The Functions of Fictions: Imagination and Socialization in Both Versions of Keller's Der grune Heinrich

Heroes and heroines of novels are notorious readers. They tend to practice a kind of misreading rarely encountered outside of fiction, namely the uncritical reception of literary fictions as life-imperatives or as specific models for self-comprehension. They are literally hypnotized by their books and subsequently engage in the most bizarre attempts to alter their reality, and bring their lives into closer correspondence with the fictions they read. Such effects, a fictional person's enslavement by another fiction, are but one aspect of the fascinating interplay between fiction and that is characteristic of the novel. In such cases, novelists who seem to be telling us that fiction is not real (by allowing their characters to act on the opposite assumption), do so in a fictional context whose reference to reality they have relativized from within. The topos literature influences life has been a standard requisite of the epic tradition at least since Dante's Paolo and Francesca and it achieves its most famous (and labyrinthine) formulation in Cervantes' Don Quixote. It is almost as old as everything else under the sun and its occurrences are so frequent and its forms so protean that it is generally difficult to characterize either synchronically or diachronically as a whole. The dynamics of imagination and desire, fascination and influence that underlie the reorientation or redefinition of the (fictional) self toward literary models are variable functions in an endless series of equations that defy taxonomy or comprehensive theory. Each instance has its own internal logic, be it the presentation of a moral lesson, a meditation on fictions and their functions in personal development, or a parody of the author-reader relationship, and studies of this novelistic archetype and Realist stereotype are generally bound to the isolated occurrence.1