Interonymity. Wilhelm Raabe‘s story Gutmann’s Travels

Abstract

In 1860, the young novelist Wilhelm Raabe travelled to Coburg to attend the first meeting of the Deutscher Nationalverein (German National Assembly), whose aim was the unification by peaceful means of the countless German states and principalities. Thirty years later he re-worked his memories into the novel Gutmanns Reisen (Gutmann’s Travels). Instead of narrating his experiences directly, he chooses a very indirect form of narration, in which intertextuality – and especially interonymity – plays a dominant role. The novel displays three levels of interonymic reference: The reference to a didactic 18th-century travel book featuring the Gutmann family, the reference to Goethe’s idyllic epos Hermann and Dorothea, and the reference to names from novels written by the German poet Jean Paul and to places where he lived. All these interonymic devices serve to distance Raabe’s novel from the actual events he experienced, and they embroil the reader in an interonymic game in which the artificiality of literature becomes obvious.