MPhil in European Literature

Structuring Memory: Narrative Perspectives in German Autobiography

Queens’ College
Wednesday, 24th of March 2004

by

Rebecca Steltner 

The Poetics of Memory and Fragment in Max Frisch’s Montauk and Peter Handke’s Wunschloses Unglück

Nägele warns of the dangers of proclaiming a general trend towards autobiographical fiction in the 60s and 70s¹ and de Man even doubts the existence and status of the genre.² Therefore, I want to aim at a simple comparative perspective and just look at the comments Max Frisch and Peter Handke make on memory (and so inevitably also on the self and our perception of self) in Montauk (1975) and Wunschloses Unglück (1974).

The extent to which these works really are autobiographical is irrelevant. It is not whether or not a text is autobiographical and what it tells us about the author’s life that is interesting. How one author fictionalises a personal event is also obviously impossible for criticism to analyse (and subconscious). What interests me is not how Montauk (M) and Wunschloses Unglück (WU) are two examples of the genre of autobiography but what they disclose about the processes of literary production in general and what this can reveal about our perception and reminiscence of experiences, and how it contributes to the ‘invention’ of the self.

The writer ‘invents’ characters all the time regardless of genre and these characters will always be selves, what else? Autobiographical writing is no different from other fiction in this respect, only the writer can do this more directly, even give his character his own name (‘Max Frisch’). The only difference is perhaps that autobiographical writing makes this fictionalising process its main topic³ and sheds light on this process rather than try to hide it in what would then be a coherent narrative. Neither of these texts is coherent in the sense that it smoothes over ‘a fragmented experience of reality’⁴, instead they use fragmentation, and in so doing automatically draw attention to the act of narration through an alienation effect. Fragmentation therefore seems to be ‘aesthetically appropriate’ to discussions of memory.

Fictionalising and Other Perspectives

One way in which these texts make the process of fictionalising of experience and self their main topic is through establishing two types of narrative, which are juxtaposed to comment on each other. These comments are, I believe, not just essayistic, as it would be too simplistic to say that one is literary (i.e. the week-end in Montauk and the mother’s story in Wunschloses Unglück which are both told in the traditionally story-like third person) and the other a meta-literary, an ‘almost’ critical discussion⁵, (i.e. the flash backs narrated in the first person in Montauk and the son’s account of the difficulties of writing his mother’s biography and therefore in a way also his own in Wunschloses Unglück).

The distinction between critical text and narrative in Wunschloses Unglück that Nägele calls for is important because after all a distinction is made in the text and should not be omitted in the criticism thereof, but this also overlooks how the more ‘critical’ parts, are not only related to the narrative by way of straightforward commentary, they are also literary as part of the narrative and so is their relation to the ‘story’. In Wunschloses Unglück, for example, language is represented as impeding the mother’s individuation. The son, in the other narrative, is aware of this in his mother’s life and yet he encounters the same when he cannot reconstruct her individuality or overcome his loss through language.

In Frisch’s Montauk the two narrative perspectives are more complex simply because both are ‘autobiographical selves’ – or alternative self-fictionalisations – which are often even entangled in a single sentence [my italics]:

[....]

1 Nägele, pp.388-390

2 de Man, “Empirically as well as theoretically, autobiography lends itself poorly to generic definition; each specific instance seems to be an exception to the norm;”, (p.920)

3 Shipe, “The real subject of Montauk is how autobiographical material came to be transformed into a work of fiction.

4 Montauk is about its own writing.”, p.55

5 Nägele criticises the treatment of both discourses as literary: “Eine solche Annäherung wird problematisch und paradox zugleich erscheinen: problematisch weil sie die strikte Trennung von kritischem und erzählerischem Text aufhebt”, (p.388) and the treatment of both voices as fictional characters: “Der professionelle Literaturkritiker könnte sich das Problem erleichtern, indem er es umgeht und einfach vom “Erzähler” schreibt. Dieser [...] Kunstgriff hat seine Berechtigung als Kritik an einer naiven Identifizierung von Autor und Erzähler, führt aber, mechanisch angewandt, zu einer ebenso naiven bloßen Umkehrung ...“, (p.392) For the sake of clarity, I must nevertheless use this ‚Kunstgriff’.