Esattezza e verità tra scienza e letteratura: La dialettica tardo settecentesca di norma e contestazione in "Die Vermessung der Welt" (2005) di Daniel Kehlmann

Exactitude and Truth between Science and Literature: Norm and Critique of Late 18th Century Dialectics in Daniel Kehlmann’s Die Vermessung der Welt (2005) · This research examines the relationship between scientific and humanistic thought in Daniel Kehlmann’s (1975) Die Vermessung der Welt (2005) in light of the dialectic tension between the principles of chaos (‘critique’) and form (‘norm’); within the context of the contemporary German language literature landscape, the aforementioned tension becomes the origin point of the late Illuministic gnoseologic-scientific paradigm upheaval pertaining to logical-factual ‘objectivity’ and analytical ‘measurability’. These are exemplified, in the text, by the presence of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß (1777-1855). After highlighting the subtle strategies of the profiling and staging of Kehlmann’s scholarly self within the context of contemporary Literaturbetrieb, and stemming from the intertextual character of the work, our attention is focused on the formula of ‘broken realism’ through which the writer, edged on by the more all-encompassing aesthetic-poetic principle of Ironie der Haltung, gives a specific and ambivalent meta-fictionality to the romance literature narrative. On the one hand, it causes the reader to question the validity of the diegetic structure of the work, while on the other it ensures the conscious integration of the Unreal within the higher order of a universe which, despite everything, tends towards rational rules. Through the ironic desecration of the empirical method (Humboldt) and the mathematical-deductive method (Gauß) – achieved through the use of the paradox, the ‘subjunctive I’ (Konjunktiv I) and a pervasive metaphorical-allegorical perspective – Kehlmann intends to relativize and demystify the supra-individual value system of the present and of the contextual linguistic- literary coding practices. Finally, he aims at identifying the authentic element of compensation in the mimetic-inventive capacity of literature with respect to the limits uncovered by knowledge and by the current contemporary scientific evolution, also in terms of environmental sustainability. KEYWORDS · Science and Literature, Modernity-Postmodernity, Historical Romance, ‘Broken Realism’, ‘Irony of Demeanor’.