Abstract
This chapter draws parallels between perhaps the earliest complete American fiction set in Berlin and some of the most recent, by comparing urban space and its treatment in Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s The Countess Ida: A Tale of Berlin (1840), Chloe Aridjis’s Book of Clouds (2009), and J.S. Marcus’s The Captain’s Fire (1996). Though the authors juggle enormously different social, historical, political, and cultural themes of their respective periods, all three novels treat foreign German urban space as one which is inherently violent, with a violence that must be repressed, deflected, or fled by the New World protagonists negotiating its thematic spaces.
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Notes
- 1.
Thomas Robert Price’s Samuel Woodworth and Theodore Sedgwick Fay: Two Nineteenth-Century American Literati (ed.D. thesis [Penn State University, 1970]) contains the only known collection of biographical materials.
- 2.
Price, Samuel Woodworth and Theodore Sedgwick Fay.
- 3.
Burr had proposed the duel in response to insults to his character reportedly made by Hamilton, which Hamilton would not specifically deny.
- 4.
Burr had been brought to court for treason by President Thomas Jefferson for attempting to found an independent state by buying 40,000 acres of land in Mexico and bringing armed farmers there to secede from Spain. He left for Europe to escape American creditors.
- 5.
Burr’s journals repeatedly mention plans for a visit to Berlin “to see Humboldt” (Aaron Burr, The Private Journal of Aaron Burr During His Residence of Four Years in Europe; with Selections from His Correspondence, ed. Matthew L. David [New York: Harper & Brothers], 1838, 305)—one of the German acquaintances Fay himself was later most proud to have made. Yet Burr finally never visited Alexander von Humboldt or Berlin, passing instead from Stockholm via Hamburg to Hanover and through Eisenach back to Frankfurt and Paris. Given Hamilton’s struggle against the pro-French faction Burr at times courted, one cannot help but imagine Burr’s aborted flirtation with Prussia before his return to America via Paris, while five times citing an interest in Berlin, mirrored (in Fay’s eyes) his own hero’s flirtation with Paris and erstwhile ensconcement in Berlin.
- 6.
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames, Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
- 7.
Kitty Klein, “Narrative Construction, Cognitive Processing, and Health,” in Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, ed. David Herman (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2003), 56–84 (65).
- 8.
And presumably his own, as Fay (like Hamilton and his own father), had studied law in New York, while working as a clerk in his father’s practice.
- 9.
According to traditional twentieth-century biographers (and we are concerned here more with Hamilton’s mythos as received in the late eighteenth century than with historical fact), because of his mother’s husband’s religion, Hamilton was unable to attend Christian school, instead studying at a Jewish school in the West Indies.
- 10.
Alexander Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton: Selections Representing His Life, His Thought, and His Style, ed. Bower Aly (New York: Liberal Arts Press: 1957), 14.
- 11.
In New York.
- 12.
Nathan Schachner, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1946), 26.
- 13.
Theodore Sedgwick Fay, The Countess Ida: A Tale of Berlin (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840), 94.
- 14.
Fay’s fictional narrative thus bypasses New York (the site of Hamilton’s untimely death).
- 15.
Hamilton, His Life, His Thought, and His Style, 7; Schachner, Alexander Hamilton, 11. As Schachner notes, Hamilton was “in later life anxious, nay eager, to avow himself the son of James Hamilton,” and to assert his connection “to the eminently respectable Hamiltons of Scotland” to give himself “a solid footing in the very insecure matter of his birth” and to establish an aristocratic background (Schachner, Alexander Hamilton, 11). His father resisted the sea voyage to the U.S. for fear of a change of climate, though Hamilton was later “pathetically flattered” (13) by direct correspondence from his Scottish relatives, seizing “the opportunity to establish once and for all the essential respectability of his birth and lineage” (13).
- 16.
Schachner, Alexander Hamilton, 17.
- 17.
Further discussion of the novel’s plot, and of the texts treated in the following section, can be found in Joshua Parker, Tales of Berlin in American Literature up to the 21st Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2016).
- 18.
“Rip van Winkle,” in Cyclopedia of Literary Places, ed. R. Kent Rasmussen (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 2003), 995–996 (995).
- 19.
Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” in Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, & Memoir (New York: Library of America, 1998), 781–796 (787).
- 20.
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (New York: Verso, 1998), 84.
- 21.
Gabriel Zoran, “Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative,” Poetics Today 5, no. 2 (1984): 309–335 (332).
- 22.
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Perennial, 1995), 11.
- 23.
Bradd Shore, Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 58.
- 24.
Fay, Countess Ida, 3.
- 25.
Fay, Countess Ida, 201.
- 26.
Mahler, in this volume, Chapter 1.
- 27.
J.S. Marcus, The Captain’s Fire (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 102.
- 28.
John Clarke et al., Jugendkultur als Widerstand. Milieus, Rituale, Provokationen (Frankfurt a. M.: Syndikat, 1979), 41; Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität,” in Kultur und Gedächtnis, ed. Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), 9–19 (36), Yuliya Kozyrakis, “Remembering the Future: Ethnic Memory in Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides,” Forum for Inter-American Research 3, no. 1 (2010). http://interamericaonline.org/volume-3-1/kozyrakis (accessed March 2014).
- 29.
Kozyrakis, “Remembering the Future.”
- 30.
Mahler, in this volume, Chapter 1.
- 31.
Marcus, The Captain’s Fire, 188.
- 32.
Chloe Aridjis, Book of Clouds (New York: Black Cat, 2009), 26 and 10.
- 33.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 1–2.
- 34.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 15.
- 35.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 33.
- 36.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 96.
- 37.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 28.
- 38.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 109.
- 39.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 112.
- 40.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 115.
- 41.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 125.
- 42.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 128.
- 43.
Lubomír Doležel, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 192.
- 44.
Doležel, Heterocosmica, 192–193.
- 45.
Doležel, Heterocosmica, 193.
- 46.
There are around 21,000 U.S. citizens currently residing in Berlin. Contemporary Berlin’s Jewish population is estimated at around 30,000 residents. Meanwhile, some 15,000 mainly young, secular Israelis have moved to the city in the last decades (Norman Sklarewitz, “Rebirth of Jewish life in Berlin,” Jewish Journal, June 5, 2012, https://jewishjournal.com/culture/travel/104791/ [accessed May 2013]).
- 47.
Doležel, Heterocosmica, 196.
- 48.
Louis Marin, Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (New York: Humanity Books, 1984), 36.
- 49.
Walter Abish, How German Is It (New York: New Directions, 1979), 2.
- 50.
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 83.
- 51.
Elana Gomel, “Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel,” Narrative 17, no. 3 (2009): 334–352 (335).
- 52.
Smethurst, quoted in: Gomel, Shapes, 335.
- 53.
Gomel, Shapes, 335.
- 54.
Gomel, Shapes, 335.
- 55.
Doležel, Heterocosmica, 192.
- 56.
Marcus, Captain’s Fire, 188.
- 57.
Aridjis, Book of Clouds, 33.
Works Cited
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Burr, Aaron. The Private Journal of Aaron Burr During His Residence of Four Years in Europe; with Selections from His Correspondence. Edited by Matthew L. David. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838.
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Zoran, Gabriel. “Towards a Theory of Space in Narrative.” Poetics Today 5, no. 2 (1984): 309–335.
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Parker, J. (2020). “A ‘Bridgehead’ in the Visible Domain”: Chloe Aridjis’s, J. S. Marcus’s and Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s Tales of Berlin. In: Kindermann, M., Rohleder, R. (eds) Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_14
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