LAUSR

Eduard von Keyserling’s novels show a great variety of narrative devices. Contrasts are pervasive, sometimes culminating in polarities, as frequently noted in Keyserling scholarship. Contrasts may in the course of a novel be modified, as by attenuation or intensification, or expansion and/or deepening. Contrasts may also be shown to be inappropriate in their initial appearance; reversals of certain components of contrasting complexes may occur. Significantly, whereas contrasts and polarities in their binary appearance usually tend to stress uniqueness and individuality, by the very fact of their recurrence, and their reference to other, similar binary opposites, these contrasts are shown to be indicative of a framework of similarity rather than contrast . Many other devices, mostly overlooked by critics, also occur, such as parallelism of figures and situations, doubling of characters, the use of leitmotifs and symbols. They, too, become recognizable as tending towards sameness rather than difference. Moreover, the play with identities and variants, with leitmotifs, with linguistic links and echoes, with borrowings and anticipations, and, especially in the later novels, with symbols, is repeated among the novels themselves. Intertextuality therefore eventually takes precedence over contextuality, and hence there is established a universe which is a coherent one and, though limited in space and time, complete in itself. This universe is one inspired by a Weltanschauung in which determinism appears to prevail over freedom of action; the analysis of structural and narrative elements undertaken here reveals their function as delineating and supporting this world-view. To see the characteristic of Keyserling’s art, therefore, as showing a divorce from the world as constituted, or an assessment of Keyserling’s novels as instances of a non-committal art for art’s sake, is ill conceived. That narrative patterns are undeniably employed in the cause of novelistic and aesthetic considerations by no means implies that they are not at the same time employed to advance a significant, though ambivalent view of the world.