Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 243 Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis Erica Weitzman Northwestern University Abstract: One of Robert Walser’s most recognizable techniques in his short prose pieces is the sped-up recapitulation of works of literature: the retelling of canonical or contemporary novels and dramas in impious paragraphto pages-long abridgments. This technique of humorous abridgement, however, is in itself hardly new. In his 1878 book of literary spoofs, Nach berühmten Mustern , for example, the novelist and Sprachskeptiker Fritz Mauthner also converts the popular literary works of his day into absurdly shortened scenes, with clearly parodic intent. This article compares Mauthner’s parodies with Walser’s condensed retellings in order to complicate the idea of the critical/ comical force of condensation and the emptying out of the epic mode practiced by both authors. Ultimately, the article argues that for all their ostensible similarity, Walser’s and Mauthner’s works are fundamentally different in both substance and aim, where Walser’s condensations are less the continuation of the practice of parodic miniaturization than a wholesale reversal of its aesthetic as well as ethical and political premises� Keywords: Miniaturization, parody, Walser, Mauthner, parabasis, reception, critique Tell me how you summarize, and I’ll tell you how you interpret. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests Of course, Robert Walser would have written a gloss on glosses. Logically enough, it is titled “Die Glosse,” and begins as follows: 244 Erica Weitzman Wer etwas zu sagen habe, schreibe mit Freuden, mit ersten und letzten Kräften hin und wieder eine Glosse, möchte man meinen, und man möchte, indem man dies sagt, vor lauter Trauer darüber, daß die Glosse eine Verkommenheit bedeutet, und daß man in diesen Sumpf hineinfiel, um vielleicht nie mehr wieder daraus in die Luft und in die Lust schönerer Übungen emporzuklettern, laut lachen, wonach einen dieses wie Äpfel oder Kartoffeln rollende Lachen, diese krankhafte Gesundheitslustigkeit unsagbar traurig machen würde� (287) In these opening lines of the piece (originally published in 1928 in the Prager Presse ) Walser thematizes the proverbially parasitic nature of the gloss, which is not even an imitation of an imitation but that imitation’s pale summary: a “Verkommenheit” of secondary chatter and a dank quagmire from which one will never again be able to pull oneself back into the ethereal sublimity of long forms and high literature (even if we can also note the irony that Walser’s opening sentence manages despite itself to span the two poles of classical poetics, from tragic “Trauer” to comic “Lachen”). And yet, even as Walser laments the swampy degeneracy of the gloss qua literary form, he also presents it as the first and last product of anyone who “etwas zu sagen habe”: insofar as the gloss is the genre of diminished secondariness, forever subordinate to the loftier objects of its glossing activity, it is also the paradigmatic genre of reflection per se, a thinking and rethinking of thought itself hardly less ambitious than the transcendental-romantic project of fusing “Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie,” such that they “[sich] immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen” (Schlegel 182)� Walser already plays in the above-quoted passage on the reflexive potential or primary secondariness of the gloss with the conditional phrase “möchte man meinen”: the interpolated qualification not only embeds commentary within the commentary, but also embeds in that commentary a commentary on the commentary, etc., etc., the smaller and more self-enclosed the commentary gets, in a “progressive Universalpoesie” (Schlegel 182) indeed of infinite autoreferential regression� Naturally, the essay “Die Glosse” is not just a gloss on glosses, but also a gloss on Walser’s own activity of textual glossing� For a long time - particularly after his move to Bern in 1921 - Walser wrote little else than “glosses”: short, self-reflective commentaries on scenes or phenomena in which descriptive breadth and epic expansiveness are replaced by synopsis, contraction, and abyssal self-reference� And though Walser appears at the beginning of “Die Glosse” to mock the gloss’s middlebrow popularity and poor repute, by the end of the piece he will return to praising the gloss as something big in its littleness, great in spite of its negligible reputation� 1 In this vein, Annette Fuchs has emphasized the perfor- Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 245 mative aspects of “Die Glosse”: though Walser speaks of the gloss as a dolefully degenerate (or degenerative) genre, his opening sentence already belies the sadness that the author of glosses might experience, grammatically bracketing it with announcements of joyfulness and laughter� 2 Even if this claim is not strictly true in terms of syntax (for “unsagbare Traurigkeit” is the passage’s actual last named emotion), it is at least true in terms of the piece’s overall mood: whatever real or feigned reservations about the gloss Walser might profess, the piece itself is a paradigmatic example of Walser’s typical verbal virtuosity and flamboyant metaphorical wit, in which the ostensible object of analysis becomes merely the pretext for self-amused (and -amusing) reflection. Thus, according to Fuchs, Walser’s glosses