German Life and Letters 37:4 July 1984 0016-8777 52.00

‘VERWIRRUNG’ IN DEB BLONDE ECKBERT

BY DAVID HORTON

There seems to be no limit to the exegetical ingenuity brought to bear by critics on Tieck’s elusive tale Der blonde Eckbert (1796), one of the most challenging examples of early Romantic short prose fiction. Particularly in recent years there have been numerous attempts to identify a rational and coherent sense behind the story’s mystifying sequence of events and to locate some form of pattern in the suggestive symbolism which pervades the slight text. Clearly, a story which is characterized by such overtly allegorical features as this is, with its strange journeys through surreal terrain, wondrous worlds of idyllic silvan isolation, witch- like women of fluid identity and magic birds laying priceless eggs, is bound by dint of its very narrative convention to invite the reader to seek an implicit meaning and thus to elicit a profusion of conflicting critical responses. A work which seems to defy generic definition by so provocatively fusing topoi of the ‘Volksmarchen’ with an ostensibly realistic level of action, interlocking its supernatural and psychological dimensions and ultimately completely obfuscating the distinct spheres of reality from which the action proceeds, inevitably presents the reader with a fascinating hermeneutic puzzle.

Critics have shown little restraint in their efforts to meet the challenge provided by Der blonde Eckbert and have subjected it to a variety of approaches, many of which have revealed interesting currents in the tale. By far the most popular of these lines of enquiry is the tendency to reduce the action of the story to the level of a paradigm of diverse psychotic conditions (persecution mania, self-destructive guilt consciousness, pronounced narcissism, paranoia, failure to mature) or to read it in the context of doctrinaire psychoanalytical thought. But the tale has also been placed against the background of Tieck’s biography and interpreted as the expression of its author’s obsessions and youthful fantasies. * It has been used by materialistic critics as a cardinal example in attempts to explore the sociology of Romantic literature and has, more generally, been viewed as a literary representation of the inherent paradox of Romantic man. Philosophical inter- pretations which abstract even more heavily from the text have also been advanced. It is an interesting comment on the inscrutability of this text that so many commentators have had recourse to extrinsic criteria in their efforts to provide a cogent view of the tale’s meaning. The majority of critics, in fact, have found themselves tempted to impose all-embracing systems onto the text from without and to graft (often most forcibly) rational schemes onto a chain of events which seems ultimately to defy reduction to a unified semantic level. That recalcitrant features of the tale are frequently ignored in such interpretations seems to be an inevitable consequence of the desire to arrive at a neatly systematic explanation of this nebulous and highly confusing story.

Despite the assiduity of many commentators, it has hitherto proved impossible to produce a satisfying and comprehensive view of Der blonde Eckbert. Conflicting opinions on the implications of the work are based on such widely divergent

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readings of the text that they often appear absolutely irreconcilable. Agreement is rarely reached even on the most fundamental premisses of attempts at inter- pretation. The reason for this is that a considerable number of particularly awkward problems are posed by the work, questions which need to be addressed in any discussion which strives to synthesize the various constituent elements of the text in a convincing inclusive interpretation. What, for example, is the precise relation- ship between Bertha’s story and the Eckbert-action, or between the supernatural and psychological levels? How are we to interpret the ‘Probezeit’, a notion introduced so tantalizingly at the end of the story, or the implications of the incestuous marriage? What does the old woman mean by the ‘rechte Bahn’ which she warns Bertha not to leave? What symbolic value is to be ascribed to the world of ‘Waldeinsamkeit’, to the old woman, the dog and the bird? What about the problem of ethical responsibility and the nature of Bertha’s guilt? All these questions are crucial in any attempt to unravel the mysteries of the tale, and so often they are simplified, distorted, forced unhappily into tenuous arguments, or conveniently overlooked. Few stories taunt the reader with as many loose ends or blind motifs as Der blonde Eckbert seems to, and it is by their ability to subsume precisely such disparate elements that any attempts at interpretation must be judged.

It is not my intention here to advance the defeatist view that Tieck’s story is uninterpretable. This thesis has, of course, already been put forward, but it seems to me both to do an injustice to several stimulating, if not wholly unproblematic, analyses of the story, and to disregard the fact that despite the many inconsistencies it is possible to make valid (but very restricted) general statements on the tale’s implications.5 It is where efforts are made to refine such basic statements that difficulties arise. Rather I would agree with Martin Swales that the questions posed by Der blonde Eckbert ‘are not susceptible of one single, unambiguous answer’, and I would assert further that the critics’ determination to identify a single, unifying sense in the work even runs counter to Tieck’s intentions in writing the tale in the first place. Not for nothing has bewilderment always been characteristic of readers’ responses to the tale; indeed, as early as 1797 one of the first contem- porary reviewers of the work was much perturbed by what he saw as a ‘ganzlicher Mange1 einer befriedigenden Aufklarung’ at the end of the story, and one finds it difficult to fault this reaction today, almost two centuries later. ’ The disorien- tation of the reader of Der blonde Eckbert appears on closer scrutiny to be so calculated and so complete that one is led to the conclusion that it is precisely this mystification that the work contrives to produce, confounding the reader with a.web of motifs and stubbornly refusing to offer any reliable clue to its innermost mechanisms. The consequence of such an absence of firm co-ordinates in the story is not that it ‘defies analysis’, but rather that it is susceptible of a great variety of interpretations, that it is, in its opacity, thoroughly polysemantic. Several critics have remarked that the reader of the work is drawn into the very hermeneutic process in which Bertha and Eckbert are themselves involved and is, like the characters in the action, confronted with a puzzle to which he is challenged to find a solution. Whilst this is undoubtedly true, there has as yet been no attempt to demonstrate how Tieck confuses the reader by engaging him in the interpretative

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operations of the text through his narrative structure. I intend here to explore the techniques by means of which the author secures the disorientation of the reader and to show how this hermeneutic uncertainty mirrors the inability of the protagonists to decipher the action of which they are a part. Such a shift in emphasis from the interpretation of the work to an analysis of its mode of presentation can, I believe, provide valuable insight into Tieck’s narrative skill.

