Abstract
This chapter discusses the instance of an averted amputation with long-lasting, painful consequences in Karl Philipp Moritz’s autobiographical novel Anton Reiser (1785–90) to explore the links between self-formation, autofictional writing, relationality, phantom pain, and mourning. The chapter outlines the relationality of the self with reference to canonical pretexts of autofiction evoked in Moritz’s Anton Reiser; it expounds the self-formative gesture of presenting a wound against the background of enlightenment aesthetics; and it relates the prosthetic self-formation and the exposed wound to an individual and cultural lack of mourning. Prade-Weiss argues that Moritz’s “biography” as Anton Reiser serves the purpose of establishing autofiction as a form of self-performance, testifying to individual suffering and, at the same time, identifying the individual through its particular suffering.
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Notes
- 1.
Unless otherwise indicated, the citation of Moritz’s novel follows the English translation by John R. Russell. To distinguish the translation from the original, the parentheses will refer to “Novel” and “Roman” respectively.
- 2.
My translation of: “Wie nahm die Entzündung in dem schadhaften Gliede allmählich zu? […] Welcher kleine unbemerkte Splitter war darin stecken geblieben, der nach und nach ein so gefährliches Geschwür erweckte?”
- 3.
My translation of: “Wie weit mannigfaltiger, verderblicher, und um sich greifender als alle körperlichen Übel, sind die Krankheiten der Seele!”
- 4.
There are, of course, justified doubts whether autofiction is a genre such as tragedy or elegy. A literary genre is, usually, a form of texts that can be aesthetically and historically differentiated. This is not the case in autobiographical writing, first, because it is a pervasive gesture of mirroring the reciprocal relation of reading, between reader in front and voice in the text, when authors talk about themselves. Second, the subject of autofiction is none other than forming a historical narrative, and a critical narrative of the history of a genre would only mirror this narrative rather than analyze it.
- 5.
Anton’s last name Reiser means, literally, “traveler.”
- 6.
Augustine starts his autobiographical narrative with infancy, too, analyzing how relationality is established in language; however, in the Confessions, the infant is the model case for Augustine’s concept of original sin as what shapes human life even before consciousness arises (I.6.8-7.11).
- 7.
Descartes writes: “we were all children before being men, at which time we were necessarily under the control of our appetites and our teachers, and […] neither of these influences is wholly consistent, and neither of them, perhaps, always tends towards the better” (11).
- 8.
Pietism combines Augustine’s imperative of self-reflection with a bourgeois ideal of productivity (Köhnen 125).
- 9.
Moritz’s and Reiser’s voices are marked as distinct: “I have gone back in my story to retrieve Anton’s first feelings and notions of the world. […] He remembers clearly” (Moritz, Novel 18).
- 10.
“Imitation of Christ” is a key concept in the history of spirituality and literature, based on the idea of following the life of Jesus as an example (O’Collins and Farrugia 115).
- 11.
This marks an important difference between Abraham and Torok’s concepts and Derrida’s “hauntology” (9). What haunts ontology is the ambiguity of all words that philosophical language seeks to eradicate from terminology, most prominently in the concept of “spirit” (Geist) as supposed to designate nothing but rationality. While Derrida’s approach is about the inevitable perspective in all thinking and knowing (the ghost [Geist] that cannot be exorcised), the psychoanalytical concept applied here is about the destruction of comprehensibility and transmission due to repression and negation that (unlike Derrida’s) cannot be accepted as a structural axiom because it destroys life and perpetuates genocide. For a detailed comparison see Davis.
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Prade-Weiss, J. (2021). “But the Damage … Lasted”: Phantom Pain and Mourning in Moritz’s Anton Reiser. In: Grayson, E., Scheurer, M. (eds) Amputation in Literature and Film. Literary Disability Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74377-2_10
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