures and can influence other narrative structures. Even today, proverbs are mainly seen as containers of folk facts, traditionalist knowledge, or mythological wisdom. Within proverb studies, Gregory Permyakov (1919-1983) in particular has analyzed how proverbs are logical, semiotic structures of text for which a purely ornamental or entertaining function is never dominant. Instead, Permyakov argues that proverbs can be instructive, prognostic, negative, or even magical utterances, but they always and primarily have a “modeling” function. He defines this modeling function by explaining that “a proverb possessing Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism 193 this function provides a verbal (or thought) model (scheme) of some real-life (or logical) situation” (Permyakov 141)� 5 The linguists Christoph Chlosta and Peter Grzybek, who apply Permyakov’s method, have especially noted the particular modeling function of Clothes Make the Man for its reversibility� Depending on context, the proverb matches the categories “Production-Non-Production,” “Revelation-Non-Revelation,” and “Qualitative Superiority-Inferiority of Things�” Chlosta and Grzybek conclude that “ Clothes Make the Man […] appears to be […] equally applicable for the case of assuming an imbalance between ‘external appearance’ and actual meaning, as it is for the case of assuming an equivalence between both.” Hence, they confirm the polyvalent semantic potential of the proverb on which Keller’s novella is built, as well as the chiastic reversibility that is so crucial for it to state the proverb as driver of formulaic narrativity. “For this reason, the logic modeling of this proverb,” they continue, “heavily depends on which implicit presuppositions one relates to it, and, respectively, which logical emphasis one puts on it” (Chlosta and Grzybek 189). Due to both its modeling of realism, as well as its polyvalent structure “Clothes Make the Man” is therefore a paradigm for the narrative potential of proverbs� Erasmus had already pointed this out in the entry “Vestis virum facit” of his Adagia (Erasmus 546—47), noting as well that this proverb is most commonly used (“vulgo tritissimum est”) by the people, even though his real interest is to establish it as invented by Homer and Quintilian� 6 Keller moves commonplace and proverb from the domain of disregarded chatter to that of micro-narrative, where it can ignite writing and narrating as an autonomous micro-story shaped by public discourse. This identification indicates the relation between literature and the reality in the public, as well as the demand for structural forms by post-epistemological narration. Keller then pushes the quality of the proverb one step further. He uses it to display the active role that proverbs play for daily life, even after they are no longer regarded as applicable know-how, and, at the same time, he frames this display into a novella that relies on the form of the proverb. As Permyakov showed, the logico-semiotic structure of proverbs thus always includes the potential to simulate the real-life situation it is meant to model. For this reason, proverbs also include a model of realism itself; they bear a clear indication of the mode of reality that has shaped them� Other instances of a realism written with “barocker Trotz” can be found all throughout Modernism - from Mallarmé to Woolf to Arno Schmidt - and it seems to go back to exactly the “Schreibart” that Benjamin pointed out for Keller. We are faced with an overpacked prose that asks too much from its readers and seems just as unsuccessful as Harsdörffer’s Schauspiel deutscher Sprichwörter � But of course, Woolf or Schmidt must not be seen as reactionary Baroquists, but 194 Florian Fuchs as Hypermodernists who wholeheartedly continue the Realist project of Keller and Flaubert� What these Hypermodernists retain from realism is the ability to render a world, and hence they do not bring back the generic orality of proverbs, but rather use the rhythm of their prose texts to render a world in which the crudeness of the forced origins of language become tangible again� Notes 1 See the convincing narratological taxonomy by Manns, especially chapter VI�3 “Das Sprichwort in den Schauplätzen, ” 200—13. 2 The only study that actively brings together Keller’s use of proverbs in his novellas (Mieder) does not recognize this structural relationship and merely notes that his is not a pedagogical, but a “künstlerischer” interest in the proverb� 3 Strapinski decides not to play, but rather to observe the Goldachers play, who confirm their Baroque view of the world by willingly including him in a theatrum mundi , that is, by organizing their social play so that he is assigned the only position on the Baroque stage in which pure observation is possible, namely that of the emperor: “So saß er denn wie ein kränkelnder Fürst, vor welchem die Hofleute ein angenehmes Schauspiel aufführen und den Lauf der Welt darstellen�” ( Werke 4: 296)� 4 For many other, exclusively German, examples, see Mieder. 5 For Permyakov, see also Grzyberk. 6 Erasmus relates it to a comment that Nausicaa makes about recognizing Odysseus only after he changed his clothes, which is quoted as well by Quintilian� Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. “Gottfried Keller. 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Konzeption und Struktur des Erzählens in Georg Philipp Harsdörffers “Schauplätzen � ” Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013. Mieder, Wolfgang. “Das Sprichwort in Gottfried Kellers Die Leute von Seldwyla. ” Das Sprichwort in der deutschen Prosaliteratur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts � Munich: Fink, 1972. 152—67. Permyakov, Gregory. “Notes on Structural Paremiology.” From Proverb to Folk-Tale. Notes on the General Theory of Cliché . Moscow: Nauka, 1979. 130—59.