Performing Boredom inEffi Briest:On the Effects of Narrative Speed

Abstract

Effi Briest is a book. This is not the kind of critical judgment one normally makes, and for two reasons. First, comes across as negative and banal, and academic criticism's task is generally not to disparage its object but rather to unfold that object's complexity. Second, and more important, it is an emotionally laden appraisal that ventures away from the work itself and into the realm of affective response. For both these reasons, declaring a work boring is bad critical form. But what if one could develop a concept of boredom that is both positive and based on textual evidence? What if one could show that boredom is pre cisely the point of a book like Effi Briest? Boredom, in this sense, would denote not a narrative defect but a narrative strategy; it would become an object of interest. In what follows, I attempt to locate just this notion of boredom in Effi Briest, one based on Langeweile, the German equivalent of boredom. Langeweile literally means a long while, and it describes a particular rela tionship to time in which time seems to stretch and drag on. This specific sense of boredom permeates all levels of Effi Briest. My argument for the centrality of boredom in Fontane's novel has three stages. First, it expounds in more detail this specifically German sense of boredom and shows how Effi suffers not only from a lack of distraction but also and primarily from a time that has grown long. Second, it treats the per formative dimension of boredom in the novel. By analyzing the relationship of narrative time to narrated time, it demonstrates how the novel effects the very boredom that it describes in its eponymous heroine. While the novel casts boredom as a problem of time becoming long, it also calibrates the act of narration such that the time of reading becomes longer when Effi is bored. Finally, on the basis of these findings, I return to the frequently discussed gaps, or lacunae, in Fontane's narrative style. Scholars have noted that the novel never describes its most important events directly. It prefers merely to hint at the intimate affair that remains obscure until Innstetten discovers the com promising letters. These gaps and ambiguities have often been studied as interesting aberrations within a novelistic practice that is supposedly realis tic. Only once their function is located within a narrative calculus of boredom,