Anna-Lena Eick: „Geschichte zerfällt in Bilder, nicht in Geschichten“: Visualität in der literarischen Geschichtsdarstellung. Paderborn: Brill and Fink, 2024. 407pp.

“History breaks down into images, not stories”: Taking its cue from Walter Benjamin’s evocative quote about the primacy of images for making sense of history, Anna-Lena Eick’s interdisciplinary, media-comparative study “Geschichte zerfällt in Bilder, nicht in Geschichten”: Visualität in der literarischen Geschichtsdarstellung explores the constitutive role of visuality for representations of history. Rather than analyzing text-image relations in the context of multimodality, media combination, or even rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy, however, the book focusses on narrative strategies that, almost paradoxically, reject the prototypical logics of narrativity in favour of the logics of visuality. More specifically, the study is interested in the proliferation of forms and devices, especially in historiographic metafictions, that emulate medium-specific characteristics of the “new visual media” (18), photography and film. Eick’s insightful study thus contributes not only to a better understanding of the late 20^th-century historical novel and its quest for more appropriate ways of representing history but also significantly expands the scope of contemporary scholarly debates around intermediality.

As its main point of departure, the book postulates an intricate relation – a “co-evolution” (3) – between two major developments of the 20^th century: the emergence and institutionalization of photography and film as visual mass media, and a crisis of traditional historiography. The latter was occasioned by an increasing consciousness of the inherent paradoxes of historiography, resulting in the urgent call to rethink central tenets of the discipline. Traditional historiography’s claim to accurately and verifiably reflect real events, which supposedly set it apart from literary representations of history, for instance, sat in a rather uneasy relation to its inevitable reliance on processes of selection and emplotment that not only undermined the distinction from literary narrative but also the claim to objectivity. Curiously persistent ideological formations such as that of a universal history, too, seemed increasingly problematic due to their tendency to erase marginalized perspectives and gloss over contradictions and contingencies. Especially within the philosophy of history, the visual was thus welcomed as a corrective to outmoded ideals of linear progression and causality. Eick takes this a step further by making a case for the postmodern historical novel as an alternative, and quite possibly preferable, means of generating knowledge about and facilitating reflexive engagement with history by making use of literature’s medium-specific affordances for representing multiplicity, contingency, fragmentation, and incompleteness.

Following a brief introduction and contextualization of the argument within relevant cultural developments and paradigm shifts around the linguistic and iconic turns, the book’s second chapter zooms in on how literature, history writing, and visuality have been brought into conversation with one another since the emergence of photography and film. While the overall scope of relevant contexts and scholarly discourses considered throughout the book is sweeping, Eick’s main focus in chapter two lies with the writings of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Vilém Flusser as three influential voices related to the 20^th-century philosophy of history. As Eick emphasizes, their positions are particularly relevant to her analysis since all three are critical of traditional historiography and turn to the visual when seeking alternative ways of representing history. Yet, none of them outright reject the narrative mode; instead, they draw more or less prominent connections to the affordances of literary texts even while focussing on the characteristics of the new visual media (56–57). Although there is, of course, a substantial body of existing scholarship on Benjamin, Kracauer, and (albeit to a lesser extent) Flusser, Eick’s in-depth engagement with the respective oeuvres holds value in and of itself due to its rigorous attention to the triad of history – visuality – literature. The main purposes of the analysis of these three positions in the context of her book go further, however, and revolve, first, around the identification of the aporias of “traditional” historiography – namely, linearity, continuity, causality, monologue, and referentiality. Second, the analyses substantiate Eick’s claim that the rise of film and photography and the turn towards the visual as a promising means of dealing with the pitfalls and paradoxes of traditional historiography go hand in hand.

