Nolten the Painter

When students and critics of the novel speak of German artist-novels and Bildungsromane they mention works long available in translation: by Goethe Novalis Hoffmann Stifter Keller or more recently by Mann Kafka Musil Grass and others. Yet Eduard Mörike's provocatively subtitled Maler Nolten: Novelle in Zwei Teilen (Nolten the Painter: A Novella in Two Parts 1832) has remained neglected and misunderstood and has never been translated into English until now. This despite its obvious ties to other artist-novels and its striking modernity in playing with conventions of narrative authority and heroic identity features that have recently begun to be realized by scholarship. Witness the subtle irony of the opening sequence in which Mörike's narrator is subverted by hints at his own clumsiness and intimations about the dire truths that lurk behind the protagonist's relationships to his male friends and to the seductive yet somehow frightening women in his life. Or the interplay between the narrator's attempts to make sense of Nolten's complex inner motivations in his loves and art and the ludicrously pompous pathos with which Nolten persists in speaking and thinking as he concocts a heroic persona caught up in passion intrigue and tragedy. Fascinating finally is the mysterious trail of the Grenzgänger or border-line characters such as the Gypsy Elisabeth the queer Wispel the duplicitous actor Larkens and the mysterious old Hofrat with their hints at the dimension of Gypsies Tramps and Thieves that seems to threaten and at the same time to foster the complex unfolding of the realities of life and art that defy Nolten's all-too-artful mastery. ~~ Raleigh Whitinger is professor in the Department of Germanic Languages University of Alberta.