In his essay ‘Shakespeare’s Behandlung des Wunderbaren’ (1 793) Tieck argues that it is above all the English dramatist’s ability to coax the spectator to suspend his disbelief and to follow the writer into a world of illusion that constitutes his genius. In his treatise, whose relevance to the ‘Marchennovellen’ P. G . Klussmann has already emphasized, Tieck explores the curious relationship between the familiar and the strange, the natural and the supernatural, the real and the dream- like. ’’ Using The Tempest as his prime example, he isolates several features which he regards as fundamental to the effective use of fantasy in literature. In Tieck’s view the ‘magischer Kreis’ (35) of poetry is able, by placing the reader in a state of complete and sustained ‘Verwirrung’ and anaesthetizing ‘den richtenden Verstand’ (44), to induce in him a trance (‘schoner Wahnsinn’) in which the laws of reality are dissolved and yet an air of familiarity remains. ‘I As in a dream, the distinction between real and fantastic phenomena is blurred, disorientating the subject:

‘VERWIRRUNG’ IN DER BLONDE ECKBERT

Wir verlieren in einer unaufhorlichen Verwirrung den Massstab, nach dem wir sonst die Wahrheit zu messen pflegen . . . der Faden ist hinter uns abgerissen, der uns durch das rathselhafte Labyrinth leitete; und wir geben uns am Ende vollig den Unbegreiflichkeiten preis. Das Wunderbare wird uns jetzt gewohnlich und naturlich (44).

Tieck opens his essay by arguing for a poetic world of total illusion which bears no relation to the commonplace, but he passes swiftly on to his real concern, the fascinating and bewildering dialectic of ‘das Wunderbare’ and ‘das Gewohnliche’ . Far from keeping these distinct, Tieck continues, the writer is able to allow the two to complement each other and to interact: even in the realm of the super- natural a certain probability is evident (41, 42, 64, 67), and although we are deprived of any ‘Massstab’ which might provide us with a means of orientation, the confused world of the imagination, like that of the dream, provides new bearings which we grow to accept:

Die ganze Welt von Wunderbarem ist es, die unsere Phantasie in manchen Traumen so lange beschaftiget, wo wir auf eine Zeitlang ganz die Analogie unserer Begriffe verlieren und uns eine neue erschaffen, und wo alles diesen neuen Begriffen entspricht (45).

The delicate and precarious balance between alienation (’das Seltsame’ , ‘das Abenteuerliche’) and identification (’das gewohnliche Leben’), between complete disorientation and the sense of some rationality, keeps the reader in ‘einer gewissen Verwirrung’ (55), a state in which the fantastic becomes familiar, and vice versa. ’’

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‘Venvirrung’, then, is the condition which the author strives to induce in the reader by confounding his sense of reality and delivering him up entirely to the writer’s aesthetic game. The blend of rationality and irrationality confuses the reader by depriving him of the ability to distinguish between ‘Wahrheit’ and ‘Irrthum’ (57). The spheres of illusion and reality, now virtually identical, can co-exist unproblematically, completely conflated. In his essay Tieck extends the principle of ‘Verwirrung’ outlined here to prose fiction generally (64), and the relevance of his statements on the potential of the supernatural in drama to his own tales is confirmed some years later when he echoes the ideas - and even the very formulations - of the Shakespeare essay in the framework narrative of the first volume of Phantasus (1812), referring specifically to the relationship between ‘das Alltagliche’ and ‘das Wundervollste’ in stories like Der blonde Eckbert and Der Runenberg:

In diesen Natur-Marchen mischt sich das Liebliche mit dem Schrecklichen, das Seltsame mit dem Kindischen, und verwirrt unsere Phantasie bis zum poetischen Wahnsinn, um diesen selbst nur in unserem Innern zu losen und frei zu machen. l 3

The search for rationality and meaning pervades Der blonde Eckbert. Long before Philipp Walther utters the fateful name of the dog, the crucial mechanism on which the entire work hinges, we find Bertha in her own story trying to order and make sense of her experiences. The bewilderment of the heroine during her childhood adventure is not just something which is superimposed onto her story by a reflective narrator reporting a series of events which took place some thirty years earlier (the implications of this narrative device will be examined below), but is a confusion central to her perception of the experiences themselves. Thus her escape from her childhood home, a flight which begins ‘fast ohne dass ich es wusste’ ( l l) , is an escape from a situation which she cannot fully comprehend (‘ich wusste nicht; ich konnte gar nicht begreifen’, 1 1)14 It involves her in a journey which is described by Tieck not merely as a progression through unknown surroundings, but, more importantly, in terms of the relationship between those surroundings and Bertha’s perception of her situation, her attempt to identify some degree of familiarity in the increasingly surreal world which she encounters. Bertha’s isolation - her awareness that she is moving away from the realm of human contact - is a key theme in this portrayal. The detail which Tieck provides here can only be justified by its relevance to the process of disorientation - or removal from the real world - in which Bertha is engaged. Her journey away from reality is characterized by great speed of movement (’bald drauf , ‘als’, ‘schon’, ‘jetzt’, ‘bald . . . bald’, ‘nun’, ‘als’, etc., 11-12), by increasing helplessness and intensifying fear (‘erraten’, ‘ furchten’, ‘fiirchterlich’, ‘Angst’, ‘erschrocken’, ‘Entsetzen’), by ascending degrees of remoteness and alienation (‘seltsam’, ‘furchtbar’, ‘schwindlicht’, ‘trostlos’, ‘seltsam’, ‘fremd’), by decreasing clarity of vision as Bertha reaches the mountains (‘neblicht’, ‘grau’, ‘trube’, ‘betrubt’) and ultimately by her vacillation between the desire to die and the determination to survive. The final outcome of her travels is the absolute loss of self-consciousness: ‘am Ende war ich mir meiner kaum noch

