Volume 39, Issue 2

Two years ago, on May 23–25, 2002, a regular annual colloquium of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA) Committee on Literary Theory took place at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, Croatia. Under the title Framing Contingency: History and Heterology the Committee members as well as prominent guests were invited to dwell upon the modes in which history is nowadays (if not always already?) forced to cope with contingency. The conference memorandum, circulated in advance, read as follows: Though it has been shaped in order to frame contingency by laying down its “hidden law,” history appears nowadays to be framed (i. e., outwitted) by the same contingency. If contingency was expected to be turned into the subject matter of human history, it suddenly turns out to be the subject , the agency that secretly shapes this history. What was intended to be carefully worked through by the unrelenting, conscious activity of a historian appears to be compulsively acted out through his or her vulnerable body. Does not, after all, the inscription of an infinitely differentiated net of memory-traces into our senses necessarily exceed any attempt at their logically coherent narrative recollection? Is the past therefore not speaking through us before we become able to speak about it; is not its interpellation the enabling condition of our speech act? Being an empowered subject of “my” past, do I not incarnate a set of inherited constraints that give it a historical shape precisely by being constitutively placed out of my control? Finally, what would be the possible consequences of the outlined “an-archic” intervention into the heart of our domesticating historical activity for the position of the constitutive parts (i.e., events, figures, focalizer, narrator, etc.) of its narrative? These are some of the questions our conference is supposed to focus upon.

Set against a horizon of post-modern rejection of the modern illusion of necessity, permanence, and universal knowledge, the essay deconstructs the notion of “framing contingency”. Understanding contingency as chance or randomness that ruptures temporal order within the circumference of any given ‘frame’ of intelligibility, the paper argues that the current popular term ‘framing’, in place of Hegel's domestication of time as necessary true historical unfolding, together with Kant's analytic aesthetic judgement, signals profound paradigm shifts in criticism that are attendant on divestiture in Hegelian inspired literary history, while positing anew the question of how to connect literary expressions past and present.

The contingency of proper names has implications for the history of concepts (‘Begriffsgeschichte’), especially with regard to the transmission of discourses among cultures and languages. “Pragmatic” theories of language that take account of hearers and social contexts are especially open to the problematics of contingency, but so is the New Theory of Reference proposed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity (1972/1980). Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler have explored the social, psychological, and political factors affecting the stability of proper names in their responses to Kripke's antidescriptivist account of reference; Michel Foucault addresses similar ideas in his reflections on the name of the author. There is an even more fundamental openness to contingency in Kripke's model than these theorists suggest. The contingency of naming and reference is explored briefly by way of the circulation of the terms “improvvisatore” and “improvisation” in the multicultural context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.

Six examples question the doxa that art is a means to control contingency. Literature has a variety of ways to represent, produce, and perform contingency. 1) In Du Bartas's La Sepmaine chaos is represented in terms of a rigorous aesthetic order. 2) Readers of Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste get disoriented and must work to construct order. 3) Bildung in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is both contingent and governed by a society (the Turmgesellschaft ) that controls the process. 4) In L'Éducation sentimentale Flaubert performs contingency by producing a paratactic style via painstaking revisions. 5) In Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften things happen to the protagonist, who is affected by events that emerge randomly. Musil's proliferation of alternative worlds prevents the completion of the novel. 6) In Guimarães Rosa's Meu tio iauaretê the narrator destroys the representations of language itself.

Adalbert Stifter's texts display a particularly high degree of “sense of contingency” (to be distinguished from Robert Musil's “sense of possibility”), not only as a mover of their plot, but also as a rationale for their own mode of writing. Their écriture is decisively metonymic in the sense of not being synecdochal: Stifter mistrusts any claim to represent a larger unit by focusing on a part of it. Rather, he stresses the contingency implied in the selection of any part. This can be clearly shown by way of a close reading that compares different versions of the story “Der beschriebene Tännling”.

An autobiography deals with a specific case of historical contingency – the temporary nature of individual life. It is anchored in two interdependent contexts: a referential one (of the life it refers to) and a discursive one (of the narrative trajectory that shapes the reference). Through a reading of three autobiographies – St. Augustine's Confessiones , Montaigne's Essais , and Breytenbach's Dog Heart – the paper sets out to show how they in different ways use a double contextuality in a (vain) attempt to give the contingent subject a stable foundation. Autobiography is an ongoing process that exemplifies the contingency it tries to overcome.

