Formen der Ambivalenz

Forms of Ambivalence – Family Resemblance in Grillparzer, Stifter, and Kafka

The aim of this book is to demonstrate that Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Adalbert Stifter (1815-1868), and Franz Kafka (1883-1924) are paragons of a specific ‘thought style’ (Ludwik Fleck) in German literature of the Habsburg Empire – not one of essence or ideas, but of a certain structure in thinking and writing. My monograph is the first to draw lines between three of the most prominent German-speaking authors that epitomize a way of thinking generally characteristic of literature and theory in this specific cultural sphere during this period. The relationship between them is viewed not as a case of direct influence but – in an innovative approach – as a case of ‘family resemblance,’ a term used by Ludwig Wittgenstein to characterize the pragmatic, non-essentialist character of our daily use of language. He uses this term to show how phenomena grouped under a common term share overlapping similarities, while no single feature may be common to all. Like family members, they share the common denominator of family traits, although these traits may be unequally distributed among the family members – even if these resemblances cannot be reduced to one essential feature, their similarities are nonetheless evident.

In my close readings of selected works of these three authors, the common denominator has proven to be the prevalence of ambiguity and ambivalence in their representation of reality, the human subject, the social and political order, and their critique of language. If ambiguity is generally regarded as the aesthetic paradigm of modernity, and if the development of art and literature since the 18th century can be understood as a constant increase in ambiguity as an adequate response to the increasing complexity of the world, I argue that characteristics of modern literature summarized as ‘ambiguity’ can take on very different forms and degrees that relate to the various social and cultural contexts of different literary traditions. My book is thus also a contribution to the relatively new and growing field of research on ambiguity and ambivalence in literature and art. In these authors, ambiguity is found not in the form of ambiguous symbolism, as in German Romanticism, but in much more radical strategies of negation and reduction that put existing discourses and social systems in a critical light. Among the many findings of my work, I have shown how deeply this literature is connected to the carnivalesque tradition as described by Bakhtin, especially the Menippean satire. On the other hand, the strategy of negation and reduction shares traits with a phenomenological approach to reality and thus points forward. It is my hypothesis that the forms of ambivalence and ambiguity identified in the works of Grillparzer, Stifter, and Kafka differ gradually from the traits of German literature outside the Habsburg Empire due to the prevalence of these strategies. I also claim that this difference is rooted in the specific challenges that the project of modernization poses to a transcultural, transnational, and multilingual state like the Habsburg Empire.

In this respect I rely on Zygmunt Baumans understanding of the project of modernity as an idea of a feasible order that has existed since the Enlightenment. According to Bauman, the modern strive to make the human subject and its natural and social environment transparent and thus regulable through unambiguous designations and differentiations, marginalizes everything that is incompatible with this order – the contingent, indeterminate, confused, and alogical – as its ‘waste’. In the Habsburg Empire, a state that participated more slowly and less straightforwardly in the project of modernity than many others, this process was experienced more painfully. For this state and its citizens, enduring incongruities, hybridities, and ambivalences were a condition of life. Those who favored this state despite its inner tensions and contradictions, in the face of the threat of nationalist and racist ideologies of ‘purity,’ originality, and vitality, would observe the process of modernity with particular distance and unease. Thus, this cultural context produced a literature whose pronounced sense of ambivalence was able to describe the problems of modernity in a profound and paradigmatic way. The three authors represent different stages in the ‘long 19th century’ – from the French Revolution to the catastrophe of WWI and the civil wars following it. During the rise of nationalism, they analyzed the challenging task of transnational and cultural (co)existence with the unyielding belief that this is the only humanistic option and alternative to the horrors of mass slaughter.

My book thus offers a contribution to the understanding of specific traits of Austrian/German-Bohemian literature through a new approach combining structural and historical aspects. As a Jew living in Prague, Kafka witnessed the world of the Habsburg Empire fall apart in nationalism, antisemitism, and the technological barbarism of WWI. As a novelty, my book shows that the homelessness producing the well-known sense of anxiety, indecisiveness, and lability in Kafka’s texts is not a ‘privileged’ insight of the Jews – the ‘betweenness’ and the structure of neither/nor that defies the either/or of logical classification is, in fact, equally prominent in the work of his much-admired predecessors, Grillparzer and Stifter. Their reflections on ‘betweenness’ as a modern condition contribute to current debates on individual and collective identities (debates that often end in a deadlock between various forms of culturalism and universalistic views in the tradition of the Enlightenment) and shed light on a third way of viewing culture, identity, and social order.