Contemporary studies in violence are usually at pains to define the very concept they are dealing with, distinguishing such forms as physical, psychological, symbolic, structural, cultural, and indirect violence.1 The violence of adventure fiction seems strangely unsubtle when it is considered against the backdrop of these debates. Adventurous storytelling involves the representation of violence in its most straightforward and traditional forms: aggressive males fighting some form of otherness and competing with each other. The blatant obviousness of violence as an element of adventure seems to discourage analysis. Is it more than a formula of male self-affirmation we are all too familiar with? This volume argues that a reassessment of forms of violence packaged as “adventure” is worth putting on the agenda. Adventure is a key concept when it comes to investigating the representation of violence from a diachronic perspective. It promises to shed light on the literary phenomenology of violence. And, last but not least, adventure is a useful paradigm that can be used to grasp the relationship between violence and narrative form.
This introduction will explore the history, the phenomenology, and the narratology of ‘adventure violence’ by embedding the contributions of the present volume in a bigger landscape of research. Despite the evident overlap of subject matter, violence studies and research in adventure fiction have hardly ever engaged in a dialogue with each other. Moreover, I will connect the essays gathered here to the conceptual groundwork laid in the last years by the Munich-based research unit “Philology of Adventure”, from one of whose conferences this publication takes its origins.2 This is the programme to be carried out in the first part of the introduction, which highlights systematic questions. The second part will present the essays and the structure of the volume in some detail.
1 Three Systematic Perspectives on Adventure and Violence
The three perspectives adumbrated in the following run like golden threads through the volume. To varying degrees, all the essays engage with issues of historicization, with the adventure fantasy of ‘traceless’ violence, and with violence as something that is processed by narrative yet has an impact on narrative form. In order to create a bigger picture, I will reassemble some of the findings of this volume and combine them with other materials that contribute to a better understanding of adventure violence.
Towards a Social History of Adventure Violence
While most of the many edited volumes on violence from the field of cultural and literary studies focus on certain historical periods,3 adventure requires us to take a rigorously diachronic stance. Despite the apparently formulaic character of adventure, the function and representation of violence in its centuries-long history is by no means homogeneous. It is in modern popular adventure fiction that things seem to be clearest. The kind of story we encounter in 19th- and 20th-century adventure narratives can be read as instantiating the process of civilization as described by Norbert Elias. Adventurers are (usually male) members of modern Western societies, where physical violence has been widely banned from the sphere of everyday life. Suffering from the social constraints imposed on their drives and desires, these men experience what Freud calls the discontents of civilization.4 Whereas the protagonists of the Bildungsroman seek in vain to tear a hole in the social order, as Hegel puts it,5 the adventurer tries his luck elsewhere. He leaves civilization behind and moves into a space that seems to represent an earlier stage of human development where the securities, as well as the social constraints of modernity, are not yet in place. Elias argues that fictional violence serves as a civilized substitute for real violence.6 If we tentatively accept this hypothesis, modern adventure fiction would relate to the civilizing process in two ways: on the one hand, it tells how modern individuals circumvent the constraints of modern society by seeking out violent adventure; on the other, adventure narratives function as a fictional surrogate for experiences that modern readers cannot find in their real lives – experiences of violent self-empowerment, for instance.7
Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is a good illustration of the argument developed so far, as well as a means to reassess it critically. In this classic piece of adventure fiction, the struggle of the protagonists for their own lives slips from simple self-defence into much more extreme forms of violence. Professor Challenger and his comrades begin by trying to survive on a South American plateau inhabited by primeval creatures and end up leading a genocide against a population of humanoid apes. During the massacre, the difference between the adventurers and the supposedly wild creatures they murder is erased. With some embarrassment, the first-person narrator of the novel, Edward Dunn Malone, confesses his feeling while frantically firing at the apes:
There are strange and red depths in the soul of the most commonplace man. I am tender-hearted by nature, and have found my eyes moist many a time over the scream of a wounded hare. Yet the blood lust was on me now. I found myself on my feet emptying one magazine, then the other, clicking open the breech to reload, snapping it to again, while cheering and yelling with pure ferocity and joy of slaughter as I did so.8
In Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s terms, the violence here described turns purely autotelic, becoming an end in itself. It thus appears particularly disturbing not only from the outlook of Western society, but of culture in general, which tends to rationalize violence as a means oriented towards the achievement of a purpose.9 Malone is acutely aware of his delicate task as a journalist (turned “war correspondent”, as he notes)10 who writes for a readership at home that regards itself as highly civilized. The apologetic rhetoric of this passage is an attempt to bridge the gap between the bloody logic of adventure and the moral standards of the society to which Malone reports his deeds. By presenting himself as an ordinary man unwillingly overcome by primitive bloodthirst, he tries to win the sympathy of his intradiegetic readers. In Juri Lotman’s terms, the violence of adventure needs to be discursively framed in order to make its way back from the loosely structured, dynamic periphery to the centre of the semiosphere, where the dominant semiotic systems of a culture are located.11 This seems to be one of the inherent paradoxes of adventure storytelling in modernity: it has to make the representation of physical violence morally acceptable and even aesthetically attractive despite the cultural taboos weighing on it. Yet adventure not only plays with the transgression of moral norms, it also supplies a demand, as the pervasive presence of violence in popular culture demonstrates. In his analysis of the recent western, Jörn Ahrens argues that the social restrictions imposed on the real use of violence fuel the fascination with violence in the collective imagination. This also holds true for adventure.
What should make us suspicious, however, is the fact that the protagonist-narrator of The Lost World can draw on a certain theory of violence in order to justify a massacre: he was simply swept away, the argument goes, by the darker parts of human nature. This is the point where the drive theory of aggression risks becoming a myth in the sense suggested by Roland Barthes, i. e. a naturalization of culturally produced circumstances.12 The ideological underpinnings of this mode of reasoning are all too clear. Using a term coined by Richard Slotkin to describe the ideology of the American Frontier society, one could call the experience of primitive bloodthirst a “regeneration through violence”: in the recesses of the wilderness, the white man overcomes savage nature both inside and outside himself.13 Individual regression is thus presented as a means of collective progress. Accordingly, and despite its tendency towards regression, adventure violence is usually made to play a somehow positive role. In The Lost World, for example, it is exerted at the service of scientific discovery. This should lead us to reverse the perspective adopted so far. Instead of being an outlet for innate aggression, adventure – and by extension, adventure fiction – seems to be part of a collective training in violence.14 The modes of action fostered by adventure contribute to a larger education that turns out to be highly useful to certain societies, for instance to colonial ones. After all, the young protagonist Malone only follows the example of his elders such as Professor Challenger, who represents an academic world obsessed with provocation, rivalry, and mutual symbolic castration.
