It All Passes On
Adalbert Stifter’s collection of novellas is long on landscape descriptions and short on climactic events—but his appeal for his more famous contemporaries is strangely understandable.
Review by Mark Clemens
The nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter counts among his admirers Kafka, Rilke, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Thomas Mann, W.H. Auden, and Marianne Moore, who translated him into English. His countryman Thomas Bernhard, who hated everybody, hated him, or affected to: “in actual fact, the most boring and mendacious author in the whole of German literature.” But if Stifter enjoys any readers in the Anglophone world at this moment, it is almost certainly because of W.G. Sebald, who often cited him as an influence. Given this cheering section of modernists and postmodernists, a reader might pick up Motley Stones, a collection of his tales newly translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, expecting to meet a daring formal innovator or a master of irrational psychology. Instead she will find: landscapes. Lots and lots of landscapes, from various parts of the Austrian countryside, minutely described. If no landscapes are readily available—a tale set in the city, for example—Stifter makes do with describing the interiors of houses. There are people in these settings, of course, and they dutifully go about enacting whatever plots Stifter has in mind, but it is sometimes tempting to think he regards them and their activities as a regrettable formality he must deal with if he is to continue describing the landscape.
It is hard to describe the precise nature of Stifter’s oddity, harder still to make it sound appealing.[1] Take “Limestone,” one of the six long stories, almost novellas, that make up Motley Stones. A surveyor maps a remote region of little interest, of “many little hills, each hill made of bare gray limestone, not fissured, as so often with this kind of rock, or dropping off steeply, but separating into…” I will cut Stifter off here, but note that he even tells us what it does not look like. In this strange setting, the surveyor encounters a strange priest, who lives a spartan existence but has unaccountably fine linens. His parsonage is naturally described in detail. Surveyor and priest become friendly; the latter points out features of the landscape and the former demonstrates his surveying tools, including the ether-soaked rag he uses to cool his flask of wine. The men debate whether a storm will break, and when it does, they sit it out in silence (the storm’s causes are thoroughly explained using the latest nineteenth-century science). All this takes up twenty pages. Tension builds around whether we will come to understand why this priest lives as he does, the origin of his linens. He will tell us himself—at length, of course.
Stifter makes an art of courting boredom and frustrating expectations. Each story in Motley Stones (which is not a miscellany, but a collection deliberately arranged by Stifter) has a geological title. In the first two, “Granite” and “Limestone,” the titular rocks serve important structural and thematic purposes. A boy sits on a granite slab with his grandfather, who gives him a safe and secure grounding in the world. The priest of the limestone hills has eroded all excess from his life, leaving a secretive and saintly core. Having spotted the pattern, we assume we know something about Stifter’s methods. On to “Tourmaline,” which has no tourmaline in it, and which Stifter begins by somewhat sheepishly explaining the meaning of his title, perhaps fearing we won’t get it otherwise. The remaining stories more or less drop the “stones” conceit entirely, and we drop any idea that this writer is going to be easy to figure out.
[1] My attempts here owe much to the semi-anonymous blogger Tom at Wuthering Expectations, whose writing about Stifter suggested several productive ways to approach him.
For Stifter, life is always anticlimactic in the long run.
These stories are not fairy tales, though they make similar use of stock characters and paratactic logic. They are not realist either, despite the surfeit of regional detail. They move slowly and with minimal plot, the kind of thing that could be called a “slice of life”—except the events they relate are far too weird to be anyone’s life. They are full of natural and sometimes domestic disasters, but use frame narratives or disruptive pacing in a way that prevents us from ever feeling concern for their characters. They have more or less happy endings, which are undercut with a queasy melancholy at the passing of all things. The closest analogue in American literature might be Nathaniel Hawthorne (very nearly Stifter’s exact contemporary), the Hawthorne of The Marble Faun and the quieter and odder short stories—“Wakefield” could be a Stifter tale, if it had less overt philosophizing and more descriptions of Wakefield’s apartment.
Stifter does have themes he pursues throughout Motley Stones: the resilience of children, the deep secrecy of people’s hearts, the insufficiency of good intentions and their value nonetheless, the difficulty of arranging a life’s events into a “narrative” that contains “meaning.” Scare quotes feel appropriate around those terms, for Stifter stresses over and over that life is long, and no dramatic moment can last forever. “Tourmaline,” for example, begins with a conventional melodramatic plot: a woman has an affair, cheating on her husband with his friend, an actor. One day she disappears, no one knows where. This all takes one quarter of the story’s length. Stifter never returns to the woman or the actor. Instead, he spends the remaining twenty-six pages telling us how the husband and his daughter spend the rest of their lives, languishing in a small basement apartment. The drama of the adultery plot is extended past where its climax should be, drawn out until it fades back into the flat line of everyday life. In the story’s final sentence, Stifter draws the line out even farther:
The great actor is long since dead, Professor Andort is dead, the woman has long since moved away from the suburb, the Perron House no longer exists, a gleaming row of houses now stands where it and its neighbors were, and the young generation does not know what once stood there, and what happened in that place.
The story ends only when all its characters and even its setting have faded from memory; its melancholy is compounded by the irony that “what happened in that place” is not all that remarkable or memorable.
For Stifter, life is always anticlimactic in the long run. Each story in Motley Stones contains three generations, and events which trouble one are dulled or forgotten in the next. In “Cat-Silver,” characters are called “the father” and “the mother” instead of their proper names. Their children grow up and take over these titles, blurring identities across time. This accounts for at least part of Stifter’s preoccupations with geology and geography: he knows that landscapes are narratives, paced so slowly no one notices they’re happening—nor does anyone know the ends to which they are unfolding. So it is with us, and, he reflects, with art. “Everything that now exists, no matter how great and good it is, lasts for a time, fulfills a purpose, and then passes on. And so it will be with all the works of art that now exist; an eternal veil of forgetfulness will lie over them, just as there is now over those things that came before” (from his long novel Indian Summer, trans. Wendell Frye—readers of Sebald will find the sentiment extremely familiar).
And here is the difficulty of reading Stifter in 2023, for he was certainly right about himself—he has been subsumed by those who came after him. We read him through Kafka, Sebald, even Bernhard, and see what those major writers saw in him, what they distilled out of him and blended into their own work. It’s a peculiar experience, reading a minor writer beloved of giants. Without fully immersing ourselves in German history and literature, it’s hard to see just what Stifter himself thought he was doing, what his contemporaries thought of him; he was—it seems unbelievable—relatively popular in his time. Now it is his oddities and rough edges that attract us. He has distinct pleasures of his own to offer—his careful attention to the “spikes of ice gleam[ing] at the edge of puddles,” or the “long flat narrow short-handled spoon” used to apply wagon grease, or the dozens of different ways to describe ice and snow in “Rock Crystal”—though they are held in perspective by the absurdities seized on by later writers. He is a case study in what might really be going on when we say someone is “ahead of their time.” We may not be able to pry Stifter loose from Sebald: Consider the way a brief saxophone line or drum fill in an otherwise unremarkable soul song becomes the basis for a classic rap track. The new remakes the old in its image. Every meaning has its homecoming festival. And Stifter has, at least for now, faded into the background of his own reputation—a perfectly Stifterian fate.
Mark Clemens writes from outside Chicago.
This edition of Motley Stones was published by NYRB Classics on May 4, 2021. You can purchase it from their website here.
