Brentano’s Remains: Visual and Verbal Bricolage in Gockel, Hinkel und Gackeleia (1838)

Abstract

THE GERMAN ROMANTIC POET Clemens Brentano published two versions of the fairy tale Gockel, Hinkel, Gackeleia, in 1811 and 1838, the latter, greatly expanded work, with an extravagantly lengthy programmatic preface outlining an aesthetic of what I shall call here remaindering-an assemblage of human, doll, and animal forms inspired by Gerumpel,1 his grandmother's moldering collection of clothing scraps, jewelry, dried flowers, Christmas decorations, and cut-out pictures. Addressing his Grosmutterchen (who is in reality the middle-aged Marianne von Willemer2), the author describes his collage method for framing his tale within what is itself also a paratextual frame, the Herzliche Zueignung. He is using already cut out and recombined once before, cycling back to their origins:. . . ja, du Kranzewinderin, Kronenbinderin, Strauserkrauslerin, aus deinen vielen getrockneten Blumensammlungen habe ich gestohlen, und von dir habe ich gelernt, . . . diese Blumen dir zur Erheiterung um ein Mahrchen herum zu befestigen, wie du sie deinen Freunden mit jenem Gummi, das aus der Rinde der arabischen Acacia vera quillt, um artige Bilder und Reime in schoner Anordnung auf Papier zu heften pflegst. Aus deiner grosen Gallerie ausgeschnittener Bildchen habe ich den grosten Theil der artigen Figurchen, welche ich hier, gleich dir, in scherz[-] und ernsthafter Combination zu einem Bilderbuche zusammengeklebt habe, und zwar von dir fur dich. (8-9)[. . . yes, you wreath maker, crown binder, bouquet gatherer, I have stolen from your many collections of dried flowers and I have learned . . . for your entertainment to glue these flowers around a fairy tale, just as you did for your friends, with that gum that flows out of the bark of the Arabian Acacia vera, by neatly attaching charming pictures and verses to paper. Drawing mostly on your large gallery of cut-out pictures, I have pasted together, as you do, this picture book of neat little images, in a combination that is both playful and serious-coming from you as they do, I dedicate them to you.]As a child, the author reports, he cut out money from gold paper, and church donations from sugar paper still carrying the traces of the cakes baked on it (14).3 Yet the actual scraps that are cut and pasted into the fairy tale belong as much to the world of high art as to folk art. The second version of the tale was published with a series of lithographs commissioned and actively overseen by Brentano and including at least one illustration by the poet himself. The frontispiece illustration (fig. 1), based on conceptions by Ludwig Emil Grimm, is an exuberant Rungian arabesque with borrowings as well from Albrecht Durer's marginal drawings for the prayerbook of Maximilian I, from previous illustrations by Grimm for the Kinderlieder (Children's Songs) of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn) and the Altdanische Heldenlieder (Old Danish Epic Songs), and from Franz Graf von Pocci's Festkalender (Festival Calendar).4 The frontispiece playfully and protosurrealistically sets up the egg symbolism of the fairy tale,5 including images of an Easter bunny laying an egg, a child emerging from a broken eggshell, a child looking into an egg basket, a stork with a swaddled baby in its beak, alongside numerous arabesque elements such as cherubs, an angel holding a star above a lily, and a strong vertical composition borrowed from Philipp Otto Runge and his Tageszeiten (Times of the Day) cycle (fig. 2). In Gerard Genette's terms a paratext6-a threshold to the book itself-the frontispiece also features a self-portrait of the artist, as well as an allusion to Marianne von Willemer's ballet performance as harlequin in 1799 (Busch and Maisak 196), a harlequin emerging from an egg.The frontispiece arabesque and the other illustrations for the fairy tale need to be read in dialogue with the text they accompany, as indeed illustrations more broadly have begun to be analyzed as constitutive of a literary work's meaning and not merely as supplemental, even servile embellishments. …