SOURCE: "The Narrator's Allusions to Art and Ambiguity: A Note on C. F. Meyer's Der Heilige," in Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, Vol. X, No. 4, November, 1974, pp. 265-73.

[In the following essay, Jacobson contends that the narrator's attempt to understand Thomas à Becket in Die Heilige exposes a distinction, crucial for Meyer, between inherent and artificial ambiguity in art.]

The general significance of Meyer's frequent symbolic use of art and artefacts has already been ably treated by Karl S. Guthke. In his essay, 'Kunstsymbolik im Werke Meyers,' he argues convincingly that these works of art and artefacts not only serve a proleptic purpose, but also function as prototypes which illuminate human character and human situations—that, in other words, life tends to imitate art in Meyer's work.¹ This note is not intended either to challenge or to substantiate further this well documented thesis. It is simply an attempt to determine the specific function of two extremely prominent passages on art in Der Heilige that were not mentioned by Guthke and have received scant attention elsewhere.

Hans, the dramatized narrator of Der Heilige, makes two references to works of art whose ultimate intent derives from a remarkable parallelism between them which has been overlooked completely in the critical literature. To facilitate comparison and provide a point of reference for the ensuing discussion, the two passages are given here:

So vergnügte er sein Auge—wenngleich der große falsche Prophet den Seinigen diese bildlichen Ergötzungen untersagt hat—oft an den weißen und ruhigen Gliedmaßen der keuschen Marmorweiber, die er in seinen Palästen aufgestellt hatte. Ihr habet wohl noch keine gesehen. Sie werden aus dem Schutte zerstörter Griechentempel hervorgezogen, und der Herr von Byzanz hatte dem Kanzler für eine politische Gefälligkeit deren einige zugeschickt. Es sind tote Steine ohne Blick und Kraft der Augen, aber betrachtet man sie langer, so fangen sie an zu leben, und nicht selten bin auch ich vor diesen kalten Geschöpfen stehen geblieben, um zu ergründen, ob sie heitern oder traurigen Gemütes sind. (XIII, 41)²

Habt Ihr das aus Byzanz gekommene Bild gesehen, das die Mönche in Allerheiligen als ihren besten Schatz hüten? Es ist ein toter Salvator mit eingesunkenen Augen und geschlossenen Lidern; aber betrachtet man ihn länger, so ändert er durch eine List der Zeichnung und Verteilung der Schatten die Miene und sieht Euch mit offenen Schmerzensaugen traurig an. Eine unehrliche Kunst, Herr! Denn der Maler soll nicht zweideutig, sondern klar seine Striche ziehen. (XIII, 72)

Any attempt at an exegesis of these two digressions should begin with some remarks about Hans who is the source for both of them and whose qualities and attitudes may thus be assumed to play an important role in how the reader is to evaluate them. The consideration of Hans himself is especially urgent in connection with these two passages, for in them he speaks about art and Thomas à Becket, subjects on which his competence and objectivity may indeed be challenged. The published assessments of Hans are many and varied. Meyer's own explicit comments on Hans, although they should not necessarily be accepted as authoritative, are sufficiently helpful to be summarized here. In a letter to Lingg he describes Hans as a person 'der den gesunden Menschenverstand personificiert,' and 'als naiven Augenzeugen eines einzigartigen Characters.'³ In response to inquiries from Betty Paoli Meyer discusses Hans and his function, stressing his mediaeval limitations: 'Energische Angabe des Kostüms durch ein lebendiges Stück Mittelalter, ich meine den Armbruster mit seinem Vorleben und seinen Raisonnements.'⁴ In a subsequent letter to Paoli he writes that, ' … der in seinem Zeitalter befangene Hans nur das Äußerliche der Geschichte, allerdings mit scharfen Sinnen, auffaßt, das Urtheil des Lesers aber über Beckets Wesen durchaus frei läßt.'⁵ The image of Hans that emerges from these comments does not serve to inspire confidence in him as a reliable judge of so complex, unusual, and modern a character as the Becket of Der Heilige. Meyer, of course, concedes Hans's inability to penetrate Becket's surface, but he does suggest that what Hans reports is at least accurate and objective.⁶