represent a “Karnevalisierung des Deskriptiven” (Fuchs 16), a parodic play with language and subjectivity that exposes the unspoken codes of its objects and draws the reader into the diminishing game� And yet, though Walser might be, in his own words, the farcically triumphant “Feldherr der Buchstaben [der Glosse], die [er] befehlig[t]” (“Die Glosse” 288), Walser’s own glossing, both in “Die Glosse” and elsewhere, is far more complex - and more subtle - than such an interpretation would have it� Such conceptual and artistic complexity is particularly notable in what is one of the most frequent forms of Walser’s glossing activity: the sped-up recapitulation of pre-existing works of literature, in which canonical or contemporary texts are retold and remarked on in drastically condensed form� One representative example of this genre is the unpublished piece from 1926—27 “Der falsche Ganina” - likely a synopsis of the Russian naturalist author Aleksandr Kuprin’s controversial 1910 social novel The Pit 3 - which, in radically accelerated fashion, narrates the tribulations of a certain down-on-his-luck “Söhnchen von Barönchen” (Walser, “Der falsche Ganina” 434) and the woman who betrays him. Typically enough, Walser thematizes his own compositional logic in the piece’s very first sentence: “Ob ich diese Geschichte in der richtigen Manier erzählen werde,” begins the piece with characteristically cheeky modesty, “weiß ich nicht; ich weiß zunächst nur, daß es in einem ganz bestimmten Roman, der ein großer Roman ist, dessen Druckseitenzahl sich auf annähernd neunhundert belaufen mag, eine tragikomische Figur gibt, deren Wesen darin besteht, daß sie nicht sein will, was sie ist” (432)� The fact that Walser explicitly emphasizes the page count of the novel he comments on - indeed, before any other of its aspects - shows his acute awareness of the era’s equation of literary importance with narrative grandiosity, as well as the absurd disproportion he creates between the novel’s epic scope and the radical diminutiveness (although, at seven pages, for Walser comparatively long) of Walser’s own version thereof. Even before the piece gets going, therefore, the manifest incongruity between the two forms of writing produces an expectation of comic intent, as Walser flattens out the mimetic pathos of Kuprin’s 246 Erica Weitzman story into a mix of deadpan plot summary, bemused commentary, self-conscious moralizing, and fan-fictional speculation. Though Walser is an innovator, this technique is not without precedent. In fact, feuilletonistic and/ or parodistic glossing was a perfectly common activity for writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, who were able to supplement their meager income by predigesting contemporary cultural products and events for the busy newspaper-reading public� 4 One potential model for Walser’s textual summaries is the novelist and Sprachskeptiker Fritz Mauthner’s 1878 Nach berühmten Mustern , a collection of parodic condensations of works by popular contemporaries such as Paul Heyse, Willibald Alexis, and E. Marlitt. The book was a bestseller, going into over 28 printings and praised by at least one of his contemporaries as a “köstliche[s] Werkchen” (Th. 141) of comedic art. Mauthner sums up his own understanding of the effects of parodic shortening in a short essay entitled “Etwas über die Parodie,” published in the cultural journal Schorers Familienblatt (where many of the pieces in Nach berühmten Mustern first appeared): “[Die] Parodie kann mit mehr oder weniger Witz hergestellt sein, aber ihre Wirkung beruht doch immer auf der gemeinsamen Lust, sich durch festhalten der Kontrastvorstellung dem lästigen Gefühl des Erhabenen zu entziehen” (139—40). Though Mauthner criticizes this technique of parody through contrast as something that “enthält immer ein pöbelhaftes, kunstfeindliches Element” (140) insofar as it may fail to recognize the actual greatness of great literature, his own parodies, as we will see, hardly diverge from this procedure, miniaturizing and distorting at least purportedly serious works of literature with the effect indeed of freeing the amusement-seeking reader from their “sublime” weight� 5 In the remainder of this article, I will compare Mauthner’s literary satires with Walser’s own book digests to ask: What is the critical and/ or comical force of abbreviation, summary, and recapitulation? What is removed in the truncation or condensation of the epic mode? And, finally: How do Walser’s literary diminutions both borrow from the parodically miniaturizing practices of his elders and constitute a critical (even parodically critical) reevaluation of such parody? For while most critics of Walser have noted his condensed rewritings of pre-existing works, almost none have gone to the trouble of placing this practice in its literary-historical context - with the result that Walser’s writing is considered precisely under the aspects of trivialization and miniaturizing mockery that it in fact works to move away from� 6 As Walser himself comments, in a sentence audibly mixing ironic self-deprecation, bohemian hauteur , and genuine cultural critique: “Bürgerliche und sonstige Leser lesen zwar herzlich gern Glossen, das steht mit Felsenfestigkeit fest, wird doch immer wieder von Zeitschriftredaktoren, von Führern in die Kulturheiligtümer hinein die höfliche Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 247 Anfrage an den kolossal