We thus find ourselves with two socio-historic theories on our hands: does adventure fiction compensate for the discontents of civilization, as Norbert Elias would have us believe, or does it, in the first place, turn individuals into violent subjects? The second theory sounds more critical and advanced, but it has a somewhat Platonic ring to it insofar as it suspects fiction to be a source of political trouble. The socio-historic perspective on adventure seems to lead to an antinomy that can be found elsewhere in violence studies. The two views just outlined correspond to different concepts of violence, namely aggression as an innate drive and aggression as socially acquired behaviour. And this antinomy mirrors the generally ambivalent relationship of adventure to social order, which has been at the centre of a recent edited volume published by the research unit “Philology of Adventure”: adventure brings to the fore what ‘civilized’ societies exclude, at least according to their positive self-image, but it also reinforces this self-image by reproducing the divide between society and its ‘other’.15
German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich has pointed out that no theory can single-handedly account for all aspects of violence.16 We should hence join them together in order to achieve a more comprehensive account of violent modes of behaviour. Following a suggestion made by Martin von Koppenfels in his contribution to this volume,17 one could view adventure as a means of cultivating aggression in a horticultural sense, making it grow, while restricting it within certain limits. Seen from this perspective, violence is both a natural anthropological potential and a cultural product. The fact that codes of honour play a persistent role from medieval chivalry to 19th-century duelling practices is sufficient proof that there are social norms regulating adventure violence, even if they permit a lot of bloodshed. This volume, however, is concerned not so much with social forms of conduct as with poetic forms of storytelling. Narrative represents violence and thus extends its presence beyond the real acts of physical aggression, but with all its implicit rules and techniques, it also imposes certain bounds on violence. Both the conditions under which violence is exercised and the way in which it is narrated should be subject to the same critical scrutiny.
The line of argument pursued so far is based on the patterns of modern popular adventure fiction. Things grow much more complicated when we widen the historical horizon and analyse adventure violence from a diachronic perspective. Adventure in medieval courtly romances certainly exhibits some of the characteristics just outlined. Social conflicts such as the rivalry between knights are settled by violent means outside the court, which can thus become a sphere of peace.18 Yet there are at least two major differences that come to mind when we hold medieval chivalry up against the modern paradigm of adventure. What seems to be absent in the Middle Ages is a dialectical concept of historical progress. Modern adventure fiction usually conceptualizes violence as a regression that can be experienced as a temporal liberation from cultural unease even as it leads back to civilization. The notion of violence as regression presupposes a modern concept of history such as the Enlightenment idea of progress, which also underpins Elias’s theory of the civilizing process. But the violence the medieval romance knight exercises against the ‘other’ of courtly culture cannot be read as a psychic or cultural regression. Violence in medieval courtly novels is no force leading either backwards or forwards in the history of society and the individual. It rather gravitates around a static notion of order. The order of the Arthurian court is always threatened by destructive violence, but there is also a constructive kind of violence to restore it.19 The fictional romance courts are like homeostatic systems that strive to maintain their equilibrium.20 This might be the reason why some of the lengthy prose romances of the late Middle Ages such as the Amadís produce a dismal impression of circularity.21 Conversely, the pattern of adventure faces crisis as soon as history enters the Arthurian world, as is the case in the sequels of the Prose Lancelot. In different ways, both the Queste del Saint Graal and the Mort le roi Artu imply concepts of historical change. They deprive the court of adventure and confront the worldly knights with a completely new and deadly form of violence that soon puts an end to their lives.22 The final clash between chivalric adventure and history, however, takes place with the advent of modernity. As David Quint points out, the process of early modern state-building and the expanding rule of law transforms the knight into an enemy of public order. The violence of Don Quixote is a straightforward anachronism.
What further distinguishes the violence of medieval adventure from its modern counterparts is the different role played by love. The knight-errant traditionally serves a lady with whom he will achieve sexual fulfilment at some point. As the lengthy description of the central couple’s wedding night in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide shows,23 the explicit representation of sexual desire does not pose major problems in chivalric culture. Love and adventure in the courtly romances often come into conflict, but they cannot exist without each other. In modernity, by contrast, the aggressive and the erotic drives are disentangled and form two different subtypes of adventure.24 On the one hand, love becomes an adventure in its own right as an isolated erotic escapade outside bourgeois marriage. For Georg Simmel, erotic adventure is even the epitome of adventure as such.25 On the other, the travelling heroes of popular adventure fiction observe a strict “celibacy of courage”, as Ernst Bloch writes with regard to Karl May.26 Despite the apparent division of love and aggression, both types of modern adventure are subliminally related to each other since erotic adventure implies the idea of conquest and real physical combat carries an erotic charge.27 In the case of modern adventure fiction, this means that erotic desire is often hidden just beneath the surface of the plot. The wound which Winnetou inflicts on Old Shatterhand (discussed by Martin Roussel) gives rise to a somewhat homoerotic blood brotherhood. With regard to The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Vid Stevanović shows that the absence of explicit sexuality in T. E. Lawrence’s narrative is counterbalanced by an implicit eroticization of combat, and that this psycho-poetic construct breaks down when Lawrence becomes the victim of real sexual violence.
Unlike the medieval romances on which it is modelled, but very much in the fashion of Karl May’s novels, Lawrence’s world of adventure is strictly homosocial. Modern popular adventure fiction not only tends to exclude women but is even driven by a latent phobia about the feminine. In Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, the beautiful female antagonist Milady de Winter is compared to a reptile, as Ralf Junkerjürgen points out.28 This misogynist stance could be read as an exemplary case of what Klaus Theweleit has called the male fantasies of modernity.29 According to Theweleit, the generations of militarized men who paved the way for the world wars imagined their own bodies as firm machines and were obsessed by a fear of the feminine conceived as something fluid. The frequent fights against amorphous monsters in modern adventure fiction seem to imply a fight against a repressed form of femininity that returns in the form of the abject. In The Lost World, Professor Challenger and his comrades chance upon a nest of pterodactyls, a species of flying reptiles, which breed their young ones in a filthy, wet pit. Malone evokes the “hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs”, thus connecting the pit to a repulsive form of the feminine.30 Even Lake Gladys at the centre of the plateau, named after Malone’s fiancée, is called “the mother of strange monsters” because of the creatures that live in it.31 If we take into account this latent aversion to the female, it does not really come as a surprise that the narrative telos of marriage turns out to be an illusion. While Malone was proving his manhood at the other end of the world, Gladys has married a solicitor’s clerk, as he finds out on his return. He thus joins his elder comrades in their inveterate misogyny. But already long before the final disappointment, a negative version of the feminine has been displaced into the very centre of the plot, where it takes on the form of a ‘filthy’ species of reptiles. Modernist authors who adopt an analytic stance have set out to explore the repressed erotic underpinnings of adventure. Robert Musil, for instance, interprets adventure as a synthesis of love and violence, as Oliver Grill argues, and thus recovers a unity that has been obliterated in modernity.
