Shivangi Bhatt

MA English Previous
Gargi College
Exam Roll no. 1600419

German Assignment: Fame

Q. “A novel without a protagonist! Do you get it…no hero advancing throughout.”

Comment.

Daniel Kehlmann’s Fame, published in 2009, is an experimental contribution to

the German post-modern literary corpus, which carries the influence of the
movements of the previous century like Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealism.
It plays with the form of the novel through its division into nine self-contained
episodes and the lack of a protagonist. Each episode has its own storyline and is
usually not in chronological continuity with the others. The episodes are set in
various parts of the world, and are not restricted to the same plane of reality, as
Kehlmann blends fiction and reality within this self-reflexive novel. In light of the
given lines of Leo Richter, this paper will examine the structure of Fame, its
narrative style and lack of protagonist, and the manner in which it is held
together by a subtle network of connections such as the relationships between
the characters and the discourse on technology and identity.

The narrative arc of each episode is disconnected from the others, and each
episode has a central character such as Ebling, Ralf Tanner and so on, that is
absent in other episodes, beyond discreet mentions. This allows Kehlmann to add
metafictional elements to the narrative through the comments of Leo, who can be
interpreted as Kehlmann’s mouthpiece or counterpart, on literature and the form
of this novel. Leo states, “A novel without a protagonist! Do you get it? A
structure, the connections, a narrative arc, but no main character, no hero
advancing throughout.” Kehlmann also juxtaposes reality and fantasy, as the third
episode is actually the fictional creation of a principal character from the second
episode, the famous writer Leo Richter. It even breaks the fourth wall, as Rosalie
directly communicates with the narratorial persona of the writer, arguing about
the reality of her existence. He eventually responds to her plea to “Let me live…
Your story. Forget it”, by appearing within the story and “tear(ing) the curtain
aside” and telling her, “Rosalie, you’re cured. And while we’re at it, be young
again. Start from the beginning again!” In the last episode, which shares its title
and principal characters with the second episode, Elisabeth even meets Lara
Gaspard, a famous character from Leo Richter’s works, who happens to be
Rosalie’s niece. Leo aptly comments, “Real. It’s a word that means so much, it
doesn’t mean anything anymore.” Kehlmann further blurs these boundaries of
fantasy and reality by denying his hand in the creation of the enigmatic driver
that appears and makes cryptic comments in the third and eighth episode.

The lack of a central protagonist means that the narrative voice and style shows
great variations, as some episodes are narrated by a third person omniscient
narrator, the ‘Auktorialeo Eozahler’, while others employ first person narration.
The writing style also varies from narrator to narrator, as the first person
authorial voice in the third episode is appropriately articulate for a short story
written by Leo, while the seventh episode is an online post written in the
extremely informal first person voice of Mollwitz, with surplus contractions,
missing articles and pronouns, and so on.

Despite the abrupt shifts in the narrative arc and setting from episode to episode,
Kehlmann links them together through a web formed by the connections
between the characters as well as common themes. As Leo observes in the last
episode, “We’re always in stories… stories within stories within stories. You never
know where one ends and another begins! In truth, they all flow into one
another.” Ebling, in the first episode, inadvertently takes over the virtual life of
episode four’s protagonist Ralf Tanner, whose presence is subtly inserted into
other episodes through posters, news articles and speculation. This is facilitated
through an error that episode seven and eight’s protagonists fail to correct due to
their own preoccupations. On the other hand, Leo from the second and ninth
episode is the writer of the third episode, and is responsible for Maria’s plight in
the fifth episode. Meanwhile, the sixth episode follows the writer Miguel Auristos
Blanco, whose books make a subtle appearance in a majority of the chapters.

This network of plots is also tied together by thematic concerns such as the
alienation and loss of identity caused by technology. Rosalie observes, “Everyone
asks the computer” and ignores what it cannot answer; people avoid thinking for
themselves and “aren’t interested in why things become the way they are.”
Various episodes show the characters’ overdependence on technology to the
point of being distanced from actual human contact, which results in a multitude
of interpersonal problems. Ralf’s identity crisis is largely facilitated by
technology. The diversion of his phone calls to Ebling makes him “feel he didn’t
exist”, an issue that is exacerbated by the estrangement caused by technology, as
the people closest to him fail to realise that he is being impersonated, virtually
and physically. He is eventually unable to bridge the gap between his public
persona that is widely disseminated by technology, and his private self, and
abandons his old identity and adopts another. This raises questions about post-
modern hyperreality and technoculture, as simulations of the real replace the
real. Thus Kehlmann delocates the narrator and addresses the impact of
technology on the sense of self, adding postmodern pluralism and metatextuality
to this experimental novel that is devoid of a protagonist, yet is held together by a
network of connections.