Agnes (novel)

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Agnes is a 1998 novel by Peter Stamm . From the personal perspective of the narrator, he tells the love story between the first-person narrator, whose name remains unknown to the reader, and Agnes, a younger physicist . The novel is divided into 36 short chapters, which describe the beginning, the development and the end of this relationship and address the topics of love and death, closeness and strangeness, freedom and responsibility.

Narrative strategies

This narrative is also the sum of strategic decisions that combine certain types of construction from the narrative toolbox:

A first narrative strategy is determined from the beginning. Since the first two sentences not only anticipate the end ("Agnes is dead."), But also provide the basic explanation ("A story killed her."), The construction of the narrative is no longer open-ended, but rather runs teleologically on the above End point too. The events are causally and chronologically subordinate to this goal and the course of events punctuated by 36 short chapters suggests an inevitability that initially remains obscure: "The story is getting narrower, like a funnel," comments the nameless first-person narrator on a short literary sketch of Agnes - and at the same time names the determining narrative construction principle. Since the author speaks through the narrator, the jump in medias res (“A story killed her.”) Could also be read as an ironic comment by the author: after all, it is he who lets Agnes die.

A second strategy is to align the characters 'actions with a behavior pattern or script , which ultimately causes the failure of their relationship: Agnes' fear of losing her freedom is also the fear of the first-person narrator of losing his freedom - and the more the two become Binding figures to one another, the stronger the centrifugal forces become: The first-person narrator knows "that it was impossible, unacceptable for Agnes, unbearable for me."

Both main characters act on the basis of their internal, psychological configurations and because these scripts of the characters are congruent, they are not compatible. They fail because of this symmetry of attraction and repulsion, because "it is the asymmetry that makes life possible in the first place," says Agnes. By dealing with the symmetry of different types of crystals in her dissertation, the author projects his narrative strategy into the world of figures in an ironic volte as a scientific theme.

In a third strategy by the author, he lets the characters play his game with action determinants. Just as the first-person narrator uses the funnel comparison to name the teleology of the narrative, the author also imagines both characters to represent scripts, in whose literary projects he is reflected. With these internal narratives, the thought experiment moves on two levels simultaneously.

The narrative goal orientation is supported by many indications that work through the world of characters as a texture of failure. The topos of wandering and the empty plane appear at a prominent position at the beginning and end and are varied throughout the narrative, e.g. B. as giving up a settlement due to economic constraints, as wandering around after an argument - and dominantly as preoccupation with luxury railroad cars, which brings travel and separation as a theme into the figure horizon: the figures do not just do it, but also reflect it.

And the topoi of the epitaphs (e.g. Stonehenge is mentioned) and the foreseeable or premature end or the breaking out of a relationship can still be heard both in the multiple spills of coffee and tea and in the departure of the fetus. The dialogues repeatedly come back to death and its forms and the figure of the other's strangeness or strangeness, which increases with the duration of the relationship, is used almost two dozen times.

Subject

The novel deals, often in symbolic or metaphorical form, with the themes of love and self-love (the narrator, Agnes and the child), life and death (symmetry and asymmetry), responsibility, care and freedom (the Pullman strike ) and the relationship between Closeness and strangeness.

Different attitudes and worldviews become apparent in the characters of the narrator and Agnes. The relationship between the narrator, who is no longer very young, and the 25-year-old Agnes is reminiscent of that between Walter Faber and Sabeth in Max Frisch's novel Homo faber . As in Frisch's novel, the first-person narrator in Agnes reports the story in a sober and laconic, distant style, but unlike Walter Faber, he is not a technician. Agnes, on the other hand, is a natural scientist, musically inclined and (unlike the narrators who often misjudge situations) capable of empathy .

Peter Stamm refuses to provide interpretation aids for his novel “Agnes”: “I cannot and will not comment on the interpretation of“ Agnes ”. It is not the responsibility of the author. (…) I think the best understanding is an accurate and unbiased reading of the text. It offers many possibilities for interpretation, none of which is right, at most those who are pulled by the hair or ill-founded or who claim to be the only right one are wrong. There is no solution to the book like there is to a crossword puzzle. Even the question of whether Agnes is dead or alive at the end of the book cannot be answered clearly. Neither from me nor from you. Don't let that stop you from thinking about it. There is much of the interpreter in every interpretation. It is obvious that men read a book differently from women, sixteen-year-olds differently from sixty-year-olds. It would be nice if these different readings lead to constructive discussions that go far beyond the story of «Agnes».