Other historic paradigms of adventure require an analysis of their own, which can only be sketched out at this point, but which will be at the centre of some of the essays in this volume. In the ancient novel, for instance, the line between the wilderness and society is by no means clear-cut. Although violence is often perpetrated by lawless figures such as pirates and robbers, it also takes place in the very centres of political power, at least when they are located at a certain distance from the heroes’ Hellenic origin.32 Furthermore, the gender economy of the ancient novel differs significantly from both modern and medieval forms of adventure, with both the hero and the heroine suffering similar forms of violence at the hands of both male and female perpetrators. While love and adventure are complements in medieval courtly romance and antitheses in many pieces of modern popular fiction, there is an underlying continuity between the two in the ancient novel, as Susanne Gödde argues in her essay. The picaresque novel, discussed by Hanno Ehrlicher, represents yet another type of adventure that challenges some of the assumptions made so far since it defines violence as the very essence of social existence. Given the differences between various subtypes of adventure, a socio-historic reading should caution us against monolithic models of adventure violence, but it can also alert us to the family resemblances that exist between them. This volume will attempt to map some of the continuities and dissimilarities that emerge when we consider the violence inherent in adventure from a broad diachronic perspective.
The Phenomenology of ‘Traceless’ Violence
We can temporarily bracket all issues of reference and social function when we move from a socio-historical to a phenomenological point of view. Luckily enough, Bakhtin has provided such an analysis in his study on the chronotope of the ancient Greek novel. Adventure time, Bakhtin points out, is distinguished from biographical time in so far as it excludes physical or psychological change. The protagonists successfully undergo various trials, thus displaying an immutable identity that has always been in place. Bakhtin uses a brilliant metaphor in order to illustrate that the trials narrated in ancient romance are violent in nature but that they do not leave any traces: “The hammer of events shatters nothing and forges nothing – it merely tries the durability of an already finished product. And the product passes the test.”33 While there is a certain scope for deviation, Bakhtin’s concept summarizes an essential feature of most adventure narratives. Adventure guarantees that the hero (or sometimes the heroine) will survive basically unscathed. He often improves his social standing and confirms his heroic identity, but he will not suffer any permanent bodily or psychic harm. What Freud writes with regard to the guarantee of survival in popular fiction certainly applies to adventure: “Nothing can ever happen to you.”34 Moreover, the adventurer is also shielded from trauma with regard to the violence he inflicts: the harm he does to others hardly ever troubles him. While the last specimens of the ape tribe in The Lost World are being precipitated over the edge of the plateau, Professor Challenger comments with scientific pride: “We have been privileged […] to be present at one of the typical decisive battles of history – battles which have determined the fate of the world.”35 And even Malone, after briefly deploring the “tragic means” used to establish human supremacy on the prehistoric plateau, concludes that the extinction of the apes “brought much advantage”.36 The trauma of the perpetrator, which has caused much debate in recent trauma studies,37 does not affect the members of this expedition. Owing to its ‘traumatophobic’ stance, adventure often involves a stage in which bad memories are cancelled, and if nightmarish memories remain, as Malone claims, their being mentioned serves to create suspense, but they hardly ever haunt the adventurer to the point of preventing him from telling “the thing in its due order”.38 In other words, they do not disrupt the narrative in a traumatic way.
Although the phenomenology of adventure violence as reconstructed by Bakhtin can be developed on the basis of the literary texts alone, it should be linked back to socio-historic factors. As a matter of fact, the fantasies of invulnerability in Renaissance romance and the emergence of full-body parade armour coincide with the very moment when the use of firearms leads to an increase in severe battle wounds.39 In a strange apotropaic gesture, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso even transfers the firepower of the artillery onto his knights, who smash enemy squadrons as if they were superhuman projectiles.40 A somewhat similar contradiction between an imagined hardening and the actual frailness of the human body can be observed in the 20th century, when global wars were ideologized as heroic adventure. Elisabeth Hutter’s essay illustrates that the pattern of adventure is strained far beyond the limits of plausibility when it is used as a plot device for modern colonial warfare. Even novels written with firm ideological intentions have to acknowledge that the exhaustion and apathy experienced by colonial soldiers starkly contrast with the agency promised by adventure, while the massacres committed against the native population give the lie to the last remaining practices of chivalric self-fashioning. On the industrialized battlefields of the First World War, the expectations created by adventure fiction seem even more problematic. Despite the risk of anachronism, Ernst Jünger’s world-war narrative The Adventurous Heart aims to give a painful lesson in heroism to the German public. As Michael Auer shows, Jünger wants his readers to consider their own life – even in the face of imminent mutilation and death – as a story of adventure. The Quixotic misapprehension is fully intended: for Jünger, the sober boredom of modern life can only be met with a reaffirmation of literary illusions.
What an adventurer’s body looks like when such illusions go to pieces can be seen in an anti-war cartoon by Greg Irons.41 The cartoon, first published in 1970, is reproduced in Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, juxtaposed with a quotation from Jünger’s wartime essays. In a series of cynically parodic scenes, Irons confronts the chronotope of adventurous invulnerability with the grim reality of the Vietnam War. Each sequence of images begins by showing American GIs engaged in some wartime activity, and it raises the typical expectations of an adventure narrative. The references to danger and exhaustion at first seem to create a naturalistic backdrop against which a heroic story can unfold, but such a story never in fact takes place. Before the soldiers even notice what has happened, they are killed by an unexpected enemy attack, their bodies torn apart and reduced to their tiniest anatomic parts. After each unexpected annihilation, the narrative voice laments that this is not what was supposed to happen according to the script, and the story then has to begin from scratch once again. Irons uses the visual code of cartoonish violence (which is addressed from a more specific perspective in Stephan Packard’s essay) in order to transgress it. As the soldiers’ eyes and genitals are scattered in various directions, one is vaguely reminded of such comic brawls as the battles in Asterix, where the teeth of Roman legionaries remain on the spot while their bodies soar through the air. But what actually goes to pieces in Irons’s cartoon is not so much the adventurer’s body as the narrative structure of adventure itself. The beginning is immediately followed by an incongruous ending. The reality of war does not allow for adventure, it doesn’t even allow for a meaningful plot. Irons’s cartoon should invite us to focus on an aspect that has been present throughout this introduction and that requires closer analysis: the relationship between violence and narrative form.
The Narrative Form of Violence and the Violence of Narrative Form
Despite the justified criticism levelled against the ever-expanding semantics of violence, there can no longer be any doubt that language and other sign systems are involved not only in the representation of violence but also in its constitution. Bernhard Waldenfels has argued that the justification of violence is violent in itself insofar as it prepares the ground for new violent acts.42 In other words, the discursive frame cannot be categorically distinguished from the violence it explains, relativizes, or legitimizes. Narrative is a major and maybe even the most important cultural technique for framing violence since it can present the deed either as an aggression or as self-defence, depending in each case on how the plot is constructed.43 In adventure fiction, the villain’s gratuitous violence or the danger posed by the ‘beast’ turns the hero into an agent of a morally just counter-violence. Following this line of argument, we could describe Malone’s journalism in The Lost World as a narrative act of violence insofar as he plays down his responsibility for the genocidal massacre.