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bewusst’ (13). The journey of Bertha, then, is primarily a journey away from the bearings of the familiar world into the realm of the unknown.

Central to Bertha’s narration of her six-year stay in the forest is her emphasis on precisely that interplay of familiarity and strangeness, alienation and acceptance that Tieck explores in his Shakespeare essay of 1793. Her initial perception of her new home as ‘wunderlich’, ‘seltsam’ (‘ein so wunderbares Gemisch, dass es mir immer nicht war, als sei ich envacht, sondern als fiele ich nur in einen andern, noch seltsamern Traum’, 15) gradually gives way to the suspension of ‘Begriffe’ and to complete immersion in the laws of her new ambience. The ‘Seltsame’, ‘Abenteuerliche’ and ‘Ausserordentliche’ recede, and Bertha is more than content to accept this world as a home in which her strange companions replace her family. Is As she grows older, however, alternative modes of existence are suggested to her by her encounter with literature. Her questioning and dissatisfaction are encouraged further when the seed of temptation is planted in her mind by the old woman’s vague and incomprehensible warning about ethical behaviour. The incompatibility of ‘Unschuld’ and ‘Verstand’, offered to us by the narrator as an inescapable truth of individual development, is something of which the child Bertha has no knowledge (17-18). For the moment she is bewildered, deprived of co-ordinates which might guide her towards a correct course of action, and once again she seems to lack the ability to arrive at a conscious decision: ‘es war fast, als wenn mein Vorhaben schon vor mir stande, ohne mich dessen deutlich bewusst zu sein’ (18). Torn by uncertainty and confusion (‘ein seltsamer Kampf in meiner Seele’, 18) she flees again, having relinquished any claim to self- awareness: ‘ich wusste nicht, was ich aus mir selber machen sollte’ (18). The eventual result of this second flight is disappointment with the outside world, renewed isolation and the attempt to gain security by putting the past behind her in her marriage to Eckbert. Her seemingly unproblematic married life with Eckbert has no discernible connection with the strange years of her childhood.

It is the startling disclosure of Philipp Walther that reawakens and compounds Bertha’s disorientation to a fatal degree. O n her deathbed she poses the question which forges the vital link between the psychological confusion of the characters within the action and the hermeneutic disorientation of the reader: from this moment on both the protagonists and we ourselves are engaged in the search for a solution to the same problem. This is much more than a teasing puzzle, for it opens up the horrifying possibility that the world of Bertha’s past and that of the present are interlocked:

1st das Zufall? Hat er den Namen erraten, weiss er ihn, und hat er ihn mit Vorsatz genannt? Und wie h a n g dieser Mensch dann mit meinem Schicksale zusammen? (22)

The heroine’s sudden realization of the invalidity of the distinction between her childhood experiences and the apparently secure and unambiguous reality of her life with Eckbert (a distinction on which her sanity obviously depends) leads to her death. Her end follows as a direct result of the disintegration of her ability to comprehend the rationality of her situation, of her search for an answer to the

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question which has deprived her of all certainty. Aware that she is losing touch wkth reality (‘um meinen Verstand gebracht’, 22), she dies, lost in wonderment at the ominous and unfathomable connection between Walther and the old woman (23).

The Eckbert-action which now follows is a story of similar psychological disorientation and disintegration, and this time the process of growing insanity is presented with an attention to detail which has prompted critics to view the tale as an uncannily intuitive perception of incipient madness. The psychological condition of Eckbert is indeed interesting, but more important in our context is the function of the last third of the tale in terms of its structure. It is Eckbert who carries the questioning procedures of the text further: it is he who must discover the fateful connection between Walther and the old woman and learn the solution to the puzzle which torments Bertha to death, at the same time plunging the reader into a state of confusion (for the reader too, of course, the safe distance between ‘Marchen’ and ‘reality’ has disappeared). Parallels between the inset narrative of Bertha and the concluding tale of Eckbert’s experiences abound. One of the most significant of these, surely, is to be seen in the fact that the solution to the dilemma facing the protagonists involves Eckbert in a process which inverts the sequence described by Bertha’s story. Whereas Bertha flees from the supernatural sphere of ‘Waldeinsamkeit’ and settles with Eckbert, only to be confronted with a shattering insight which causes her destabilization and death, Eckbert, now similarly unable to grasp the reality surrounding him (‘alles ward ihm immer mehr ein Ratsel’, 25), is drawn inexorably to the same supernatural sphere, where he will learn the truth (the common identity of Walther and the old woman) and die, like Bertha, deranged. Thus the question raised by Bertha has been answered. Eckbert’s development after the death of his wife merely serves to confirm that the possibility opened up by Walther’s naming of the dog - that reality and the supernatural are inseparable -has been realized. ‘Marchen’ and ‘wirklicher Lebenslauf , past and present, childhood and maturity have interlocked; all barriers have been dissolved. In terms of the structure of the tale, then, Eckbert picks up the process of cognition where Bertha had left it: he continues the hermeneutic process of the text in his struggle for a meaning. Like Bertha he is destroyed by a crushing awareness of the fluidity of reality and is transported to exactly that state which Tieck, in ‘Shakespeare’s Behandlung des Wunderbaren’, describes in strikingly similar language as ‘Verwirrung’ . He can no longer distinguish between fantasy and normality and has lost any ‘Massstab’ by which he might comprehend the ‘Ratsel’ of his situation:

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Jetzt wares um das Bewusstsein, um die Sinne Eckberts geschehn; er konnte sich nicht aus dem Ratsel herausfinden, ob er jetzt traume, oder ehemals von einem Weibe Bertha getraumt habe; das Wunderbarste vermischte sich mit dem Gewohnlichsten, die Welt um ihn her war verzaubert und er keines Gedankens, keiner Erinnerung machtig (25).

He survives just long enough to hear the revelations of the old woman. Raymond Immerwahr’s notoriously provocative assertion that the old woman’s

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disclosures at the end of Der blonde Eckbert constitute ‘an artistic flaw in an otherwise perfect tale’I6 has led critics to search for ways in which the ending of the story can be connected logically with the events which precede it. One can only construe the final paragraphs of the text as a flaw, of course, if the conclusion to the story remains inconsistent with an otherwise cogent and inclusive explanation of the tale’s significance. In terms of the structure of the work, though, the ending must surely be regarded as a tour de force. For the quest for coherence which it initiates in the reader is precisely what Tieck intended, and the surprising revelations which he withholds until the closing lines, far from representing a ‘crude shocker after the manner of . . . cheap horror literature’, l 7 are, above all else, integral to the hermeneutic bewilderment at which he aims. Having effectively drawn the reader into the search for rationality instigated by Bertha’s problem (‘wie hangt dieser Mensch dann mit meinem Schicksale zusammen’), Tieck first of all provides the solution to that problem and partially satisfies our curiosity by completing a basic pattern of question and response. At the same time, however, he introduces unexpected additional revelations which point far beyond the original puzzle, confounding the issue further. The reader, then, still has some considerable way to go if he is to fathom the mystery completely and to arrive at an overall under- standing of the text. Although the secret of Walther’s knowledge has been divulged and our initial bewilderment to that extent relieved, other potential clues to interpretation present themselves: the scheme of guilt and retribution (‘das Unrecht bestraft sich selbst’, 26); the identity of Hugo; the true identity of Bertha as Eckbert’s half-sister; the idea of a ‘Probezeit’ and the cause of Eckbert’s tragic intuition - all of these facts, which reveal the true course of events to have been vastly different from its surface reality, are now disclosed and challenge the reader, at last privy to the various secrets of the text, to return to the narrative and to attempt to make sense of it in the light of his fresh insight. A fascinating inter- pretative process is instigated at this point, an operation which clearly illustrates the exegetical procedure classically described as the ‘hermeneutic circle’. The reader, having shared the disorientation first of Bertha and then of Eckbert on their journey towards cognition, is finally left to evaluate the implications of the new knowledge granted him. Now that we are fully engaged in the dynamic operations of the text and are aware of all apparent anomalies, it is up to us to strive for the comprehensive understanding of events which is denied Eckbert. Subsequent readings of the work, conducted with the vital pre-knowledge provided by the ending, are constantly modified by our moving back and forth between the previously quite discrete components of the tale and our newly gained sense of its overall configuration. O u r perception of the relationship between individual features and the entire context - a relationship which is crucial if we accept the need of interpretation to expose the intelligibility of a literary work as an organic whole - has been radically altered by the conclusion to the work. In this way we become involved in the circular process of what in reception theory is called ‘consistency building’ (Iser), the attempt to construct patterns which establish coherence among the elements of the text. We are encouraged to project new hypotheses about the tale’s significance, ever striving to balance our inferences in a consistent whole, uniting perspectives in our search for an integrated

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understanding. The question of whether this hermeneutic circle is a vicious circle in the case of Der blonde Eckbert remains to be considered.

