D. Worlds Apart
II. Paradigms of Rational Order
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.
The various narrative strands provide the prerequisites for the reader to perceive the ending as highly meaningful. Connectedness with an individual’s internal narratives is the essence of meaningfulness. The preliminary sections of Brigitta, by presenting the reader with narratives to which the final climactic scene refers back, lays a necessary groundwork so that the reader will care.
The narrative lingers in particular over the description of Uwar. From the narrator’s observation “daß alle Zweige seiner Thätigkeit ihre eigene Geldverwaltung haben” (436), it can be deduced that the Major’s estate is carefully ordered. The narrator’s tour through numerous specialized divisions supports this claim. These “branches” are the smaller subdivisions of a larger organizational structure resembling a tree: they are all a part of Uwar, which is one of the four
“Musterhöfe” that makes up the agricultural “Bund” (441); and these, in turn, are involved not only in an outreach to other, smaller operations in the area, but also in an overarching concept of economic development that includes all of Hungary, as expressed by the Major: “Dieses weite Land ist ein größeres Kleinod, als man denken mag, aber es muß noch immer mehr gefaßt werden. Die ganze Welt kömmt in ein Ringen sich nutzbar zu machen, und wir müssen mit.
Welcher Blüthe und Schönheit ist vorerst noch der Körper dieses Landes fähig, und beide müssen hervorgezogen werden.” (436) This developmental concept is like a hardy plant: it begins at the bottom, with the workers — even encompassing some “Bettler, Herumstreicher, selbst Gesindel”
(428) enticed by a reliable wage — and ends with a “Blüthe.” In this botanical schema, Brigitta is like a root,19 which is a fitting role for the one who originally came up with this method of cultivation.
19 The text brings Brigitta into a metaphorical association with roots in the passage describing how she became suspicious of affectionate displays during childhood: “Die Mutter aber wurde dadurch noch mehr zugleich liebend und erbittert, weil sie nicht wußte, daß die kleinen Würzlein, als sie einst den warmen Boden der Mutterliebe suchten und nicht fanden, in den Fels des eigenen Herzen schlagen mußten, und da trotzen.” (447)
The narrator’s comparisons of cultivation activities at Uwar with the “alten starken Römer”
and the “Sage von dem Paradiese” (437) create an atmosphere of mythological significance that seeks to elevate agriculture and animal husbandry — which are indeed useful and necessary to humanity — to a higher status. These vocations might otherwise be considered ‘below the station’
of someone from an aristocratic background such as the Major. Nevertheless, the estates maintain a hierarchy with their owners at the apex, though the workers are depicted as being fully satisfied with their place in the arrangement.20 Everyone seems to have their proper place, including those persons neither at the bottom nor the top of the social hierarchy, such as the managers of the Schäferei: “Er hat einige Leute dort, die bedeutende Bildung verrathen, und mit ihm in das Wesen der Sache, die sie lieben, einzugehen scheinen.” (436) The overall picture is idealized to the point of being rather unrealistic;21 nevertheless, it presents an image of a useful vocation that fits into the total aesthetic vision of an integrated life that the novella seeks to promote, and which is not complete until it also includes familial harmony.
Without the support of the preparatory narratives, there would likely still be some
affective component to the reconciliation between the two main characters, but it would not be as strong. A reader might perhaps be moved by an extremely simple version of events — presented, for example, thus: ‘Two people were estranged for many years and then became reconciled.’ In this pared-down rendition, any affective response would be subject to associations with an individual’s existing stock of narratives pertaining to reconciliation; it would therefore be largely based on generalizations pertaining to similar situations, rather than on details specific to the novella Brigitta. Specific details have greater potential to result in an intense emotional response because the author of the text provides the components that are evaluated to produce the
20 See page 135.
21 Wilfried Thürmer, for instance, calls the estates “utopian” in “‘Die ganze Welt kömmt in ein Ringen sich nutzbar zu machen, und wir müssen mit’: Zur Ambivalenz der Liebes-Geschichte in Stifters Erzählung Brigitta,” Wirkendes Wort 57 (2007): 231.
emotion, rather than these components being drawn from whatever an individual’s personal experience happens to be. Thus, the more detail and development present in the preliminary narratives of a text, the more opportunity the author has to influence the emotional response generated by the narrative as a whole.
The extent to which something is perceived as meaningful increases in proportion to its degree of interconnectedness with other mental data, which is precisely what the network of specific details in Brigitta provides. Something that is well-connected, by relating either to a large number of other data, or to a datum that is rated as highly important within the overall hierarchy of the mind, becomes meaningful by extension. Emotions play an important role in these
meaning networks, since they are the mechanism for hierarchizing cognitive information: the greater the emotional intensity attached to a cognition, the higher its perceived importance is.22 An intense emotion experienced at the end of the novella is thus part of a two-part reinforcement of meaningfulness: the preparatory narratives provide the conditions for the ending to be
meaningful and therefore emotionally intense, and the emotional intensity, in turn, underlines the significance of the themes of forgiveness and reconciliation, thereby priming them to be re- evaluated and perhaps upgraded in the overall order of the mind’s belief system. In this way, an effectively affective literarary text can gain access to the mind’s internal mechanisms for making sense of the world.