This volume won’t circumvent these thorny issues, and it will consider narrative both as a medium that informs the violence it represents and as a vehicle that potentially carries its own violent charge. The term ‘narrative formation of violence’ used in the title therefore carries a wider and a narrower meaning, although the two are not separated by a hard and fast line. In the wider sense, the phrase refers to the representation of violence through the form of narrative, for instance on the level of emplotment, through time management, or in terms of perspective. The essays in this volume provide quite a few examples that illustrate how violence can be narratively shaped. As Ralf Junkerjürgen shows with regard to The Three Musketeers, the duels in Dumas’ novel follow a strict choreographic pattern that serves to squeeze the simultaneity of parallel actions into the linear medium of speech while creating suspense. In popular pictorial narratives, Stephan Packard notes, the choreography of adventure combat often has a rhythmic quality that signals the shift to the chronotopic logic of tracelessness, but that can also highlight moments when it is transgressed or problematized. Scenes of wounding – a commonplace adventure motif – can serve to attract attention to crucial points of the plot. Martin Roussel argues that Old Shatterhand’s initiation into the world of the Wild West in Winnetou I coincides with the moment when he is stabbed by his future blood brother. But violence is not only formed through narrative, it also has the power to impact its own narrative formation. As has been mentioned with regard to Vid Stevanović’s reading of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a plot structure can change under the disruptive force of the traumatic event it tells, shifting from romance to other narrative modes.
In the narrower sense, however, the subtitle of this volume suggests that adventure storytelling can itself be violent – not only through the content it represents but through its very form. That literary forms in general can be violent is not in doubt.44 The aesthetic programme of modernism, for instance, has often been described as an act of aggression directed against both the material and the audience of art.45 Michael Auer contends that Jünger’s wartime essays are instances of such avant-garde violence and that they aim to impose the “imperative of the adventurous heart” upon the reader.46 The form of these literary explosives is fragmentation. Hanno Ehrlicher highlights another case of narrative violence: in the Lazarillo de Tormes, the picaresque first-person narrator deliberately begins to withhold important information at a certain point of his account, thus frustrating the expectations he has previously raised, and he concludes his treatise with an explicit menace issued against those who might question his honour. Having suffered greatly at the hands of others, Lazarillo seems to resort to an act of narrative counter-violence. Martin von Koppenfels discusses yet another dynamic interaction between violence and form: according to his analysis of Chrétien’s Yvain, chivalric adventure ‘contains’ the violent potential of knighthood by means of narrative, embedding it in a well-defined plot structure. In this case, narrative is not an instrument of violence but rather a means to keep it at bay.
The tension between fragmentation and coherence, which has emerged incidentally in this overview, is also a central issue in trauma studies. The field of trauma studies has probably given the most systematic account of the relationship between violence and narrative. According to the approach most commonly adopted, the representation of trauma involves a loss of narrative coherence, thus reproducing the psychic effects of violence at the level of form.47 But we have already seen that adventure takes an anti-traumatic stance on violence and typically aims to provide coherence as well as meaning. In order to analyse the violent form of adventure narratives, it is useful to return to the traditional parameters of emplotment: the structure of beginning, middle, and end. To conclude this section of the introduction, I would like to argue that all these structural components of the plot are potential sites of violence in adventure narratives. This also means that violence in adventure fiction is by no means an amorphous element of the story. It is, quite to the contrary, a structuring device of narrative form.
As far as beginnings are concerned, adventure narratives often start with a moment of bodily or symbolic violence that creates tellability. The first Arthurian romance, Chrétien’s Erec et Enide, opens with a dwarf striking the hero’s face with his whip. This literal loss of face sets in motion Erec’s first adventure and can only be compensated for by an equivalent measure of counter-violence directed against the knight who backed the insolent dwarf.48 Chivalric adventure consists in creating a symbolic balance between suffering and inflicting violence. As long as this balance has not been achieved, narrative closure is impossible. One might object that this is a universal aspect of storytelling and not something that characterizes adventure in particular. The model of narrative desire developed by Peter Brooks, for instance, defines the beginning as the point when narratability is created through an initial stimulus of pain.49 But if narrative beginnings are always violent, this would make an analysis of formal violence in adventure fiction even more urgent. The violent beginnings of adventure instantiate the foundational violence of narrative itself. Adventure can thus serve as a paradigm for understanding narratological issues of greater importance.
In addition, adventure involves formal issues of its own that can be analysed in terms of violence. Whereas the beginning is usually painful but structurally unproblematic, the notorious endlessness of adventure storytelling creates a narrative aporia that calls for violent solutions – solutions that often deny the reader the final discharge of tension.50 Is there a way to conclude a tale of adventure without arbitrarily interrupting it or switching to another narrative mode that allows for closure? A famous example of the impossibility of closure is the late 15th-century Orlando innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo (discussed in David Quint’s essay), which ends with the poet telling his audience that he has to interrupt his story and leave it unfinished because of a French invasion in 1494. In this case, it is only an accidental outbreak of real historical violence that allows, if not for closure, at least for an ending to a potentially endless text. But a violent ending is sometimes even worse than no ending at all: when Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes die at the Reichenbach Falls in “The Adventure of the Final Problem”, published in 1893, he faced indignant protests. Obviously, his readers felt they had been deprived of something that was due to them: the next episode, or at least a less brutal ending. They retaliated against this personal offence as best they could, cancelling their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle gave in some ten years later, when he resuscitated his protagonist for new adventures.51 The hero’s tragic end turns out to be a fake death, the only kind of lethal event that can happen to an adventurer. Sherlock Holmes may have solved the final problem, but the problem of finalization in adventure fiction remains a conundrum.
Even the narrative middle can be a site of violent formal techniques. In most cases, the repetition typical of adventure entails monotony. It thus calls for a discursive mode of structuration that complicates the chronological order of the episodes. This might be the reason why narrative devices such as the cliffhanger and entrelacement emerge in the context of adventure storytelling: they are a necessary complement that makes episodic storytelling more enticing. In the terms introduced by Roland Barthes and adopted by Peter Brooks, the complication of temporal order by means of interruptions and entrelacement entails a (partial) displacement of the proairetic by the hermeneutic code, i. e. the structure of the plot becomes a riddle to be solved.52 In medieval romance, Chrétien de Troyes is the first to experiment with these narrative strategies. From the prose romances of the early 13th century to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the interruptions of the narrative strands become ever more extreme. They are also experienced as increasingly frustrating or at least challenging by readers.53 Is there any point in calling cliffhangers ‘violent’, or would this just add to the already inflationary use of the term? I would like to suggest that cliffhangers have long since been perceived and styled as violent moments in the plot. An early example is Apuleius’s Metamorphosis, which is at the centre of Alexander Kirichenko’s essay. The books into which this novel is divided repeatedly break off when the donkey protagonist faces a major threat. At the end of book 8, for instance, Lucius runs the risk of ending his life in a saucepan as his owner’s cook needs a substitute for the venison leg stolen by a dog. It is only at the beginning of book 9 that we learn of Lucius’ escape. Matteo Maria Boiardo, who systematically combined the traditional canto structure of Italian chivalric romances with the device of the cliffhanger, was also a translator of Apuleius’ novel and may have learned something from him.54 The author who really takes up Apuleius’ heritage, however, is the major expert in early modern chivalry as well as the potential founder of the modern novel: Cervantes. In Don Quixote, cliffhangers are systematically presented as acts of violence directed against the text, the prime example being the interruption of the fight between the protagonist and the Basque in chapters 8 and 9 of the first part of the novel. Other examples of bloody interruptions are Don Quixote’s fight against the wineskins (which, as universally acknowledged, is modelled on a scene from Apuleius’ Metamorphosis) and his intrusion into Maese Pedro’s puppet show.55 What Cervantes wants us to understand is that adventure cliffhangers are violence on the level of narrative discourse: a plot can lose its integrity as much as a body. An inquiry into the violence of narrative form simply treads in the footsteps of authors with a strong meta-narrative awareness such as Apuleius and Cervantes.