The major technique by means of which Tieck places the reader in a state of uncertainty is his skilful dislocation of the chronological sequence. In essence there is nothing complex in this procedure: after all, the withholding of information necessary to a full understanding of what is going on is common in literature which seeks to evoke mystery, and the posing of questions to which answers are revealed only gradually is fundamental to the idea of suspense. Tieck’s technique, though, is considerably more complex. He places Bertha’s retrospective narration within an open-ended frame and shows the workings of the revenge exacted by the old woman, which presumably begin as soon as Bertha flees from the forest (19) and are thus operative in the opening scene in Eckbert’s castle, before revealing them to be such. He rearranges the three sections of his story in such a way that the inset narration from which all the later action springs is placed second, while the bewildering events which follow Bertha’s story reveal the situation in the opening frame to have been very different from its initial appearance. In other words, while Bertha’s childhood adventure (A) chronologically precedes her decision to tell her story (B), and the remainder of the action results from the unforeseeable consequences of this narration (C), Tieck arranges the sequence B-A-C, divulging the connection between the three parts only at the very end. Each of these parts throws light on both of the others, producing a confusing system of interdependences. Only when in possession of all the information gradually revealed during the course of the story is the reader able to transform retrospec- tively his interpretation of events, revising his understanding of passages which had hitherto appeared inexplicable. ” Furthermore, Tieck provides information in the closing lines of the story which offers insight into events preceding even Bertha’s adventure (the circumstances of her birth). The surprise we experience when we reach the end of the work is occasioned not simply by an unmotivated ‘crude shocker’, but above all by our sudden realization that the parts of the whole are interrelated in a way which places the entire action in a new light. Arriving at the end of the tale, we are challenged to reconstruct the true chronology of events in an attempt to determine connections hitherto obscured from us and thus to establish any underlying causality or rationality in the work. Such a rearrange- ment of the time sequence is, of course, absolutely indispensable to the author, who has to construct his text in this way in order to permit the coalescence of the two spheres of action at the end of Bertha’s narration: the dissolution of all distinctions between past and present demands the use of the open-ended frame. Tieck’s unorthodox framework is thus the central formal device by means of which he secures the confusion of the reader. It is important to note, however, that this is not the only means which Tieck uses to bring about disorientation. Even with the insight provided at the end of the work and when in possession of a full understanding of the chronological relationships which obtain in the tale, we are strangely unable to make complete sense of Der blonde Eckbert. There are a number of other obstacles to its interpretation.

Of great interest in this context is the fictional mode of the work. Both Heinz Schlaffer and Martin Swales have demonstrated that Der blonde Eckbert contaminates

330 ‘VERWIRRUNG’ IN DER BLONDE ECKBERT ____ the naive, unreflective innocence of the traditional ‘Volksmarchen’ by suffusing it with an essentially modern psychological dimension. This synthesis of inexplicable irrationality and analytical probing is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Tieck’s story. Swales in particular has examined ways in which the tale ‘suggests a psychological interpretation which challenges the simplicity of the folk-tale register’I9 and disorientates the reader in as far as it ‘sets up a tension of expectations’ within him. Both the narrator and the characters themselves, of course, are engaged in psychological questionings. So torn is the reader between the acquiescence with which he approaches the unproblematic world of the fairy tale and the sense that the events unfolding before him are susceptible of some causal explanation that critics have been tempted to view the work as an ‘Anti- Marchen’.’’ It is indeed true that the oscillation of Der blonde Eckbert between the world of fantasy on the one hand and precise psychoanalytical observation on the other unsettles the reader by thwarting his expectations. But just as important as the register of any particular fictional convention in this context is the actual narrative strategy of Tieck, who confounds us by inserting into his third-person narrative the reminiscences of Bertha, which are related entirely in the first person. The presence of two narrators in the work seems to me to have received insuffi- cient attention, especially in view of the fact that first-person narrative is in itself quite incompatible with the ‘Marchen’ tradition since it introduces an element of reflection and comment alien to the usually uncritical acceptance of supernatural happenings in that genre,

The disruption in point of view caused by the sudden shift in narrative perspective in Der blonde Eckbert inevitably adds to the interpretative difficulties of the reader, who is deprived of any narrative consistency and a sustained authorial voice through which he experiences - and against which he might measure - events. This fragmentation of perspective contributes significantly to the notorious elusiveness of the work. It makes it impossible for the reader to settle into the (apparently) secure continuity of a single narrative level and misleads us by presenting the two spheres of action from different vantage points, thus stressing their distinctness. The switch of narrators is, then, of considerable importance in any consideration of the complex and problematic relationship between the Bertha-action and the Eckbert-plot. For whilst the two levels are initially kept narratively (as well as chronologically) distinct, they gradually come to overlap and impinge on each other. As the past invades the present, as the ‘Marchenhafte’ enters reality and the consequences of Bertha’s childhood transgression become clear in the world of Eckbert’s castle, we witness yet another dissolution of established boundaries in the work. Bertha’s first-person narrative loses its remoteness from the events of the framework action as supernatural and psychological phenomena become mixed in the last part of the tale, obfuscating any clear lines of development. Even the apparent bearings afforded by the separation of the two narrative voices - one detached and ‘contemporary’, the other intimately involved and ‘historical’ - emerge as false, and a further point of orientation is lost. The juxtaposition of third-person reportage and first-person confession paves the way for all manner of narrative sleights of hand, allowing Tieck to exploit the potential benefits of both points of view.

