A Printed Proteus: Textual Identity in Grimmelshausen's: Simplicissimus Teutsch

Grimmelshausen's masterpiece, Der Abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668), is at its core a stifled quest for self-discovery. Throughout the novel the eponymous protagonist is in a constant state of flux, f luidly moving between places and languages, fantasy and fact, and an almost innumerable host of professions. Over the course of his textual Odyssey, he changes political and religious affiliation, gender, even species - never finally coming to a clear and permanent identity. John Heckmann puts this quite succinctly when he writes that "Simplicius does not undergo a single conversion, but a multiplicity of conversions, each one of which is revealed in retrospect to have been in bad faith" (880). The politico-historical inspiration for this protean metamorphosis seems obvious: the profound destabilization of religious and national identity during the Thirty Years War is not merely alluded to, but is indeed the target of the more polemical aspects of Grimmelshausen's work. Less obvious, perhaps, is the unstable status of writing itself at an historical moment when the printed word is still a novelty. I would therefore like to refocus attention onto the textual and narrative implications (if not inspirations) of the protagonist's mutable identity. My central claim will be that Simplicius's written project aims essentially to establish a stable sense of self, but that this endeavor is subverted by the very character of text. If Simplicissimus seems to sell itself, in its fifth book and Continuatio (1669), as a kind of Bildungsroman for the Baroque - a textual attempt to come to terms with the "traumatic experience" of the Thirty Years War (Menhennet 6) - what it actually portrays is a failure of Bildung through writing.1 In Simplicissimus, there is an historically appropriate fascination with the printed word. Books and allusions to the budding print culture repeatedly crop up at key moments in the novel and Grimmelshausen capitalizes on the visuality of printed matter to enable word games and create ambivalences in meaning. The narrator himself praises printing as sovereign among the arts: "Welcher woke den nicht preisen / der die Buchstaben zu erst erfunden? ja wer wolte nicht vielmehr den uber alle Kunstler erheben / welcher die Edle und der gantzen Welt hochst nutzbare Kunst der Buchdruckerey erfunden?" (152-53). 2 Clearly, as an artwork, Simplicissimus does not take its medial materiality lightly. Not only does the narrative include a precise description of its own fictional medium, but the Continuatio to the novel dedicates itself largely to a fictional explication of the conditions under which the work comes into existence. As it is the conclusion to the work that, somewhat paradoxically, chronicles its fictive coming-into-being, I will focus my investigation primarily on the fifth and purportedly final book of Simplicissimus and its appendix. Through an analysis of key scenes of reading and inscription, I intend to demonstrate that text, while supposedly proffering a potential unification of self, ineluctably subverts this undertaking - that text in this apparent Bildungsroman is, in fact, ultimately antithetical to Bildung itself. As my point of departure, I will discuss the work as a trauma narrative in which the fictional act of writing serves in therapeutic fashion (albeit futilely) as an attempt to bring wholeness to a psyche shattered by overwhelming events. After establishing the appropriatness of this classification of Simplicissimus, I will turn to medial concerns in order to argue first that reading, for the protagonist, consists of a rending of the self into disparate roles and that text is, by its very nature, complicit in this process. Finally, I will address the fifth book of Simplicissimus and its many continuations to affirm that text invariably postpones and defers signification - and consequently any ultimate attainment of a conclusive identity on the part of the writing subject, the subject producing text. …