Although in the past most critics have been satisfied with and have echoed Meyer's view, more recent criticism has attempted to revise the generally accepted image of Hans. George Fulton Folkers argues for an extremely positive evaluation of Hans as 'circumspect,' 'devout,' 'pious,' 'loyal,' 'trustworthy,' and, unlike Becket and Henry, embodying 'the fusion of two otherwise exclusive entities, body and spirit,'⁷ while Michael Shaw, at the other extreme, characterizes him as essentially base, hypocritical, untrustworthy, and extremely hostile to Becket.⁸ A more moderate account of Hans is given by William D. Williams, but he too suspects that his fierce loyalty to Henry makes him unfit to discuss or judge Becket objectively.⁹ Good arguments can and have been made for most of the divergent views of Hans set forth in the critical literature and this is a consequence of the drastic ambiguity of the novella. I mention all this only as a reminder that there is no incontrovertible authority or critical concensus to which one might turn for a truly reliable opinion of Hans's character. This makes any attempt to interpret the two passages under consideration here an especially hazardous and subjective undertaking, since it involves speculations on the tone and import of two statements by a speaker whose true character has proved most elusive.

Before attempting to discern the intent of the two digressions when seen in conjunction, it will be necessary to explore their possible individual functions. The occasion for the first digression is the introduction of Queen Ellenor, Henry's promiscuous and vindictive wife. Hans describes Becket's behaviour towards the queen as unfailingly proper, but reveals that he suspects that Becket was actually revolted by her, since what he admired in women were delicacy and decency: 'Der Kanzler begegnete ihr, wo er ihr nicht ausweichen konnte, mit tiefer Ehrerbietung, während ich glaube, daß sie ihm zuwider war; denn er liebte an Frauen das Zarte und Anständige' (XIII, 41). The remarks about Becket and the Greek statues follow this statement, ostensibly to illustrate and confirm Hans's appraisal of the qualities Becket valued in women. While Hans seems only to point to a praiseworthy element in Becket's character, his use of the statues to confirm this is very suggestive and problematical. Had he simply cited an example of Becket's admiration of a real woman who possessed the virtues of decency and delicacy in a high degree, he would have made his point and eliminated the suspicion that he may mean something different from what he says. Instead, in bypassing the human realm and in choosing to substantiate his claim with an example of Becket's admiration for works of art which embody the virtues in question in idealized form, he opens the way for a variety of interpretations. Hans may simply adduce the statues in support of his claim because no example from real life comes to mind; his use of the statues is then free of any ulterior motive or special intent. Perhaps, however, he wishes to stress Becket's extreme fastidiousness by introducing the statues. Or he may have chosen the statues to illustrate his assertion in order to subvert its apparent praise of Becket by suggesting that he lacks the capacity to respond to real people and can only find satisfaction in art. Whatever Hans's intention may be, his special use of the statues leaves the reader with the impression, which is of course borne out elsewhere in the text, that Becket shies away from contact with real life, that he is an aesthete par excellence. Therefore Hans praises Becket in such a way that we are led to wonder about his motives and intentions, and while we cannot determine with certainty what he wished to suggest, a great deal more comes to the reader's mind than he could have intended.

