Colin Riordan finds the key to Uwe Johnson's puzzling works in an idiosyncratic moral code to which both Johnson and his narrative figures adhere. This code underlies the development in Johnson's prose from his first novel Ingrid Babendererde (written 1956, published 1985), through Mutmaßungen über Jakob (1959), Das dritte Buch über Achim (1961) and Zwei Ansichten (1965), to the four-volume masterpiece Jahrestage. Aus dem Leben von Gesine Cresspahl (1970-83). The complex narrative of Jahrestage is unravelled, revealing the problems Gesine Cresspahl encounters in reconstructing her past. These problems can only be solved by evolving a code of narrative ethics which forces Gesine — and the reader — to confront the kinds of painful truths which might otherwise remain submerged.
This book, originally published in paperback in 1989 under the ISBN 978-0-947623-25-8, was made Open Access in 2024 as part of the MHRA Revivals programme.
Contents:
i-ix, 1-246
The Ethics of Narration: Uwe Johnson's Novels from Ingrid Babendererde to Jahrestage Colin Riordan Complete volume as single PDF
The complex system of narrative dynamics evident in Jahrestage operates according to a set of moral imperatives which together amount to no less than a code of narrative ethics. And that code of ethics explains the technical develop- ments from the early novels through to Jahrestage in a way which extra-literary explanations — sociological and historical — cannot match. This is not to say that Johnson's narrative ethics are a purely literary phenomenon: indeed, the present study will attempt to show that they have profound political, historical, and social implications. Johnson's fiction acts as a testing ground for issues which have affected the moral and political consciousness of both Germanies since 1945.
Although Ingrid Babendererde, we now know, was the first novel Johnson wrote, it will suit the present purpose initially to consider Johnson's early works in the context of their critical reception, in order to explain the origins of certain misconceptions which have dogged readings of Johnson's work ever since. Mutmaßungen über Jakob enjoyed a critical if not commercial success. Yet it would be neither inaccurate nor ungracious to assign it to that category of twentieth-century novel which cannot be read, only re-read.
The assumption of limited narrative cognizance in Mutmaßungen über Jakob, whereby the narrator is taken to be as limited in his perceptions of the events portrayed as any of the participants, has become something of a commonplace wisdom in Johnsonian critical literature, one which is frequently incorporated into an examination of some other aspect of the author's work.
A cynic might suggest that Karsch, und andere Prosa (1964) was produced to sustain public interest in Uwe Johnson during the four-year gap between Das dritte Buch über Achim and Zwei Ansichten. Comprising only eighty-nine pages of large, well-spaced type, these texts have only a peripheral relevance to the analysis of the technical evolution in Johnson's novels. All the same, the omniscient narrative perspective adopted is symptomatic of the rather more complex, but related approach in Zwei Ansichten.
In the struggle to salvage by fictional means a world submerged in the past, Jahrestage resorts to a set of narrative circumstances whose paradoxical complexity requires comprehensive explication. The novel shows at its most distinctive the familiar Johnsonian structural pattern of erzählte Zeit beginning at a point well previous to the fictional present, gradually catching up and merging with the Erzählzeit. In the novel, Gesine Cresspahl, who lives with her daughter in New York, spends a year retracing the story of her family from around 1920 to the fictional presence in 1968.
The summer of 1947 saw Gesine's first deliberate attempt to reconstruct the past, and so her first recognition of the associated problems. The description of that attempt is in effect a reconstruction of a reconstruction, but provides a number of insights into the creative process which Gesine later felt herself compelled to enter on. She naïvely seeks not just memories, but what might be termed authentic memory; experience in fully the same broad, vibrant, yet intelligible terms as it was originally perceived.
Narrative develops its own momentum, although to be maintained it requires a regular supply of new energy. Nevertheless a number of particular objectives may be discerned in Gesine's efforts to recreate the past, objectives which must be examined if the Johnsonian narrative technique is to be explicated effectively.
Gesine's daughter Marie is handicapped by being largely unable to compare her mother's version with an alternative of her own. Her efforts must restrict themselves to discovering intrinsic implausibilities and inconsistencies in Gesine's story, testing, as it were, the narrative's structural strength. The child acquires an ever-increasing maturity which eventually enables her to subordinate the progress of the story to her own objections and the trepidation which those objections arouse in Gesine. This becomes a narrative crisis which peaks at the end of Jahrestage 3.
Having elucidated the origins, development, and operation of the complex code of narrative ethics (and so narrative structures) evident in Jahrestage and the earlier works, we now discuss briefly their implications under three headings: political, biographical, and literary.
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Bibliography entry:
Riordan, Colin, The Ethics of Narration: Uwe Johnson's Novels from Ingrid Babendererde to Jahrestage, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 28 (MHRA, 1989)
First footnote reference:35 Colin Riordan, The Ethics of Narration: Uwe Johnson's Novels from Ingrid Babendererde to Jahrestage, MHRA Texts and Dissertations, 28 (MHRA, 1989), p. 21.
This title was first published by Modern Humanities Research Association for the Institute of Germanic Studies but rights to it are now held by Modern Humanities Research Association and the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies.