When students and critics of the novel speak of German
artist-novels and Bildungsromane, they mention works long available
in translation: by Goethe, Novalis, Hoffmann, Stifter, Keller, or
more recently by Mann, Kafka, Musil, Grass, and others. Yet Eduard
Morike's provocatively subtitled Maler Nolten: Novelle in Zwei
Teilen (Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts, 1832) has
remained neglected and misunderstood, and has never been translated
into English until now. This despite its obvious ties to other
artist-novels and its striking modernity in playing with
conventions of narrative authority and heroic identity, features
that have recently begun to be realized by scholarship. Witness the
subtle irony of the opening sequence, in which Morike's narrator is
subverted by hints at his own clumsiness and intimations about the
dire truths that lurk behind the protagonist's relationships to his
male friends and to the seductive yet somehow frightening women in
his life. Or the interplay between the narrator's attempts to make
sense of Nolten's complex inner motivations in his loves and art
and the ludicrously pompous pathos with which Nolten persists in
speaking and thinking, as he concocts a heroic persona caught up in
passion, intrigue, and tragedy. Fascinating, finally, is the
mysterious trail of the "Grenzganger," or border-line characters,
such as the Gypsy Elisabeth, the queer Wispel, the duplicitous
actor Larkens, and the mysterious old Hofrat, with their hints at
the dimension of "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves" that seems to
threaten and at the same time to foster the complex unfolding of
the realities of life and art that defy Nolten's all-too-artful
"mastery." Raleigh Whitinger is professor in the Department of
Germanic Languages, University of Alberta.
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