Mediating Marginality: Ekphrasis and the Outsider in Christoph Geiser’s Das geheime Fieber

Abstract

Mediating Marginality: Ekphrasis and the Outsider in Christoph Geiser’s Das geheime Fieber Thyra E. Knapp As a man on the margins, the first-person narrator in Christoph Geiser’s Das geheime Fieber is driven by desire: the desire to seek out and possess the sensuous young boys depicted in paintings by the Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). Because his objects of desire are merely images captured in oil on canvas, the only way the narrator is able to experience and engage them is to transpose what he sees into literature. This act of intersemiotic transposition is nothing new; from ancient Greece to modern-day Berlin, from poetry to prose, art works have often served as catalysts for the production of literary language (see Boehm and Pfotenhauer; Hagstrum; Schmitz-Emans; Weisstein). Indeed, the narrative potential of the visual arts is most evident in the act of ekphrasis: the use of verbal means to evoke the visual image of an art work, either real or imagined, in the mind’s eye (see Heffernan; Mitchell; Scott). Although in recent decades ekphrasis has become “a highly codified conceptual site that hosts inquiries into logocentrism, aesthetic autonomy, and the interplay of description and narration” (Spinozzi 223), this codification has not yet been considered through the particular lens of alterity employed here. While much research in the field is devoted to the results of these ekphrastic acts, this article argues that in many cases it is the transposition itself that is of greatest interest, the means of production rather than its ends. Analyzed here in a new and specific role, ekphrasis is redefined in form and function as an act that gives voice to the marginalized first-person narrator in contemporary prose. Taking Geiser’s 1987 novel as evidence, this analysis shows that by engaging already extant paintings from his perspective on the fringes of society, the narrator creates something entirely new: literary portraits that reflect his own, individual experience as an outsider. In the act of ekphrastic narration, the man uncovers previously unexplored elements of canonical paintings while simultaneously identifying and mediating the realities of his own marginality. Geiser’s narrator is a modern-day writer obsessed with the art works and personal life of Caravaggio. The man’s fascination with the painter drives him to seek out the artist’s creations, visiting the locations in which Caravaggio lived and worked. His quest begins close to home in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, but he eventually travels to Rome, Naples, Sicily, and Malta, consciously [End Page 419] mirroring the trajectory of Caravaggio’s tumultuous life and untimely death. This convoluted text is told on three narrative levels: the narrator’s present-day experiences, the historical world of Caravaggio, and the imagined scenes represented in the artist’s paintings. These three levels are “verschränkt,” folded into one another. They complicate the structure of Geiser’s novel, allowing the author to shift temporalities without indicating these transitions. As Ruth Schori puts it, the text “kreist [...] in assoziativer Bewegung um die von der Situation evozierten Felder” (62–66), an effect that gives the reader the same feeling of disorientation experienced by the narrator and Caravaggio and most startlingly achieved through the presence of ekphrastic passages that are neither introduced nor explained. In the course of Geiser’s novel, more than twenty paintings are engaged by the narrator, resulting in ekphrases ranging from mere allusions to paintings to detailed excursions into the picture plane. Each painting provides the main character an opportunity to locate reflections of his own homoerotic desire, here awakened by Caravaggio’s seductive portrayals of young men, martyrs, and saints. By identifying with the subjects of these paintings and transposing what he sees into language, the narrator is able to give voice to his own marginalized condition. While the sufferings of a narrator positioned on the margins of society remain a recurring motif in twentieth-century literature, Geiser’s treatment of this main character, and his narrative doppelgänger in the personage of Caravaggio, deserve further investigation. Both figures, the writer and the painter, can be categorized not only as men conflicted by their homosexual desires, but also as characters who do...