Proverbial Reality: Harsdörffer’s Proverbs, Keller’s Baroque, and Formulaic Realism.

This article compares two very different historical cases in which oral proverbs provided the essential linguistic material for literary writing: Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s 1642 play The Seeing=Play of German Proverbs and Gottfried Keller’s 1856 novella cycle The People of Seldwyla. Harsdörffer’s use of the proverb as the crude but ‘original’ token of German vernacular that could help to construct German as a literary language from its spoken realist pieces returns in the crude formalism of Keller’s realist novellas. With subtle but constant allusions to the Baroque, Keller employs various proverbs as a scaffolding for his realist prose. As will be shown particularly for the novella Clothes Make the Man, these proverbs are responsible for rendering a realist modern world based on formulaic structures, while demonstrating at the same time that this realist world can, in consequence, be navigated by formulas alone. Keller’s use of the proverb as a foundation for realist diegesis hence echoes Harsdörffer’s attempt to ground German literature on the proverb. This implies that a decisive signature of the surface and the make-up of modern reality is its constant reliance on repeatable formulas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]