SOURCE: "Gottfried Keller and the Grotesque," in Monatshefte, Vol. L, No. 1, January, 1958, pp. 9-20.

In the following essay, Jennings DISCusses the role of the grotesque in Keller's work, maintaining that it has a social as well as a personal function in his short fiction.

Exceedingly strange figures adorn the pages of Gottfried Keller's sketch books and confront us in his "doodling" in the margins of poems and elsewhere: bubble-blowing creatures whose limbs taper off into thin tendrils, fiddling skeletons, skulls with duck's feet bowing elegantly, a skull inhabited by tiny jesters. The vividness of these figures suggests that they spring from elemental forces in Keller's artistic personality, the effect of which upon his literary production has not as yet been systematically explored.

Although we find the term "grotesque" employed in a confusing variety of ways, these images unquestionably fall within its range. Indeed, it is to such visual...