Fuhrmann Henschel and the Ruins of Realism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4550240 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert F Gro, Robert F Gross (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1998 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 319-334 |
| Publication date | 1998-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Theatre Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0192-2882 • E-ISSN: 1086-332X |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/tj.1998.0067 |
| OpenAlex | W2001120953 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
Fuhrmann Henschel and the Ruins of Realism* Robert F. Gross (bio) I The title of Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1899 Fuhrmann Henschel resists translation into English. 1 The protagonist, Henschel, is described through his occupation as Fuhrmann, which denotes a carter, teamster, drayman, or wagoner. But none of these English equivalents capture the overtones of Fuhrmann, with its compound composed of a form of the German verb fahren, which means among other things “to drive,” and the noun denoting the male, Mann. From the first, Henschel is a man who is identified through his occupation—an occupation, we will later learn, that he has inherited from his father. As Fuhrmann, Henschel is marked as male and as master, evoking resonances going back to Plato’s Charioteer. He is a man of civilizing force, and with [End Page 319] his involvement in his task of mastery, this Mann is identified not only as male, but as masculine. And yet he is marked by obsolescence. In the play, set in the 1860s, Henschel is already aware that his occupation is being displaced by capitalist and technological “progress,” and is being superseded by the railway. By the end of the 1890s, the Fuhrmann was already a creature of the past. Thus the title of the play speaks both of mastery and its loss; the Fuhrmann is a Samson, eyeless in Gaza. This investigation of what is now a largely forgotten German turn-of-the-century play is not motivated by theatrical nostalgia, but by an interest in the variety of forms realistic drama has taken. I do not wish to enter into the current polemical debate on realism here, although the questions it raises about the relationships between ideology and theatrical presentation are undeniably important. 2 What concerns me is the tendency of the debate to oversimplify our understanding of style. A stylistic rubric such as “realism” is often used to create groupings of plays at the expense of an awareness of the particular qualities of the individual work, with its own elisions, overstatements, gaps, and compromises. 3 Instead of understanding style as a unifying force found throughout the play, we should rather see it as a field of varied and often warring impulses that draw the play first in one direction, then in another. Since the discussion of style can often reduce an individual play to yet another expression of a highly generalized Weltanschauung, it is important to look for the specific moments in a play that exist at odds with what might appear to be the predominant style, and to reveal a more specific historical context and set of meanings. Fuhrmann Henschel is a particularly apt object for these questions since it shows a crisis of realistic representation unfolding within the conventions of a realistic play. Hauptmann’s dramaturgy in this play is usually discussed as part of that particular development of realism known as naturalism, a term largely absent from current discussions of realism. Although definitions of naturalism in the 1890s were so divided and contentious that some historians have despaired of finding a comprehensive definition, a general, working definition has nonetheless emerged. It holds that naturalism is a form of realism that was initially shaped by positivism, claimed to be scientific in its methods, and influenced by the work of Emile Zola and the social plays of Ibsen. 4 [End Page 320] Inherent in this definition is a largely unarticulated premise that naturalism is a form of realism that takes realism’s use of metonymy to an extreme. For Kenneth Burke, metonymy is the master trope of realism: any attempt to deal with human relationships after the analogy of naturalistic correlations becomes necessarily the reduction of some higher or more complex realm of being in terms of a lower or less complex realm of being. 5 Following Burke’s insight, Hayden White has identified all writing dominated by causal thinking as metonymic. 6 The emphasis on tightly contrived and plausible chains of causality, and the attempts to account for character through causal explanations are only two examples of the dominance of metonymy in realistic drama. The standard definition of naturalism emphasizes an extremely reductive causality that is clearly metonymic. Stressing
Art · Art history · German · Linguistics · Literature · Obsolescence · Realism · History · Mathematics · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |