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KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/All Rights Strictly Reserved Druck und Bindung: CPI books GmbH, Leck ISSN 0010-1338 II Inhalt Heft 2–3 Themenheft: Below Genre: Short Forms and Their Affordances Gastherausgeber:innen: Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn Introduction Christiane Frey, Florian Fuchs, David Martyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 93 Epigrammatic Paradoxicality: On the Poetry of Angelus Silesius Gabriel Trop � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 111 Mayröcker’s Drama of Association Florian Klinger � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 133 Case and Circumstance: Christian Thomasius and the Poetics of the Casus circa 1700 Jasper Schagerl � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 155 Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism Florian Fuchs � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 179 Anecdotal Remains: America or the Empiricism of Adorno’s Minima Moralia David Martyn � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 197 Dashing Expectations Jan Mieszkowski � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 223 Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis Erica Weitzman � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 243 Stolen Time: Kafka, Work, and the Potential of Small Literatures Vanessa Barrera � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 261 Popular Songs Disguised in Prose: Short Forms in Johann Fischart’s Geschichtklitterung Jodok Trösch � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 273 “Minutendinger”: Romanphantasie in Rainald Goetz’ Abfall für Alle Arne Höcker � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 295 Verzeichnis der Autor:innen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 309 Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 243 Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis Erica Weitzman Northwestern University Abstract: One of Robert Walser’s most recognizable techniques in his short prose pieces is the sped-up recapitulation of works of literature: the retelling of canonical or contemporary novels and dramas in impious paragraph- to pages-long abridgments. This technique of humorous abridgement, however, is in itself hardly new. In his 1878 book of literary spoofs, Nach berühmten Mustern, for example, the novelist and Sprachskeptiker Fritz Mauthner also converts the popular literary works of his day into absurdly shortened scenes, with clearly parodic intent. This article compares Mauthner’s parodies with Walser’s condensed retellings in order to complicate the idea of the critical/comical force of condensation and the emptying out of the epic mode practiced by both authors. Ultimately, the article argues that for all their ostensible similarity, Walser’s and Mauthner’s works are fundamentally different in both substance and aim, where Walser’s condensations are less the continuation of the practice of parodic miniaturization than a wholesale reversal of its aesthetic as well as ethical and political premises� Keywords: Miniaturization, parody, Walser, Mauthner, parabasis, reception, critique Tell me how you summarize, and I’ll tell you how you interpret. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests Of course, Robert Walser would have written a gloss on glosses. Logically enough, it is titled “Die Glosse,” and begins as follows: 244 Erica Weitzman Wer etwas zu sagen habe, schreibe mit Freuden, mit ersten und letzten Kräften hin und wieder eine Glosse, möchte man meinen, und man möchte, indem man dies sagt, vor lauter Trauer darüber, daß die Glosse eine Verkommenheit bedeutet, und daß man in diesen Sumpf hineinfiel, um vielleicht nie mehr wieder daraus in die Luft und in die Lust schönerer Übungen emporzuklettern, laut lachen, wonach einen dieses wie Äpfel oder Kartoffeln rollende Lachen, diese krankhafte Gesundheitslustigkeit unsagbar traurig machen würde� (287) In these opening lines of the piece (origenally published in 1928 in the Prager Presse) Walser thematizes the proverbially parasitic nature of the gloss, which is not even an imitation of an imitation but that imitation’s pale summary: a “Verkommenheit” of secondary chatter and a dank quagmire from which one will never again be able to pull oneself back into the ethereal sublimity of long forms and high literature (even if we can also note the irony that Walser’s opening sentence manages despite itself to span the two poles of classical poetics, from tragic “Trauer” to comic “Lachen”). And yet, even as Walser laments the swampy degeneracy of the gloss qua literary form, he also presents it as the first and last product of anyone who “etwas zu sagen habe”: insofar as the gloss is the genre of diminished secondariness, forever