bekannten, anerkannten Glossenschmied gerichtet, ob er nicht für einige Franken witzig sein möchte, wozu der Schreiner oder Schlosser meist freudig ja sagt” (“Die Glosse” 287)� Humorously put though Walser’s statement is, it also establishes the context in which it is written: the comic gloss is by no means a peculiarity of Walser’s, but a well-established minor genre of the time, enjoyed by a mass public eager for light amusement - “irgend etwas Lesenswertes, Aufheiterndes” (287) - as a break from both daily cares and the self-important ponderousness of high culture. At the same time, the statement puts the easy pleasures of the comic gloss itself into question, which indeed wittily deflates its readers’ literary monuments, but in doing so establishes their monumental status - not to mention the ideological and socioeconomic realities that go together with them - all the more firmly. Or as Walser’s forebear Jean Paul writes, “[f]olglich ist das Lächerliche das unendliche Kleine, [aber] worin besteht diese ideale Kleinheit? ” ( Vorschule 105)� As I will show, comparing Walser’s literary encapsulations to those of Mauthner will elucidate what is at stake in them beyond back-slapping in-jokes, critical ridicule, and urbane impiety. “[U]ngleich dem gemeinen Spaßmacher mit seinen Seitenhieben,” Jean Paul continues, “[hebt der Humor] keine einzelne Narrheit heraus, sondern er erniedrigt das Große […] um ihm das Kleine […] an die Seite zu setzen und so beide zu vernichten” (125). Correspondingly, my argument in this article will be that Walser’s glosses are not just examples of frivolous or subversive satire and comic diminishment - much less, of a “spannungsreiches Junktim zwischen dem Trivialen und Grotesken, das den Spielraum der exzentrischen Originalität des Ich absteckt” (Fuchs 130). Rather, they are cannily ironic interventions into the very concepts of “triviality” and “grotesqueness” themselves - together with their aesthetic counterparts, greatness, seriousness, and normativity - and thus also an implicit commentary on other, older practices of miniaturization/ glossing, which are indeed far better characterized by what Fuchs calls a “[dialogische] Lachgemeinschaft zwischen dem Ich und dem Leser” (132) 7 than Walser’s own glosses ever were or are. In short, there are glosses and there are glosses: and Walser’s glosses, I submit, not only aim higher than the belittling waggishness of bourgeois comedy, but take aim at the comedy of be littling itself� As Linda Hutcheon and others have noted, the genre of literary parody experienced a boom in the nineteenth century ( Theory of Parody , esp. 2 and 11; see also Genette 67 on the “Victorian neoburlesque”). A newly literate bourgeois public, which wielded knowledge of classical and romantic works as cultural capital, together with an exponentially increasing trade in boulevard and entertainment literature, provided ripe fodder for play with and mockery of both 248 Erica Weitzman the established and contemporary literary canon� Mauthner himself is explicit about the connection between the rise of mass-market literature and the necessity of literary parody in the introduction to the 1879 edition of his book: “Ja, sie verstehen sich auf die Massenfabrikation, die großen Herren! haben es von den Pappschachtelwerkstätten gelernt, wie denn die Büchermacherei auch ein bescheidener Zweig der großen Papierindustrie geworden ist. Und im großen Gewerbe, das nur durch Ueberproduktion die kleinen Leute vernichten und sich so zu erhalten vermag, da muß Teilung der Arbeit an Stelle der alten zünftigen Gründlichkeit und Verwendbarkeit treten” (“Aus dem Vorwort zum ‘Neuen Folge’” 15)� The deadline pressures of the book market and the debased taste of the public mean that nowadays authors are compelled to reproduce themselves as types, all the better to parody: “Muß aber das ‘Genie’ sich [dem Publikum] unterwerfen? […] Aber […] die Herren haben keine Zeit, sich selbst zu verändern und die neue Aufgabe demgemäß selbständig auszuarbeiten. Morgen soll das neue Buch fertig sein! Unmöglich, es bis dahin zu schaffen! Nun, her mit der Schablone, die dem Publikum gefällt” (14—15). Such critiques of conventionalized literary forms notwithstanding, Mauthner’s parodic abridgments have their own direct precedent in Bret Harte’s 1867 Condensed Novels , whose contents Harte describes in the brief preface to his published collection as “a humorous condensation of the salient characteristics of certain writers, selected without reference to their standing or prominence in literature” (Preface 12)� Harte’s parodies are hardly subtle; the sketch “Miss Mix by Ch-l-tte Br-nte,” for example, a broad send-up of Jane Eyre , begins, with burlesqued gothic portent, “My earliest impressions are of a huge, misshapen rock, against which the hoarse waves beat unceasingly […]. A dark sky lowers in the background, while two sea-gulls and a gigantic cormorant eye with extreme disfavor the floating corpse of a drowned woman in the foreground” (“Miss Mix” 67), and ends with the titular governess falling on the neck of “Mr. Rawjester” as the latter exultantly watches the house containing his three secret African wives burn down (“Miss Mix” 79)� Mauthner honors his model by including a Harte parody, “Der Blutsauger von Brandy-Bar,” among the literary spoofs of his own book. However, where Harte declares that his sketches “are written with no higher ambition than that of filling the ephemeral pages of a weekly paper” (Preface 12), Mauthner - as he repeatedly explains in the various forewords to the editions of Nach berühmten Mustern - has higher aims for his parodies than “einen bloßen Ulk” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1897] 6). As Mauthner stresses, his “Büchlein” is to be, not just silly fun, but “eine Art exemplarischer Kritik” (7), a disciplinary measure against shoddy writing and an assessment method for literary value in general: “Entweder sei der Parodierte ein ganzer Dichter, dann sei es ungehörig, Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 249 sich über ihn lustig zu machen; oder sein Dichten sei Manier, dann müsse die Parodie zur Kritik werden und die Manier ins Herz zu treffen suchen” (6). As Almut Vierhufe summarizes (in what appears to be the only scholarly monograph thus far dedicated to Nach berühmten Mustern ): “Mauthners Parodien [entpuppen sich] als aktuelles Symptom des kulturellen Zeitgeists. Seine Warnung […] gilt der unreflektierten, dilettantischen, unkünstlerischen Mache und dem unkritischen Konsum der in seiner Zeit stetig zunehmender Zahl seichter Unterhaltungsliteratur, der er jeden Anspruch auf literarische Qualität absprechen muß” (226)� (Or as Hutcheon puts it: “this conservative function of keeping modishness in line” [ Theory of Parody 2].) Thus Mauthner insists - implicitly positioning himself in the literary pantheon alongside Aristophanes and Cervantes - that his parodies aim, not at sublimity, but only at the false sublime, “ein unechtes Werk der erhabenen Gattung” (“Etwas über die Parodie” 140)� 8 Indeed, in the introduction to the 1897 edition of the book, Mauthner explains that, in the current culture, his parodic technique has become all but superfluous, for “[d]ie nachhinkenden Dilettanten der verflossenen Moden sind Parodien ihrer selbst und stellen sich freiwillig außerhalb der Literatur” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1897] 8). In other words, for Mauthner, bad literature effectively inflicts on itself that which the Russian formalists described as the parodic maneuver (in Linda Hutcheon’s paraphrase): “a conflict between realistic motivation and an aesthetic motivation which has become weak and made obvious” ( Narcissistic Narrative 24). And yet, Mauthner’s literary satires are less aimed at pushing literature forward than of holding it in place; transposed into the twin registers of absurdity and banality, the various literary devices and mythemes of his originals become, not just strange, but small. Mauthner illustrates - and genders - such transposition in the second paragraph of “Etwas über die Parodie”: Denken wir uns eine schlichte Frau, welche Schillers Glocke deklamieren hört und sich bei “des Feuers Macht” plötzlich an ihren Braten in der Röhre erinnert� Vergißt sie darüber die ernsten Worte des Dichters, so hat eben die eine Kontrastvorstellung die andere abgelöst, ohne das etwas neues zu Stande gekommen wäre; man würde sie zerstreut nennen. Teilt sie aber ihre Sorge um den Braten z.B. ihrem Mann mit, der noch unter dem Bann der Dichtung steht, so […] faßt [er] beide Wirkungen zusammen, er wendet die Schillerschen Worte auf den Braten an […] und die Parodie ist fertig. (140) Moldy gender stereotypes aside for the moment, what Mauthner’s example basically describes is a profanation through miniaturization� Trimmed to the housewife’s limited horizon, Schiller’s patriotic hymn becomes little more than a glorified kitchen timer, in which the immediate referentiality of the words crowds out any more elevated implications. Meanwhile, the husband, while 250 Erica Weitzman alert to the true grandeur of the poet’s meaning, is still easygoing enough to think both worlds simultaneously, laughing at the contrast between the noble aims of poetry and his wife’s circumscribed imagination� Miniaturization is the oven in which parody is cooked, reducing literary sublimity to comical bite size. Again, despite Mauthner’s professed distancing from this technique in “Etwas über die Parodie,” such a juxtaposition of sacred and profane, great and small is more or less what Mauthner does in his own crude burlesques. Here an example is no doubt in order� Mauthner’s sendup of Gustav Freytag’s historical epic Die Ahnen , “Die Vorfahren,” opens with the hunter Wlf sitting sorrowfully over a deer he has just shot down, sad that he has fresh kill but no knowledge of how to cook it� Immediately thereupon the “mannbare Jungfrau” (34) Mrl enters and, after some flirtatious banter in faux-archaic style, suggests to Wlf the workaround of raw minced meat� Just at that moment the vixenish Blsk appears and claims to be able to cook the deer by riding around with it on horseback in the hot air. Wlf picks up a deer leg and jumps on Blsk’s horse, but he soon gets bored and returns to eat his deer tartare with Mrl. Blsk falls off her horse and dies; Wlf eats the dropped wind-roasted deer leg and declares it better than Mrl’s cooking after all. Finally, Wlf and Mrl marry “in echt germanischer Ehe” (38) - “Nur selten trübte die Erinnerung an Blsk’s [sic] gargerittene Keulen den Himmel ihrer Bärenhaut” (38) - siring generations of sons (respectively: Wlf II, Wulf, Wolf, and Wolff) that Mauthner lists in a closing string of begats. Obviously, condensation or miniaturization is not the only satirical method being used here. In the words of Joachim Kühn, “übertriebenes Lob am falschen Platz, gespielter Ernst, Verbindung von Prosabericht und Verszitaten, Isolierung verstiegener sprachlicher Bilder” (131) - not to mention narrative trivialization, stylistic pastiche, non sequiturs, puns, nonsense words, unsubtly intimated Herrenwitze , and what Gérard Genette terms “anachronistic vulgarization” (67) 9 - are all also significant elements of Mauthner’s parodic technique. 