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If the reader is to remain fully within the questioning process of the text a certain mystery, even ignorance, is essential. In order to sustain our uncertainty, Tieck must ensure that we are not privy to knowledge superior to that enjoyed by the figures themselves, i.e. he must be certain that we share their perception and are unable to transcend it. Omniscient though the narrator may be, therefore, he must not, if he is to keep us in ‘einer unaufhorlichen Verwirrung’, allow us to benefit from his omniscience. This cultivation of absolute uncertainty is handled masterfully by Tieck, who manipulates the reader with a tantalizing equivoca- tion of narrative style. Even the narrator of the opening framework story, we soon learn, is not free from reservations about what is going on. Into an apparently reliable and straightforward account he swiftly and surreptitiously introduces indications of doubt: ‘Sein Weib liebte die Einsamkeit ebensosehr, und beide schienen sich von Herzen zu lieben’ (9, italics mine). The first two paragraphs of the story prepare us for what is to come by betraying a curious blend of conven- tional ‘Marchen’ omniscience and disturbing narrative uncertainty, culminating in highly unorthodox statements: ‘nur wenn e r allein war, bemerkte man an ihm eine gewisse Verschlossenheit, eine stille zuruckhaltende Melancholie’ (3). This, furthermore, is a narrator who is able (in the fourth paragraph) to interrupt his account in order to provide a general statement on the ambivalences of friend- ship, offering the reader at the same time a hint at a possible interpretative approach to the Eckbert-action. But our expectations that such interpolated comment might act as a guide to comprehension are thwarted, for instead of allowing us to test this suggestion against a consistent authorial stance, Tieck prefers to continue to equivocate on matters of crucial importance to a full understanding of the action. Throughout the final section of the work, where the first narrator resumes his tale, we are faced with a disconcerting juxtaposition of three narrative levels: detached and generalized statement (‘Wenn die Seele erst einmal zum Argwohn gespannt ist, so trifft sie auch in allen Kleinigkeiten Bestatigungen an’, 21); apparently reliable authorial comment (‘er war schon sonst immer schwermiitig gewesen, weil ihn die seltsame Geschichte seiner Gattin beunruhigte’ , 2 3 ) ; and, particularly at key points, information presented to us exclusively through the perspective of Eckbert’s unstable mind (‘Er glaubte ein hamisches Lacheln zu bemerken, esfiel ihm auf, dass er nur wenig mit ihm spreche, dass er mit den Anwesenden viel rede, und seiner gar nicht zu achten scheine’, 24, italics mine). The distanced, ‘unreal’ language of such passages, with its marked emphasis on supposition and appearances, expressed through subjunctive constructions and even the double use of indeterminate verbs (‘es fie1 ihm auf, dass er . . . seiner gar nicht zu achten scheine’), completely undermines any authoritativeness we may seek in the narration and places it in the realm of pure conjecture. O n occasions, in fact, the narrator makes no attempt to distinguish between what is portrayed as Eckbert’s perception of events and the underlying narrative voice, mixing assumption and ostensibly reliable comment: ‘Walter schien sich nicht viel darum zu kiimmern und uerliess auch den Ritter ziemlich gleichgdtig’ ( 2 2 ) . This extraordinarily equivocal style involves the author in apparent contradictions, confusing the various perspectives of the narrative even within one sentence:

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Eckbert ward durch dieses Betragen im aussersten Grade gepeinigt; er liess sich zwar gegen Bertha und Walther nichts davon merken, aber jeder musste doch seine innerliche Unruhe an ihm gewahr werden (22).

Here objective authorial statement on Eckbert’s state of mind is fused first with comment on the apparent effect of the hero’s behaviour on other figures and second with an unusual form of omniscient observation.

Much of the same narrative strategy characterizes Bertha’s story. In the transi- tion to her confession Tieck signals his departure from the relative simplicity of third-person reportage, infusing the narrative with a reflective consciousness able to question the fantastic action. From the moment Bertha introduces her tale with the comment that it is ‘sonderbar’ but ‘kein Marchen’ (10) - Eckbert has already described it as ‘seltsam genug’ - we are prepared for a story which is to challenge our assumptions regarding the distinctness of reality and fantasy and thus to under- mine our faith in the validity of conventional generic types. But Tieck goes further: not only does Bertha reflect on her life in the forest during her sojourn there. She recounts her childhood adventure from a point in time many years later, frequently interrupting her account with general comment made with the benefit of the hindsight her maturity affords her (e.g. 13, 16, 17). Onto a chain of events which she was unable to comprehend at the time she imposes her continued bewilderment, and thus, while her narrative lacks the confused perspectives of the framework action, events reach us only after having been filtered through the mind of a narrator questioning them from two different critical angles. The reader is, as it were, twice removed from the world of ‘Waldeinsamkeit’. Bertha’s con- fession to Philipp Walther: ‘Die Erinnerung an meine damalige Lebensart ist mir noch bis jetzt immer seltsam’ (16) voices the uncertainty which characterizes her entire narration: the absence of a rational meaning is her problem in exactly the same way as it is ours. It is a story whose sense continues to elude her, confronting her with the same dialectic of ‘seltsames Marchen’ and ‘wirklicher Lebenslauf“ which will later plague Eckbert and ultimately also the reader. Throughout Der blonde Eckbert the reader shares the insurmountable interpretative difficulties of two distinct yet (in every way) closely related narrators. More than anything else, this fragmentation in narrative perspective renders the quest for a single deter- minate meaning in the work extremely difficult.

The narrative uncertainties of Der blonde Eckbert are reflected in the frustrating indeterminacy of style. In the story as a whole few things are stated. Instead hypothesis, assumption and conjecture are everything. As we witness events first through Bertha’s memories of her childhood perceptions and secondly (via the main narrator) through the gradually disintegrating mind of the hero, the unreliable perspectives of the figures completely dominate the narrative. We experience few episodes except as projections of the characters’ minds, through their attempts to discern meaning, and the absence of any independent authorial voice which might enable us to assess the validity of the characters’ perceptions is vital to Tieck’s purpose. Whether one views the later action in the story as the product of Eckbert’s paranoid condition or as ‘fictive reality’ (the result of super- natural metamorphosis) is here quite immaterial: eventually the psychological and

‘VERWIRRUNG’ IN DER BLONDE ECKBERT 333

supernatural levels become so inextricably linked as to appear synonymous, and Tieck succeeds in demonstrating that the two are different only in degree. What is more important in the context of the cultivated disorientation of the reader is the assiduous avoidance of all unambiguous statement by both narrators. Equivocations such as ‘es war fast, als wenn . . .’; ‘es war mir, als sei . . .’; ‘es war mir, als hatte . . .’; ‘ich hatte die Empfindung, als wenn . . .’; ‘er dachte, dass . . .’; ‘es schien ihm, als wurde . . .’, abound. The verbs ‘glauben’, ‘scheinen’, ‘fuhlen’, ‘einfallen’ belong to the most frequently used words in the text. Qualifiers like ‘fast’, ‘ziemlich’, ‘kaum’, ‘vielleicht’ are to be found everywhere, The style of the work is sufficiently insubstantive to suggest a wide variety of interpretations while refusing to yield the specificity to support any one line of enquiry. In conjunction with the highly suggestive motifs which are not developed by the author (the adultery of Bertha’s father; the childlessness of the protagonists; the old womhn’s religiosity; the ‘Probezeit’ ; the sudden reoccurrence of the bird’s song) but which have all figured in challenging permutations in various interpretations of the work, the refractoriness of the style contributes much to the tale’s imperviousness.

