Symmetry as Narrative Structure: OCD in Gottfried Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet

Boos, Sonja

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_5

Sonja Boos⁵

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

This chapter continues the discussion of literature as a source of scientific knowledge, but also as a critique of the historical contingencies of medical experimentation. A close reading of Gottfried Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet demonstrates that the novella not only challenges Esquirol’s explanation of monomania but effectively anticipates the pioneering research on obsessive-compulsive disorder conducted in Austria and Germany by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Wilhelm Griesinger, and Carl Westphal.

An earlier version of this chapter was published as “‘A Weird Sense for Symmetry’: Obsession and Compulsion in Gottfried Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet,” The Germanic Review 88 (2019): 185–201.

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Notes

1.
Conceived in 1847, the novella was first published in the first volume of the Keller’s collection The People of Seldwyla (Die Leute von Seldwyla; Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1856) and then in a revised edition on its own (G. Keller, Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe; Stuttgart: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1876). Gottfried Keller, Sämtliche Werke: historische-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Walter Morgenthaler et al., 10 vols. (A. M.: Stroemfeld, 1996–2013). Gottfried Keller: Stories, ed. Frank G. Ryder (New York: Continuum, 1982), 53. Hereafter cited in the text.
2.
See Walter Silz who first noted the “manifest symmetrical patterning of the whole story.” Walter Silz, Realism and Reality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954), 82.
3.
See James Ryan, “The Symmetrical Structure of Romeo and Juliet,” Shakespeare Newsletter 50, 4 (2000): 97–98, 100.
4.
Winfried Menninghaus, Artistische Schrift: Studien zur Kompositionskunst Gottfried Kellers (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 107, 126. For the first inquiry into the function of geometrical structures in Keller’s work, see Gabriel Imboden, Gottfried Kellers Ästhetik auf der Grundlage der Entwicklung seiner Naturvorstellung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1975).
5.
Downing, Double Exposures, 17–18.
6.
Ibid., 18. Downing’s discussion of nineteenth-century realist fiction is based on his understanding that the latter is “firmly grounded in repetition as part of its efforts to maintain and convey a uniform, regular version of the world,” while at the same time resisting repetition as it breaks with “the dominant modes of representation and signification.” Ibid., 260.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Freud, “On Narcissism. An Introduction,” The Standard Edition, Vol. 14: “On the History of the Psycho-analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology, and Other Works (19014–1916),” 99.
9.
Oliver Freudenreich, Psychotic Disorders: A Practical Guide (Cham: Humana, 2020), 414.
10.
See Silz, Realism and Reality, 86, and Petra Fachinger, Rewriting Germany from the Margins: “Other” German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s (Québeck City: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001), 26.
11.
See Jörg Kreienbrock, “Das Kreditparadies Seldwyla. Zur Beziehung von Ökonomie und Literatur in Gottfried Kellers Die Leute von Seldwyla,” Gottfried Keller,“Die Leute von Seldwyla”: Kritische Studien, ed. Hans Joachim Hahn (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 129 and Eva Geulen, “Habe und Bleibe in Kellers ‘Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe,’” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 129 (2010): 253–263.
12.
Étienne Esquirol, Des Maladies mentales considérées sous les Rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal (Paris: J. - B. Baillière, 1838). Étienne Esquirol, Mental Maladies, xii.
13.
Lennard J. Davis, Obsession: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 68.
14.
See, for instance, Johannes B. Friedreich et al., Die Grundbegriffe des Criminalrechts und seine leitenden Grundsätze (Nürnberg: Friedrich Korn’schen, 1861); and Joseph A. Knop, Die Paradoxie des Willens (Leipzig: Louis Pernitzsch, 1863).
15.
Esquirol, Mental Maladies, 363.
16.
Ibid.
17.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Beiträge zur Erkennung und richtigen forensischen Beurtheilung krankhafter Gemütszustände für Ärzte, Richter und Verteidiger (Contribution to the Discernment and Correct Forensic Evaluation of Pathological States for Physicians, Judges, and Defendants) (Erlangen: Enke, 1867), 36.
18.
See Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms, 141.
19.
Ronald Chase, The Making of Modern Psychiatry (Berlin: Logos 2018), 32.
20.
Wilhelm Griesinger, “Über einen wenig bekannten psychopathischen Zustand” (On a Little-Known Psychopathological State), Archiv für Psychiatrie 1, 3 (1868): 626–635.
21.
Carl Westphal, “Über Zwangsvorstellungen” (On Obsessive Thoughts), Berlinische klinische Wochenschrift 46.14 (1877): 669. English translation cited after Edward Shorter, A Historical Dicionary of Psychiatry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 199.
22.
See Carl Wernicke, “Über fixe Ideen,” Deutsche Medizinische Wochenzeitung, 23 (1892): 581. Cited in Wolfgang Warda, “Zur Geschichte und Kritik der sogenannten psychischen Zwangszustände,” Archiv für Psychiatrie, 39, 2 (1905): 240.
23.
Mark G. Ward, Perspectives on German Realist Writing: Eight Essays (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1995), 18.
24.
Holub, Reflections of Realism, 126.
25.
See, for instance, Eduard Hirschmann, Gottfried Keller: Psychoanalyse des Dichters, seiner Gestalten und Motive (Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1919); Allen McCormick, “The Idyll in Keller’s Romeo und Julia: A Study in Ambivalence,” German Quarterly 35 (1962): 270; Menninghaus, Artistische Schrift, 126–130; Erika Swales, The Poetics of Scepticism: Gottfried Keller and Die Leute von Seldwyla (Providence: Berg, 1994), 80–97.
26.
The symbolism of teeth links the physical experience of pain and loss to the physical changes caused by dentition in the infant, as well as its repetitions around the sixth year and during puberty. See Sandor Lorand and Sandor Feldman, “The Symbolism of Teeth in Dreams,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 36 (1955): 146.
27.
On the symbolism of plowing, in which a female role is assigned to the earth and a male role to the penetrating plow, see Walter A. Weisskopf, The Psychology of Economics (London: Routledge, 1955), 144.
28.
See Ludwig Wille, “Zur Lehre von den Zwangsvorstellungen,” Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 12 (1882): 28. In a similar vein, Freud defined “obsessions” (Zwangsvorstellungen) as “disguised and transformed self-reproaches about acts of sexual aggression in childhood” (“aus der Verdrängung wiederkehrende Vorwürfe, die sich immer auf eine sexuelle, mit Lust ausgeführte Aktion der Kinderzeit beziehen”). Sigmund Freud, “Further Remarks on the Neuro-Psychoses of Defence,” The Standard Edition Vol. 3: (1893–1899) “Early Psycho-Analytic Publications,” 169; Sigmund Freud, “Weitere Bemerkungen über die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen,” Neurologisches Zentralblatt (1896): 438. In Keller’s novella, the etiology of intrusive thoughts crosses into psychoanalytic territory insofar as they are structured on what Freud termed the “polymorphous perversity” of the sexual instinct. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” The Standard Edition, Vol. 7: “A Case of Hysteria: Three essays on sexuality and other works” [1901–1905], 150.
29.
The French thesis, according to which obsessions resulted from disturbances of emotions, prevailed into the twentieth century. See Berrios, The History of Mental Symptoms, 149. In Germany, Ludwig Wille was a prominent critic of the “intellectual” thesis who argued for an emotional origin of obsessions.
30.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie auf klinischer Grundlage für praktische Ärzte und Studierende (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1897), 68. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Textbook of Insanity: based on Clinical Observations for Practitioners and Students of Medicine (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1905), 63.
31.
Wolfgang Warda, “Zur Geschichte und Kritik,” 248.
32.
A. S. Radomsky, S. Rachman, “Symmetry, Ordering and Arranging Compulsive Behaviour,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 42, 8 (2004): 893–913.
33.
While it did seem irrational and economically unmotivated within the conceit of the story, it is a crucial emotional outlet, an annual ritual providing relief from the intrusive thought. Derek Hillard defines it as a ritual enacting the destruction and renewal of community in a “post-mythical age.” This chapter argues that the plowing is a manifest symptom of the farmers’ obsessive compulsion. Unable to cope with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the ritual fails to generate any improvement for Marti and Manz, but has instead the adverse effect of highlighting the loss of community and social interaction which is at stake in it. Derek Hillard, “Violence, Ritual, and Community: On Sacrifice in Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe and Storm’s Der Schimmelreiter,” Monatshefte 101, 3 (2009): 361.
