Review Written and Edited by Peter Buller.
Ephemerality lies at the heart of all description. From skimmable sentences to carefully conceived images, description always forms a fleeting, linguistic conceptualization of the thing described. Character's outfits and background scenery is detailed, and before long the reader finds these things forgotten as the text's more intriguing insights unfold. Moreover, description always services a greater purpose. Even proponents of "show, don't tell" suggest a writing more dedicated to images--or sentiments, or concepts, etc.--behind and beyond descriptions, rather than the language of description itself. One would be remiss to read Hemingway for his descriptions of trees, after all. Description, it seems, fits in one of two critical frameworks: first, as one of the few remaining utilities of the objective approach to literature (which Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy cunningly criticizes); and second, as a functional but dull way to convey information to the reader in service of a deeper theme. Neither approach grants description much, if any, appeal; nor offers it any real defense. Criticisms of objective writing tend to argue against the authenticity of an approach riding on descriptions, while critics of the latter permit that other literary tools often serve writing better than bland description. Our critical consensus seems ready to do away with description altogether; though sometimes the exceptions to our critical perceptions slip through the cracks. Such is the case of Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal and its shimmering prose.
Stifter's short tale seems like an odd defense of description in the grand scope of literary discourse. Stifter himself was of course, one of the great German stylists associated with the poetic realists; and as noted in W. H. Auden's introduction, was heavily influenced by Goethe and shared "his master's interest in natural history and geology," a fascination he displayed through landscape painting as well as writing. All this should support Stifter's interest in description; yet what's peculiar to Rock Crystal is that it's not terribly experimental in form. It is a Christmas story, and doesn't present a story more complex than any other Christmas story. Two children, brother and sister, hike to a neighboring mountain valley from their small town of Gschaid, only to get lost on their way back. Taking a wrong path, they end up stuck on a glacier as the night falls, and must wait for the elements to calm before completing their journey home. To wit, it sounds like any other Christmas story. Truly it attests to Stifter's skill that, in Auden's words, "what might so easily have been a tear-jerking melodrama becomes in his hands a quiet and beautiful parable." His dedication solely to the landscape and all its details--from the image of "a snowy mountain with dazzling horn-shaped peaks" to the steadfast townspeople, "ever adhering to the ancient ways"--hones his prose to reveal, in purest whimsy, the storyteller's soothing cadence.
Hannah Arendt describes Stifter as "someone who possesses the magic wand to transform all visible things into words and all visible movements--into sentences." And she is right. Stifter's prose reads like a massive landscape painting, an oddly appropriate analogy for a story of less than eighty pages. Just as one can feel the tactility of brushstrokes upon painted canvas, so too can one feel the sway and sound of Stifter's sentences, each word weighed and polished like gemstones. Carrying the reader through his prose is the warm voice of a storyteller, assuaging their senses with thorough details of "the high mountains of our country." Stifter shifts between portraying the world of his story through soft reflections and indulging in the mannerisms of its quirky inhabitants as a town bard, transitions he manages seamlessly.
There is not a man, young or old, in the village who has not something to tell about its peaks and crags, its caves and crevasses, its streams and torrents--either something that has happened to himself or that he has heard about from others. This mountain is the pride of the village, as though the people had made it themselves, and with due respect to their honesty we can't swear to it that once in a while they would not fib for the glory of their mountain.Grounded exhilaration and whimsical asides flow together harmoniously. The specificities to the story ("This mountain is the pride of the village") unfold like lavish pictures in a storybook, even as they found concerns for the greater picture to the reader's benefit ("with due respect to their honesty we can't swear..."). Before the shift in perspective is recognized Stifter has already moved on--and the reader's attention follows him.
The magic of Stifter's writing is not easily conveyed through quotations and criticism, however hard I try to make well on this compromise. Such is to be expected, however, of a story of pure description. No critical discourse properly amends the act of pulling and isolating passages to explain their effects by the same measure as an actual reading of the text; and Rock Crystal is a story that proves this point demonstrably. The charm of Stifter's work, the luminescent warmth of his sentences, doesn't stem from any experiential cunning in terms of its plot, characters, moral leanings, or any conceptual interests; nor does any presiding rule, gimmick, or meter saddle an "answer" for its prosaic resonance. Rather, it's Stifter's sheer dedication to storytelling that illuminates its scenes with all the more brilliance, its images with resplendent vividity. Before the reader even reaches the two children's tale--indeed, before they are even introduced--Stifter recounts the prior establishment of their father's shoe-making business in Gschaid, his courting of the dyer's daughter and wife-to-be, and their eventual marriage; and before writing of Gschaid's denizens, he describes the setting of the town and its landscape, describing the mountain, the valley, and the village in meticulous detail. Were plot and characters a concern, one might debate the need to learn of the circumstances behind the shrine Sanna and Conrad later come across, or question the detail given to describing their father's early days as "not too model a youth." For Stifter's purposes, however, the link between one description and the next suffices.
Perhaps the closest Stifter's work arrives to any outstanding mechanism is to a mythic interest in the specific circumstances. While his story never grants explicit life to any god or spirit, it contains a parable reminiscent of those found in stories like the Sagas. However, rather than detailing the high comedy and tragedy of conflicts between gods and monsters, Stifter settles for life's quiet blows. Sanna and Conrad's entrapment on a glacier resembles a strange melange of mythic intensity and grounded happenstance. One could even imagine Stifter's exact story retold through a late-night news broadcast, were the town's history and circumstances not so refined and particular. On the other hand, Stifter's staunch reliance on description at the behest of any introspective insight seems at odds with the mystic interest in developing virtues out of conflict. His prose is at once too ephemeral for a myth's lasting impact and too crystalline to fade from memory as news reports are.
Beyond the interest Rock Crystal provides for literary criticism, though, the text is a moving tale of a genre plagued by melodrama and nauseating moral posturing. What remains at the story's conclusion is neither hamfisted Christian posturing; nor any dreadfully cheerful substitute. Instead, Stifter describes with unmatched polish and microcosmic marvel a scene of overcoming indelible odds and coming together. It's and endeavour made possible only by his obstinate dedication to describing every movement, every moment, in effervescent detail; ultimately transforming an otherwise easily-anticipated parable into a fruitful tale, as brief as it is beautiful.
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