DONATELLA BREMER

Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica

Research interests: the language of medieval mysticism, women’s literature, literary onomastics.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.53321/al81-12

Volker Kohlheim

THE NAME IN LITERATURE

With the collaboration of Rosa Kohlheim. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter (“Contributions to Recent Literary History,” 393), 2019, pp. 372. “Rivista Italiana di Onomastica” (= RIOn) by Enzo Caffarelli, volume XXV (2019), 2 RIOn, XXV (2019), 2, pp. 788–793. Translated from Italian by Ieva Kirilaukaitė

Donatella Bremer was an associate professor of German at the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics of the University of Pisa. She is a co-founder of the Onomastica & Letteratura association and co-editor of the journal «il Nome nel testo» and the onomastic studies series Nominatio. She served on the Board of Directors of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences and is currently a member of the terminology group of ICOS.

QUOTATIONS FROM THE ORIGINAL

Preface.

1. Personal Name: The Literary Character and Their Name (Introduction. The “poieity” of the literary name. The proper name in the real world. The proper name in the system of the literary work of art. The proper name in the context of the basic aesthetic orientation. The constitutive function of the literary name. The production-aesthetic perspective. Reversal of the pyramid. Secondary functions of the literary name. The reception-aesthetic perspective: The literary name between ambivalence, ambiguity, and irony. On titles).

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Excursus 1: The Proper Name in Jean Paul: Its Function and Its Problems (Jean Paul and Names. Attila Schmelzle: The Broken Name. Quintus Fixlein: The Name as the Driving Force of the Plot. Siebenkäs: The “Order of Names.” Nikolaus Marggraf or the Fate of the Name. Jean Paul and the Paradox of the Literary Name). Excursus 2: Uncertain Naming: Goethe’s Novel Elective Affinities (Introduction: First Sentences. Poetic Conception or Laboratory Experiment? Eud Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic. “Dilettantish” Name Exchange. Skepticism about Language and the Constitution of Characters: Goethe’s Questionable Naming). Excursus 3: Ambiguous Names in Wilhelm Raabe’s Novel Restless Guests (Raabe’s Unusual Work and Its Names. Phöbe Hanemer between the New Testament and the Greek Pantheon. “Man of the World” Veit Fhr. von Bielow-Altripen →“doomed from the outset”, Prudens Hanemer, Pastor Against His Will. Volmar Fuchs, the One Who Has Had His Fill. Valerie, Not Always Courageous. Conclusion: “Restless Guests”). Excursus 4: The Literary Name at the Turn of the Millennium: Personal Names in Andreas Maier’s Novel Wäldchestag (A Literature Without Names? Published in 2000: Andreas Maier’s Novel Wäldchestag. The Names in Wäldchestag: Some Statistics. Sebastian Adomeit, Son of Adam. Jeanette Adomeit, a Joan of Arc? Anton Wiesner or The Longing for Freedom. The Other Young People. Summary and Outlook: The Literary Name in the 21st Century). Excursus 5: Forms of Address in Th. Fontane’s Novel Frau Jenny Treibel (Introduction: Forms of Address in Historical Change. The Use of the Family Name among Friends. The Use of Names in Marriage). Excursus 6: The Literary Name in (Musical) Theater: Richard Wagner as an Example (Introduction: Naming in Narrative Text and Drama. Techniques of Naming in Richard Wagner. The Onomastic Expressive and Appellative Functions. Name Games. Name Variations. Name Creations. The Suitability of Names. Name and Being. Conclusion).

2. Place Names in Literature: Names of Larger Places: The Role of Place Names in Literature. Literary Onomastics and Its Toponyms. The Constitution of Fictional Space. The Problem of Proprial Reference from a Cognitivist Perspective. Further Functions of Literary Toponyms: Semantics, Sound Symbolism, and Classification. Disturbance and Reassurance. “Space-Time.” Prague, Mandalay and Burma). Excursus 1: The Constitution of Space through Proper Names in Jean Paul’s Novel Siebenkäs (Introduction and Outline of the Plot. An Opposition: Augsburg and Kuhschnapel. Kuhschnapel, the Narrow One. Baireuth, the Broader One. Vaduz, the Otherworldly One. Individual Topographies. Real and Fictional Toponyms. Conclusion: The Shaping of Space in Jean Paul’s Novel Siebenkäs). Excursus 2: Referentializable Toponyms in Jean Paul’s Travel Narratives. Jean Paul’s Travel Narratives. From Hof to Baireuth.