34.
See Westphal, “Über Zwangsvorstellungen,” 687.
35.
Salomon Stricker, Studien über das Bewußtsein (Wien: Braumüller, 1879), 94.
36.
In Freud’s definition, they are ich-synton (ego-syntonic), as they are experienced as consistent or harmonious with the total personality and the person is not bothered by it. Freud, “On Narcissism. An Introduction,” 99.
37.
Walter Silz, “Motivation in Keller’s Romeo und Julia,” German Quarterly 8 (1935): 2.
38.
In an essay dating from 1949, Sergei Eisenstein compares Dickens’ experimentations with innovative narrative techniques such as the use of multiple points of view, cross-cutting between parallel actions, and the combination of close-ups and panoramas, to D. W. Griffith’s legendary development of parallel action. Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and Ourselves” (Dickens, Griffith and the Film Today), Film Form: Essays in Film Theory and The Film Sense (New York: Meridian, 1957), 195–255.
39.
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry. A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947).
40.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1055–1099 (II, Chor, 13–14).
41.
Ibid. (I.1.5).
42.
Theodor Fontane, “Otto Brahms’ Gottfried Keller,” quoted in Alfred Zäch, Gottfried Keller im Spiegel seiner Zeit. Urteile und Berichte über den Menschen und den Dichter (Zürich: Scientia, 1952), 110 (translation mine). For a summary of the multiple familiar fairytale motives that are woven into the second part, see Edgar Hein, Gottfried Keller. Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe (Munich: Oldenburg Verlag, 1987), 69–72.
43.
Gerhard Kaiser, “Sündenfall, Paradies und himmlisches Jerusalem in Kellers Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe,” Euphorion 65 (1971): 39. See also Heinrich Richartz, Literaturkritik als Gesellschaftskritik: Darstellungsweise und politisch-didaktische Intention in Gottfried Kellers Erzählkunst (Bonn: Bouvier, 1975), 66.
44.
See Holub, Reflections of Realism, 112–113.
45.
Ibid., 131. The notion of “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen” alludes to the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm bearing the same name.
46.
Ibid., 117.
47.
Ibid., 128.
48.
As Holub asks suggestively: “Could the compulsion forcing Keller to capture the fable have a different source than he is willing, or perhaps able, to identify?” Ibid., 108.
49.
Quoted in Gottfried Keller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Thomas Böning, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–1996), Vol. 4: “Die Leute von Seldwyla,” 693. Translation mine.
50.
See Emil Kraepelin, Psychiatrie. Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und Ärzte (Leipzig: Barth, 1899), 184.
51.
According to Jakob Frohschammer, “The total dominance of the delusion is the common endresult of monomania” [translation mine] (“Die totale Herrschaft der Wahnidee ist wohl das gewöhnliche Endergebnis der Monomanie”). Jakob Frohschammer, Die Phantasie als Princip des Weltprocesses (Munich: Theodor Ackermann, 1877), 570.
52.
See Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung (Stuttgart: Enke, 1886), 414. R. v. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis. With Special Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1965), 371.
53.
Freud’s “seduction theory” of neurosis, first published in 1895 and abandoned by 1897, explains the frequency of hysteria in his patients with the improbably large number of sexual assaults on children through near relatives; see Gerald N. Izenberg, “Seduced and Abandoned: The Rise and Fall of Freud’s Seduction Theory,” The Cambridge Companion to Freud, ed. Jerome Neu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25–43. On the link between sex and the nineteenth-century conception of contagion see Bashford and Hooker who argue that “through most of the nineteenth century ‘contagious diseases’ meant sexually transmitted diseases—transmission through the closest and most problematized contact of all.” Alison Bashford, ed., Contagion: Historical and Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 2001), 4.
54.
Keller, Sämtliche Werke 4, 690–691.
55.
Hence the “anxious practices in which selves and societies sought (vainly) to secure clear boundaries.” See Bashford, Contagion, 5.

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Department of German and Scandinavian, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
Sonja Boos

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Boos, S. (2021). Symmetry as Narrative Structure: OCD in Gottfried Keller’s A Village Romeo and Juliet. In: The Emergence of Neuroscience and the German Novel. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82816-5_5
Published: 30 September 2021
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