2 The Essays in This Volume
The wide historical spectrum of adventure violence analysed by the essays in this volume called for a primarily diachronic structure. This is why they are ordered according to cultural paradigms and historical contexts, while the systematic perspectives outlined above define overarching research questions. I will now present the essays in detail and outline some common interests that emerge within each section.
The first section (“Adventure and Violence in the Ancient Novel”) explores the genre that underpins Bakhtin’s influential account of adventure time, but it focuses on issues that remain at the margins of his theory: gendered violence and imperial politics. In her essay on the Greek novels of adventure, Susanne Gödde shows that both the love relationship between the young lovers and their trials are permeated by the very same kind of erotic violence. Above all, the female protagonists are the targets of an ambiguous violence that fuses asceticism and eroticism. By successfully defending their virginity against the assault of bandits, pirates, and other male perpetrators, they survive undefiled but also further enhance their erotic value and their attraction as potential victims. Gödde argues that this kind of sexualized violence is by no means limited to the world of adventure and that it also permeates the relationship between the protagonists. In Leucippe and Clitophon, love is associated with violence and death from the very beginning. This continuity also provides an underlying link between the supposedly peaceful sequence of biographical events and their sudden interruption through adventure.
Alexander Kirichenko’s essay deals with the relation between the Greek novels (as well as other Hellenic texts) and the tradition of the ass-tale, which emerges roughly at the same time. During the Second Sophistic, Kirichenko maintains, classical Greek literature enjoys an unprecedented prestige in the Roman Empire but is also perceived as increasingly oppressive since it condemns poets to an endless recycling of Hellenic commonplaces. Violence is one possible means to escape from this claustrophobic intertextual universe: Kirichenko points out that Seneca’s tragedies strive to outdo the Greek myths they put on stage through the representation of excessive and meaningless physical violence. In Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, by contrast, the protagonist escapes from the Greek world of adventure by crossing the border to another culture: his trials come to an end when he entreats the Egyptian goddess Isis to restore him to his human shape.
The second section (“Knighthood and Its Aftermath”) centres on the cultural and literary paradigm of chivalry, within which the very concept of adventure (aventure) has been invented, and which is often regarded as the first full-fledged narrative realization of adventure.56 David Quint’s essay analyses the paradoxes that arise from the unlimited desire for recognition inscribed in the chivalric code of honour. He focuses on early modern romances, which were written at a time when European state building was well under way and which reflect the conflicts that result from the clash between knightly aggression and the emerging rule of law. Given that adventure takes place in a space where the right of the strongest prevails, the knight comes to resemble the outlaw as soon as the state is powerful enough to impose its monopoly of violence. The chivalric figure that most famously sets out to challenge public order is, of course, Don Quixote. Cervantes’s protagonist not only identifies with the robber baron Rinaldo di Montalbano, but he also meets an actual bandit during his third sally near Barcelona, the Catalan Roque Guinart, whose real historic model, Perot Rocaguinarda, eventually struck a deal with the Castilian crown to leave Spain and command royal troops in Naples. Here, as in other cases, it turns out that the boundaries between, knight, robber, and state are anything but easy to establish.
Martin von Koppenfels’s essay deals with another aftermath of chivalry. In a reading that mediates between modern psychoanalytic theories and chivalric romance, he argues that medieval narrative culture is rife with objects, states, and narrative devices that can best be described with Donald Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object. Von Koppenfels’s inquiry into narrative transitionality starts from Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, where the female first-person narrator tries to overcome her grief for her father’s death by taming a goshawk. He then turns to a parallel case of feralization that can be found in Chrétien’s Chevalier au lion: after his madness, the Arthurian knight Yvain only returns to sanity, and to society, through a series of transitional practices and objects, the most important of which is a lion. In modernity, the narrative world of the Middle Ages with its abundance of transitional objects is increasingly considered as regressive and therefore relegated to the domain of children’s literature. On the basis of these readings, von Koppenfels advances a historically grounded narrative theory of the transitional object, which addresses an even more fundamental psychic level of storytelling than plot-based theories of narrative desire.
The third section (“Adventure on the Battlefield”) examines some cases in which military violence is narrated in terms of adventure or at least comes into contact with genres of adventure. Hanno Ehrlicher follows the traces of the picaresque novel from early modern Spain to the battlefields of the First World War. He reads the anonymous fountainhead of the genre, the Lazarillo de Tormes, not only as a story of incisive violent experiences but also as an instantiation of narrative violence. While the power of the state remains in the background of Lazarillo’s life, the picaros of the following century become entangled with history and enter the theatre of war. In the last Spanish picaresque novel of the early modern period, Vida y hechos de Estebanillo Gonzalez, the protagonist cynically exhibits his deviation from the soldierly code of honour, thus undercutting the heroic ideals of Spanish imperialism. Ehrlicher concludes his comparative study of the picaresque novel with a reading of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, which can be regarded as a peculiar specimen of the picaresque genre. Like the Lazarillo, Hašek’s text systematically frustrates the readers’ expectations. Despite the acceleration of warfare that results from modern military technology, the moment of battle is indefinitely deferred.
Starting with a brief reassessment of some historical constellations of adventure and war, Oliver Grill’s essay focuses on Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which revolves around yet another of these constellations: the collective experience of the beginning of the First World War in August 1914 as an adventure. The so-called August-Erlebnis gave rise to a revival of pre-modern heroic sentiments and was perceived as an adventurous escape from the boredom of modern bourgeois life. The protagonist of Musil’s novel, Ulrich, exemplifies this mass-psychological state since his experiences and activities before the war betray a fascination with violent adventures. What distinguishes Musil from other contemporary observers is the double stance he adopts in his novel. Through narrative, Grill argues, it is possible to have an intoxicating dream and to reflect on it. The Man Without Qualities thus combines a pre-war with a post-war perspective. In the part of the novel dedicated to Ulrich’s relationship with his sister Agathe, the simultaneity of experience and analysis is mirrored by the unity of difference between love and violence. Given that adventure involves aggression as well as desire, it instantiates the unity of both.