Interestingly, the digression contains a parenthetical remark that essentially parallels the peculiar complexity and suggestiveness of the passage as a whole. Hans comments on Becket's delight in viewing the statues with the remark: ' … wenngleich der große falsche Prophet den seinigen diese bildlichen Ergötzungen untersagt hat … ' The great false prophet is of course a reference to Mohammed and the implication here is that Becket is a believing Mohammedan.¹⁰ It is not clear whether Hans brings this up simply because he cannot resist the opportunity to take a thrust at Becket, or whether he takes Becket's Mohammedanism for granted and alludes to it here to emphasize his admiration for the statues by pointing out that he is willing to violate a tenet of his religion for the sake of the pleasure he derives from them. Whatever Hans's intention is here, he makes use of the statues to label Becket a heathen. Becket, he asserts, is a Mohammedan and thus a heathen and this view of him seems to be reinforced by his liking for the statues which are heathen art.¹¹ Surprisingly, however, Hans inadvertently undermines his own apparent intentions by asserting that Becket has to violate a tenet of his heathen faith in order to gaze upon heathen art. Thus the term heathen is allowed to emerge as complex enough to contain mutually exclusive attitudes. It could certainly not have been Hans's intention to point up the complexities and render essentially meaningless a term which he so often uses as a facile pejorative. Once again, and within the same passage, Hans must serve a double purpose: he must act in character and at the same time suggest a different, more sophisticated, and opposite view—possibly Meyer's own. Even after all these considerations there remains a residue of detail in the digression that resists explanation unless it is viewed in conjunction with Hans's second digression.

A most important event transpires between these two passages: the seduction and death of Becket's daughter Gnade. Gnade's death produces a marked change in Becket's behaviour¹² and Hans even claims to observe a physical change in him, which he illustrates in the digression on the painting of Christ. The mark of death, which he observed on Becket's face when he surprised him leaning over Gnade's coffin, has now become a permanent feature. After describing the painting, he concludes: 'Mit dem Kanzler aber ging es mir umgekehrt. Wenn ich sein Antlitz langer betrachtete und er schwieg, so war es, als schlössen sich seine Lider und es sitze ein Gestorbener mit dem Könige am Tische' (XIII, 72). Since the gist of this conclusion is that Hans believes that Becket is already essentially dead to the world,¹³ one wonders whether the relatively lengthy description of the painting was really necessary to prepare for it. Indeed the initial sentence of the conclusion—'Mit dem Kanzler aber ging es mir umgekehrt' (italics mine)—gives one the impression that the connection between the description of the painting and the conclusion is somewhat forced; that the author created a reason or excuse to introduce the painting. Thus the suspicion arises that here, just as in the first digression, the narrator's and the author's intentions, which are in no way congruent, may be in conflict.

One of the more difficult and confusing aspects of the reference to the painting is that Hans here juxtaposes Christ, or more specifically, a certain representation of Christ, and Becket. Two factors differentiate this passage from the usual literary suggestions that a certain character is a Christ figure: the use of the term 'umgekehrt' to establish the relationship between Becket and the painting and Hans's negative evaluation of this particular representation of Christ. Because of these factors it seems clear that Hans wishes to suggest something other than that Becket is Christlike. Christ comes to life while Becket seems to die; a positive development in the first instance and a negative one in the second. An invidious comparison in favour of Christ, one might be tempted to conclude, but this cannot be Hans's intention here since it is specifically the painting of Christ to which he objects. Since Hans believes that the painting depicts a kind of false Christ we are perhaps intended to conclude that Becket is a kind of false saint. While we can be quite sure that Hans does not introduce the painting to suggest a similarity between Becket and Christ, from this point on Becket is in fact more and more identified with Christ or identifies with him.¹⁴ Perhaps the digression on the painting is intended as a warning that Becket is really hypocritical. This in fact seems to be Hans's basic attitude towards him, but the question is really whether the reader should share this attitude.

Specifically, however, Hans objects to the painting's ambiguity and it is this quality too which seems to disturb him in Becket. Thus Hans may simply, perhaps subconsciously, wish to vent his annoyance at being unable to fathom Becket by castigating the painting. Another possibility is that Hans, naive, commonsensical, and intellectually circumscribed, is unable to accept ambiguity in either art or life. Hans's seemingly categorical rejection of ambiguity is particularly perplexing in the light of Meyer's own accurate characterization of the novella in which it occurs as 'absichtlich mehrdeutig.'¹⁵ Even this aspect of the passage has drawn very little critical attention. Faesi dismisses it as gratuitous irony,¹⁶ while Williams is the only critic who has offered an exegesis for it: 'Here Meyer is going out of his way to forestall objections. This altar-picture exactly parallels Meyer's own technique in this story, and that Hans calls it unehrlich draws our attention deliberately to it. There is no need to argue whether a distinction is being drawn between what is proper to painting and what to narrative—the artistic purpose of the episode lies simply in calling attention to the technique of the narrative.'¹⁷

