The suicide of Christine has been regarded by some critics as a plot flaw in the novel. I am not so sure. First of all, Christine is a woman of integrity, who cannot bear to live out a lie by playing the role of the contented wife for their circle. Second, were she to accept graciously her husband’s earlier betrayal, it would be a way of saying that our hurtful actions don’t really matter that much, don’t have lasting consequences—thereby assenting to the very unseriousness she finds appalling in Holk. But finally, Christine has been death-haunted at least since the fatal illness of her child. She says at the start that she is determined to be buried first in the family vault. The early warnings of a suicidal propensity can thus be read retroactively into her character, if we are so inclined.
The paradox of this couple is that Holk is shallow, but there is something life-affirming in his breezy resilience, whereas Christine consistently embraces the good and the profound, but her virtue contains an element of inflexibility that leads, in the end, to self-destruction. Thus the superficial, pleasure-seeking, likable Holk and the serious, responsible, morose Christine become embodiments of the contest between Eros and Thanatos, and Life’s scales, fairly or not, tilt toward the former.
A self-mocking comment made by the sixty-year-old, hardworking, bookish Fontane in a letter shows his belated understanding of the importance of good looks and insouciant gaiety:
Ah, how lucky are the lieutenants, the six-foot Junkers, and all the rest of the Don Juan clan! I take back everything I said (while I could still dance) in favor of lyric poetry, and against all good-looking, laughing, well-washed youthful victors over girls’ hearts. The bookworm, be he ever so decent and clever, is really only pleasing to himself and a small handful of others. The world passes him by and beckons to life and beauty …. [to] gay and handsome creatures to whom the hearts of their fellow men continue to turn.[11]
Fortunately, there was enough bookworm and dedicated literary artist in him, enough Teutonic work-drive, along with enough mischievous playfulness, to allow for the accomplishment of a voluminous, light-footed, serious, deeply satisfying oeuvre, inflected throughout by that celebrated Fontane-tone, which has been summarized by Erich Heller as “the tone of a voice that speaks affectionately, with gentle irony and the hushed knowledge of the vanity of all things.”[12]
—Phillip Lopate
[1] Gordon A. Craig, Theodor Fontane: Literature and History in the Bismarck Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 199.
[2] Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 287.
[3] Ibid., 298.
[4] Theodor Fontane, Before the Storm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
[5] Quoted by Yves Chevret, “Theodor Fontane and France: A Problematic Encounter,” in Theodor Fontane and the European Context, edited by Patricia Howe and Helen Chambers (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 63.
[6] Quoted by Erich Heller, “Introduction: Theodor Fontane, the Extraordinary Education of a Prussian Apothecary,” in Two Novellas (London: Penguin Books), xiii.
[7] Quoted in Craig, Theodor Fontane, 181.
[8] Heller, xv.
[9] Even the men pile on: his brother-in-law Arne and his friend Baron Pentz both tell Holk repeatedly that he knows nothing about women.
[10] Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 15.
[11] Quoted by Mann, 294.
[12] Heller, xxvii.
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Translation and introduction © 1964 Douglas Parmée
Afterword © 2011 by Phillip Lopate
All rights reserved.
First published as Unwiederbringlich, 1891
This translation first published under the title Beyond Recall, 1964
Cover image: Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior, Strandgade 30, 1908
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Fontane, Theodor, 1819–1898.
[Unwiederbringlich. English]
Beyond recall / by Theodor Fontane ; afterword by Phillip Lopate ; translated [from the German] by Douglas Parmée.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 978-1-59017-374-9 (alk. paper)
1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction. I. Parmée, Douglas. II. Title.
PT1863.U6513 2011
833'.8—dc22
2010033640
eISBN 978-1-59017-569-9
v1.0
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