The narrator’s reluctance to commit himself through unequivocal statement or to offer firm guides to the significance of events ultimately brings the reader to the point where even the most basic assumptions about the text appear question- able. This is particularly so where the inability of the figures to achieve genuine self-knowledge or even to exercise decisive control over their behaviour is concerned. Many of the most fateful actions in the story are performed by the characters unconsciously - Bertha’s original flight (1 1), her decision to leave the old woman (18) and departure from the forest (19); Eckbert’s murder of Walther (23), his decision to divulge his guilty secret to Hugo (24) and his journey to the forest (25): all of these are prefaced with remarks such as ‘fast ohne dass ich es wusste’ (1 l), ‘ohne zu wissen, was er tat’ (23), ‘ohne sich einen bestimmten Weg vorzusetzen’ (25). A clear example of this disjunctive technique is Eckbert’s murder of Walther: the narrator tells us that Eckbert feels the existence of Walther to be the only obstacle to his renewed peace of mind and that his murder would be beneficial. And yet in his depiction of the circumstances immediately preceding the act of murder Tieck deliberately obscures the causal relationship between the hero’s intentions and actions: ‘Er nahm seine Armbrust, um sich zu zerstreuen und auf die Jagd zu gehen’ (23). While reinforcing the nebulousness of the story, such qualifications ultimately undermine the pattern of cause and effect in the tale and raise the question of whether the entire action is not subject to some external determining force. This consideration has profound implications for any reading of the work in as far as it potentially deprives the characters of free will and thus obscures the most fundamental scheme in the story: that of guilt and punishment. However dubious other abstractions about Der blonde Eckbert may be, the mechanism of transgression and retribution which underlies the tale, one might suspect, offers at least some degree of interpretative certainty. It is, after all, present in the old woman’s warning about the ‘rechte Bahn’ (‘die Strafe folgt nach, wenn auch noch so spat’, 17) and in both the second and third versions of the bird’s song (‘Oh, dich gereut/Einst mit der Zeit’, 21; ‘Hier wohnt kein

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- ‘VERWIRRUNG’ IN DER BLONDE ECKBERT 334

Neid’, 25), and it is confirmed explicitly at the end of the story by the old woman herself, the agent of retribution, in a position which would seem to give it the status of a moral (‘das Unrecht bestraft sich selbst’, 26). Since, however, the notion of guilt presupposes that of moral choice and responsibility, even this point of orientation is lost, and attempts to view the sinister chain of events a5 the logical consequence of Bertha’s, Eckbert’s or even their father’s guilt become futile We are left, then, with a story which fails to offer even the most tentative of inter- pretative guides without calling them into question.

I have been concerned to show how Der blonde Eckbert manoeuvres the reader into a situation in which, like the characters themselves, he is unable to grasp the rationality of events. This is not to say that all abstractions about the work are unproductive and untenable, and it is certainly not to suggest that fascinating (and illuminating) theories about its implications cannot be constructed. Critics have produced these, and will doubtless continue to do so. But I would claim that any attempt to refine an interpretation of the story beyond a certain level of generality will of necessity lead to suspect results. It is central to the narrative strategy of Tieck, with its dislocation of chronological relationships, disorientating contamination of narrative perspectives, equivocations of style and deliberate obfuscation of underlying patterns, that the many indeterminacies of the text should not be reducible to some firm, single structure of sense. The very ‘Verwirrung’ at which Tieck aims serves to call into question our assumption that the literary text is an integrated whole whose meaning we discover when we succeed in logically relating its constituent elements to the entire context, removing all anomalies. Here the hermeneutic circle is a vicious one in as far as the ‘inner click’ which accompanies the recognition of the unity of part and whole never happens It is the enduring fascination of Tieck’s story that it succeeds in sustaining a delicate balance between the reader’s sense that there is some discernible rationality behind the tale and his gnawing suspicion that, in the end, all is overwhelmingly irrational. Like the juxtaposition of the supernatural and the psychological in the story, this oscillation between arbitrariness and causality prompts us, possibly against our better judgement, to participate in the author’s aesthetic game and embark upon the search for a meaning. The result is confusion:

~~ .

Wir verlieren in einer unaufhorlichen Verwirrung den Massstab, nach dem wir sonst die Wahrheit zu messen pflegen . . . der Faden ist hinter uns abgerissen, der uns durch das rathselhafte Labyrinth leitete.