10 But condensation or miniaturization is still clearly the primary factor� Instead of a six-volume saga from 357 A.D. to the beginnings of modern Germany, we get a single scene of a prehistoric love-triangle cook-off. Instead of narrative digressiveness and dialogical development, we get acceleration, ellipsis, and stichomythia. Instead of the episodic epic of the dawn of the German nation, we get style without content, character without story, archaisms without motivation or verisimilitude. Indeed, Mauthner himself highlights the act of condensation in his own rhyming epigraph to the piece: “Durch ein Mikroskop vergröbert / Wird das Zöpfchen aufgestöbert” (“Die Vorfahren” 32). In other words: examined up close and in concentrated form, Freytag’s primitive Teutons are revealed as nothing so much as masks of the modern bourgeois� But more important than the not-so-secret inauthenticity of Freytag’s novel is the fact that Mauthner’s Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 251 condensation denies Freytag’s national-patriotic epic anything that could give those masks meaning� What Freytag (through the mouthpiece of one of his modern protagonists) calls “das Höchste und Hoffnungsreichste in dem geheimnisvollen Wirken der Volkskraft,” “die Einwirkung des ganzen Volkes auf den einzelnen” (Freytag 1344), 11 disappears in the reduction of its epic sweep to a single scene� Deprived by Mauthner’s brutal abbreviation at once of historical arc, character development, and underlying conceit, Die Ahnen loses precisely that which justifies and plausibilizes its portentous anachronicity: in the absence of both context and telos , all that is left is (imitable) style. Freytag’s Die Ahnen is a dismal piece of kitsch, where Teutonic skalds transfix rebel warriors and two students celebrate a double wedding on the same day of the first issue of their newly founded patriotic journal. But Mauthner’s parody is perhaps kitschy in its own way: for in understanding miniaturization as parody, it tacitly affirms the transcendent status of great literature and its distance from ordinary life, whereby the joining of great notions to trivial concerns is always inherently demeaning and/ or comic. “Im Grunde liegt in jedem Zitat, das einen feierlichen Vers auf das tägliche Leben anwendet, etwas Parodistisches” (“Etwas über die Parodie” 140), since an art dedicated to beauty, dignity, empathy, historical destiny, and moral edification must have nothing to do with the vulgarity of the day-to-day� Great literature is to smallness what “die liebende Gemeine” (Schiller, “Das Lied von der Glocke” 69, line 400) are to their Sunday dinner. The little housewife and her roast - so to speak, the eternal parody of the community 12 - will always be incompatible with the poetic sublime� It is from here that Walser’s work takes off. Unlike Harte or Mauthner, Walser does not aim at reproducing the style of the source text to exaggerate, and thereby to isolate, its “Manier” as “Manier” (Mauthner, Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1897] 6). Indeed, the opposite is rather the case: as one can see in pieces like “Der falsche Ganina” and myriad others, Walser’s texts execute not an exaggeration so much as a leveling of style, an assimilation of every text, from Cervantes to Dostoyevsky to “Bahnhofhallenbüchlein” (Walser, “Gespenster” 335) into Walser’s own attitude and voice� The result is just as much a removal of the summarized work’s affective power and verisimilitude as Mauthner’s miniaturized parodies; and yet this is not in the sense of a broadly comic or even comic-critical diminution that contrasts greatness or pretended greatness to its trivialized caricature. Rather, it must be understood in the sense of a critical (in the romantic sense) and even a phenomenological expansion, which miniaturizes works of literature to establish an entirely different set of aesthetic criteria and form of comic relation� 13 252 Erica Weitzman One microscript piece beginning, “Sie warfen ihr abgefallene Kastanien nach,” a synopsis of a performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as told from the perspective of “Antoinette, eine erprobte Mamsell” (“Kastanien” 265), presents a paradigmatic example of Walser’s summarizing procedure: Dem Macbeth steht nun zunächst sein Freund Banquo im Weg, und wie er diesen hinwegräumt, indem er sich dreier Schurken dazu bedient, wird auf folgende Art anschaulich gemacht. Der Redliche hält mitten im mitternächtlich dunklen Wald einen Monolog, worin er wegen seines Freundes Bedenken äußert. “Ich fürchte”, spricht er, “daß ich allen Anlaß habe, meinen ehrlichen und guten Macbeth tief zu beklagen”, und kaum sind ihm diese gutgemeinten Worte über die Lippen geflohen, so kriegt er dafür so viel Applaus, daß er röchelnd zu Boden sinkt und wie ein ahnungsloser, vorlauter Mensch jämmerlich verendet. Ich steckte von Zeit zu Zeit eine Erfrischung in den Mund. Mein Nachbar raunte seiner Frau voll Respekt für den Dichter zu: “Das ist großartig”. Es verhielt sich in der Tat