The third chapter fully turns towards literary representations of history. As a first step, it contextualizes the use of visual strategies in postmodern historical novels within the highly relevant field of intermediality. As a rather useful side effect, this also relates the book’s detailed engagement with 20th-century discourses and scholarship to contemporary debates in narratology, comparative literature, and media studies, hence highlighting their continued relevance. Building on the works of Irina O. Rajewsky, Werner Wolf, and Marie-Laure Ryan, among others, Eick argues that the visual representational strategies under investigation cannot be adequately captured by the concept of intermedial references (though these do play a role in the postmodern historical novel). She instead proposes the much broader concept of medial interferences (“mediale Interferenzen”, 190) as an umbrella term for all kinds of interactions and mutual influences between literature and the new visual media. These include literary evocations or suggestions of simultaneity, spatiality, and discontinuity through fragmentation; (too) detailed descriptions, repetition, and metalepsis; as well as many others. As carefully reconstructed in Eick’s analysis of the discursive context, the proliferation of these techniques in the historical novel is inextricably tied to the rise of photography and film and to the hopes projected unto these new visual media. As such, medial interferences not only become relevant to the discussion of intermedial phenomena but also point to a crucial research gap in the study of intermediality that the book sets out to fill.

The remainder of the third chapter is dedicated to the proposal of an analytical model composed of five thematic categories, derived ex negativo from the aporias of historiography identified in earlier chapters. Each of the problematically paradoxical tenets of historiography is now juxtaposed with an alternative, visuality-based principle for making sense of history (a “Gegenkonzept”; literally, “counter-concept” in Eick’s terminology, 203). In the postmodern historical novel, historiography’s flawed yet persistent ideals of linearity or linear chronology, continuity, and causality are challenged by spatialization (Verräumlichung), discontinuity, and antinarrative structures. The monologue is superseded by a multiperspectival polylogue; and referentiality and mimesis are accompanied by (self-)reflexivity. The resulting five categories (spatialization, discontinuity, antinarrativity, polylogue, and reflexivity) offer neither a formal typology nor an exhaustive catalogue of possible strategies and devices. Indeed, each of the sensemaking principles could be achieved by any number of different literary strategies, leading to overlaps between the categories that reflect the complexity of the phenomenon at hand. As a deliberately open framework, the five counter-concepts are meant to aid the detailed analysis of primary texts, i. e., historiographic metafictions, and provide orientation regarding their potential to explore new ways of writing and making sense of history.

Chapter 4, finally, illustrates the value of the analytical model by applying it to Claude Simon’s 1981 novel Les Géorgiques, an anti-war novel in the tradition of the Nouveau Roman. Following the novel’s own lead, Eick maintains a twofold focus in her analysis. On the one hand, she considers the novel’s impetus to deconstruct those modes that are no longer deemed functional – the chronicle, the omniscient narrator, the autobiography, etc. On the other hand, she scrutinizes the proposal and exploration of new forms of expression based on the principles of spatialization, discontinuity, antinarrativity, polylogue, and reflexivity. Perhaps most importantly, Eick pays careful critical attention to the interplay between different strategies and devices across the entire work, and, by implication, to the potentially complex dynamics between the five categories. Guided by an open and flexible analytical model, Eick skilfully teases out the specific means by which Les Géorgiques negotiates the question of how one might adequately represent a history overshadowed by war and trauma.

Situated between comparative literature, narratology, media studies, and history, Anna-Lena Eick’s study comprehensively explores the affordances and limitations of literary representations of history where they intersect with the aporias of traditional historiography on the one hand, and the forms of expression showcased by the new visual media on the other hand. The book’s merit thus lies in creating a dialogue (possibly a polylogue) between literature, image, and history; between technological, cultural, and academic developments; and between multiple scholarly disciplines. Marvelling at the wealth of new forms of creative expression following the rise of photography and film, compellingly analyzed in this book, one cannot help but wonder what insights the author might have contributed to the more recent paradigm shift to the digital image. While Eick explicitly and justifiably brackets the digital and post-digital in her study, it is worth noting that many of her concerns remain strikingly topical. At any rate, the question at the heart of the book – how can history be represented adequately? – seems as pressing as ever. In Eick’s reading of Benjamin, we may find the tentative beginnings of an answer: “History breaks down into narrated images, not stories.” (84)