Chamisso’s Bounding Lines

This article takes as its focus three abstract line drawings made by Adelbert von Chamisso. I situate these drawings in the context of Chamisso’s working life, positioning them alongside his notational habits and other doodles made in his poetry notebooks of the early 1830s. In doing so I centre these images as embodied traces of a particular kind of work: the management and cultivation of complex verse forms. From this context, the line drawings seem to take on a life of their own, teasing out questions about life force and form, seeming to embody the felt experience of boundedness. The article suggests that this experience may be brought into productive dialogue with Chamisso’s enquiries into the global imaginary as it emerges in the final pages of his tale Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte: as forms that negotiate a tension between containing wholes and complex networks. The article is thus a case study in how doodles can be understood as a variety of medially — and formally-bound thinking.