Within limits Williams's assessment of this passage and its function is accurate. Hans's comments do indeed call attention to the general question of ambiguity in art and therefore also to the ambiguity of the novella. Also it must be assumed that Meyer wishes to forestall objections to his use of ambiguity in this work rather than to encourage them with this passage. But Williams fails to point out just how the passage achieves this purpose. Nor does he prove that there is no distinction between the technique of the painting and that of the novella. Both works do indeed make use of ambiguity, but are they, as Williams asserts, exact parallels of each other? Is it not possible that Hans's generalization about the value of ambiguity in art is to be rejected, but that his specific judgment of the painting is completely accurate? This question can best be answered with reference to the earlier digression, for the two digressions are intended to function together to convey something beyond and more significant than what we have seen to be their individual suggestiveness.

The two passages exhibit a sufficient number of similarities to warrant the suspicion that they are intended to elicit a comparison from the reader. The use of the same phrase in both passages—'betrachtet man … länger'—not only establishes a link between them, but invites the reader to consider them with special care. Indeed, only when seen in conjunction does Hans's criticism of the altar-picture and ambiguity come to make sense as a defence of Meyer's own technique in Der Heilige.

Both the painting and the statues are mentioned in digressions and brought into conjunction with Becket. Both of these works originated in Byzantium and in both descriptions our attention is focused on the eyes. Although the painting and the statues are executed in different media, belong to two completely different historical periods, and depict totally different subjects, they share one most salient feature: ambiguity. The source of the ambiguity in the painting and the statues resides in the eyes. Christ's eyes are closed and those of the statues lifeless. Thus both Christ and the women give the initial impression of being dead. As one continues to gaze at them, however, both the painting and the statues seem to come to life. Yet, according to Hans, there is a crucial difference in how this is achieved and in the effect it has on the viewer. While the eyes of the dead Christ seem to open up and look at the viewer with an expression of pain and sadness, those of the statues are and remain lifeless. The coming alive of Christ is an optical illusion and, as such, is produced by a trick, 'eine List der Zeichnung und Verteilung der Schatten.' The ambiguity of the work resides completely in the technique. There seems to be no inner necessity for it and it reflects no insoluble mystery. Hans describes the ambiguity of this work as dishonest. The Greek statues are an entirely different matter. No trick has been employed by the sculptor. They are not both dead and alive. Their aliveness is inherent and needs only to be discovered by the viewer. Even after he has made this discovery, however, an insoluble mystery remains. In Hans's words: ' … ob sie traurigen oder heitern Gemütes sind.'

Although the ambiguity in both the painting and the statues is stressed, a clear distinction is drawn between them concerning both the nature and the value of this feature. The ambiguity of the painting is arbitrarily imposed from without by means of a trick and is not an organic part of the work. It is therefore explicitly rejected. The ambiguity of the statues, on the other hand, is inherent and artistically true. It is the ambiguity of life itself. The pleasure that a man of Becket's sensibilities and tastes derives from them and Hans's repeated efforts to fathom them testify to their genuineness, charm, and mystery. The two passages suggest that there are at least two reasons for ambiguity in art and, if we rely on Hans's judgment, one good and one bad. Meyer, then, being fully conscious of the ambiguity of Der Heilige and anticipating the objections that indeed were forthcoming to this feature of his work, may have introduced these two digressions on art to indicate that he was not purposely attempting to confuse the reader, but rather to show that Becket's nature was itself ambiguous, while the portrayal is artistically true. Only if one accepts the connection between the two digressions as intended and their function to be that described above, can one speak of an effort to forestall objections that might be truly effective.

