Paul Binding

. . . or sensing impending doom

‘What am I? A completely ordinary person from the so-called higher reaches of society.

issue 23 April 2011

‘What am I? A completely ordinary person from the so-called higher reaches of society.

‘What am I? A completely ordinary person from the so-called higher reaches of society. And what can I do? I can train a horse, carve a capon, and play games of chance.’ So reflects Botho von Rienäcke, the central character of Theodor Fontane’s novel of 1888, Irrungen, Wirrungen (newly translated as On Tangled Paths). His bitter self-examination is a consequence of his predicament. Like many a fellow officer, he has taken up with a working-class girl. He met her on a boating trip when he came to her rescue from an accident in the water. The grateful, unconstrained company of this pretty young female is a welcome contrast to all the calculated pairings-up in upper-class Berlin’s marriage market. But, against his intentions, Botho has fallen deeply in love with Lene, and, to complicate matters, greatly admires her as well.

Such is the quality of Fontane’s delicate art and constantly probing morality that by the time we reach his painful bout of introspection, halfway through the novel, we readers share the Baron’s admiration. We have seen Lene’s consistent (and sore-tried) unselfishness towards her foster mother and her prying neighbours. We have observed in her the sane coexistence of ardent feeling for her very likeable young man with an unflinching sense of reality. The latter makes her acknowledge the hard truth that claims of class with its firm codes, spoken and unspoken, cannot be lightly rejected, if indeed at all, in so relentlessly stratified a society as Prussia.

Botho in fact possesses both Lene’s attributes himself, but in weaker, more malleable form. But maybe he is not so ordinary as he has thought. ‘Each person is predisposed by nature towards certain things. And for me those things are simplicity, truth and naturalness. Lene has them all, that’s been her fascination for me.’ But is he unordinary enough to convert this fascination into the desideratum of deeper commitment?

Fontane (1819–1898) is generally agreed to be German language and culture’ s most impressive contributor to the great European achievement that is the 19th-century novel, evolving through Scott, Balzac and Stendhal. Indissoluble from it is recognition of the continuous and usually unequal tension between the complexities of the individual and the complexities of society, together with the insistence that these are explored in terms of thoroughly understood habitat and period.

Fontane came to fiction late, when nearing 60, but after years of serious journalism and belles-lettres. A possible explanation for his sad neglect by the English-language world (Effi Briest, 1895, apart) is our uncertainty about where to position his work. An enthusiastic reader of Dickens and Thackeray, four years younger than Trollope, and a contemporary of George Eliot, he yet has more in common with those writers younger than he responding to the specific pressures of the 1880s and 1890s, notably Ibsen, Hardy and Zola. He treats sexual relationships frontally, his espousal of the progressive vies with his fear of unstoppable, unthinking progress.

Helen Chambers, in her perceptive afterword to No Way Back (1891), is surely right to cite as an influence Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea (1888). In both works the sea, compelling, powerful, resisting control, attracting both reverence and anxious superstition, is a correlative for the feminine in a repressive society, as well as for those components of every psyche that baulk at narrow definition.

Whereas On Tangled Paths has the flawless logic and beautiful design of the novella at its best (of Turgenev’s First Love, for instance), No Way Back, for all its intent concentration on its male protagonist and his feelings for two women, has the amplitude, the social and personal varieties, we expect of the major social novel. It surely ranks among the most imaginatively challenging and intellectually satisfying attainments in that dominant 19th-century literary form.

Its German title is Unwiederbringlich — ‘Irretrievable’. Not the least of the book’s interests lies in deciding what it is that cannot be retrieved, what blocks return to a life of sensible compromise. The situation it develops — over the years 1859-1861 — is shot through from the first with ambiguities. Holk, a German landowner in Schleswig-Holstein, is proud master of a schloss he has had built by the coast in classical style, at once grand and comfortable. His social position in the twin duchies, retained by Denmark after her 1848–1851 war with Prussia, compels him however to forsake home and family, for a winter season’s duty at the Danish court, in attendance on the King’s aunt, an aging princess.

Ironically this means exchanging a life heavy with ideals of duty, thanks to his wife, Christine’s fervid pietistic beliefs, for one where the pursuit of pleasure doesn’t preclude frivolity and even licentiousness. Holk is not sorry to be away in a Copenhagen of theatres and long dinner-hours, or in the royal country residences with sophisticated personnel. For he and Christine — once rapturously happy — have fallen out of love. She looks down on her husband, less clever than herself, easygoing, amateurish, while he feels oppressed by her self-righteousness, and resents her unswerving intention of submitting their two children — sensitive, musical daughter, sportsman son — to the rigours of religious schooling.

In accord with his feeling of release Holk finds himself drawn to the princess’s alluring lady-in-waiting, Swedish-Jewish Ebba Rosenberg. Yet, like Botho in the earlier novel, he is insufficiently secure in himself to live either outside external conventions or athwart inwardly received moral prescriptions. Like Botho again he is ‘ordinary’, while thinking himself unique in his plight; this makes him a representative figure worthy of real sympathy.

Fontane was learned in ballads, especially English and Scottish ones, and this ancient art form permeates the novel, undercutting its scenes of domestic ritual and society chitchat alike. Like Ibsen and Hardy, Fontane uses folklore to embody humanity’s deepest aspirations and fears and the relationship to elemental nature that civilisation too frequently suppresses. Throughout there is an irrational sense of approaching ‘catastrophe’. Four years after its events Prussia was to take Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark in war. Less than a quarter-century after the publication of No Way Back Europe was engulfed in catastrophe of unimagined proportions.

Fontane’s novel is a product of the European intelligence at its most acute and ethically attentive. We should be grateful to Angel Classics for restoring him to his rightful place among his peers.

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