NOTES

’ Psychological interpretations of Der blonde Eckbert (in chronological order): V. C , Hubbs, ‘Tieck, Eckbert und das kollektive Unbewusste’, PMLA, 71 (1956), 686-93; V. L. Kippere, ‘Ludwig Tieck’s Der bha2 Eckbert - A Psychological Reading’, PMLA, 85 (1970), 473-86; J. Gellinek, ‘Der blmde Eckbert: A Tieckian Fall from Paradise’, in Festschrifl f u r Heinrich Henel, ed. J. L. Sarnmons and E. Schiirer, Munich 1970, pp, 147-66; R . W. Ewton Jr., ‘Childhood without End: Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert’, GQ, 46 (1973), 410-27; J. M. Ellis, Narration in the German Nouelle, Cambridge 1974, pp.77-93; T. F. Sellner, ‘Jungian Psychology and the Romantic Fairy Tale: A New Look at Tieck’s Der blonde Eckbert’, GR, 55 (1980), 89-97.

‘VERWIRRUNG’ IN DER B L O N D E E C K B E R T 335

R . Immerwahr, ‘Der blondeEckbert as a Poetic Confession’, GQ, 34 (1961), 103-22; D. H . Haenicke, ‘Ludwig Tieck und Der blonde Eckberl’, Vergleichen und Verandern. Festschriftfur H. Motekat, Munich 1970,

H. Schlaffer, ‘Roman und Marchen: Ein formtheoretischer Versuch iiber Tiecks Blonden Eckbert’, Geslaltun~sgeschichte und Gesellschafisgeschichte, ed. H . Kreuzer, Stuttgart 1970, pp.224-41; C. Burger, ‘Der blonde Eckbert: Tiecks romantischer Antikapitalismus’, Literatursoriolo~ie, ed. J. Bark, I, Stuttgart 1974, pp. 139-58; G. Vitt-Maucher, ‘Eckbert, der gescheiterte Romantiker? Eine Strukturanalyse von Tiecks Der blonde Eckbert’, Wege der Work. Festschr$fur W. Fleischhauer, Cologne 1978, pp.332-46.

G . Haeuptner, ‘Tiecks Marchen Der blonde Eckbert’, Verslehen und Vertrauen: Otto Friedrich Bollnow r u m 65 Geburtstag, ed. J. Schwartlander, M. Landmann and W. Loch, Stuttgart 1969, pp.22-6; T. Fries, ‘Ein romantisches Marchen: Der blonde Eckberl von Ludwig Tieck’, MLN, 88 (1973), 1180-1211,

Margaret Atkinson, in the introduction to her edition of the story, concludes that it ‘defies analysis’ (Tieck: Der blonde Eckbert; Brentano: Geschichte uom brauen Kasperl und dem guten Anner l , Oxford 1951, p X X V ) , and the same assumption underlies the discussion by Emil Staiger in his Stilwandel: Studien zur Voyeschichte der Goethezeit, Zurich 1963.

M. Swales, ‘Reading one’s Life: An Analysis ofTieck’s Der blonde Eckbert’, GLL, 29 (1975/76), 173.

~~ ~~

*

pp.170-87.

‘ ’ Allgemeine Literaturzeitung, Jena and Leipzig, 2 December 1797, IV, 565.

E.g. Swales, op.cit., p.172; Fries, op.cit., p.1210; W. J . Lillyman, ‘The EnigmasofDerblondeEckbd, Realiv’s Dark Dream, Berlin 1979, p.89; E. Ribbat, Ludwig Tieck: Studien ZUT Konzeption und Praxis romantischer Poesie, Kronberg, Taunus 1978, p. 143.

Neither the study of J. M. Ellis nor that of G. Vitt-Maucher, despite the emphasis on narration in their titles, addresses itself to the actual narrative structures of the work. l o P. G. Klussmann, ‘Die Zweideutigkeit des Wirklichen in Ludwig Tiecks Marchennovellen’, ZfdPh, 83 (1964), 426-52.

I ’ Quotations from ‘Shakespeare’s Behandlung des Wunderbaren’ are from Ludwig Tieck, Kritische Schriften, I, Leipzig 1848. l 2 See p.58 of Tieck’s essay, where he develops the dream analogy: ‘Ein seltsamer Traum illudirt uns um so leichter, wenn wir Personen darin erscheinen sehen, die wir recht genau kennen. Auf eben diese Art hintergeht uns der Dichter, indem er Charaktere einfiihrt, die seiner wunderbaren Welt zu widersprechen scheinen, da sie ganz aus der gewohnlichen genommen sind . . . So entfernt uns die iibrige wunderbare Welt steht, so nahe stehen uns diese; durch ihre Alltaglichkeit erhdt das Ganze mehr individuelle Ziige, und indem sie einen Theil der Aufmerksamkeit auf sich ziehen, wird das Schauspiel und das Uebernatiirliche um so tauschender und wahrscheinlicher’. I 3 Ludwig Tieck, Phantasus, ed. K. G. Wendriner, I , Berlin 1911, p.100. See also p.101.

I‘ Quotations from Der blonde Eckbert are drawn from Ludwig Tieck, Werke in vier Banden, ed. M . Thalmann, 11, Munich 1964. I’ Bertha’s emphasis on the increasing familiarity of her new ‘Familienzirkel’ (16) provides an interesting echo of Tieck’s insistence in the Shakespeare essay that, when presented effectively, the ‘wunderbare Welt’ becomes accepted as a ‘Heimat’ (Kritische Schriften, I, p.48). l 6

I ’ Ibid. I*

from us on p. 9, are revealed on p.23.

l9 Swales, op.cit. , p.169.

’

Immerwahr, op.cit. , p. 11 7.

Thus, for example, the reasons for the hero’s ‘stille, zuriickhaltende Melancholie’, which are withheld

Ibid. , p.175. * I Fries, op.cit., p.1206.