Effi Briest Read Free Page B

at a society whose warped logic it has exposed.
    This reading requires qualification to the extent that the assertion of Effi as herself at the end, only in death, equally implies that the individual cannot survive independent of a particular social and historical context. Even if society’s values are wrong the only possible existence is social existence, and you either conform or go under. Going back to the garden – Hohen-Cremmen has frequently been seen as a paradise from which Effi is expelled – is not a viable option. On the other hand Innstetten’s option is only viable invery reduced terms. The career to which he sacrifices Effi, Crampas, home life and happiness brings him no joy in the end for he comes to see the price he has paid for shoddy goods.
    The central question of a theory of time-limits raised by Fontane’s placing the discovery of the adultery at a remove of almost seven years from the act is a further aspect of the way in which he used an individual case as representative of wider social and political questions. That the loyal servant of the state should agonize over this matter of form and convention and decide in favour of a traditional code which demands the meaningless sacrifice of human beings and human values signals that the society portrayed is a society in decline. It is an age of transition and Fontane spotlights this transition and illuminates the unease, diagnoses the illness without being able to help the patient, except by the bracing and sympathetic clarity of his vision. The cult of honour, which derives from the military code, a male construct, is shown to lack moral foundation and be unequal to the dilemmas of real life in the social and domestic sphere, and indeed politically irrelevant too in the age of Bismarck’s
Realpolitik
, where pragmatism and opportunism have determined the very shape of the contemporary state. The inflexibility of the code is radically at odds with ‘the re-evaluation of all values’ – to use a phrase from Fontane’s contemporary Nietzsche – that was going on in Germany, above all in the young metropolis Berlin in the years of industrial expansion that followed unification.
    The novel is set in the 1880s and Fontane was working on it during the first half of the ’90s. He claims to have written it ‘as in a dream and almost as if I were using a psychograph’. 11 In fact the birth of the novel was prolonged and difficult and this comment can only apply to the initial draft written in 1890. In 1892, the year in which he returned to it, Fontane suffered a severe physical and nervous breakdown from which he recoverd by following his doctor’s advice and writing down memories of his childhood
(Meine Kinderjahre
, 1893). The main work of revising and correcting, always a laborious process for Fontane, took place in winter and spring 1893-94. Comparison of the final result with earlier versions reveals the extent to which the finished text is the product of constant refinement, reduction and paring away of redundant material.
    Fontane’s particular brand of realism with its subterranean dynamic, not unlike Jane Austen’s, is based not on the naming or describing of an abundance of people and things. It works rather through glimpses and allusions. There is a strictly limited circle of characters whom we encounter in small groups. Large social occasions such as Effi’s wedding tend to be referred backto. The most striking example of this deliberately oblique, retrospective technique is Fontane’s treatment of Effi’s adultery. Only when we read the letters over Innstetten’s shoulder seven years after the event do we become sure that it actually took place, and we may then examine earlier chapters to find what we missed. Fontane was well aware of this aspect of his artistry. He wrote in a letter to Ernst Heilborn in 1895:
    I’m glad to see that you’re in agreement with my leaving a lot to the reader’s imagination; I would find it quite