In 1914, Ernst Jünger was yet another young man who perceived the outbreak of the real war as a liberation from the discontents of modern culture. Michael Auer reads Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart as an avant-garde act of literary violence that aims to inculcate its readers with a heroic world view. As Auer argues, the form of Jünger’s essay mirrors a change in German war tactics in 1916, which supplemented the protective underground tunnels of trench warfare with mobile storm troops. For Jünger, who commanded one of these units, this shift corresponds to literary history’s transition from the bourgeois novel to avant-garde writing. Through its incoherent, heterogeneous form, The Adventurous Heart is conceived of as a textual projectile aimed at the German youth of the time. The “inner form” of the text determines the transformation it is to effect in its readers: even though the hero and author of The Adventurous Heart are identical, the narrative voice is to be characterized as heterodiegetic since the author regards himself from an impersonal, aloof perspective. Likewise, the readers have become the narrators of their own lives and regard themselves from above, without pity.
The fact that Jünger enlisted in the French Foreign Legion in 1913 before searching for adventure on the battlefield shows how closely war and colonialism are connected as contexts where violent adventure can be expected even under the conditions of modernity. The fourth section (“Colonial Adventures”) investigates violence in colonial settings in the late 19th and early 20th century, beginning with Karl May, whose novels are set in the heartland of the European colonial imaginary (North America and the ‘Orient’). Martin Roussel puts a wound suffered by Old Shatterhand in Winnetou I at the centre of his analysis. During an engagement with the Apache tribe, the hero is saved from death only by a tin can he carries in his pocket that deflects the thrust of Winnetou’s knife. According to Roussel, the wound marks a double transformation. On the one hand, it highlights the point where the protagonist turns from a derided greenhorn into an expert of the Wild West. On the other, this rite de passage has a poetological dimension: the tin can contains Old Shatterhand’s private notes, which can be interpreted as the origin of the very novel that mentions their existence. This is the reason why the tin can figures at key structural moments in the plot and is shifted each time from the adventure plot to a scene of writing. As the hero becomes a writer, the author Karl May also becomes the hero of his own novel.
The generation of Germans who participated in the late colonial adventure of the Reich between 1884 and 1919 were informed by May’s novels and carried their mental literary baggage to German East Africa. Elisabeth Hutter demonstrates that the colonial fiction of Imperial Germany draws on the pattern of adventure and yet reluctantly takes notice of the fact that it no longer suits the representation of colonial life. This paradox concerns, above all, the novels written after 1900, which had to face the public outcry over the horrors committed by Germans abroad. Alfred Funke’s African Laurel, for instance, tries to counteract the growing discrediting of colonialism by redeeming the infamous colonial administrator Carl Peters, but it also strives to rehabilitate adventure as a vehicle of colonial fiction. In Hutter’s analysis, Peter Mohrs Fahrt nach Südwest by Gustav Frenssen serves as a negative counterpart to Funke’s text. In Frenssen’s novel, the pattern of adventure collapses as it is confronted with the reality of colonial warfare. However, the critical stance on adventure is not meant as an attack on colonialism as such. By showing how German soldiers overcome their apathy through violence, Frenssen tried to influence public opinion in favour of a strong colonial commitment before the 1906 Reichstag election.
While Ernst Jünger was stuck in the muddy trenches of the Western front and German colonialism was in its final throes, T. E. Lawrence took part in the Arab Rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. As Vid Stevanović argues in his essay, Lawrence’s account of these events in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom draws extensively on the adventure pattern but also demonstrates its failure in the face of violent warfare. Informed by his reading of medieval chivalric romance, Lawrence styles the first half of his narrative in the mode of adventure, depicting his Arab allies and himself as noble knights-errant. The supposed cleanness of this chivalresque rebellion collapses during a key episode set in the city of Deraa, where Lawrence is raped and tortured. This traumatic event leads to an escalation of cruelty on the battleground and to an abandoning of the romance form in the text. During the US interventions in the Middle East after 2001, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was repeatedly cited by military strategists as a guidebook on how to instrumentalize local forces for one’s own purposes. This appropriation, Stevanović outlines in his conclusion, overlooks the fact that Lawrence’s account is itself a narrative of failure.
The representation of violence in popular novels, comics, and films, addressed in the fifth section (“Violent Popular Genres”), draws on centuries-old conventions of adventure storytelling, adopting them to new media platforms and techniques. Ralf Junkerjürgen’s analysis focuses on the choice of weapons in Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. The prominence of smallswords and rapiers in the novel bespeaks a nostalgia for the knightly code of honour and reflects a concern of 19th-century duelling manuals, which promote traditional duels as a typically French, civilized form of violence, while disparaging the use of firearms as a sign of cowardice and treachery. The choice of weapons heavily impacts the representation of violent encounters in the first musketeer novel, above all on the level of narrative time. Junkerjürgen also points out that smallswords function as a symbol of patriarchal power. The female villain of the novel, Milady de Winter, is only equipped with a dagger. Despite the taboo on violence against women, Milady is eventually executed after a pseudo-trial just beyond the French border. The latest adaptions of Dumas’s novel, however, have begun to rewrite the story from a feminist perspective and make the female protagonist take up the rapier in order to take revenge on a group of male ruffians.
Stephan Packard focuses on the rhythm of violence in popular pictorial narratives. As he observes, combat scenes in adventure comics and films often display a specific rhythmic texture that sets them apart from other elements of the plot such as dialogue. Packard draws a heuristic parallel with the literary tradition of the prosimetrum, which is also predicated on the combination of different medial modalities. In popular films and comics, prosimetric structures are used to achieve a broad variety of effects. In a 2002 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, elements of music draw attention to the rhythmic qualities of adventure violence, but they also function as an implicit poetological comment on metaleptic shifts. The Amazing Spider-Man series employs different rhythms to mark off the world of adventure from the world of everyday life. Text and image are slightly out of phase in combat scenes, while they coincide in the melodramatic strand of the plot. These two rhythmic layers also correspond to different narrative structures: episodic adventures and the overarching biographic storyline.
Other violent popular genres involve elements of adventure without matching the adventure formula completely. According to Jörn Ahrens, the western has faced a constant decline since the emergence of films based on Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, which can be regarded as the most successful blueprint for adventure narratives in popular culture. The western does not tell a hero’s journey but serves as an allegory for the creation of society and of modern institutions in a hostile environment. After decades of insignificance, the recent western has developed a new, critical take on the conflict between archaic violence and modernity. This renewal took place through a rediscovery of an apparently outdated figure: the old white man. As the patrons of modernity are unmasked as corrupt and self-interested, the old white man has to return and take up his violent business once again – not in order to reclaim power for himself but at the service of the victims of modernity. Ahrens argues that the western and adventure are to be regarded as two competing narrative patterns in popular culture, although both testify to the same fascination with violence.