so. (265—66) This is a miniaturization of Macbeth of a kind, but there is nothing Macbeth -ish in it, neither in soberly imitative nor in parodically exaggerated form. Similar to Mauthner’s parodies, the accelerated and, moreover, inaccurate retelling of the play deprives the tragedy of both immediacy and verisimilitude, and thus, of its affective power, presenting Macbeth ’s action not in the stirring words and bloody deeds of its characters but in Walser’s girl narrator’s banal paraphrase thereof. And yet, more crucial than the comedically incongruous banality of the paraphrase is the way in which the act of paraphrasing radically flattens out or indeed reverses the usual hierarchy between spectator and spectacle, stage and staged. Banquo is not murdered by Macbeth’s henchmen, but as it were crushed under the weight of the audience’s applause; the peanut-gallery commentary of the narrator’s neighbors carries the same weight as the words of the play; the theatergoing taking of refreshment - in classical aesthetics precisely the metaphor of what art must not be - is as much of an action as the action itself. If, according to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit , comedy happens when the actor takes off his mask to stand before the spectator in parabatic self-consciousness, then Walser does this one better by leading the spectator herself onto the stage, not merely disrupting the dramatic illusion, but placing precisely that which must remain invisible for the artwork to maintain its illusion - the scene of spectation - squarely in the foreground. 14 All this is as much to say that Walser’s “repetition with a difference” - in Hutcheon’s epigrammatic definition of parody ( Theory of Parody 6) - retells the play in condensed form as the experience of its viewing � Walser’s persona is not just watching political intrigue and murder in medieval Scotland: she is also watching Shakespeare’s rendering thereof, the actors’ performance of Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 253 that rendering, and her own and her fellow spectators’ reactions to that performance� All the layers of the play’s being exist at once in the ironic yet paradoxically absorbed distance of the spectator, who is perhaps not quite as naive as her voice would initially seem to indicate. “Was mich betrifft,” comments Walser’s theatergoer, “so wuchs ich angesichts dieses Großen immer stärker in die niedlichste Niedlichkeit hinein, d.h. das Stück, das ich von der Tribüne herunter mitansah, machte mich ganz verdutzt, geringfügig und höflich klein, und das war für meine arme Mädchenbrust nur angenehm” (“Kastanien” 266). In this creation of agreeably perplexing sensations in young girls’ breasts, art reenters the sphere of practical reason and everyday life: taste turns into tasting, free play into critique and consumption, enjoyment metaphor into enjoyment metonym, as the question is posed of how separate aesthetic seriousness and inaesthetic triviality are from one another after all� In other words, Walser’s literature summaries force the reader to understand the artwork as simultaneously itself and its reception� But this is no longer either bad or ridiculous or demeaning, as it had been for Mauthner. Rather, Walser’s summaries demonstrate that this seemingly scandalous or laughable overlap of artwork and reception is simply the fundamental experience of art as such� Indeed, in their organic interweaving of mimesis and critique, absorption and irony, Walser’s summaries evoke the classical aesthetic principle of disinterested play: the production of, in Schiller’s words, a “mittlere Stimmung, in welcher das Gemüt weder physisch noch moralisch genötigt, und dort auf beide Art tätig ist” ( Ästhetische Erziehung 76—77), i.e., a disposition toward the object suspended between pleasure and morality as the prerequisite to emotional maturity and political and spiritual freedom. At the same time, however, the principle of artistic autonomy upon which such an aesthetics is built is also undermined in the performative confirmation that art is always inherently - even if only as spectacle and play - an integral part of interested experience and real lived life� The artwork has no reality outside of its being seen or read or thought about or even parodied; the text necessarily and always already includes its paratexts� The piece “Die Tragödie,” a truncated summary of Schiller’s Die Räuber , is perhaps an even better example of this technique than “Sie warfen ihr abgefallene Kastanien nach” or “Der falsche Ganina,” insofar as it is a relatively straight and indeed un -playful text for Walser. “Ich sah einmal ein Theaterstück,” it begins, das mit der Vorführung eines sorgfältig gekleideten Stubenhockers begann, der, in dem er die gesunde Vernunft verkörperte, sich zu Hause seit etlicher Zeit zu langweilen schien, trotzdem die Zimmer allem Anschein nach herrlich tapeziert und die Möbel von talentvoller Handwerkhand hergestellt worden waren� (“Tragödie” 326) 254 Erica Weitzman Here again, the description collapses text and performance, setting the elliptical description of the play’s story on the same plane as the costuming and the mise en scène. In what follows, Walser describes the opening scene of Die Räuber in a style both condensed and at times almost bureaucratically torturous - for example, “Der umsonst seinen Zärtlichkeitsgesamtvorrat an den Sympathieherausfordernden Verschwendende trat, auf einen