I hope to have brought out at least some of the possible functions of the two digressions on art when viewed independently and to have shown that, whatever Hans may have wished to suggest by them, they cause the reader to consider possibilities that Hans would certainly not have intended and which, perhaps, represent the author's views to which the reader should give priority. Since the entire story is told from the narrow and biased perspective of the dramatized narrator, the author may or must occasionally intrude in some subtle way and offer correctives for his narrator's assertions. In the two digressions under discussion I believe that we feel the author's presence more than anywhere else in the text. The two passages on works of art do very little actually to support the contentions for which they are ostensibly adduced. Rather, they tend to suggest possibilities about both Hans and Becket that we could not expect the narrator to be able or willing to reveal. Even after attempting to exhaust the possible intentions or suggestions of the individual passages, a residue remains which can only be accounted for if they are seen in conjunction and interpreted as the author's defence of his use of ambiguity.

Notes

¹ Karl S. Guthke, 'Kunstsymbolik im Werke Meyers,' Wirkendes Wort, 8 (1958), 336-47.

² Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Der Heilige in Sämtliche Werke, 14 vols., ed. Hans Zeller and Alfred Zäch (Bern, 1962), vol. XIII. Subsequent references to the text will be indicated by volume and page numbers in parentheses.

³Briefe Conrad Ferdinand Meyers, ed. Adolf Frey, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1908), II, 305-6.

⁴ Letter of 19 April 1880, quoted by Alfred Zäch in C.F. Meyer, Sämtliche Werke, XIII, 296.

⁵ Letter of 17 January 1881, quoted by Alfred Zäch in C.F. Meyer, Sämtliche Werke, XIII, 297. XIII, 296.

⁶ For a full discussion of Hans as an unreliable narrator see Manfred R. Jacobson, 'The Narrator in C.F. Meyer's Prose Work,' PH D dissertation, University of Chicago, 1972, pp. 44-95.

⁷ George Fulton Folkers, 'The Narrative Techniques of C.F. Meyer in Der Heilige ' PH D dissertation, Princeton University, 1967, pp. 98-112.

⁸ Michael Shaw, 'C.F. Meyer's Resolute Heroes,' Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 40 (1966), 360-90.

⁹ William D. Williams, The Stories of C.F. Meyer (Oxford, 1962), p. 53.

¹⁰ The novella abounds in suggestions that Becket is in secret a Mohammedan, but usually in the sense that he has certain affinities or sympathies for the Arabs. In this passage, however, the implication is that Becket subscribes to Mohammed's teaching.

¹¹ The correlation Mohammedan = heathen and statues = heathen is only implicit in the final version of this passage and must be deduced by the careful reader. Earlier versions (cf. Sämtliche Werke, XIII, 331) made this point explicit. For 'den Seinigen' of the final edition, 'den Heiden' had been written, and 'Griechentempel' replaces the earlier 'Heidentempel.'

¹² Cf. XIII, 78: 'Waren aber die Worte des Kanzlers nicht allesamt christlich, so wurden es seine Werke je mehr und mehr.' It should also be noted that Hans here remarks on Becket's addressing the crucifix which he had regarded with aversion earlier, although Hans emphasizes that he addresses Christ as a kind of equal. Thus Becket's attitude toward the crucifix and, by implication, Christ is still ambiguous and this change of attitude does not vouch for a genuine conversion. What has drawn Becket closer to Christ is, apparently, the suffering that they have shared in common. It is suffering that Becket had tried to hold at bay until Gnade's demise proved his efforts futile. He is now ready to deal with this aspect of human existence more realistically.

¹³ There is both parallelism and progression in the two digressions under consideration. In the first one the implication is that Becket is removed from life, and in the second that he is already essentially dead to the world. This is just one of many factors that links the two passages.

¹⁴ To cite just a few examples: XIII, 76-7, 84-5, 120, 124, 129ff.

¹⁵Louise von François und Conrad Ferdinand Meyer: Ein Briefwechsel, ed. Anton Bettelheim (Berlin, 1920), p. 2.

¹⁶ Robert Faesi, C.F. Meyer (Leipzig, 1925), pp. 87-8.

¹⁷ Williams, p. 65, n. 1.