Double Exposures: Repetition and Realism in Nineteenth-Century German Fiction

Abstract

Downing, Eric. Double Exposures: Repetition and Realism in Nineteenth-Century German Fiction. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. 338 pp. $65.00 hardcover. Reviewing books, sometimes considered the drudge work of the profession, can on occasion be a genuine pleasure. Only on rare occasions have I read and enjoyed a book as much as Eric Downing's Double Exposures; most impressive are his lucidity, his sensitivity to textual detail, his theoretical sophistication, and the cogency of his argumentation. What is most significant about this work is its theoretical framework, which draws on previous work (including my own), yet goes beyond it in intriguing and productive ways. Downing claims that realism is not only invested with the compulsion to repeat a previously encountered reality, but also with a resistance to that very repetition. Thus in theories of realism, but especially in the texts of realism one finds in conflict both a movement toward repetition, which is manifested on levels from the linguistic to the thematic, and a self-- conscious, self-deconstructive proclivity that undoes or at least threatens to undo, everything that repetition has propagated. According to Downing, for example, the norms of realism, firmly associated with middle-class life, are simultaneously affirmed and questioned by the fictions of the mid-nineteenth century. While most commentators have taken realism to be something simple or mono-directional, Downing regards realism as a prototypical discourse that works incessantly against itself. Double Exposures consists of an introduction, a conclusion, and six interpretive chapters. The authors and works Downing treats are familiar from the realist canon, although a few works are less frequently cited in the literature. Chapters two and three deal with the writings of Adalbert Softer: first the celebrated preface to his Bunte Steine, in which he outlines something of his own model for realist writing, and then a brilliant interpretation of chiastic mimesis in Der Hochwald. I oversimplify greatly in reducing the intricate and patient exegeses to sentences or phrases, but with regard to the Preface Downing wants to demonstrate that the suppression of imagination and desire, hallmarks of Stifter's efforts throughout his career is itself accomplished only by exercising imagination and desire. In his analysis of the novella Downing shows how the text is an instantiation of this dual and contradictory movement, focusing in particular on vision and the image of the telescope. The following chapter, on Gottfried Keller's Sieben Legenden, revisits the question of repetition, this time as an inner literary matter; here Downing is particularly interested in the statue and its implication for a realist program, as well as the sensuality of the body and its demise. In chapter five Downing turns to Theodor Storm's novella Viola Tricolor, in which repetition is an obvious theme; in this analysis he is interested not only in the literary resonance of the second wife, the Ligeia impulse, but more centrally in the complex interplay of desire and repetition that structures the work and comments ambivalently on its connection to a realist aesthetics. Although the work on Stifter, Keller, and Storm is extremely persuasive, I found the final two interpretations, which examine Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Die Hochzeit des Monchs and Wilhelm Raabe's Stopfkuchen, to be the most compelling and challenging. …