Stab gestützt, humpelnd, als sei er betäubt, ab, und der Solide sprach zu sich selbst oder zum horchenden und teilnehmenden Zuschauerpublikum” (326—27) - upon which the narrator comments, “Welchen unwiderleglichen Eindruck mir und gewiß auch andern sein von auffallend feiner Frisiertheit umrahmtes Racheantlitz machte! ” (327). One could read these lines as mere comic-grotesque, in which the reduced plot of Die Räuber serves Walser as a pretext for improvisation and linguistic mannerism. To do so, however, would be to ignore the fact that Walser’s improvisation is also a redescription , that is, an interpretation � 15 Walser’s quick dispatching of the middle section of Die Räuber , for example - “Einer Landschaftsszene voll gewinnender, anheimelnder Aussicht blieb es vorbehalten, die Wehmut eines Herzens, das sich in mancher Beziehung geirrt hatte, eindrucksreich darzustellen” (“Tragödie” 328) - both accurately synopsizes Schiller’s text and pithily lays bare its dramatic ploys and mood-creating techniques. In the words of Yuri Tynianov, the conversion of mimetic staging into metaliterary description “mechanizes the device” of Schiller’s drama, isolating it as a conscious authorial choice and effect-creating technique (“Dostoyevsky and Gogol” 43). But this mechanization is here not put in the service of parodically undermining Schiller’s work, on the assumption that epic grandeur and critical condensation (or analysis) are fundamentally incompatible� To the contrary: Walser’s piece demonstrates the extent to which critical condensation and analysis are integral to epic grandeur - which is to say, the extent to which the inevitable diminishment effected by critical reception is always already part of the literary work, and indeed not just in terms of Schiller’s text, but in terms of literature as such. 16 Certainly, as with Walser’s Macbeth abridgment, one can hardly say that “Die Tragödie” has the same power or effect or even meaning as Die Räuber . And yet, once again, there is no winking complicity here with a reader who delights with the author in cutting Schiller down to size� Walser is not parodying a particular style according to a certain dominant aesthetic norm (or even subjective aesthetic tastes). If he is parodying anything, it is rather the very idea of a dominant aesthetic norm that makes literary parodies possible in the first place: the idea that exposing the hidden inauthenticity or borrowed authority of certain works through satirical miniaturization is a good weapon in the (in Mauthner’s words) “Kampf[] gegen dunkle Schatten unserer literarischen Republik” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1878] 8). Walser retells the literature he has read Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 255 or seen in the mode of memory and multitasking - in effect, in the “distracted” mode of Mauthner’s housewife - but this is no longer a mockery of either the work or its recipient� It is rather a playfully serious representation of the fact that this fusion of pathos, performativity, abridgment, and recapitulation within the experience of art reception is both the unavoidable consequence of the “Markt für geistige Ware” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1897] 11) that Mauthner decries and the logical result of the “Vertiefung in die Meisterwerke unserer großen Dichter” (Introduction to Nach Berühmten Mustern [1878] 5) that he extols� Bildungsbürgertum saw miniaturization as laughable - but, as Walser’s recapitulations show, its own valorization of literary grandeur was already a contribution to the smallness it derided, insofar as it equated smallness and non -master status with derisability� “Von Bratkartoffeln zu reden, wo Werte umgewertet werden sollten, war arg,” writes Walser in another piece (marvelously titled “Ibsens Nora oder die Rösti”) (27)� Arg it may be - but, so long as one consumes books along with one’s hash browns, it is also an inevitable part of the activity of literature itself. Mauthner’s synopses, truncating the literary work’s story to emphasize its style, deprive the work of its idea ; Walser’s synopses, filtering the literary work through spectatorship and circumstance, deprive it of its privilege � The downsizing of literature emerges as either its parody - or as a critique of the very aesthetic ideology that makes such downsizing parodic in the first place. Notes 1 “Ich erkläre […], daß die Glosse, obwohl sie, streng genommen und vom bepolsterten Stuhl der schriftstellerischen Sittlichkeit aus angeschaut, eine Verdorbenheit repräsentiert, klein von Gestalt, wie sie ist, indem man sie um ihres geringen Umfanges willen bequem placieren kann, nach überallhin wirkt, und wenn sie einigen Eindruck macht, wie rührt dann ihren Empfänger ihre zarte Beseeltheit, die ihn mit stiefmütterchenhafter Großäugigkeit gefaßt anschaut” (Walser, “Die Glosse” 289). 2 “Denn die Freude am Glossologischen und am Lachen umklammern von vornherein die subordiniert vorgebrachten Einwände und Ängste” (Fuchs 141)� 3 On the allusion to Kuprin’s novel, see the editors’ note to “Der falsche Ganina” in Walser, Sämtliche Werke , vol. 19, 474—75. 4 As Walser jokingly admits: “Nein, der Glossist sitzt auf dem Rosse seines schönen und unschönen Berufes keineswegs einsam, vielmehr steht seine Figur in Reih und Glied eines Heeres von solchen eingegliedert da, die für ihre Anstrengungen im Menschheitsdienst höchstens einen, wenn vielleicht 256 Erica Weitzman auch nur flüchtigen, Nasenstüber als Belohnung eingeheimst haben” (“Die Glosse” 288)� On the feuilleton as a form of both popular literary criticism and communicative skim-reading, see Wildenhahn, esp. 34—35. 