D. Worlds Apart
I. An Instantaneous Superimposition of Narratives
of empathy (“Einfühlung”) on Stifter’s text, which sheds light on the way characters relate to their surroundings, suggesting that it is an organic, complicated interplay, and more than a merely intellectual level of engagement.16 Whether explicitly or implicitly through character analyses, a large proportion of scholars acknowledge the emotional depth of the novella, though there are exceptions.17
conjoined so that there is a sense of relationship between the parts. Piquant details are not buried in the middle of a string of clauses, but rather placed at prominent positions in the sentence. As a countermotion to this increase in linguistic concreteness, however, the book version tends to present in a more subtle fashion details pertaining to characters’ psychological dispositions; one example is the passage on the child Brigitta’s affinity for stones and sticks, which will be analyzed later in this chapter.18
Setting the tone for the psychological elements of the story, the novella begins with a brief reflection on “Dinge und Beziehungen im menschlichen Leben, die uns nicht sogleich klar sind”
(411), at the end of which the first-person narrator informs us that these thoughts were inspired by the events which he is about to relate. His narrative begins in the modus of a “Reisebericht,”
telling of a friend, the Major, whom he met during travels in Italy and who subsequently invited the narrator to visit him at his estate in Hungary. Throughout the novella, the male protagonist is only ever referred to as “der Major,” never by name. This is an important point. The text is divided into four sections of nearly equal length: “Steppenwanderung,” “Steppenhaus,”
“Steppenvergangenheit,” and “Steppengegenwart.” The narrator’s journey to Uwar, the Major’s estate, as well as his reflections on how they got to know each other, form the first section. The second section deals with how the Major lives in Hungary, details of how he manages his estate, and how the narrator occupies his time during his stay there. Along the way, the narrator engages in some speculation about why the Major never married; learns that the latter harbors a passion for the titular protagonist, Brigitta Marosheli; and is told by the neighbor Gömör that Brigitta cannot marry the Major because she had a husband who abandoned her long ago without divorcing her. The third section, which contains a lengthy flashback, tells the story of Brigitta’s childhood and early life: how she was neglected for being ugly in appearance; how all her faculties
18 See page 134.
turned inward; how the attractive and sought-after Stephan Murai courted her; how they married and had a child; how Stephan became attracted to the outwardly beautiful Gabriele; and how Brigitta divorced him and moved to Marosheli with the child Gustav. (The latter detail contradicts what the narrator had been told earlier, downgrading that story to the status of hearsay and speculation.)
The narrative thus establishes the history of three characters, besides the narrator: the Major, Brigitta, and Stephan Murai. In the climactic sequence at the end of the novella, Brigitta’s son, Gustav, is wounded, though not life-threateningly, by a pack of hungry wolves. The Major and the narrator come to his rescue and the three of them escape back to Uwar. Word is sent to Brigitta, who arrives the same night. The next morning, as she tends to Gustav, the narrator comes to check in with them, sees the Major standing at the window in the next room, and realizes that he is crying. When the narrator asks him what is the matter, he replies: “Ich habe kein Kind.” Brigitta apparently overhears this, enters the room, and says a single word: “Stephan.”
(472) She and the Major embrace, and the reader realizes that Stephan is his name. Thus, with only one word, the novella reveals that the two narratives of Stephan and the Major are actually part of one history, because they are the same person.
This turn of events is both emotionally and intellectually laden. The reason the twist works is that the information needed to unravel the plot strands is compact enough that its effect happens in a near-instantaneous moment. The temporal compression is indispensible for
producing the reader’s emotional reaction because the effect depends on a multitude of realizations crowding in all at once. The first three sections of the novella set the reader up to make a positive evaluation of the Major and a negative one of Stephan Murai; when it is revealed that they are the same person, one of the immediate results is that the reader has to re-evaluate the Major/Stephan character and try to reconcile opposing attitudes towards him. Brigitta, too, is
due for a re-evaluation, since her character appears in a different light once one realizes that, by her choice, during the entire time in which the Major has lived at Uwar, the actual nature of their relationship has been acknowledged neither to their neighbors nor to Gustav, who had a rightful claim to know.
The textual medium has a certain type of linearity in that words are arranged sequentially.
There are a number of ways in which this linearity can be disrupted — for example, visually, in works of poetry as well as experimental literary forms. Brigitta’s surprise twist is a different type of disruption, not visual, but simulated. The novella establishes two layers, one belonging to the present and the other to the past; the present-layer encompasses the first, second, and fourth sections of the novella, and the past-layer is developed in the third section. Both possess the linearity of a written text; each is read and experienced in imagination as a sequential narrative.
The revelation that “der Major” and “Stephan Murai” are the same person superimposes the past- layer onto the present-layer; as a consequence, the reader must re-evaluate numerous aspects of the present-layer according to information about the psychology of the characters that can only be logically deduced after the relationship between the two protagonists has been clarified.