Colossal Scrawls and Divine Naughts: Images of Formlessness in Gottfried Keller’s Der grüne Heinrich and Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten

Abstract

Abstract In Robert Walser’s novel Jakob von Gunten (1909), a specific metanarrative revolves around the long-standing opposition between form and formlessness. This metanarrative redefines the ill-reputed non-form, establishing it as the core of aesthetic and linguistic productivity. At the same time, it provides insights into the literary precursors and theoretical contexts that reverberate throughout the novel. Literary resonances include Gottfried Keller’s canonical work Der grüne Heinrich, whose images of formlessness are adapted and transformed in Jakob von Gunten. On a theoretical level, it is a contemporary strand of Formal Aesthetics that elucidates the form-conceptual innovations in Jakob von Gunten. Reconstructing the references that structure the novel and its underlying poetology of form, this article reviews a literary manifestation of the theory of form that shapes the aesthetic discourse in the 1900 s.