Contingency with all its connotations plays a major role in the literature of the fantastic. The latter takes refuge in three modes of encapsulating contingency into speech: 1. by placing it into the framework of the paradox of speaking about the unsayable, 2. by empowering its phantasms to reinvoke a past which was repressed by the constraints of official culture, 3. and, conversely, to efface historical traces of the given culture, official or non, by constructing an ‘unprecedented culture’, a cultural a-topia. These different approaches to contingency – transcendent, mnemonic, and anti-mnemonic – either foster divergent sets of argumentation within the fantastic text, and/or are implemented by textual strategies.

Tracing the conditions and consequences of the disarticulations of narrativist conceptions of historiography, notably within the constructions of a psycho-history, we show how Freud's revised understanding of defences and disavowals have de-linked memory and consciousness. This brings psychoanalysis face to face with its own disavowals. The ghost of hypnosis re-surfaces in its role in group psychology, where it is closely linked to the phenomenon of panic. Freud concedes that this is not the absolute limit of the group, but the limit constitutive of the group. By virtue of its constitutive role, panic attains a theoretical status. La panique historique is a theoretical panic that confronts the denials over which a narrativist historiography had claimed mastery.

Like any other type of human discourse, history writing should not be viewed as an objective enterprise whose implicit telos is to seek truth; rather, it should be treated as a sphere of conflicting social interests and asymmetrical power-relations. To understand the past, therefore, we not only have to analyze verbal disputes that frequently occur between individual speakers and writers but also need to watch out for the ideological presence that has infiltrated virtually all social institutions.

What is the relation between history as contingent traumatic experience (Julian's Persian campaign), history as narrative of that experience ( Res gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus) and the historian as author/narrator/participant (Ammianus Marcellinus)? The documentary dimension of the historian's experience, usually accepted at face value, is problematized. The historian's intermittent appearances in the text as participant are literary choices establishing the evidentiary value of the narrative.

Hitherto unknown archival material allows a closer look at Carl Schmitt as a theorist of culture and tragedy, and a fuller examination of Heiner Müller's interest in, and debt to, him. The significance of Schmitt's theory of drama for Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine is analyzed against the comparative background of Russian literary Hamletism. Müller's self-conscious intertextualism was a response to, and an extension of, Schmitt's critique of the role of artistic imagination in drama, which is treated here as but an element of his wider post-romantic cultural and social theory.

This essay deals with Durs Grünbein's extensive engagement with the classical legacy. What is its role and function in his poetry? What are some of the modes in which the poet's “desire to speak with the dead” (Greenblatt) articulates itself? To what extent are both past and present displaced, reinvented, and rewritten in and through their entwinement in Grünbein's poetry? These and similar, related questions bearing on the classics' continuous sway stake out the framework for inquiring into Grünbein's “bridge to antiquity.” Focusing on two poems in particular – “Vita Brevis” and “Julia Livilla” – this essay traces Grünbein's conversations with Homer, Horace, and Seneca, among others, with a view to disclosing what may be considered his unique contribution to our dealings with, responses to, and understanding of the past in and through art.

Uttering the name which negates his own existence, Odysseus as Nobody embarks on the endless journey of reflection of Western subjectivity. On an island at the limits of civilization Homer pushes language to say what cannot be said and the hero to reach beyond his identity. And as the poet searches not for the word but for the word-event, so must his persona consider individuality in its transcendental dimension. The immeasurable denial that this quest entails effaces almost the entire positivity of the word and of the self in order to withdraw itself at the point where the mirroring of the subject on its representation shall rise again as the condition of humanity's possibility.

The literature on representing the concentration camp complex of Mittelbau-Dora and the adjacent underground rocket factory Mittelwerke is so large that comprehensive approaches to the topic need a broad methodological framework. We propose a model that distinguishes between fictional, historiographical, and what we tentatively term “traumatographical” modes of writing on the subject. Focusing on the Dora -related passages in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), we show that privileging one of these modes at the cost of the others leads to a one-sided depiction of the historical referent. Every individual representation should therefore situate itself in relation to the other two modes of representation.

An overview of the most important properties of free indirect speech leads to an examination of the temporal structure one finds in free indirect speech. Free indirect speech arises from the temporal difference between the time of narration and narrated event not from the relations between author (or narrator) and fictional figures.

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