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Localization and “Mapping”: The Journey to Fichtelberg. Toponyms as a Plot-Structuring Element.

3. Street Names and Other Urbanonyms in Literature: Introduction: A Street Name. A Distinction: Real and Fictional Urbanonyms. Urbanonyms as Mental Concepts. A Divided World: The Street and the Fantastic. The Alley as a Microcosm. Tell Me Where You Live, and I’ll Tell You Who You Are: Street Names as Social Markers. Berlin – Dublin – Paris: The Disappearance of the Referent in Modernity. Space Becomes Time. Excursus: Near and Far: Field, Street, and Other Place Names in Andreas Maier’s Novel Wäldchestag (Wäldchestag—A Local Novel? Names Create Fictional Space. Near and Far).

4. The Foreign Name in Literature: The Foreign Name in German-Language Literature from Goethe to Treichel (Introduction: The Foreign Name between Aversion and Fascination. Goethe: Mignon. E.T.A. Hoffmann: Signor Formica. Joseph von Eichendorff: The Marble Statue. Hans-Ulrich Treichel: My Sardinia. Conclusion. The Foreign Becomes Familiar: The Function of Toponymic Comparisons in Travel Literature. Introduction. The Travels of Duchess Auguste of Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld. The Travel Diaries and Letters about the Journeys to Italy in 1821/22 and 1823/24. The Function of Toponymic Comparisons in the Travel Diaries and Letters. Further Functions of Toponyms. Conclusion.

5. The Psychological Factor: Why Isola Bella? Unconscious Reasons for Jean Paul’s Choice of Names (The Literary Name and Psychoanalysis. Jean Paul’s “Cardinal Novel” Titan and Its Hero Albano. Isabela, the False Mother. Is(o)la-bella: The Name Beneath the Text). Gradiva, the Story of an Onomastic Obsession (An Archaeological Publication and Its Consequences. A Story and Its Interpretation. The Meaning of the Name. After Freud: Paths and Detours of Interpretation. Gradiva rediviva. Conclusion).

6. The Name in Translation: Don Quijote Through the Ages: Introduction: Names and Translation. Don Quijote and His First German Translator. Personal Names (and Rocinante). Toponyms. Conclusion.

Bibliography. Subject and Concept Index.

Volker Kohlheim, who has written numerous works on the anthroponymy and toponymy of the medieval and modern periods, is also widely known to the general public as the author, together with Rosa Kohlheim, of two comprehensive dictionaries of German first names and surnames, published by the prestigious Duden publishing house. These dictionaries continue to be maintained and updated to reflect demographic, social, and cultural changes among German-speaking peoples.

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In addition, the scholar has worked in the field of literary onomastics for more than ten years. The results of V. Kohlheim’s intensive scholarly activity are set out in the work Der Name in der Literatur, the only work of its kind to offer such a comprehensive treatment of literary onomastics and undoubtedly one that can be used as a reference work. Indeed, until now the only scholarly work in this field was Friedhelm Debus’s study Namen in literarischen Werken. (Er-)Findung – Form – Funktion (200 years), which presents and further analyzes the theories studied about a decade ago by Hendrik Birus and Dieter Lamping, supplemented by interviews with numerous writers.

Having gathered the results of the latest research, especially that conducted by the Italian association “Onomastica & Letteratura,” with which V. Kohlheim actively collaborates, the scholar broadened the field of literary onomastics and set out comprehensive theoretical and methodological reflections, alongside precise textual analyses of a philological-linguistic, aesthetic, and historical-literary nature. V. Kohlheim addresses the function of personal names in literary writing, drawing on concepts described by the linguists R. G. Barthes, W. Benjamin, G. Genette, T. Todorov, J. Tynianov, J. Derrida, and G. Saussure. The author of the study also examined important broader themes, such as the relationship between literary text and historical context. In doing so, he employed the tools of cognitive linguistics and pragmatics, which enabled a different perspective on authorial intention and on the role of the reader as the recipient and interpreter of onomastic items. In examining the logical processes that fundamentally determine the creation of a fictional character or fictional setting, the scholar described the importance of inference, distinguishing several key characteristics of literary names—ambiguity, duality, and irony. V. Kohlheim also considered certain onomastic types, such as names treated as proper names and foreign names that are evocative, resonant, unusually spelled, and endowed with hidden meaning (German Fremdnamen). The linguist also analyzed cases in which a name reconstructed in the mind is closely connected with deep psychology. V. Kohlheim was also interested in problems of translation, highlighting the disparities between the different systems to which the personal names in the source language and the target language belong. One of the major merits of this study, written in collaboration with R. Kohlheim, is that alongside its detailed research and theoretical discussion of the principal onomastic categories, it also offers analyses of specific texts, selected mainly from German-language literature, but also from English, American, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian literature.