Bibliography
Sources
Studies
Koppenfels, Martin von, “Wissenschaftliches Programm”. DFG research unit “Philology of Adventure”, 03/2021. https://www.abenteuer.fak13.uni-muenchen.de/forschungsgruppe/wissenschaftliches-programm/index.html (last retrieval 6 April 2024).
See Christian Gudehus and Michaela Christ (eds.), Gewalt. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler 2013, pp. 1–15. On the semantic expansion of the concept of violence, see Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, “Überlegungen zum Gewaltbegriff”, in: Wilhelm Heitmeyer (ed.), Gewalt. Entwicklungen, Strukturen, Analyseprobleme, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2004, pp. 21–61: at pp. 21–27.
A more general overview of this groundwork (not focused on violence) can be found in Manuel Mühlbacher, “A Narrative Poetics of Adventure. With a Case Study on Its History in Medieval and Early Modern Romance Literature”, in: Storyworlds 12.1/12.2 (2020), pp. 105–147.
See, for instance, Dagmar von Hoff, Brigitte E. Jirku and António Sousa Ribeiro (eds.), Einschnitte: Signaturen der Gewalt in textorientierten Medien, Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2016 (with a focus on 20th- and 21st-century literature), and Albrecht Classen (ed.), Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature. A Casebook, New York: Routledge 2004.
See Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, in: id., Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards and James Strachey, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer 1974, pp. 191–270: at pp. 237–244 (on the cultural repression of aggressive drives).
See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2016, vol. 2, pp. 219–220.
See Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation. Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1979, vol. 2, p. 330. There are plenty of critical assessments of Elias’s theory from the field of violence studies. See, amongst others, Wilhelm Heitmeyer and Hans-Georg Soeffner, “Einleitung”, in: iid. (eds.), Gewalt: Entwicklungen, Strukturen, Analyseprobleme, pp. 11–17: at pp. 12–13, and Michael Staudigl, “Leitideen, Probleme und Potenziale einer phänomenologischen Gewaltanalyse”, in: id. (ed.), Gesichter der Gewalt: Beiträge aus phänomenologischer Sicht, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 2014, pp. 9–47: at pp. 14–15. What Elias seems to overlook is the fact that the state’s potential of violence has massively increased in the 20th century. However, the assumption that physical violence in the daily life of the individual has in fact decreased in the same period, at least in many countries worldwide, still seems plausible.
The compensatory nature of popular adventure fiction in modernity has been underlined in Volker Klotz, Abenteuer-Romane, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt 1989, pp. 211–216, and Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, Populärromane im 19. Jahrhundert. Von Dumas bis Zola, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1976, pp. 7–31. On the history of adventure in both popular and high-brow modern literature, see Oliver Grill and Brigitte Obermayr (eds.), Abenteuer in der Moderne, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink / Brill 2020.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World, ed. Ian Duncan, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008, p. 145.
See Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Vertrauen und Gewalt. Versuch über eine besondere Konstellation der Moderne, Munich: Pantheon 2009, pp. 116–124.
Conan Doyle, The Lost World, p. 158.
See Juri Lotman, “On the Semiosphere”, in: Sign System Studies 31.1 (2005), pp. 205–226: at p. 214. On the implications of Lotman’s theory for a narratology of culture, see Albrecht Koschorke, Wahrheit und Erfindung. Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Erzähltheorie, Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer 2012, pp. 128–134.
See Roland Barthes, Mythologies, in: id., Œuvres complètes, ed. Éric Marty, Paris: Seuil 2002, vol. 1, pp. 671–870: at pp. 840–843.
See Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence. The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, Middletown/CT: Wesleyan University Press 1987, and id., Gunfighter Nation. The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, New York: Harper Perennial 1993, pp. 10–16.
See Marilyn C. Wesley, Violent Adventure. Contemporary Fiction by American Men, Charlottesville/VA: University of Virginia Press 2003. With Bourdieu, one could argue that adventure fiction, at least in certain historical contexts, contributes to the creation of a particular habitus (see Pierre Bourdieu, La domination masculine, Paris: Seuil 1998, pp. 39–40).
See the editors’ introduction in Oliver Grill and Philip Reich (eds.), Ordnungen des Außerordentlichen. Abenteuer – Raum – Gesellschaft, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink / Brill 2024, pp. IX–XL: at pp. XXIII–XXIV.
See Alexander Mitscherlich, “Zwei Arten der Grausamkeit”, in: id., Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Klaus Menne, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1983, vol. 5, pp. 322–342: at pp. 323–324.
See below, pp. 85–86.
See Hubertus Fischer, Ehre, Hof und Abenteuer. Vorarbeiten zu einer historischen Poetik des höfischen Epos, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1983, p. 161, and Armin Schulz, Erzähltheorie in mediävistischer Perspektive, Berlin: De Gruyter 2015, p. 129.
On the positive value of violence in the courtly romances, see Will Hasty, Art of Arms. Studies of Aggression and Dominance in Medieval German Court Poetry, Heidelberg: Winter 2002. Critical reassessments of Elias’s theory of the civilizing tendency of courtly culture can also be found in Albrecht Classen (ed.), Violence in Medieval Courtly Literature. A Casebook, New York: Routledge 2004.
See Ralf Simon, Einführung in die strukturalistische Poetik des mittelalterlichen Romans. Analysen zu deutschen Romanen der matière de Bretagne, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann 1990, p. VI, and Hans Fromm, “Doppelweg”, in: Ingeborg Glier (ed.), Werk – Typ – Situation. Studien zu poetologischen Bedingungen in der älteren deutschen Literatur, Stuttgart: Metzler 1969, pp. 64–79: at p. 72, who underlines the absence of history in the Arthurian world.
Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, Der Sinn der Parodie im Don Quijote, Heidelberg: Winter 1963, p. 15.
See David S. King, “Wounds and Healing: A Moral Guide to the Prose Lancelot”, in: South Central Review: The Journal of the South Central Modern Language Association 36.1 (2019), pp. 41–59. On the influence of historiography on the Prose Lancelot, see Erich Köhler, “Zur Entstehung des altfranzösischen Prosaromans”, in: id., Trobadorlyrik und höfischer Roman, Berlin: Rütten & Loening 1962, pp. 213–223, and on the crisis of Arthurian knighthood in the cycle, see Walter Haug, “Das Endspiel der arthurischen Tradition im Prosalancelot”, in: Karlheinz Stierle and Rainer Warning (eds.), Das Ende, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1995, pp. 251–266.
Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, trans. and ed. Jean-Marie Fritz, Paris: Livre de poche 1992, vv. 2065–2104.
