Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter, and: Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
2022; Austrian Studies Association; Volume: 55; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/oas.2022.0003
ISSN2327-1809
Autores ResumoReviewed by: Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter, and: Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter Vincent Kling Adalbert Stifter, Motley Stones. Translated by Isabel Fargo Cole. New York: New York Review Books, 2021. 288 pp. Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal. Translated by Elisabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore. Introduction by W. H. Auden. New York: New York Review Books, 2008. 96 pp. Despite its inadequacy, the view still prevails that Stifter was a quiescent Biedermeier figure dedicated entirely to an idyllic view of nature at peace and of human community in balance. His Nachsommer, a monumental Bildungsroman, projects an ideal of equanimity, and his famous "sanfte Gesetz," formulated in the preface to Motley Stones, proposes that small objects and everyday routine signify more than vast upheavals. These values have an escapist aspect, counterbalancing the revolutionary disturbances of 1848. As Isabel Fargo Cole points out in her "Translator's Foreword," Nachsommer is "almost entirely devoid of drama, conflict, and, indeed, plot" (xiii). Likewise, Thomas Mann called Witiko the most static great novel ever written. Stifter may have abetted misunderstanding by subtitling Motley Stones, in German Bunte Steine, "ein Festgeschenk," a winsome collection of children's tales. It isn't all beetles and buttercups, however, to echo Friedrich Hebbel's disparagement; readers who remember the old woman's milk jug but forget the volcano in Stifter's preface might not see how frail placidity and communal amity are. Like Henry James, another great novelist often mischaracterized as dainty, Stifter is masterful at depicting cataclysms underneath a surface of near immobility. The violence can be psychological, as when the impeccably elegant Mrs. Gereth from The Spoils of Poynton burns down her house rather than let another woman inherit her priceless furnishings. Likewise, Stifter creates in "Rock Milk" (119–53) a gentle, kindly castle owner, loving and beloved by all, who in wartime, though, exhibits raving xenophobia and demands the ruthless wholesale slaughter of the enemy. The very sources of solace can become wellsprings of mayhem; in "Granite," the last sentence (39) reveals with deceptive casualness that the speaker has never overcome a childhood trauma inflicted by his mother. In his introduction to an earlier translation of Rock Crystal, which is included in this volume, W. H. Auden observed that Stifter's love "of tradition, order, childhood and the limpid serenity of the classical style" (vii) is not unrelated to his depression, anxiety, and disordered personal [End Page 144] life, culminating in his apparent suicide. But beyond psychological turmoil, Stifter goes further than almost any other writer in depicting nature as the faceless enactor of rampage and violence, the inexorable destroyer destined to annihilate all life. Earth, air, fire, and water all turn terrifyingly ferocious. Mann observed elsewhere that "behind the quiet, inward exactitude of his descriptions of nature [ . . . ] there is at work a predilection for the excessive, the elemental and the catastrophic, the pathological." It is only by happy chance that the children in Rock Crystal are narrowly rescued, and before they are, the glacier is depicted as a fearsome region of cold and ice, one face of "indifferent and hostile nature" (ix). The balance is typical—as Auden observes (ix), "The community, through having responded to a threat to some of its members, has realized itself completely." Yet even in the serenest resolutions there lurks at least an undertone of unease as unsettling as Blaise Pascal's terror at the empty darkness of immense space. Harmony is always a provisional, temporary state, and the villagers can never look at the mountain again without recalling its terrible menace. Read in light of the recent pandemic, the tremendous ravages of the plague in "Granite," pitilessly killing off whole communities; "Limestone" and "Cat-Silver" depict storms of apocalyptic violence, especially in the latter story, in which hail utterly destroys buildings, crops, and animals; "Limestone" shows flooding as a grave threat to children's lives. In "Tourmaline," the narrator announces the more psychological theme of humans yielding to the chaos of selfish passions, and he sets the story entirely in Vienna, seemingly far from nature. And indeed, the demolition of the Perron House is an apt correlative to the wreckage of lives, but the ravages of nature are apparent at...
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