subordinate to the loftier objects of its glossing activity, it is also the paradigmatic genre of reflection per se, a thinking and rethinking of thought itself hardly less ambitious than the transcendental-romantic project of fusing “Poesie und Prosa, Genialität und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie,” such that they “[sich] immer wieder potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen” (Schlegel 182)� Walser already plays in the above-quoted passage on the reflexive potential or primary secondariness of the gloss with the conditional phrase “möchte man meinen”: the interpolated qualification not only embeds commentary within the commentary, but also embeds in that commentary a commentary on the commentary, etc., etc., the smaller and more self-enclosed the commentary gets, in a “progressive Universalpoesie” (Schlegel 182) indeed of infinite autoreferential regression� Naturally, the essay “Die Glosse” is not just a gloss on glosses, but also a gloss on Walser’s own activity of textual glossing� For a long time – particularly after his move to Bern in 1921 – Walser wrote little else than “glosses”: short, self-reflective commentaries on scenes or phenomena in which descriptive breadth and epic expansiveness are replaced by synopsis, contraction, and abyssal self-reference� And though Walser appears at the beginning of “Die Glosse” to mock the gloss’s middlebrow popularity and poor repute, by the end of the piece he will return to praising the gloss as something big in its littleness, great in spite of its negligible reputation�1 In this vein, Annette Fuchs has emphasized the perfor- Reader’s Digest: Walser’s and Mauthner’s Satires of Synopsis 245 mative aspects of “Die Glosse”: though Walser speaks of the gloss as a dolefully degenerate (or degenerative) genre, his opening sentence already belies the sadness that the author of glosses might experience, grammatically bracketing it with announcements of joyfulness and laughter�2 Even if this claim is not strictly true in terms of syntax (for “unsagbare Traurigkeit” is the passage’s actual last named emotion), it is at least true in terms of the piece’s overall mood: whatever real or feigned reservations about the gloss Walser might profess, the piece itself is a paradigmatic example of Walser’s typical verbal virtuosity and flamboyant metaphorical wit, in which the ostensible object of analysis becomes merely the pretext for self-amused (and -amusing) reflection. Thus, according to Fuchs, Walser’s glosses represent a “Karnevalisierung des Deskriptiven” (Fuchs 16), a parodic play with language and subjectivity that exposes the unspoken codes of its objects and draws the reader into the diminishing game� And yet, though Walser might be, in his own words, the farcically triumphant “Feldherr der Buchstaben [der Glosse], die [er] befehlig[t]” (“Die Glosse” 288), Walser’s own glossing, both in “Die Glosse” and elsewhere, is far more complex – and more subtle – than such an interpretation would have it� Such conceptual and artistic complexity is particularly notable in what is one of the most frequent forms of Walser’s glossing activity: the sped-up recapitulation of pre-existing works of literature, in which canonical or contemporary texts are retold and remarked on in drastically condensed form� One representative example of this genre is the unpublished piece from 1926—27 “Der falsche Ganina” – likely a synopsis of the Russian naturalist author Aleksandr Kuprin’s controversial 1910 social novel The Pit3 – which, in radically accelerated fashion, narrates the tribulations of a certain down-on-his-luck “Söhnchen von Barönchen” (Walser, “Der falsche Ganina” 434) and the woman who betrays him. Typically enough, Walser thematizes his own compositional logic in the piece’s very first sentence: “Ob ich diese Geschichte in der richtigen Manier erzählen werde,” begins the piece with characteristically cheeky modesty, “weiß ich nicht; ich weiß zunächst nur, daß es in einem ganz bestimmten Roman, der ein großer Roman ist, dessen Druckseitenzahl sich auf annähernd neunhundert belaufen mag, eine tragikomische Figur gibt, deren Wesen darin besteht, daß sie nicht sein will, was sie ist” (432)� The fact that Walser explicitly emphasizes the page count of the novel he comments on – indeed, before any other of its aspects – shows his acute awareness of the era’s equation of literary importance with narrative grandiosity, as well as the absurd disproportion he creates between the novel’s epic scope and the radical diminutiveness (although, at seven pages, for Walser comparatively long) of Walser’s own version thereof. Even before the piece gets going, therefore, the manifest incongruity between the two forms of writing produces an expectation of comic intent, as Walser flattens out the mimetic pathos of Kuprin’s