1869, Ep. 153 with Alexander Sorenson, author of The Waiting Water

6:48PM Sep 30, 2024

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Alexander Sorenson

Keywords:

realism

german

drowning

sacrifice

ophelia

realist

symbolism

19th century

literature

water

book

texts

ovid

motif

narratives

interesting

thinking

ends

find

bit

Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Alexander Sorensen, author of the new book The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice and Submergence in German Realism. Alexander Sorensen is Lecturer of German and Comparative literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York. His research and teaching interests center upon interdisciplinary themes and issues related to the environmental humanities, such as the interface between philosophy, literature, art and the history of science. We spoke to Alexander about the differences between German Realism and English and French Realism, what the symbolic meaning is behind one of the most recurring motifs in German Realist literature, death by drowning, and the deep connections between this drowning motif and Ovid's Metamorphoses, as well as Shakespeare's character Ophelia in Hamlet. Hello, Alex, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, Jonathan, thanks so much for having me

My pleasure. Well, I look forward to talking to you about your new book, The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice and Submergence in German Realism. Tell us the backstory to this book. How did it come to be?

Well, it started actually, when I was a college student and was doing my best to get better at German, and was finding myself getting really interested in German literature. So I did the typical college student thing, and took as many classes as I could at different time periods and subjects and, you know, periods of history, just trying to get as much of a feel for it as I could and figure out what I was most interested in. And as part of that process, I took a class that was just a survey of 19th century German literature. So we kind of started with romanticism at the beginning of the 1800s and worked our way all the way through and Realism was one of the periods that we covered. And as part of that class, we read a few realist novellas, two of which actually end up getting their own chapters in the book, because what caught my attention about them at that point was just this casual consistency of water and, more disturbingly, death in water, which just sort of seems to be hidden in plain sight. It was showing up all over the place, but it didn't really come up in in class conversations, or the little that I was able to look and at that point, the little I was able to look into, you know, secondary scholarship, as I was getting interested in that kind of stuff, it wasn't really being discussed at length there, either. So I got really compelled and curious about this, and ended up making that the topic of my my term paper for that class, and the topic just stayed with me, and it ended up becoming the subject of my dissertation research years later in grad school, and then eventually that dissertation gave rise to this book. So it's been, it's been on my mind for a long time, and this book was my, my best attempt to try and give an account of what I saw going on with this particular symbolism and why it's so prevalent in narratives from this particular period in time. So, so that's, yeah, it's how it came about.

Well, I look forward to diving in. No pun intended.

Hope it makes a splash. Yeah,

I'm sure people have said this too many times.

There's, there's, there's millions of puns that we can do. We'll probably get a few of them out of the way before we're all done here.

Nice, nice. Before we before we go deeper. Tell us a little bit about the difference between realism and German Realism. I was looking in the introduction that there was one of the aims was that German Realism was to be, quote, more true than all reality. Tell us what's this all about?

Yeah,

well, I mean, I think one way to start thinking about it is just in chronological terms. German Realism is a bit different from, say, French and English Realism, which we might be more familiar with, simply because it ends up happening a little bit later in history than than those movements. People have made arguments for why that may be. One of the more popular ones is that industrialism comes. Bit later to the German speaking lands than certainly in England, where it had been a thing from, you know, the the 18th century onwards, and the the connections between industrialized capitalism and the growth of cities and mass society and these sort of cultural transformations that realist literature often goes hand in hand with those kinds of economic and historical and social transformations. And I certainly, I certainly think that's true, but whatever the specific explanation for why it happens later, I think what for me, is more interesting is some of the stylistic differences. So if you think of a typical, you know, English realist novel, say something by Dickens or Thackery, or in the French sphere, you get into kind of more naturalist forms of realism, thinking of, you know, Flaubert or Zola, especially these, which often are really interested in describing the minutia of day to day life, often in like urban environments, kind of city, city life, and what that does to, you know, the human subject and and there's, There's a lot of that going on in the German sphere as well, but in German Realism, or to use the term that they used for their own movement, which is Poetic Realism, which might seem like an oxymoron at first, and that's sort of an interesting side to This. Within poetic or German Realism, you end up finding more stories that are set in nature or in communities that are still tied to to the land, to the landscape, to the environment. And while you do find stories that take place in kind of the newly mass society of the larger cities and things, that's one initial difference to some of the more well known realist texts that we might be familiar with from the English or the French tradition. And that quote that you mentioned is actually comes from a text from Schiller, who is a much earlier author, but it echoes a lot of what the realist theorists and authors in the German speaking sphere at this time were writing about what the goals of their own movement should be, and they were very interested in trying to play or explore the relationship between the true and the real. And you get really interesting kind of esthetic discussions in these in these letters and in these periodicals, where they're trying to really establish German Realism as a self understood movement. And that's something that is spoken about over and over and over again. So the relationship between what makes something simply real and what makes it simply true, and when do those two overlap? When do they diverge, and what does that look like in a work of art and literature was their primary medium for the most part. So there was a lot of stuff floating around that definitely links up with other traditions of realism, but there are also some very interesting little areas like that, where the the esthetic concerns and some of the even more philosophical possible, even metaphysical undergirding of some of the assumptions that these writers are bringing to their their narrative work, those are equally prevalent, and I find them maybe even more interesting than the similarities. So that's what I chose to to delve into in this particular book.

