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Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (ca. 1621-1676) is the most significant (and still readable) author of seventeenth-century German novels. His Abenteuerlicher Simplicius Simplicissimusremains the one German novel of its time that has attained the stature of "world literature": its unique mix of violent action and solitary reflection, its superlative humor, its realistic portrayalof a peasant turned soldier turned hermit has made it the longest-running bestseller in German literature. Read by students and scholars in comparative literature, history, and German, and by those interested in the development of the picaresque novel in Europe, the work and its "Continuations" have increasingly occupied scholars around the world, who have in recent years shown it to be a work ofsubtle structure and characterization, bearing the imprint of the most advanced political thinking of the time, and showing the influences of some of the most significant works of world literature, including Cervantes' Don Quixote and Barclay's Argenis. This volume of essays by leading Grimmelshausen scholars from Germany, the United States, and England provides analyses of significant topics in his life and works, including questions of genre, structure, satire, allegory, narratology, political thought, religion, morality, humor, realism, and mortality. Contributors: Christoph E. Schweitzer, Italo Michele Battafarano, Klaus Haberkamm, Rosmarie Zeller, Andreas Solbach, Dieter Breuer, Lynne Tatlock, Peter Hess, Shannon Keenan Greene, and Alan Menhennet.
KarlF. Otto is Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on German Baroque literature.
Bey dieser Zeit / ist fast kein Buch verkäufflich / ohne einen Kuppfertitel welcher dem Leser desselben Inhalt nicht nur mit Worten / sondern auch mit einem Gemähld vorbildet. Harsdörffer, Frauenzimmer Gesprächspiele (1646),
Preface to Part VI
“Liebes Kind / diese bilder können nicht reden / was aber ihr Tun und Wesen sey / kann ich auß diesen schwartzen Linien sehen / welches man lesen nennet.” (ST 31)
A Simplician Model of Reading
When the illiterate Simplicissimus first encounters the texts of the New Testament, in Book I of Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668), he apprehends them by way of their illustrations. These he anthropomorphizes, confusing pictures with people. He attempts to speak with the book by speaking with the pictured figures. Yet it is the hermit's corrective response that is particularly striking. Pictures and texts, he explains to the naive Simplicissimus, do not figure in a verbal mode, but are rather to be encountered visually: “[…] diese Bilder können nicht reden/ was aber ihr Tun und Wesen sey/ kann ich auß diesen schwartzen Linien sehen/ welches man lesen nennet” (ST 31). From these black lines of print, he explains, thereby lending color and shape to the words on the page, one sees the actions and essence of the pictures. In other words, one comes to know the pictures, according to the hermit, by viewing a disparate set of pictures; namely, the printed letters on the page.
“To see from these black lines” is thus a Simplician model for reading: not the discursive hermeneutics that Simplicissimus himself launched when he began by speaking to the illustrations, but rather a visual engagement with books. Where Simplicissimus treats the pictures discursively, the lesson to be learned is that it is not the pictures that are to be understood and engaged by means of conversation, but rather the words that are to be understood (viewed, literally), in conjunction with pictures. “These black lines” make sense of the pictures. The hermit corrects a hermeneutic reading to an emblematic one: it is by way of accompanying words that one sees the actions and essence of pictures.