Pre-Positioning the Narrator: Circumspection, Speaking-For, and Foreknowledge in Adalbert Stifter’s “Granit”

Abstract

This article explores Adalbert Stifter’s “Granit” (1852/53) as a paradigmatic text for tracing the narrator’s position against the backdrop of postclassical narratology. Specifically, the article uses the interrelations of perception, speech, and knowledge in what can be referred to as “prepositional” thought: in notions of circumspection, speaking-for, and foreknowledge as they unfold over the course of the story. By juxtaposing two different kinds of narrators—the first-person frame narrator and the oral storyteller of the embedded stories—“Granit” brings to the fore issues of authority, reliability, and memory. At the same time, it challenges the histoire/discours binary, unsettles any rigid narrator-audience relationship, and presents the grand narrative of a community in dialogue with a personal petit récit.