Nice, nice. Well, speaking of links, the one of the reasons I was interested in talking with you was that I had my own experience of being surprised at drowning symbolism from an author much later than the period that you discussed, but it was Herman Hesse and his his book, The Glass Bead game. I don't want to give it away, but one of the central characters actually dies by drowning. And it was very surprising, very shocking. And I was perplexed. Why did this happen? And so when I saw your book, I was like, okay, Alex is going to be able to tell me a little bit about this, because he's obviously, obviously sitting on the shoulders of giants in German literature from the past, and clearly was influenced by this drowning symbolism. So walk us through what does this symbolism mean in your findings?

Well, it's really interesting that you mentioned that book, and it definitely falls kind of outside of my area of focus. Historically, but it's a really interesting case to mention, because that drowning scene, actually, I looked into it a little bit. It wasn't a text that I knew particularly well, but at your recommendation, I checked it out, and it's actually striking how much of what water symbolism more generally, and then the drowning motif specifically in the area that I'm focusing on, kind of mid 19th century realist literature that in Hesse's description of this scene, towards the end, there's kind of an uncanny resemblance, actually, in a lot of the language that's being used in a lot of the thematic elements. So just to name a few to you know, give you a sense of of what I try and show in the book. One thing that's immediately interesting about that scene in Hesse's novel is that the drowning is not intentional, right? It's not an act of of suicide, which immediately is something that often gets associated with the motif of drowning. And we'll talk maybe a little bit about where that comes from and where we see that most prevalently in the European cultural context. But it's it's not an act of suicide, it's an accident. It's not intended, and the language surrounding the scene makes numerous references to sacrifice. And I can, I don't know if you want to use this in the actual recording, but I can read some of the quotes that I pulled in case it's interesting. But feel free to leave them out if you'd like John, please. But just to pull a few quotes before I take us back to the 19th century. So this is referring to the younger character who the protagonist is sort of a mentor to, and they're at this mountain lake kind of just before dawn. And one of the descriptions of the young character who is eager to jump into the lake for an early morning swim, it says, I quote, his steps flew in joyous homage toward the victorious sun and reverently retreated from it. His outspread arms embraced Mountain Lake and sky kneeling, he seems to pay tribute to the earth mother, and extending his hands to the waters of the lake, he offered himself his youth, his freedom, his burning sense of his own life like a festive sacrifice to the powers. A few sentences later, it refers to his essentially, He's warming up to swim, basically. So he's stretching and whatnot, and it refers to it as a ceremonial and sacrificial dance. And still further on, it refers to him both proudly and submissively, offering up in the dance his devout soul as a sacrifice to the sun and the gods. And then eventually, you know, he challenges the protagonist to a race, and the main character sort of jumps in after him, and as a result of the extreme cold of the water and maybe other factors, he ends up drowning. But he's, he's trying to to reach the other side. So, um, that's an interesting case, I think, because it brings in several things that are really central to the drowning motif in German Realism, that diverges in lots of ways from maybe what are some more familiar stereotypical tropes, right? So the lack of a suicidal kind of driving motivation behind it, the fact that this is not a an exclusively feminine form of demise, that's something else we can talk about that is going on in the 19th century, but that the German tradition does a little bit differently in various ways. And then the thematic elements of sacrifice and of sort of these primordial forces that seem to be doing almost more of the work when it comes to the event itself, these are all things that I try and argue in the book are much more central to water symbolism and the drowning motif in German Realism than one might at first assume. So what I end up trying to argue in the book actually is that rather than some of those maybe more familiar tropes connected with water in poetic realism, or German Realism, water and submergence as a theme revolve more around two main concepts that are interlinked, and that is the concept of order or of lawfulness, more broadly on. One hand and sacrifice on the other. So those are kind of the two conceptual frameworks that water symbolism and the drowning motif are kind of circulating around in these narratives. So maybe, if it's helpful, to dive into that a little bit more. Yes, please. So what I try and show in the book through these chapters, which combines close reading of primary texts, but it's also trying to pull from a deeper cultural history that goes back to antiquity and that comes up to the present day, that certainly includes literature and art, but also goes into the areas of philosophy and theology and cultural history. So the scope of the book is simultaneously very specific, but also methodologically. It tries to be broad enough to bring in what I felt should be brought in in order to do justice to the topic. And what I end up arguing is that in realist narratives in the German tradition, what we find driving the plots is a basic relationship between human subjectivity and different forms of law. So sometimes that's like actual literal jurisprudence, actual laws, positive law, we could say sometimes it's connected more with the idea of natural order or the laws of nature, cosmic law, this sort of thing. Sometimes it's linked more to the idea of ethical or moral imperative, right? So it takes different forms, but the the best sense I got of how to categorize it would be, you know, the idea of order, or of orderliness or of lawfulness, right? So that relationship between these human individuals and these various forms of order in the texts that I look at, they play out in different ways, but they almost inevitably culminate over and over again in moments of sacrifice. So that brings in, then the the other main concept that's at work here, and this too, I found really interesting because it diverged quite a bit from what we might most immediately think of when we hear the word sacrifice. So there right sacrifice? Or sacrificiality has tons of meanings and forms, but I think probably the most common or popular way of thinking about it is in the context of ceremony or religious ritual, and it's often connected with the idea of of violent negation or of destroying something or offering something up, or, you know, putting an end to something in a ceremonial context in order to bring about certain ends, whether that's appeasing a deity or seeking atonement or whatever it might be, right? So this is the image that we often have, and Hollywood has has done a good job of reinforcing that. When you hear the word sacrifice, where we're thinking of The Wicker Man, you know, the film from the 70s, and we're thinking of religious ritual and all of this, and that's frequently how cultural theorists from the 20th century think about and position sacrifice. So everyone from Freud in Totem and taboo to Rene Girard to George Bataille to Giorgio gambin figures like this when they deal very prominently with sacrifice, it's often in this traditional mode of violent extirpation or negation of an object, right? And what's going on in German Realism that's quite different is that what we find is not a violent or destructive or ritual context of sacrifice, but rather an ethical paradigm of decision, right? So when sacrifice is taking place in German realist narrative, it's in the form of particular choices or decisions that are being made to surrender one good or value for the sake of something else or vice versa, right?

Tell us the connections between Ovid's Metamorphoses and Shakespeare's character Ophelia in Hamlet. Yeah.