5 In this, Mauthner’s parodies as well as his parody-theory correspond to the popular description of parody offered by Schopenhauer: “Ihr Verfahren besteht darin, daß sie den Vorgängen und Worten eines ernsthaften Gedichtes oder Dramas unbedeutende, niedrige Personen, oder kleinliche Motive und Handlungen unterschiebt� Sie subsumirt also die von ihr dargestellten platten Realitäten unter die im Thema gegebenen hohen Begriffe, unter welche sie nun in gewisser Hinsicht passen müssen, während sie übrigens denselben sehr inkongruent sind; wodurch dann der Widerstreit zwischen dem Angeschauten und dem Gedachten sehr grell hervortritt” (Schopenhauer 113)� 6 Jochen Greven does connect Walser’s work to Mauthner - and more generally, to “einer Epoche von Sprachskepsis, Sprachkrise und Sprachkritik” - concluding, “Auf den epochalen Sprachzweifel waren unterschiedliche Antworten möglich, wie die literarische Entwicklung gezeigt hat. Robert Walsers war die eines bis in die Groteske getriebenen Verfahrens mit dem Zitathaften, eines parodierend-experimentierenden Spiels mit Sprache in einer metasprachlichen Dimension” (29). This connection, however, still overlooks the ways in which Walser’s play with language fundamentally differs from the parodic japery of his immediate forebears� 7 “die Glossierung [ist] immer auch ein Verfahren der Komik […], das eine Lachgemeinschaft zwischen dem Ich und dem Leser stiften will” (Fuchs 132)� 8 In the 1897 introduction, Mauthner lightly chides himself for having “geistige Führer wie Heyse und Spielhagen ähnlich [behandelt] wie den Modelitteraten Sacher-Masoch und seinesgleichen,” and congratulates himself for at least letting “meine große Lieblinge” Gottfried Keller and Ludwig Anzengruber off the hook (7). 9 As Genette comments further on: “Vulgar pastiche-makers […] like to stuff their imitations with additional comical and satirical effects: puns, anachronisms, clever allusions to the person and work of the model’s author, parodic plays on the names of characters, etc. - all of which are nonessential to the caricatural purpose but act as functional indices or signs” (89)� 10 On sexualization and linguistic nonsense as aspects of Mauthner’s parodies, see, respectively, Vierhufe 192—93 and 194—200. 11 As Freytag’s book ends: “Vielleicht wirken die Taten und Leiden der Vorfahren noch in ganz anderer Weise auf unsere Gedanken und Werke ein, als wir Lebenden begreifen. Aber es ist eine weise Fügung der Weltordnung, Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 257 daß wir nicht wissen, wie weit wir selbst das Leben vergangener Menschen fortsetzen, und daß wir nur zuweilen erstaunt merken, wie wir in unsern Kindern weiter leben. Vielleicht bin ich ein Stück von jenem Manne, welcher einst an dieser Stelle von dem Reformator gesegnet wurde, und vielleicht war ich es selbst in anderer Erscheinung, der schon auf diesem Berge lagerte, lange bevor die ehrwürdige Feste gebaut wurde. Aber meine Valerie hatte keiner von den alten Knaben, keiner saß meinem Henner am Arbeitstisch gegenüber, um liberale Artikel zu schreiben, und keiner sah wie wir von dieser Höhe hinab in die Landschaft eines großen deutschen Volkes, welches über der Arbeit ist, das Haus seines Staates zu zimmern. Was wir uns selbst gewinnen an Freude und Leid durch eigenes Wagen und eigene Werke, das ist doch immer der beste Inhalt unseres Lebens, ihn schafft sich jeder Lebende neu. Und je länger das Leben einer Nation in den Jahrhunderten läuft, um so geringer wird die zwingende Macht, welche durch die Taten des Ahnen auf das Schicksal des Enkels ausgeübt wird, desto stärker aber die Einwirkung des ganzen Volkes auf den einzelnen und größer die Freiheit, mit welcher der Mann sich selbst Glück und Unglück zu bereiten vermag. Dies aber ist das Höchste und Hoffnungsreichste in dem geheimnisvollen Wirken der Volkskraft” (1344)� 12 The reference is to Hegel’s famous phrase in the Phänomenologie des Geistes (352)� 13 As Yuri Tynianov asks, “on that knife’s edge where the comic essence of the parodic genre and the comedic elements of the work being parodied both disappear, we can ask: is the point really in the comic? ” (“On Parody” 299—300). The example that leads Tynianov to ask this question differs significantly from Walser’s works (and could be said to be more fraud than parody); however, the question itself is no less applicable to Walser’s case. 14 Hegel also co-implicates the spectator in comic parabasis, but his interest obviously lies less in what this means for the artwork than in the self-consciousness it implies and the sublation of the artwork that it should eventually enable (see Hegel 541-44)� 15 On literary summary as an act of interpretation, see Genette 242—43. 16 Thus Walser’s abbreviated rewritings are significantly more sophisticated than the parodic “process of mimicry” Valerie Heffernan has read them as, by which Walser would “call into question the power structures and institutions of authority that pervade his literary milieu” (64) conceived as monolithic cultural hegemon� 258 Erica Weitzman Works Cited Freytag, Gustav. Die Ahnen. Ungekürzte Ausgabe . Berlin: Kurt Wolff, 1872. Fuchs, Annette. 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