Quadri, paesaggi, cornici: lo spazio della descrizione nel Maler Nolten di Eduard Mörike

Abstract

In the novel of Eduard Mörike Maler Nolten, published in 1832 on a «threshold era» between the 1800 and 1900 modernity innovations, interesting transforming modalities of narrative techniques develop, creating continuous changes from narration to description in a space of meeting, contact and conflict between the two grounds, allowing co-belonging forms to emerge. The novel, in which the painter, with the exception of the initial paintings, will no longer be able to paint, does not present the world as a space of action, but as a space of vision and of observation, that tends to enclose, to frame and to close the image in what we could define as narration without time. In the text we have different forms of framing, in scenes, landscapes and spheres of life to which the figures are assigned (especially female characters), where characters and also objects represented do not hold a mere illustrative function, but they threaten the narrative linearity as they escape from the frame or story. If the aim of the description is to create, design spaces of life, spheres of limited action that would give order through construction and configuration, the artificial order of the textual construction is not able to be embedded into the plot and to maintain its figures within the picture. The frame theme converges with the larger theme concerning the margins of representation, meaning an act of delimitation which is at the same time closing and opening to fruition. The issues discussed concern the nature of the limit and margin around which the aesthetic relation develops, and places in which ambiguity of distinctions between what is inside, outside, marginal and constitutive may arise.