In particular, Agnes' death ("death"?) Allows different interpretations:

1. A reader can believe the statement at the beginning of the novel. According to this, Agnes would be comparable to Georg Bendemann in Franz Kafka's story The Judgment : Georg Bendemann is sentenced by his father to "death by drowning" and immediately enforces this judgment by running away from his parents' house and jumping over the railing of a river bridge. Agnes reads the text that the narrator wrote and in which he suggests her death by freezing to death. She doesn't shut down the computer, leaves her bitten sandwich, just takes her coat with her, walks “as if in a trance” (this is how it is described in “Ende2”, p. 151) from the apartment and the skyscraper into the park and searches death by freezing to death. She previously rated it as a “beautiful death” (p. 78). This behavior would be another example of “poisoning through reading” (p. 120). After reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha , she has already risked her bare feet freezing to death in the snow (p. 119). Agnes' willingness to follow the guidelines of the metadiegetic story is shown by the fact that she "really" (p. 64) wears the blue dress that, according to the metadiegetic story, she wears on the day in question. A regulation in the sense of something previously written becomes a regulation in the sense of an instruction.

2. According to another interpretation, the narrator takes himself too seriously. The figure Agnes is a “creature” (p. 62) of the narrator in that he can dispose of the narrative material, including the figure of Agnes, at will from the time the intradiegetic story is told in January. In his capacity as an agent in intradiegetic history, however, he can only deal with the agnes of metadiegetic history at will. From this perspective, the Agnes of the intradiegetic story is a “real person” who cannot be treated like a puppet. The “afterlife” of the metadiegetic story increases with Agnes to the point of buying baby things for the child who will in reality never be born, but this excess ends with the realization that she is “sick” (p. 119). Consequently, the metadiegetic story is no longer important to Agnes in the end. The couple's relationship long since cooled to a low point in January. Her tenderness is superficial (p. 122), only at Christmas does the narrator get sex from Agnes, and that expressly as a “gift” (p. 128). The emotionally intense farewell to Agnes (p. 142) before the narrator goes to Louise's party is all the more striking. Perhaps by this point Agnes has already decided to leave the narrator. Reading the text is an occasion for them to leave spontaneously. Since the story is told shortly after Agnes 'departure, it remains unclear what Agnes' absence really meant.

Intertextual references

The novel Agnes takes up a variety of motifs from other literary works, some of which are explicitly addressed in the text.

  • A no longer young man reflects on his failed father-daughter relationship with a significantly younger woman. → Max Frisch , Homo Faber
  • An artist ( Pygmalion ) creates a figure that comes to life. → Ovid , Metamorphoses
  • A man treats a living woman like a figure that he can shape at will. → George Bernard Shaw , Pygmalion → Frederick Loewe , My Fair Lady
  • An older man sentences another, younger person to death; the younger person immediately executes the judgment by suicide. → Franz Kafka , The Judgment
  • Death by freezing to death appears as a "beautiful death". → Robert Walser , Tanner siblings
  • A story in which the protagonist commits suicide results in people killing themselves in reality in the way described in the story. → Werther effect , legends about Robert Walser's "Death in the Snow"
  • A man (Nathanael) tries to cope with his life by writing a metadiegetic story, but after reading the work is appalled by the demons that his unconscious has set free. → ETA Hoffmann , The Sandman

reception

Together with the drama Dantons Tod by Georg Büchner and the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch, the novel was one of the compulsory reading for the Abitur 2013–2018 at vocational and for the Abitur 2014–2018 at high schools in Baden-Württemberg .

filming

The film adaptation of the novel, entitled Agnes , was released in cinemas on June 2, 2016. The main roles are Odine Johne as Agnes and Stephan Kampwirth as the first-person narrator, whose name is Walter in the film.

expenditure

Agnes. Novel. Munich: Goldmann 2000. Goldmann Taschenbuch (btb 72550). ISBN 3-442-72550-X
Agnes. Novel. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2009. Fischer paperback. ISBN 978-3-596-17912-1
Agnes. Audiobook: Speaker: Christian Brückner . 3 CDs. Parlando, Berlin 2016. ISBN 978-3-941004-83-2

literature

  • Birgit Schmid : The literary identity of the script. Investigated using the case study “Agnes” by Peter Stamm (= Diss. Zurich 2003). Lang, Bern 2004, ISBN 978-3-03910-246-4 .
  • Magret Möckel: King's explanations on Peter Stamm's "Agnes". Bange, Hollfeld 5th A. 2015, ISBN 978-3-8044-1952-0 .
  • Wolfgang Pütz: Peter Stamm, Agnes. Reading key for school pupils. Reclam, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-15-015455-7 .
  • Johannes Wahl: Peter Stamm, Agnes. Klett learning training for reading aids, Stuttgart 2017, ISBN 978-3-12-923124-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2012, p. 153 .
  2. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012, p. 43 .
  3. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012, p. 133 .
  4. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012, p. 45 .
  5. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012, p. 62 ff., 68, 119, 139 .
  6. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012, p. 10, 13, 32, 34, 70 ff., 91 ff., 153 .
  7. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012, p. 31 ff., 70 ff., 77 .
  8. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012, p. 15, 17, 19, 80 .
  9. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012, p. 111 ff .
  10. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012, p. 9, 11, 22 ff., 26 f., 31 ff., 78, 81, 130 f., 152 .
  11. ↑ Peter Stamm: Agnes . 2012
  12. ↑ Abitur. Retrieved March 29, 2018 .
  13. ↑ http://www.moviepilot.de/movies/agnes--2?filter=all