Günther Jarfe: The Baffle of Being. Critical Essays on Modern and Con temporary British Literature. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2019.

Günther Jarfe’s collection of essays comes with a set of paratexts rich in allusion. Its title – The Baffle of Being – quotes a famous phrase of W. H. Auden. The cover image features Paul Klee’s 1938 painting Die Waldhexen. Both Auden’s words and Klee’s image evince an ideal of curiosity and openness in dealing with artistic objects, or even with life at large. As Auden’s poem “Tonight at Seven-Thirty” puts it, “the funniest / mortals and the kindest are those who are most aware / of the baffle of being.” For Jarfe, this sensibility is key to making sense of life and literature alike. As he stresses throughout, meaning will only unfold in loops of hermeneutic interpretation, withholding definitive closure and requiring the reader to be sensitive to the text’s lingering bafflement and mystery. Klee stages a similar process. From the thick forest of his painting’s black labyrinthine lines, we will only gradually discern the two eponymous witches, unable to delimit their exact shape, form and import. Taken together, these intertextual and intermedial references set the scene for the essays assembled here, as well as providing a frame for an otherwise highly variegated collection.