Modernist Aesthetics in Joseph Roth's "Radetzkymarsch": The Crisis of Meaning and the Role of the Reader

Abstract

Joseph Roth's narrative of fin-de-siecle Austro-Hungary depicts an aesthetic transition from realism to a modernist subversion of realist conventions.1 Although the novel contains such realistic devices as a fictional world anchored in a specific time and place, a plot with a credible ending, plausible characters, and an omniscient narrator, Roth subverts the thematics of destiny and the strategies of illusion-hallmark traits of late realism.2 In particular, Roth punctures the realist illusion of the wholeness of the text with a self-reflexiveness ubiquitous in German Romantic works which not only exposes the machinations that produce mimesis, but also subverts the basis of realism, the tacit assumption that fictional reality contains an intrinsic order. This use of Romantic irony addressed to the reader challenges the presupposition that an irreversible cause-and-effect sequence of events shapes the protagonists' inevitable destinies and draws attention to the process of narration. This self-reflexiveness creates a self-consciousness of the text as artistic artifact in which the author's aesthetic shaping of the narrative through linguistic devices, not an intrinsic cosmic or historical force, creates order among disparate events and alerts readers to their own role in the aesthetic enterprise of producing meaning. This self-conscious depiction of the text's order and meaning as products of increasingly obsolete linguistic stratagems of the nineteenth-century novel exposes the precarious role of language in transforming a chaotic reality into a meaningful narrative and demands the readers' participation in discovering/constructing the text's meaning. Although the fictional works of Roth's contemporary, Carl Einstein, an anti-realist novelist and art critic, differ from Roth's, his aesthetic theories reveal the debates concerning the novel of Roth's generation and shed light on modernist aspects of Roth's work. Einstein distinguishes between a self-conscious, artistic order imposed upon fictional reality and one that appears inherent in the world of mimetic novels. In an essay Uber den Roman (1914) Einstein notes that the plot of a psychological novel is based upon the logical development of cause and effect, a psychologically motivated chain of events.3 He proposes an alternative novelistic form ruled not by psychological motivation, but by the randomness of auctorial caprice: Also das Kunstwerk ist Sache der Willkur (Einstein 127). As Neil Donahue notes: notion of arbitrariness undermines the logical connectedness required for naturalistic depiction in visual or verbal art [...].4 In this alternative art form, laws of formal composition as an aesthetic order replace the order of logical causality in mimetic art. Einstein perceived causality and artistic form as opposites and believed that a chronological ordering of events as a linear sequence of causes and effects destroyed the autonomous, closed form of the total work of art.5 Roth's work is transitional because it consists of a balancing act between Einstein's two paradigms for the novel. At first reading, the decline of the empire appears to be the result of an inevitable historical destiny, the teleological design of a realist novel that consists of a linear cause-and-effect sequence of events. The narrator's intrusive commentary, however, calls attention to authorial manipulation of the narrative that is so pervasive in German Romantic, modernist, and postmodernist prose. The narrator subverts the illusion of an inherent order, often depicted as fate in nineteenth-century fiction, through self-reflexive commentary on the storytelling process that fictionalizes events through the techniques of mimesis and verisimilitude, which create meaning. Both this questioning of an intrinsic order and the allusions to an arbitrary aesthetic one in Roth's novel underscore art's dubious role in imposing order onto a chaotic world. Specifically, cyclical, repetitive aesthetic patterns and the leitmotif, a prevalent technique in music, subvert the novel's linear plot and mimetic function. …