V. Kohlheim begins the first chapter of the study, devoted to personal names, by stating that the names of literary characters remain in readers’ memories longer than the names of friends and acquaintances. According to the study’s author, when creating a character, one should avoid emphasizing that a literary name is more or less decisive because it characterizes that character, whereas the names of people encountered in real life serve the function of identification

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and establishing a person’s identity. In everyday life, personal names are indeed used for practical purposes, but in the aesthetic realm they serve other ends, and the linguistic sign acquires particular significance. This idea can be clarified by saying that in fiction, a personal name created by a writer’s imagination acts like a magnet, attracting meanings and additional senses and evoking associations that gradually take shape around the characters. Beginning from these premises, V. Kohlheim surveys other significant factors that shape the creation of literary names, including phonetic, symbolic, cultural, and intertextual connotations. In the section of the study devoted to close textual analysis, the scholar provides a detailed account of Jean Paul, a writer particularly prodigal in assigning names (Latin nominatio). His novels abound in unusual, even bizarre names (for example, Quintus Flexin, Leibeger or Siebenkäs), which are rarely invented but are chosen deliberately and presented in long lists, further divided into “good” and “bad.” V. Kohlheim also analyzes J. W. Goethe as the author of the novel Draugų pasirinkimas. As Heinz Schlafer has shown, this novel is based on the relationships among the names of its four main characters. V. Kohlheim discusses in greater detail the novel’s opening, in which the author warns the reader, drawing attention to the fact that one character has been given a foreign name. According to V. Kohlheim, the author presents this warning to the reader as an interpretation applicable to the entire novel, in which an unexpectedly changed or altered name and the atypical use of onomastic items are meant to show that the realities of art and life are fundamentally different. Later, in another paragraph, the scholar examines the novels Unruhige Gäste (by Wilhelm Raabe), Waldschatt (by Andreas Maier), and Frau Jenny Treibel (by Theodor Fontane). The chapter ends with an excursus on names in Richard Wagner’s music dramas: in them, names are magical or mysterious and may even determine characters’ actions, as happens in the opera Lohengrin; objects such as swords may be given names, or names may be used for songs or musical motifs—such names occur in the opera Nürnberger Meistersingeriai.

The second chapter examines place names, which are generally excluded from studies of literary onomastics, mainly because they are equated with place names that exist in reality. In fact, however, literary place names differ from real ones because, at the very least, they perform various textual functions, the most important of which is creating a fictional space. V. Kohlheim interprets place names used in literature as a kind of link between narrated events and the map that takes shape spontaneously in the mind of every reader drawn into the narrative. This cognitive approach, adopted by the scholar from the outset of the study, runs counter to the narrower interpretation of Gérard Genette, according to which literary place names coincide with place names that exist in reality. The image created by a place name can, in fact, vary

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depending on the context (for example, when writing about nineteenth-century Paris) or on references to biographical episodes connected not only with the author but also with the reader. Other functions of literary place names include setting boundaries with the meaning most commonly attributed to them (for example, Thule usually denotes a distant and inaccessible place)—such place names may have a certain symbolic meaning, attract the reader through unusual sound qualities, indicate a particular setting and place, or even unsettle the reader or direct them to an imagined and fantastical world, as happens in various works by J. L. Borges. Finally, place names can convey not only space but also time (for example, the place name Lutetia takes the reader back to the beginnings of Paris, while the sequence of places visited by a travelling character, though indistinct, creates a perspective of continuity). The examples selected from the texts that V. Kohlheim presents at the end of the theoretical part of the chapter illustrate the functions of place names in some works by Jean Paul. One distinctive feature of this writer’s novel Siebenkäs (which, among other things, was chosen by Luigi Pirandello as an example for his novel Mattia Pascal) is that, in creating space and place closely connected with the stories of the characters, deftly arranged by an omnipresent and omniscient author, both real place names (such as Augsburg) and invented ones (Kuhschnappel) are used.

The third chapter analyses the connotations of street and city names. The importance of street and city names in literary texts is demonstrated by the fact that they often appear in the titles of works (for example, N. Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect, A. Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, or K. E. Gadda’s That Awful Mess on Via Merulana). As with place names, they create a connection between the imagined and real worlds.

In the fourth chapter, devoted to the study of foreign names, V. Kohlheim, drawing on Karlheinz Hengst’s definition, points out that the effect of a foreign name (German Fremdname) on the reader and the author is produced mainly by the phonotactic and morphotactic differences characteristic of foreign names. An exotic- or unusual-sounding name can in fact evoke all kinds of emotions and associations, becoming either an attractive or a repellent factor—or both. The celebrated character Mignon¹, found in the first part of J. W. Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, is such an ambivalent figure. The name is not even a proper noun (it is an adjective), does not reveal the character’s place of origin (one can only surmise that the character is French), and does not make it clear whether it is intended to describe a male or female character. Only later is it revealed that Mignon is a girl of Italian origin whose age cannot be determined. Yet the choice of a name with such indistinct contours is no accident: Mignon is not a realistic being but rather a personification of longing (German Sehnsucht), as felt by J. W. Goethe and

¹ From French: dear, beautiful, clever, intelligent, attractive (here and hereafter, the translator’s notes).

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other intellectuals and artists of the time for their deeply beloved Italy. Nevertheless, the novel also describes the character’s negative traits, which contrast with her image. The other examples of foreign names discussed also encode allusions to Italy. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s novellas reveal a creative tendency common to many writers: assigning negative traits to characters with Italian names (an Italian name may carry a hint of deceit, but more often it leads a character into grotesque or comic situations). Yet in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s works, Italian personal names not only sound beautiful but are not necessarily assigned to deceitful or fraudulent characters—they may also be associated with artists, for example, Salvator Rosa, whom the writer chose as his alter ego (the same Salvator Rosa, chosen by Friedrich Hölderlin as his alter ego, and to whom Ferenc Liszt dedicated one work from his musical cycle Années de pèlerinage). Other examples analysed are drawn from Joseph von Eichendorff’s novella Das Marmorbilder and Hans-Ulrich Treichel’s novel Mein Sardinien—works that also use personal and place names of Italian origin, with meanings and layers closely connected to the smaller narratives being constructed. This chapter of the study concludes with R. Kohlheim’s analysis of the functions of place names, as well as personal names, found in travel literature. The functions analysed are chiefly those through which the author provides the reader with information about the places visited and the characters. The examples are selected from the diaries and letters of Princess Augusta of Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld (eighteenth–nineteenth centuries).

The fifth chapter examines the connections between personal names and the unconscious. It focuses on an analysis of two works—Jean Paul’s Titan and Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. Una fantasia pompeiana. The first is an exceedingly complex Bildungsroman in which the weak and noble hero, Albano, travels through a dreamlike atmosphere in search of his father and finds traces of him everywhere, but strives even harder to find his mother, who died early, attempting to bring her back to life through Princess Isabella. The name Isabella contains an allusion to the name of the island that is the hero’s destination—Isola Bella. Jensen’s story, which Jung discussed with Freud and which he analysed from a psychoanalytic perspective, depicts how an impression from the outside can trigger a psychic tension rooted in the unconscious. This process is determined by the meanings of the names of the two female figures between whom the protagonist vacillates. One of these figures is an ancient sculpture with whom the hero falls in love; the other is his first love, a childhood playmate, forgotten early on so that there might be room for his beloved archaeology. The particular pose of the marble girl seen in the museum—as if she were walking into the hero’s consciousness—revives the image of his first love, conveyed by her name Bergtag, “she who shines as she walks,” and the hero unconsciously

² From Italian: the beautiful island.

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He applies a similar meaning to the sculpture, naming it Gradiva, “she who steps forward” (from Latin gradior – “I walk”). The work ends with yet another name: prompted by a dream, the young scholar travels to Pompeii in search of a being like the one he is constantly thinking about, and finds one, alive and well, christened Zoë, “she who lives,” just like his first beloved. According to V. Kohlheim, this mode of interpretation, encountered only occasionally in literary onomastics, could be especially fruitful, for example, in analyzing late German Romanticism, whose literature abounds with characters wandering between reality and illusion, consciousness and the unconscious, reason and madness.

This chapter of the study, written in collaboration with R. Kohlheim, focuses on translations of personal names and place names used in one of the most widely read works of all time—the novel Don Kichotas—over a period of three hundred and fifty years. A wide range of translation strategies were employed, but the results were not always successful. One wonders whether any of the novel’s many readers know that the name chosen by the hero himself, Kichotas (Spanish Quijote), was a source of amusement in Cervantes’s time because it referred to a piece of armor designed to cover the thigh.

Received October 14, 2019.

DONATELLA BREMER

Dipartimento di Filologia, Letteratura e Linguistica

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I-56126 Pisa

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