Literature and Knowledge
That
Öffentlichkeit—or revelation—was expected of literary authors in their relationship to power is seen in the reception histories of critical texts and, perhaps most tellingly, in the fierce criticism of GDR authors after the collapse of the GDR. As discussed in the Introduction to this book, following the publication in 1990 of
Was bleibt, a literary text that recounts the experiences of a female GDR writer subject to intense observation by the Stasi, Christa Wolf was accused of being a “Staatsdichterin” (state scribe) who was now attempting to present herself as a victim of the state. It did not seem to matter to her accusers that
Was bleibt was not marked as autobiographical or referential; they read it as a sharing of knowledge by the author about her own life. The debate that ensued focused on the role of literary authors in an authoritarian state and the extent to which literature should have a political function.
1See Wolf was dubbed “Staatsdichterin” by Ulrich Greiner: Greiner, “Mangel an Feingefühl,” 66. For a full documentation of the literature debate in the early 1990s see, Anz, Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf. Literary texts were, in this sense, supposed to convey knowledge about the experience of living in the GDR, including the public secret of the Stasi.
But what does “knowledge” mean in relation to literary fiction? As we have argued throughout this book, knowledge cannot be conceived of as something that is “out there” to be found by anyone with the right skills. Knowledge is “inevitably situated in a particular place and moment”
2Harris, Ways of Knowing, 4. and must “always be analysed from within the interactions with other persons.”
3Glaeser, Political Epistemics, 163. Literature might in this sense function as what Fredrik Barth terms a “medium of knowledge”:
4Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” 3. a process through which knowledge is shared and constructed. Indeed, as literary scholars many of us tend to assume or accept this premise without question. We work with what John Gibson describes as a “humanist intuition”; that is, the “thought—or hope—that literature presents the reader with an intimate and intellectually significant engagement with social and cultural reality,” but that it does so through a vision of “
other worlds.”
5Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, 2. And yet is it not strange that we put faith in the idea that fiction—which makes no claim to extra-textual referentiality—might in fact be referential to something extra-textual?
Rita Felski similarly references the “widespread intuition that works of art reveal something about the way things are.”
6Felski, Uses of Literature, 77. Felski notes that debates around what “literary texts reveal or conceal” are long-standing, but remain unresolved.
7Felski, Uses of Literature, 77. In her own engagement with this problem, she aims to undo the tendency to equate “reference with reflection and mimesis with mirroring.”
8Felski, Uses of Literature, 77. That is to say, in order to understand literary knowledge, we need to go beyond the assumption that when we say that literature provides knowledge of the world we are suggesting a simplistic equation of text and reality, and ignoring the complex relationship between sign and signifier and the self-referentiality of language. Felski states that we need to “relinquish the false picture of a reality ‘out there’ waiting to be found” and instead think of “literary conventions as devices for articulating truth rather than as obstacles to its discovery”
9Felski, Uses of Literature, 84.—that is, we might add, as media of knowledge. Mimesis in this understanding is not an attempt—doomed to failure—to recreate exactly the world in the text, but “an act of creative imitation.”
10Felski, Uses of Literature, 85. Our use of language (including literary language and forms) is, as Felski argues, embedded in our experience of the world, our “practices of knowing.”
11Felski, Uses of Literature, 86. Our literary redescriptions of the world are creative reimaginings that “can augment our understanding of how things are.”
12Felski, Uses of Literature, 86. One notable feature of literary fiction is “its ability to read minds,”
13Felski, Uses of Literature, 89. and the recreation of the world from the perspective of “deep intersubjectivity … what it feels like to be inside a particular habitus.”
14Felski, Uses of Literature, 92. In this way, literary knowledge offers a subjective and creative insight into the “meaningfulness of a world as it is lived by its inhabitants,” which is quite distinct from the idea of knowledge as “the correct representation of an independently given reality.”
15Felski, Uses of Literature, 92.John Gibson’s book is similarly an effort to reconcile the non-referentiality of literary fiction with the “intuition” that it can nonetheless tell us something significant about reality—that is, to show how “
other worlds” can be used to provide knowledge of “
our world.” Like Felski, Gibson seeks to understand what is particular about the literary recreation of the world. A question that others have answered with assertions that fiction can be a source of “moral knowledge”
16McCormick, “Moral Knowledge and Fiction.” or that “certain important truths about the world” can only be conveyed in literary form,
17Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 6. a form that extends our vision of the world and makes “us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling.”
18Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 47. Gibson engages with both continental and analytic philosophy to show that both poststructuralism’s insistence that there is nothing outside of the text and the focus on truth and reference in the analytic approach preclude literature from being a direct vision of our world. Gibson’s solution is to conceive of literature as playing “a crucial role in the construction of those narratives in virtue of which we give sense to our characteristically human practices and experiences.”
19Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, 50. Literature, for Gibson, is an archive of “standards of representation” of cultural forms through which we can say “
this is jealousy,
this is anger,
this is suffering” and have a shared understanding of what is meant. In our context, these “standards of representation” might include “this is life in a state dominated by secrecy,” “this is paranoia,” “this is suspicion,” “this is trust.”
20Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, 70–73.Felski stresses, that the potential for what she—following Paul Ricoeur—describes as “transfiguration” can only come into being through the reader, who brings their own knowledge to the text: “readers are shaped by what they read, even as they cannot help but impose on texts what they already know.”
