South Atlantic Modern Language Association

Vertrauter Alltag, gemischte Gefühle: Gespräche mit Schriftstellern über Arbeit in derLiteratur by Donna L. HoffmeisterReview by: Heike A. DoaneSouth Atlantic Review, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Nov., 1990), pp. 141-143Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3200465 .

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South Atlantic Review 141

China and Japan symbolize egoless existence, Zen, n-dimensionality, and Durrell's heraldic universe, "just a name for that element in which that queer fish the artist swims." Although Durrell was born on the Tibet-Indian border, neither man ever travelled to the land that had so captured their imaginations. Tibet seems to function as an escape hatch for the healthy development of the artist. For forty-five years, Miller and Durrell nurtured this imaginary land in the other. As Durrell acknowledges (in an unpublished letter that MacNiven quotes in his article), "Was ever a writer luckier in a true friend I wonder?"

The Letters comprise 210,000 words out of a million-word correspon- dence. An earlier edition of the letters, Lawrence Durrell-Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence, edited by Alan Thomas, appeared in 1963. But Thomas, who excised personal passages, had access to only half of the total correspondence, because Miller was to live seventeen more years. MacNiven, Durrell's authorized biographer, has done an admirable job in restoring the missing passages and adding new letters to the col- lection. As MacNiven notes, the Letters have "all the candour of an eavesdropped conversation between intimates." The conversation is so interesting that the reader regrets those rare gaps in the narrative when the writers were together and their discussions went unrecorded. Nev- ertheless, the Letters give us an excellent idea of the thought processes of two twentieth-century authors whose works are due for a reassess- ment and a revival.

Anna Lillios, University of Central Florida

0 Vertrauter Alltag, gemischte Gefilhle: Gesprache mit Schriftstellern tiber Ar- beit in der Literatur By Donna L. Hoffmeister. Abhandlungen zur Kunst-, Musik- und Literaturwissenschaft 382. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1989. 178 pp. DM 48.00.

In this book of interviews, conducted between August 1984 and August 1985 with fourteen German fiction writers, Donna Hoffmeister sets out to present an inside view of the writing process and the "real person behind the literary mask" (1). Not surprisingly, such an en- deavor is not always completely successful. After all, contemporary authors who understand their role as public figures might divulge some inside views to interested strangers, especially those in the literary field, but any sense of self (ASelbstverstiAndnis") revealed in one interview is likely to be tainted by the subject's skill of self-representation (Selbst- darstellung). If authors have always been regarded as "Instanz[en] der Integritit" (2), this impression is derived from their written words, not

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142 Book Reviews

from the public's knowledge of their personalities. Hoffmeister, how- ever, does succeed in portraying a literature that aims to reflect modern everyday life. In choosing authors whose fiction illuminates common problems and conflicts of the workplace and whose protagonists ex- press the hopes and aspirations of their real-life counterparts, Hof- fmeister shows how traditions of realism and bourgeois modernism have adapted to the new trends of a post-modernist sensitivity. In her eyes, the synthesis of private and public events, of introversion and involvement, represents not merely a phase in a literary development, but an inventive attempt to portray a new age. The emotional labyrinth created by the confluence of inner and outer worlds is no longer restricted to the fragmented private self. Rather the problems of the imperiled self that characterize the protagonists are regarded as para- digms of the collective experience of a new and complex environment. The workplace is the outgrowth of a societal structure in which values are reforged by new expectations, routine and monotony encroach upon the emotions, and an eventless reality fuses with lifeless illusions. The book is held together by a common theme, which Hoffmeister describes as her intent to investigate occupational influences on the protagonists and the way their station in life has shaped their sense of identity. In so doing, she relates the identity of the literary figure to the experience of the writer (82). The selection of authors supports this goal. The list includes seven West Germans: Hermann Lenz, Ludwig Fels, Wilhelm Ganazino, Hans Dieter Baroth, Gisela Elsner, Max von der Griin, and Martin Walser; five Austrians: Peter Rosei, Gernot Wolfgruber, Franz Innerhofer, Elfriede Jelinek and Walter Kappacher; and two Swiss: Silvio Blatter and Beat Paul Sterchi. With the exception of Elsner, Jelinek, Lenz, Walse, and Rosei, the writers started their careers as blue-collar workers. They typically come from families in which manual labor was the paramount task of life and yet was rarely talked about. Many, like Walser, were the first in the family to break the mold of dependence and financial hardship.

Hoffmeister's method of embedding a predetermined set of ques- tions into each interview lends additional unity to the responses of an otherwise diverse group of individuals. While this approach defines the parameters of her socio-literary investigation, the repeated question pattern seems at times to rob the answers of their originality. Martin Walser's observation that all writers suffer from a damaged identity, that they compensate in their writing for a lack which they experience in everyday life, is one of the recurring themes; another is Ernst

Jiinger's statement that freedom can be attained in and through work; yet another is the variation on the Gretchenfrage, namely: "Was halten

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South Atlantic Review 143

Sie vom Sozialismus?" Although the responses do not hold many sur- prises, they support the study's premise that work is the dominant element in experiencing self-awareness. Unfortunately, the book suf- fers from a considerable number of misspellings and typographical errors (I counted nineteen). The following passage, for example: "Da war auch nie einen Tag, auf dem ich sagte, ich werde Schriftstellerin. Ich bin es iibergangslos geworden. Ich ging immer davon ab, daB jeder, der sich hinsetzt und nachdenkt, eine Geschichte schreiben kann" (117), most likely cannot be attributed to Gisela Elsner in this form and is not worthy of Donna Hoffmeister, who in her introduction gives ample proof of her outstanding German language skills. Nonetheless, the book's usefulness as a reference work on German fiction of the seventies and early eighties cannot be disputed. A collection of this kind provides not only a concise introduction to the field of "Literatur des Arbeitsalltags" (3), but saves the reader from having to scout news- papers or television scripts for the authors' own perspectives on the literature they have produced.

Heike A. Doane, Cary, North Carolina

0 Desire and the Political Unconscious in American Literature: Eros and Ideology. By Sam B. Girgus. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. 236 pp. 0 Aesthetic Individualism and Practical Intellect: American Allegory in Emer- son, Thoreau, Adams, and James. By Olaf Hansen. Princeton, NJ: Prin- ceton University Press, 1990. 249 pp. $29.95.

The fairly traditional character of these two studies of American letters does not diminish the originality of their contributions to a field rapidly being reshaped by deconstructive readings. Both critics are engaged in the broad tradition of American culture as distinct from a more narrowly-defined literary one. The thesis of Sam B. Girgus's Desire and the Political Unconscious in American Literature: Eros and Ideology, clearly stated from the outset, is shaped by fresh readings of Freud and by Girgus's own firm grasp of the progress of American politics and culture. His point is that authors from Hawthorne to Fitzgerald define a shifting America caught in the interplay of two typically opposing forces--the desire for selfhood and the urge for social "consensus," or, as Girgus puts it, "the wish for psychic harmony and completion and the wish for collective unity and identity" (5). The discussion of the break- down caused by the American's disappointment in being unable to fulfill personal and social wishes begins with the only poet in the volume, Walt Whitman, who, Girguts writes, teaches us to read other

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