Here and in the following, I refer to some findings of the DFG research unit “Philology of Adventure”, which has investigated the drive economies of adventure in earlier publications. With regard to the division of erotic and aggressive drives, see Martin von Koppenfels, “Wissenschaftliches Programm”. DFG research unit “Philology of Adventure”, 03/2021. https://www.abenteuer.fak13.uni-muenchen.de/forschungsgruppe/wissenschaftliches-programm/index.html (last retrieval 6 April 2024), p. 18.
See Georg Simmel, “Philosophie des Abenteuers”, in: id., Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918, ed. Rüdiger Kramme and Angela Rammstedt, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2001, vol. 1, pp. 97–110: at pp. 103–104.
See Ernst Bloch, Über Märchen, Kolportage und Sage, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1985, p. 172.
See the editors’ introduction in Elisabeth Hutter et al. (eds.), Triebökonomien des Abenteuers, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink / Brill 2022, pp. VII–XIX: at pp. XI–XII, who build on the hypothesis of drive division proposed by Martin von Koppenfels.
See below, p. 263.
See Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987, and vol. 2, Male Bodies, 1989.
See Conan Doyle, The Lost World, pp. 103 and 122.
Conan Doyle, The Lost World, p. 174.
This is the case in Chariton’s Callirhoe, where an important part of the adventures take place at the Persian court in Babylon, and in Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story. In both cases, liberation becomes possible when political order is overturned by war. See Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe, trans. B. P. Reardon, in: Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B. P. Reardon, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press 2008, books 6–8, pp. 17–124: at pp. 89–124, and Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story, trans. J. R. Morgan, in: Collected Ancient Greek Novels, pp. 349–588: at pp. 516–558 (books 8–9).
Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, in: id., The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press 1981, pp. 84–256: at pp. 106–107. On the adventure wound as a narrative device, see Manuel Mühlbacher, “Adventure and the Wound: History of a Paradoxical Relationship”, in: Fabrizio Bondi, Massimo Stella and Andrea Torre (eds.), The Wounded Body. Memory, Language and the Self from Petrarch to Shakespeare, London: Palgrave Macmillan 2022, pp. 159–187, as well as Susanne Gödde’s and Stephan Packard’s essays (below, pp. 14–17 and 278–279).
Sigmund Freud, “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren”, in: id., Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al., Frankfurt/Main: Fischer 1982, vol. 10, pp. 169–179: at p. 178. Freud quotes the Austrian playwright Ludwig Anzengruber (“Es kann dir nix g’schehen”).
Conan Doyle, The Lost World, p. 159.
Conan Doyle, The Lost World, p. 160.
See Erin McGlothlin, “Perpetrator trauma”, in: Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, London and New York: Routledge 2020, pp. 100–110. The diagnosis PTSD, first defined in the DSM-III in 1980, was introduced owing to the advocacy of Vietnam veterans, many of whom were both perpetrators and victims of violence.
Conan Doyle, The Lost World, pp. 129 and 149.
See Carolyn Springer, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2010.
See Lina Bolzoni, “‘O maledetto, o abominoso ordigno’: la rappresentazione della guerra nel poema eroico-cavalleresco”, in: Walter Barberis (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 18. Guerra e pace, Turin: Einaudi 2002, pp. 201–247: at pp. 227–228, and Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, ed. Cristina Zampese, Milan: BUR 2012, 19.83.
See Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2, pp. 187–196. Iron’s cartoon is titled “Raw War Comics” and was first published in the collection Hydrogen Bomb and Biochemical Warfare Funnies, San Francisco: Rip-Off Press 1970. Unfortunately, we were unable to obtain the rights to reproduce the cartoon, but it can be viewed on the website of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum (see https://osucartoons.pastperfectonline.com/Webobject/74F161E9-E693-4873-8032-462711195322, last retrieval 16 May 2024).
See Bernhard Waldenfels, Der Stachel des Fremden, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1998, pp. 103–119.
Albrecht Koschorke points out that debates on the responsibility for armed conflicts usually revolve around the genuinely narrative question of beginnings. They try to settle the question of who perpetrated the first aggression. See Koschorke, Wahrheit und Erfindung, pp. 245–246.
On the violence of literary form, see Mandy Dröscher-Teille and Till Gerrit Nitschmann, “Einleitung: Gewaltformen/Gewalt formen”, in: iid. (eds.), Gewaltformen/Gewalt formen: Literatur – Ästhetik – Kultur(kritik), Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink / Brill 2021, pp. 1–26; Karlheinz Bohrer, “Stil ist frappierend”, in: Rolf Grimminger (ed.), Kunst – Macht – Gewalt. Der ästhetische Ort der Aggressivität, Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2000, pp. 25–42; and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Louis-Ferdinand Céline und die Frage, ob Prosa gewalttätig sein kann”, in: Kunst – Macht – Gewalt, pp. 127–142.
See Paul Sheehan, Modernism and the Aesthetics of Violence, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2013, and Ian Fleishman, An Aesthetics of Injury. The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino, Evanston/IL: Northwestern University Press 2018.
See below, pp. 168–169.
See the critical reassessment of trauma theory on narrative in Joshua Pederson, “Trauma and Narrative”, in: Roger Kurtz (ed.), Trauma and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2018, pp. 97–109: at pp. 106–107.
See Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, vv. 125–1241.
See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot. Design and Intention in Narrative, Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press 1992, pp. 101–102.
The endlessness of adventure has been commented on throughout the centuries. On the criticism levelled against the endlessness of romance by Aristotelean Renaissance poetics, see Manuel Mühlbacher, “Die Lust an der Endlosigkeit. Spuren des Abenteuers in der italienischen Gattungspoetik des 16. Jahrhunderts”, in: id. and Martin von Koppenfels (eds.), Abenteuer. Erzählmuster, Formprinzip, Genre, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink / Brill 2019, pp. 117–136. See also Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher, Elmwood Park/IL: Dalkey Archive Press 1990, p. 52.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company 2005, vol. 1, p. 713. See also Kinger’s introduction “The World of Sherlock Holmes”, ibid., pp. xvii–lxvii: at pp. xxxii–xxxvi. Stephan Packard highlights a somewhat similar case of fake death in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where contingent economic circumstances first cause the death and then the resuscitation of the heroine (see below, pp. 278–280).
See Roland Barthes, S/Z, in: id., Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, pp. 119–341: at pp. 131–133, and Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 16.
See Daniel Javitch, “Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando Furioso”, in: MLN 95.1 (1980), pp. 66–80.
See Julia Haig Gaisser, The Fortunes of Apuleius and the Golden Ass. A Study in Transmission and Reception, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008, pp. 175–180. Gaisser points out that Boiardo imitated some of Apuleius’ embedded novellas in the Innamorato but does not mention possible similarities in narrative technique.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico, Madrid: Real Academia Española 2015, I.8–9, pp. 111–122; I.35, pp. 454–458, and II.26, pp. 928–930. There are countless essays on the Apuleius reference in Don Quixote’s fight against the wineskins. The allusion has already been noted in Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, p. 89.
See, for instance, Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, Bern: Francke Verlag 1964, pp. 134–135.