So as you say, though, the book focuses really on this 19th Century Literary epoch of realism, it's also doing a lot of work to situate that epoch within the larger context of water symbolism more broadly. And these were actually the parts of the book that I found the most fun and interesting to research and to write, because they allowed me to. Open up this symbolic framework that includes everything from literature to art to philosophy to theology to psychoanalysis, right, moving ahead rather than backwards, and in order to, from my perspective, in order to try and do justice to that symbolic framework, you have to be able to look for points of connection between a 19th century realist novella and Homer's epics and the way that water functions there, or as you mentioned in something like Ovid's Metamorphoses or in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the figure of Ophelia casting a very, very long and influential shadow over water symbolism in European culture more generally. And so, you know, in trying to integrate this, this deeper cultural context, while not losing focus on on the main topic of the book, the close readings of these 19th century texts. It It gave me a really fun opportunity to explore how water and order and sacrifice end up being simultaneously pertinent to these very old precedents, to the 19th century, and then, as you indicate, also bearing quite a bit of relevance to to subsequent periods of cultural history leading up to the current day, and things like the environmental crisis, which is sort of where I try and end the book, and the conclusion looking at the world around us right now that we find ourselves in, I think just, you know, maybe the examples that you mentioned, it's actually the figure of Ophelia that becomes a way of thinking about that deeper tradition, in a way that's more I think, immediately obvious than to try and go straight into it from the 19th century realist context of German literature, which may seem at first glance to be not as closely related. But if you look at something like Ophelia, which had this enormous cultural, iconographical influence in the 19th century, from from England, certainly in the Victorian period, to, you know, French symbolism, Rambo writes a very influential poem about Ophelia that ends up becoming kind of a template within German expressionism much later. So she's certainly a an impossible to miss figure in this story. But one of the things that makes her so interesting is, to me, at least the way that that scene in Hamlet in Act Four, what we see going on is actually a very ancient way of thinking through The figural and the symbolic characteristics of water. So I would encourage your listeners to go read the speech by Gertrude in that scene. It's very short. Doesn't take long. But something that you see going on there that's really cool is that as that speech is narrating these events, the figure of Ophelia is described as slowly coming to resemble water in various ways. And at the same time, her natural surroundings are gradually being anthropomorphized, right? They're they're being given human characteristics, um, and then eventually, at sort of the climactic moment of drowning, the text describes her as a creature native and endued unto that element that is to water, and that basic pattern of reflection on the one hand, but literal reflection, but then more figurative reflection, right? One element taking on the characteristics or echoing the characteristics of a separate element, this mutual resemblance between the watery or the natural sphere and the Human Sphere that then immediately precedes a moment of transformation or of merging or of convergence, right? That's straight out of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the way that water is deployed there, and Ovid is then resting on an older tradition in turn that he's riffing on and that he's playing with. So Shakespeare picks that up people who then start deploying. Ophelia as a trope are sometimes consciously and maybe sometimes not so consciously, involving themselves in this very deep, interwoven topos from much earlier periods of literature and and art and everything else, and that sort of just keeps redesing forward until you get to modernist poetics and the role that the imagery of drowning and of Ophelia and of the relationship between the human and the non human. So it one of the things that I like so much about it is that whether you're zooming in in super close detail to one particular moment in time and one instance of the way this imagery is used and what its implications are, or you're trying to zoom out and kind of see the forest rather than the tree, you're always able to find yourself implicated in both at the same time, right? However specific the motif is, you're necessarily reading something that is part of this much longer, very complicated, very elegantly woven, visual and and symbolic story, which is water symbolism, right? And if you're taking a very broad view, and you're sort of starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh and trying to get as close to the present as we possibly can along the way, you will keep finding these little representative bundled points in particular texts, in particular artworks that are simultaneously doing something new and unique, and by virtue of that, they're also reinheriting and reinventing these older traditions that inform them and setting the stage for new invocations of it in in subsequent times. So in a way, it's kind of a beautiful metaphor for literature as such. You know the way that water works within these texts because it operates in the way that texts themselves do. Maybe that's getting too meta, but that's one of the, one of the things that, again, I find so rich about it as a as a metaphorical resource.

Yeah, I know it's great, and you've gone into the depths of this, and you

could continue to go, you've gone off the deep end, maybe,

but it's so rich. You were saying it's so fun to see all the connections all the way back, you mentioned Gilgamesh, you know, you can find it everywhere, in different forms. So this has just been, it's been so fun talking to you about this. I'm sure we could talk for hours, because your wealth of knowledge and it's just it is fun symbolism to play with and to try to understand as well. So anyone that is listening, I would strongly encourage you to take a look at Alex's new book, The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice and Submergence in German Realism,

I hope it floats your boat.

What's that?

I said I hope it floats your boat. Had to get one more in.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's great. So thank you so much. It was a lot of fun talking with you.

Thanks so much, Jonathan. It's been a pleasure.

All right, take care

You too.

That was Alexander Sorensen, author of the new book The Waiting Water: Order, Sacrifice and Submergence in German Realism. You can purchase Alexander's new book as an affordable paperback at our website, cornellpress.cornell.edu, and use the promo code 09 pod to save 30% off if you live in the UK. Use the discount code csannounce and visit the website combined academic.co.uk Thank you For listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast. You