21Felski, Uses of Literature, 87. Felski refers to: Ricoeur, “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis.” Similarly, Gibson argues that “literature turns out to offer what is best described as a
fulfilment of the knowledge we bring to it, a completion of our understanding of how our concepts and words function to unite us with others and our world.”
22Gibson, Fiction and the Weave of Life, 11. Indeed, if we combine Gibson’s insights with the constructivist position that views knowledge as situated, then we need to add that the “shared understanding” offered by literature is only created in context and through communication. If all knowledge is produced in relation to something else, then literary knowledge—even knowledge about supposedly “timeless” human emotions or “standards of representation”—is no more “out there” for the taking than any other form. In this sense, literature can only function as knowledge if it is read. The particular form that readership takes determines the nature of the knowledge produced through the literary text. Literary production in the GDR provides the ideal site to explore this proposition, as its readership was structured not only by the vagaries of the literary market but also by censorship, state control, and the availability of a second audience in a radically opposed political and social system in the West.
An interesting case study here is that of Uwe Kolbe’s poem “Kern meines Romans,” which contained within it a “hidden” poem that was highly critical of the state and party. The first letter of each capitalised word spells out the following:
Eure Maße sind Elend
Euren Forderungen genügen Schleimer
Eure ehemals blutige Fahne bläht sich träge zum Bauch
Eurem Heldentum den Opfern widme ich einen Orgasmus
Euch mächtige Greise zerfetze die tägliche Revolution
23Kolbe, “Kern meines Romans.”[Your dimensions are misery
Your demands are met by sycophants
Your once bloody flag puffs lazily to your belly
I dedicate an orgasm to your heroism and sacrifice.
May you mighty old men be torn to shreds by the daily revolution]
However, cracking the code contained in Kolbe’s hidden poem required an “adequate reader”—akin to Gilmore’s “adequate witness” described in chapter 3
24Gilmore, Tainted Witness, 4.—and the publication and reception history of this text shows that even within the GDR it did not always meet with one. In his interview with Windsor, Kolbe recalls that the contact for Aufbau Verlag in the Office for Publishing and Book Trade intimated that they noticed the poem was an “interessanter Text” (interesting text), but that after discussion they had decided to publish it anyway.
25Interview with Uwe Kolbe, June 1, 2021. This indicates that the body that functioned as censor in the GDR had indeed been an “adequate reader,” but had decided—much to Kolbe’s surprise—to ignore the coded message in the poem. Nonetheless, the Stasi files suggest that the poem did not in fact meet with an “adequate reader” until it was released onto the GDR book market. A report dated May 4, 1982 states that on submission to the anthology
Bestandsaufnahme 2 (Inventory 2), Kolbe’s work was read by different informants, including those in key positions, as well as lectors in the publishing house. None recognised the critical statements in Kolbe’s “Machwerk” (concoction).
26Review of operative information relating to Uwe Kolbe’s publication of a so-called “Machwerk” by Oberstleutnant Gröger (in OV “Poet”), dated May 4, 1982. This explanation was not readily accepted, as other files indicate (see Information on the freelance writer Uwe Kolbe, dated March 18, 1982). The publisher was disciplined for the appearance of the poem: Memo dated April 30, 1982. In a file note dated May 11, 1982, we are told that the publisher had learned about the hidden poem from reader circles in the book trade; another file note dated May 18, 1982 points directly to a reader who returned the book to their local library, demanding to know why such a work was allowed to circulate.
27Information on the young poet Uwe Kolbe, dated May 11, 1982, 57; Information dated May 18, 1982, 62. The Stasi files also contain records of meetings with leading functionaries such as Klaus Höpcke, who quite clearly understood who were the targets of Kolbe’s poetological attack.
28See the series of documents on this episode in BArch MfS AP 10820/92, 57–83. The poem was also printed in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and
Der Spiegel and Kolbe regarded it as being his “größter … Erfolg in Westdeutschland” (my greatest … success in West Germany).
29Interview with Uwe Kolbe, June 1, 2021. Within the GDR, the response was a withdrawal of the anthology from circulation, severe restriction on Kolbe’s opportunities to publish and read from his work, and a rejection of his application to join the Writers’ Union. More significantly in our context is the knowledge that Kolbe revealed with his poem about the repressive atmosphere in the GDR and his own rage about the treatment of his friends, especially—as he notes in the interview with Windsor, the treatment of Frank-Wolf Matthies by the publisher (Mitteldeutscher Verlag) and the Stasi. At the same time, he conceals that knowledge in a way that requires an adequate reader to uncover it.
In this chapter, we explore this relationship between knowledge and readership by considering a series of texts that took different routes to reach audiences of different scales and in different contexts, sometimes across staggered periods. These texts can be seen as occupying along the way different positions on the spectrum between total revelation and total concealment of knowledge. By exploring paths to publication and undertaking close readings of a range of texts, we demonstrate that the revelatory character of literary texts dealing with the Stasi often stood in inverse relation to the size and composition of readership(s) they reached. That is, the more open and revelatory a text was in terms of content and literary style, the more limited its circulation within the GDR. This, in turn, has repercussions for each text’s character and potential as a medium of knowledge. To illustrate this, the chapter is structured around a scale or spectrum of readerships, beginning with the most limited and moving through to the largest audiences reached.